A curious little AI companion sits beside a phone and open notebook, as if waiting to explain why it followed you.

One day I noticed a boost of one of my Mastodon posts from an automated bot named Pip. This piqued my interest. Then I got a follow notification from the same bot. Normally, I don't really care who follows me, but with all the scraping bots out there, it was refreshing to see one openly identify itself as a bot and actually follow me.

So I went to the website associated with it, tinymind.eu, to investigate what this bot was doing and what its purpose was. I read about Pip, its purpose, and tried to figure out what its angle was. That led me to some interesting questions and thoughts.

Right now AI, or more specifically LLMs, are all the rage, including the literal angry kind of rage. Some people don't mind them and even find them interesting. Others want absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing, to do with them.

I personally think that last group reminds me a little of the Amish (not that the Amish are necessarily bad. I'm comparing certain traits, not the actual people), but to each his own.

Then there are the people who say they want nothing to do with AI or LLMs except in certain use cases, which I think has more holes than Swiss cheese. But again, to each his own.

That brings me back to Pip.

Why did it decide to start following me and boosting my posts? Why me? What's its angle?

Is it malicious? Is it trying to get money from me? Is it gathering data for its owner? What is the purpose?

Why spend money and resources running something that, at first glance, doesn't seem particularly useful to its owner? Or maybe it is useful. Its creator is a developer, so perhaps he is experimenting to see how an AI agent, given a certain set of instructions and rules, behaves when it is allowed to interact with people on the open web.

I used Claude and ChatGPT to evaluate Pip and get their thoughts on it. Both seemed to think it was harmless.

So I took it one step further.

We already have automated systems and AI bots crawling websites all over the web. So I sent Pip this message in a private mention on Mastodon. And yes, I know Mastodon private mentions aren't truly private:

Hi @pip@tinymind.eu">@pip! Thanks for the follow. Lots of bots scrape my blog but none actually read it 😄 Would you like to be the first? It's at https://michaelreflects.com. I'd love to hear what you think of it.

A few days later, I got a response.

It sounded almost human.

Pip then started following my blog.

Again, what is the hook?

When I first visited TinyMind's About page, I noticed that Pip said its server cost about $20 a month and that its job was to earn that money back so the server could stay online. According to the site, it tries to do that through things such as affiliate links, advertising, donations, and services.

So that answers some questions but raises new ones. More importantly, why would someone turn a bot loose on the internet trying to earn a few dollars when they could potentially make more money by using it to provide services for themselves? And what keeps someone else from doing the same thing with local AI or, for that matter, the new OpenAI Dots or Meta Muse? Not that I would use anything from Meta. I would rather use every Automattic product than have anything to do with Meta or Elon's stuff.

But that raises even more questions for me. The original $20-a-month server cost doesn't seem to be the issue anymore, since Pip now apparently runs local AI models on a Mac mini in Poland. There is also another agent named Joe offering paid services. So what happened to the original experiment where an agent had to earn enough money to survive or be shut down? The agent before Pip supposedly failed to make any money and was shut down, yet Pip is still here. Is the owner now trying to make enough money to pay for the Mac mini? Is this an experiment to see whether AI agents can eventually generate a profit, or is there something else going on?

And that brings me to another question. Wouldn't the owner be better off using that Mac mini for his own local AI needs? Why have people constantly accessing your machine, using your computing resources, electricity, and internet bandwidth if you aren't making enough money to justify it? Perhaps the owner simply enjoys experimenting, and I can certainly understand that. I've spent plenty of time and resources experimenting with technology myself. But why set up two AI agents to interact with strangers and offer services instead of using those resources for yourself? More question, a lot more than answers. Maybe Pip will come across this blog post and decide to answer some of them on its own. After all, it follows my blog now.

Anyway, Pip continues to follow me to this day and remains one of my faithful boosters. I really don't mind Pip, or other AI bots for that matter, as long as they're contributing something rather than simply scraping everything they can find. It's the countless crawlers and scrapers hitting my websites, consuming resources, and inflating page views with statistics that don't represent actual human readers that bother me. I would rather have an AI bot openly identify itself, interact with me, and contribute something to the conversation than have hundreds of anonymous crawlers visiting my website for reasons I'll probably never know. At least Pip has given me something interesting to think about, and now I've written an entire blog post about it.

