Lisa Schmeiser

New from me: In an age where human labor seems to be ever more deprecated, it's becoming ever more apparent that the real in-demand product is human taste: open.substack.com/pub/lschmeis...

Surprisingly optimistic conclusion to Mikko Hypponen's Black Hat keynote: "Overall, I would claim that today security is better than ever." Two reasons: we made browser hijackings obsolete by killing off Flash and Java, and we have locked down entire platforms like game consoles and smartphones.

"I would rather launch an entire tech startup than willingly spend a minute treating a human being with care or consideration" is a surprisingly persistent tech business model.

We saw it with the mobile web, it's no surprise it's happening here too.

The rhetoric around agentic AI -- where little bundles of pattern-recognition code are called "colleagues," "coworkers," "digital labor" and "teammates" -- is really worth paying attention to because of how it's moving the Overton window on the value of human beings' skilled labor.

I feel like Senator Bill Cassidy deserves a li'l epidemic flu or two named after him for letting that nom to the full Senate.

It's not a question of whether we name the name wholly preventable pandemic after Kennedy, it's a question of how many people's deaths could have been prevented if he had made different choices.

I have been reliably informed by the teen in my house that "we don't have a song of the summer because America did nothing to deserve nice things this year."

Really admire legacy media's restraint in declining to run the story "In a Break With Precedent, Current President Prowls Around Roof Like Escaped Housecat."

It's been remarkable watching ICE recruitment ads on YouTube. What would have been dismissed as heavy-handed satire in the 1980s is just straight-up taxpayer dollars at work now.

How one California community is turning an old oil field into protected habitat - High Country News Despite federal policies complicating Fullerton’s conservation success story.

"We have to think about the green infrastructure we can save for future generations."

www.hcn.org/issues/57-8/...

Am waiting for Woody Allen defenders to crawl out of the woodwork and explain how the letter was actually tongue-in-cheek irony and insulting, and only dummies would read it as the complacent chitchat of a spoiled rich person.

New data shows workers are mostly ignoring return-to-office orders Bosses to workers: 'Return to the office every day, or else.' Workers to bosses: 'No.'

The disconnect between upper management and the workforce is worth noting: www.fastcompany.com/91378094/new...

Also gross is how many of the western world's movers and shakers apparently had no problem hanging out in this fetid bagnio.

And Woody Allen! The letter he writes describing the dinners shows how the rich, they are not like us: static01.nyt.com/images/2025/...

Or Apple TV+ series! I want TEN HOURS of this. One episode alone on the fifteen year old who was like, "okay, they're all on the other ship, guess I'm driving for a bit."

It really makes you look askance at the global elite that they all just hung out here and literally none of the people -- who enjoy the power to move global economics, launch a nuclear war, cure malaria, whatever -- ever said, "Jeffrey, that thing is hideous. What the actual hell?"

There really seems to be an inverse relationship between moral depravity and good taste here.

There are bordello owners specializing in ~~discreetly fulfilled proclivities~~ who would dismiss the statue of the child bride clinging to a rope as "a little too on-the-nose."

oh absolutely -- some folks really resent knowledge work and are hoping to flatten the distinction between knowledge work vs. information work. Coding = information work. Debugging = knowledge work.

Right? It's not inevitable! Stop accepting the narrative that it is!

I may have startled someone at a dinner recently by just monologuing for ten minutes about the brilliance of the Blue Ant trilogy.

Hi, former Foreign Service Officer here

The Secretary of State might be interested to learn that visa requirements and terms are generally reciprocal. We do it to them, they do it to us.

Once again, @greatdismal.bsky.social well ahead of the societal curve with ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES, which dropped in 1999.

woof, I mean commodify+devalue & my brain made a portmanteau word. Sorry! My point is that a lot of AI evangelists are existentially threatened by human creativity & systemically devalue it any chance they can get, all while showing how profoundly they don't understand it.

So a piece I'm working on for my newsletter is on how the AI/automation boom is a last-gasp attempt to decommodify creativity & devalue human effort. I think we will, in our (GenX) lifetime see a rethink of what counts as skilled human labor. The 20th century may be an anomaly.

I remember sitting in grad school thinking big thoughts about how hyperlinking could be used to break down/subvert the authority of primary/secondary sources & change author intent, and I wish we had foreseen how it was going to lead directly to the rollback of the Enlightenment.

Plus the point to a watch even pre-smart watch was to give you incremental data that you used in highly specific and personal contexts. Smart glasses don't even have that going for them.

Technologies take off when they remove a pain point or reward a new behavior. It is unclear what smart glasses do in WEIRD societies that could present a new user behavior opportunity that is not seen as rude (as in, opting passersby into your data collection without their consent) or fatuous.

Phil & I were talking about that this past weekend -- as we walked in a redwood reserve with no cell signal. We were like, there is no compelling consumer use case where either a new social behavior emerges -- like when people started using phones to send photos to friends -- or a problem is solved.

A.P. Moller - Maersk and IBM to discontinue TradeLens, a blockchain-enabled global trade platform A.P. Moller - Maersk (Maersk) and IBM today announced the decision to withdraw the TradeLens offerings and discontinue the platform.

No technological adoption-->societal transformation pipeline is inevitable. I remember sitting through demos explaining how blockchain was going to transform the global supply chain, and ... www.maersk.com/news/article...

We keep taking these people's words that AI will take jobs, and that's presuming an awful lot, including the notion that corporations will love being sued for all liabilities AI tool use will incur, or that there will not be malicious compliance/misuse, or that these tools actually have sound ROI.