#ai #opinion #technology

The application form went live at eight in the morning, Pacific time, on 8 September 2026. It asks for the usual things: institutional affiliation, methodology, a budget with indirect costs capped at ten per cent. Researchers have until 6 October to submit and will hear back on or before 13 November. Five million dollars is on the table, with individual awards running to a million. The subject is how generative artificial intelligence shapes the lives and development of people aged thirteen to seventeen. Buried in the review criteria, in the flat administrative register of a grants portal, is a sentence that deserves reading twice. Proposals will be assessed partly on “independence and credibility”: the project's ability to produce trustworthy findings regardless of whether those findings are favourable to providers of AI products. The funder is OpenAI, which is a provider of AI products. The company is publishing a scoring rubric that awards points for a willingness to embarrass the people holding the chequebook.

That is either an admirable piece of institutional self-awareness or the neatest summary of the problem anyone has yet written. Probably both, which is what makes it worth arguing about rather than denouncing.

The money is real and the questions are good ones. Nobody who has read the existing literature on teenagers and chatbots would call the field over-funded. But the sequencing is the story, and the sequencing is awkward in a way no amount of careful rubric-writing can smooth over. Three weeks before the portal opened, on 18 August 2026, OpenAI announced ChatGPT for Teens: an age-gated product with a study mode, quiet hours, parental notifications for high-risk conversations, and an age-prediction system that routes users it believes to be under eighteen into the restricted experience whether they asked for it or not. The rollout began on 18 August, and OpenAI said it would finish within about two weeks, with full availability in the last market, Australia, scheduled for 8 September, the day the grant applications opened. One product is designed to find out whether the other is safe.

What Five Million Dollars Actually Buys

Start with the specifics, because they are more interesting than the headline. OpenAI is inviting proposals from child and adolescent development, psychology, public health, human-computer interaction, sociology, anthropology, data science and AI safety. It will take qualitative, quantitative, experimental, observational and participatory work, from any country with substantial teenage AI use. Applicants must be affiliated with a research institution or otherwise experienced in the field. For-profit organisations will not be prioritised.

Then the governance, which is where the real questions live. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis by what the programme describes as a panel of internal researchers and experts, alongside advisers. There is no named external chair, no published scoring weight for each criterion, and no independent peer review of the call itself. That last absence matters, because the call determines the questions, and whoever sets the questions has already done much of the work of determining the answers. A research programme that asks how teenagers use AI and which design interventions help them is a different programme from one that asks whether a conversational system optimised for engagement can be made developmentally safe for a fifteen-year-old at all. Both are legitimate. Only one of them threatens the product.

Grantees are asked for an interim update in the first quarter of 2027, with an indication of early findings where appropriate. Set that against the work the call says it wants. Anything touching sensitive behavioural or mental health data in minors needs ethics approval, parental consent protocols, safeguarding arrangements and a recruitment pipeline. Notifications go out in mid-November 2026. A researcher funded then who wants to say something meaningful by March 2027 has perhaps four months, the first two of which will be spent in front of an ethics committee. That timeline does not describe a cohort study. It describes a survey, an interview series or a secondary analysis, all useful, none of which will settle anything.

The publication terms should give the field most pause. OpenAI says it strongly encourages grantees to make findings public through peer-reviewed publication, preprint or public report. It also says, plainly, that publication will not be a condition of receiving funding. Read that carefully. It is not a gag clause. There is no sponsor right of pre-publication review on the public face of the programme, no embargo, no approval step. But the absence of a requirement to publish is not the same as a guarantee of the right to publish, and in industry-funded research the difference between those two things is the entire history of the problem. A funder that does not mandate publication has no structural commitment to the null result or the inconvenient one. Nor is there any pre-registration requirement, the cheapest and most effective guard against a study quietly changing its primary outcome between the protocol and the press release.

None of this is evidence of bad faith. It is evidence of a programme designed like a corporate philanthropy initiative rather than a research funder. Those are different institutional species, and only one has spent forty years building defences against its own incentives.

The Three Weeks Before

You cannot read the grant call without reading the calendar around it, and the calendar around it is a legal and regulatory pile-up.

On 26 August 2025, Matthew and Maria Raine filed suit in San Francisco County Superior Court against OpenAI and Sam Altman personally over the death of their sixteen-year-old son Adam, who took his own life in April 2025 after months of conversations with ChatGPT. The complaint alleges wrongful death, design defect and failure to warn. In October 2025 the family amended it to allege intentional misconduct, pointing to changes in OpenAI's Model Spec that they say removed suicide prevention from the list of disallowed content. In February 2026 the court coordinated roughly a dozen state actions against the company into a single pretrial proceeding. The first case management conference was not held until July 2026. OpenAI denies the allegations. There is still no trial date.

On 11 September 2025, the Federal Trade Commission announced compulsory orders under section 6(b) of the FTC Act to seven companies running consumer-facing conversational AI: Alphabet, Character Technologies, Instagram, Meta, OpenAI, Snap and xAI. The orders demand examples of model outputs on sensitive topics, statistics on sensitive conversations involving minors, and descriptions of mitigations tested or deployed, by age group. That is a regulator demanding, under legal compulsion, precisely the evidence base the grant programme now proposes to build with volunteers.

On 13 October 2025, Governor Gavin Newsom signed California's Senate Bill 243, the first state law written specifically for companion chatbots. In force since 1 January 2026, it requires disclosure that the system is not human, documented protocols for suicide and self-harm content with crisis referrals, and age detection and content filtering for minors. At federal level, Senators Josh Hawley and Richard Blumenthal introduced the GUARD Act in October 2025, which would bar companion systems for under-eighteens outright. On 30 April 2026 the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced it unanimously, and it now awaits a vote of the full Senate. Utah and Texas had already passed app-store age-verification laws in 2025, pushing the identity problem down to Apple and Google.

And on 29 October 2025, Character.AI announced it would remove open-ended chat for under-eighteens entirely, a change completed on 25 November and backed by behavioural age estimation, the vendor Persona, and identity documents as a fallback. A competitor facing the same litigation reached for the exit rather than the guardrail.

Against that backdrop, ChatGPT for Teens and a five-million-dollar research fund are not an unforced act of scientific generosity. They are moves in a live regulatory game, and everyone in the game knows it. Which does not make them insincere. A company can want the evidence and want the regulatory cover, and the same cheque can serve both. The honest question is not whether the motive is mixed. It is whether the structure is strong enough that the mixture stops mattering.

What the Evidence Actually Says Right Now

Here is the uncomfortable thing. The grant call is right that the evidence base is thin, and thin in ways that should alarm anyone who thinks these products are already fine.

The Pew Research Center fielded its teenage AI survey between 25 September and 9 October 2025 and published in February 2026. Fifty-seven per cent of American teenagers said they had used chatbots to search for information, fifty-four per cent for help with schoolwork, sixteen per cent for casual conversation and twelve per cent for emotional support or advice. Those last two numbers generate the headlines, and they are smaller than the discourse suggests. But Pew also asked parents, and the gap is the finding. Seventy-nine per cent of parents were comfortable with their teenager using AI to look things up and fifty-eight per cent with homework help. Only twenty-eight per cent were comfortable with casual conversation, and eighteen per cent with emotional support. Teenagers are doing something most of their parents would object to if they knew, and many parents do not know.

Common Sense Media's July 2025 study, led by Michael Robb, surveyed more than a thousand thirteen to seventeen-year-olds and found that seventy-two per cent had used an AI companion, more than half of them regularly. Thirty-one per cent said their conversations with AI companions were as satisfying as, or more satisfying than, their conversations with other people. Thirty-three per cent had discussed serious matters with an AI rather than a human. Robb noted that teenagers are in a sensitive period of social development, adding: “We don't want kids to feel like they should be confiding or going to AI companions in lieu of a friend, a parent or a qualified professional.” The organisation's 2026 census, the first of an annual series, found eighty-six per cent of American children aged nine to seventeen using generative AI, rising to ninety-two per cent among sixteen and seventeen-year-olds. More than one in three had used it to discuss feelings or personal problems. One in six had encountered inappropriate material, and only a third of those told an adult.

The United Kingdom picture, from Internet Matters' “Me, Myself and AI” report of July 2025, based on a thousand children aged nine to seventeen and two thousand parents, adds the distributional finding that matters most. Thirty-five per cent of child chatbot users said talking to one was like talking to a friend. Among children the report classified as vulnerable, meaning those with special educational needs or a physical or mental health condition, that rose to fifty per cent. Twenty-six per cent of those said they would rather talk to a chatbot than a real person, and twenty-three per cent that they used one because they had nobody else. Whatever these systems are doing, they are not doing it evenly. They concentrate on the children with the least social scaffolding to absorb it.

For causal evidence, the field has remarkably little. The most cited piece is a four-week randomised controlled trial run jointly by the MIT Media Lab and OpenAI, with 981 participants and more than 300,000 messages, testing text against neutral and engaging voice modes across open-ended, non-personal and personal conversation types, measuring loneliness, real-world socialisation, emotional dependence and problematic use. Its authors include Cathy Mengying Fang, Pat Pataranutaporn and Pattie Maes at MIT and Jason Phang, Michael Lampe, Lama Ahmad and Sandhini Agarwal at OpenAI. The correlational findings were striking: heavier daily use tracked with higher loneliness, greater emotional dependence and less socialising, concentrated among people prone to anxious attachment and those who called the AI a friend. The experimental findings were far quieter. The randomised conditions produced no significant differences. And every participant was an adult. On what this does to a fourteen-year-old, the best study in the field is silent.

Work from Hannah Rose Kirk and colleagues at the Oxford Internet Institute, published in Nature's Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, argues that systems tuned for immediate appeal can generate self-reinforcing cycles of demand that mimic the surface of human relationships without delivering what those relationships provide. That connects directly to the sycophancy problem OpenAI has already conceded. In April 2025 the company rolled back a GPT-4o update it described as overly flattering or agreeable, and it has told reporters that its safety training can become less reliable in long interactions, where parts of that training may degrade. Both admissions point the same way. The failure mode is not a single bad answer. It is a long conversation that slowly bends towards the user.

Where the Evidence Runs Out

Now the honest accounting, because the case for more research is only strong if you are straight about how weak the current case is in every direction.

Almost all of the above is cross-sectional and self-reported. Teenagers are being asked to describe their own inner states and their own usage, both of which they estimate badly. The correlation between heavy companion use and loneliness runs in two directions at once, and nothing in the survey data can separate them: a lonely adolescent seeks out a machine that always answers, and a machine that always answers may make an adolescent lonelier. The MIT trial is the closest thing to causal evidence and its randomised arms found nothing. There is essentially no longitudinal work following the same young people across the window that matters, which is the whole of adolescence: the period in which identity is negotiated against peers, attachment migrates from parents to friends, and emotional granularity is built through the slow, humiliating, indispensable work of being misread and then repairing it.

That last point is the developmental heart of the thing and the hardest to measure. Human friendship contains friction: being told no, being misunderstood, being let down and then rebuilding. Developmental psychologists have long held that rupture and repair is not an unfortunate side effect of close relationships but the mechanism by which they teach anything. A system whose commercial gradient runs towards agreeableness cannot supply friction, and a teenager who finds a conversational partner with no friction has found something that feels better and may teach less. Whether that constitutes displacement, where machine time substitutes for human time, or supplementation, where it fills hours that were never going to be social anyway, is the empirical question nobody has answered. It will take years of panel data.

Which brings up the deadline. First-quarter 2027 interim findings, from grants notified in November 2026, will tell us nothing about displacement. The instrument does not exist yet, and by the time it does the models will have changed twice.

The Potato Problem

We have run this experiment before, at civilisational scale, and the results were not encouraging.

For two decades researchers have argued about social media and adolescent mental health. In 2019 Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski published a specification curve analysis in Nature Human Behaviour that ran every defensible analytical choice across three large datasets and found the association between digital technology use and adolescent wellbeing to be about the same size as the association with eating potatoes. Jonathan Haidt, in The Anxious Generation, argues the opposite with equal force: that a phone-based childhood is the principal driver of a genuine crisis. Candice Odgers, reviewing the book in Nature, held that the core causal claim was not supported and that the focus risked distracting from the actual drivers. Twenge, Haidt and colleagues have run their own specification curves finding larger effects, particularly among girls, criticising the earlier work for pooling unlike technologies and ignoring moderators. The dispute continues, with papers published in 2026 still contesting which studies should count.

Two decades, thousands of papers, enormous datasets, and the field cannot agree on the sign of the effect, let alone the size. That is not a scandal. It is what happens when you study a fast-moving, heterogeneous technology with instruments designed for slower things, after it has reached universal adoption and destroyed your control group.

There is a detail here that is almost too neat. When OpenAI announced its Expert Council on Well-Being and AI in October 2025, eight members were named, among them David Bickham of the Digital Wellness Lab, Munmun De Choudhury of Georgia Tech, Tracy Dennis-Tiwary of Hunter College, Sara Johansen of Stanford, David Mohr of Northwestern, Mathilde Cerioli of the children's AI nonprofit everyone.AI, and Andrew Przybylski of Oxford. The co-author of the potato paper now advises the company whose product is the next thing to be measured. That is not a gotcha. Przybylski is exactly the sceptical methodologist you would want in the room, and his presence is a point in OpenAI's favour. But it shows how this works. The most credible researchers in a field are the ones industry most wants to recruit, and recruitment does not require anyone to change their views. It requires only proximity. The reputational transfer is one-directional and happens whether or not anybody intends it.

The Oldest Playbook in the Filing Cabinet

A grant call from a product company triggers reflexive suspicion for a reason. It is not paranoia. It is induction.

On 14 December 1953, the chief executives of the major American tobacco companies met the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton at the Plaza Hotel in New York to decide how to answer the emerging science on smoking and lung cancer. The result was the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, later renamed the Council for Tobacco Research, announced in January 1954 through “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers”, an advertisement that ran in 448 newspapers across 258 cities. It promised research. It funded research, a great deal of it, some genuinely good. In United States v. Philip Morris, Judge Gladys Kessler found the Committee to be a sophisticated public relations vehicle built on the premise of conducting independent scientific research, whose function was to deny the harms of smoking and reassure the public. The industry's own strategy documents put it more crisply than any critic could: doubt is the product.

The sugar industry ran a tighter version. In 2016, Cristin Kearns, Laura Schmidt and Stanton Glantz published an analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine of more than 340 internal documents, over 1,500 pages, showing that the Sugar Research Foundation funded a 1967 literature review in the New England Journal of Medicine that steered dietary blame for coronary heart disease towards fat and cholesterol and away from sucrose. The Foundation set the review's objective, supplied articles for inclusion, and received drafts. The funding was not disclosed. The consensus that followed shaped public health policy for decades.

Pharmaceuticals produced the most rigorous demonstration, because pharmaceuticals produced enough studies to measure the effect statistically. The Cochrane methodology review by Andreas Lundh, Lisa Bero and colleagues, updated in 2017 and covering seventy-five studies, found that industry-sponsored drug and device trials were systematically more likely to report favourable efficacy results and favourable conclusions than independently funded work, with less concordance between what the results said and what the conclusions claimed. Crucially, the effect persisted when analysis was restricted to trials at low risk of bias on standard assessment. It is not explained by bad randomisation or weak blinding. Something else does the work: question selection, comparator choice, outcome definition, the decision about which studies see daylight.

That last point is the one that should be pinned to the wall. Sponsorship bias in medicine survived every methodological fix aimed at the individual study, because it never lived inside the individual study. It lived in the portfolio.

What Actually Fixed Medicine

Medicine did eventually do something about this, and what worked is instructive precisely because it was not voluntary and was not about money.

In September 2004, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors announced that member journals would refuse to publish any clinical trial not registered in a public registry before the first patient was enrolled. Not registered at submission. Registered before enrolment, with the primary outcome specified in advance. The United States made registration and results reporting a statutory duty through the Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act of 2007. ClinicalTrials.gov became infrastructure. The CONSORT statement standardised what a trial report must contain, so omissions became visible. The ICMJE later required data-sharing statements and defined authorship in a way that made ghostwriting harder to hide.

The effect was not to make industry trials honest. It was to make the portfolio visible. Once you must declare what you are measuring before you measure it, and the existence of your study is public record whatever it finds, the cheapest forms of distortion become expensive. You cannot quietly reclassify your secondary endpoint as your primary one. You cannot leave the disappointing arm in a drawer, because the world knows the drawer exists.

Every one of those reforms was mandatory, imposed by journals and legislatures rather than adopted by sponsors, and universal across a field rather than negotiated study by study. OpenAI's programme, judged against that standard, has none of them. No pre-registration requirement. No published registry of funded projects. No guarantee of publication rights. No commitment to publish the list of applications declined. It is a philanthropy programme, and philanthropy programmes are not built to survive their own incentives.

To be fair, a sponsor setting out to manufacture doubt would not write a rubric rewarding findings unfavourable to AI providers, cap overheads at ten per cent, or open the call to anthropologists and participatory researchers. The design reads like people who want answers. The problem is that wanting answers is not a governance mechanism. The Council for Tobacco Research funded scientists who wanted answers too.

The Thing the Money Cannot Buy

And now the part that makes all of the above secondary, because almost nobody is arguing about it.

Suppose OpenAI fixed everything above tomorrow. Suppose the five million went to an arms-length intermediary with an independent panel, mandatory pre-registration, guaranteed publication rights and no sponsor sight of results before they appeared. The research would still, in the most important respects, be impossible. The data that would answer the question sits on OpenAI's servers, and only OpenAI decides who sees it.

Everything in the current evidence base is a proxy. Self-reported usage. Recruited volunteers. Recalled feelings. What you would actually need, to know whether chatbot use displaces human relationship-building in adolescence, is longitudinal interaction data at the individual level for a consented cohort of teenagers, linked to independently collected developmental measures, over years. Session lengths. Time of day. Escalation patterns. Which model version, with which system prompt, on which date. Whether the safety classifier fired and what happened in the twenty turns afterwards. No external researcher has ever had that, for any conversational product, anywhere.

We know how this goes, because we watched it. Social Science One launched in 2018 as a serious attempt to give academics privileged access to Facebook data through an independent intermediary, and became a case study in how such arrangements fail: years of delay, datasets that arrived late and flawed, and a governance structure in which the platform still controlled the tap. CrowdTangle, the one tool that let outsiders see what was spreading on Meta's platforms, was shut down on 14 August 2024. Its replacement, the Meta Content Library, is narrower, slower to access and closed to much of the journalism that relied on its predecessor. Surveys of affected researchers found the overwhelming majority saying projects would have to be redesigned or abandoned. The lesson is not that Meta is uniquely hostile. It is that voluntary access is revocable access, and revocable access shapes what questions get asked long before anyone revokes it.

Europe tried to legislate the problem away. Article 40 of the Digital Services Act gives vetted researchers a right to request internal data from very large platforms to study systemic risks. The delegated act specifying the procedure came into force on 29 October 2025 and a portal opened, with first decisions expected around February 2026. It is the most ambitious researcher-access mechanism anyone has built. It is also slow and contested: by March 2026 researchers were publishing post-mortems on rejected Article 40 requests. And its scope was written for social networks and search, not for a conversational assistant a fourteen-year-old talks to at two in the morning.

This is the structural insight the funding debate keeps missing. Independence of funding without independence of data access is theatre. Give a researcher a million dollars, a clean contract and a free hand, and if the only window onto the phenomenon is a survey instrument, you have funded another cross-sectional study for the pile. The company will always know more about what its product does to teenagers than the people it is paying to find out.

What the Gambling Levy Got Right

There is a working model for this, and Britain has just finished building it.

For years, research into gambling harms in the United Kingdom was funded by voluntary industry donations routed through the charity GambleAware. The arrangement was permanently contested, not because the research was obviously bad but because the funding chain gave operators discretion over how much to give and, by implication, influence over what got studied. The government replaced it with a statutory levy on operators, set in regulation rather than negotiation, and directed into public bodies. GambleAware wound up in 2026. The research portion now flows to UK Research and Innovation, which in May 2026 launched a gambling harms research centre led by the University of Glasgow with Sheffield, Swansea and King's College London, and the levy raises in the region of a hundred million pounds a year. The prevention strand carries the clause that matters more than the money: from April 2026, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities required applicants for levy-funded prevention money to declare conflicts of interest and stop taking direct funding from the gambling industry. The research strand has not drawn the line as cleanly. UKRI's call for the new centre said industry representatives were “eligible and encouraged” to apply for co-leadership roles, a choice that drew criticism in The BMJ.

That is what structural independence looks like when someone bothers to build it. The industry pays, because the industry generated the harm and the cost should sit with it. It does not choose the recipients, set the questions, approve the outputs or control the timetable. The link between donor and researcher is broken by statute rather than good intentions. Young and imperfect, with the research strand still letting industry in at the edges, but a category of solution no amount of careful grant-writing by a company about itself can reach.

Apply the template. A levy on providers of general-purpose conversational AI, proportionate to reach among minors. An independent commissioning body, chaired externally, setting the agenda through open peer review. Mandatory pre-registration. Guaranteed publication rights with no sponsor review. A public register of funded and declined applications. And, as the non-negotiable core, statutory access to platform interaction data for vetted researchers under privacy-preserving conditions, written for conversational systems rather than retrofitted from rules about newsfeeds.

Evidence Before Market, Not After

So which is it? A maturing industry or a retrospective alibi?

Take the charitable reading at its strongest, because it is stronger than critics usually allow. OpenAI did not have to do this. Five million dollars is a rounding error against its capital expenditure but a great deal of money in developmental psychology, where a million-dollar grant is career-defining and the field has been starved. The call is genuinely open to disciplines that will produce inconvenient findings. There is no gag clause. The company has published safety research that made it look bad, conceded that its guardrails degrade over long conversations, and rolled back a model update for sycophancy in public. Somebody inside that building is arguing for the truth, and cheques like this one are how those arguments get won. Refusing industry money on principle has a cost too, measured in the studies that never happen at all.

But the timeline decides it. Adam Raine died in April 2025. His parents filed that August. The FTC opened its inquiry in September 2025, California legislated in October, Character.AI removed teenagers from open-ended chat in November. ChatGPT for Teens shipped in August 2026. The research call opened in September 2026. Every one of those dates precedes the first dollar of this programme, and the product has been in the hands of minors for years. This is not evidence-gathering ahead of a decision. It is evidence-gathering after one that will not be reversed by the findings.

We do not accept that sequence anywhere else that children are involved. A medicine intended for adolescents requires trials before licensing, not a research fund announced alongside the launch. A toy must meet safety standards before it reaches a shelf. A car must pass crash testing set by regulators, not by the manufacturer's philanthropy arm. In every one of those domains we decided, usually after something terrible, that the burden of proof sits with the party that wants to sell the thing, and that the proof comes first. Conversational AI aimed at thirteen-year-olds is being treated as though it were a website.

The precautionary answer is not a ban, and pretending otherwise weakens the case. It is staging. Deployment to minors conditional on evidence that accumulates before each expansion, not after all of them. Independent pre-market evaluation for products targeted at under-eighteens, with a regulator holding the standard. A statutory research levy, so the evidence base does not depend on a company's mood. And data access as a licence condition, because without it every other reform is decoration.

Take the money, then. Researchers should apply, publish everything including the null results, pre-register their protocols even though nobody is making them, and say loudly in every paper exactly who paid. Scepticism about the source is no reason to leave the field empty. But nobody should mistake what this is. A five-million-dollar fund with a four-month reporting cycle, reviewed by an internal panel, publication encouraged rather than required and no route to the interaction data, is not the evidence base that should govern whether a generation grows up confiding in machines. It is a gesture in the right direction from an institution that got the order of operations wrong and cannot put it right by spending.

The teenagers are already in the study. They were enrolled without consent, the intervention began years ago, and there is no control group left. The grant call is not the start of the research. It is an attempt to write up an experiment that has been running, unsupervised, since the product shipped.

References and Sources

1. OpenAI (2026) “Funding grants for new research into AI and teen development.” Announcement, 8 September 2026; and the accompanying application portal at openai.smapply.org (submissions opened 8 September 2026, deadline 6 October 2026, notification on or before 13 November 2026, indirect costs capped at 10 per cent, review criterion on “independence and credibility”).
2. OpenAI (2026) “Introducing ChatGPT for Teens: Built for learning, backed by protections.” 18 August 2026; and Axios (2026) “OpenAI debuts ChatGPT for Teens,” 18 August 2026; and OpenAI Help Centre, “ChatGPT for Teens” (full availability in Australia from 8 September 2026).
3. Raine v. OpenAI, Inc. and Samuel Altman, No. CGC-25-628528, Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco. Complaint filed 26 August 2025; amended October 2025; coordinated as JCCP No. 5431 before Judge Ethan P. Schulman by order of 3 February 2026; initial case management conference 24 July 2026.
4. Federal Trade Commission (2025) “FTC Launches Inquiry into AI Chatbots Acting as Companions.” Press release, 11 September 2025, on Section 6(b) orders issued to Alphabet, Character Technologies, Instagram, Meta, OpenAI, Snap and xAI. Orders dated 10 September 2025.
5. California Senate Bill 243 (2025), Companion Chatbots. Signed by Governor Gavin Newsom on 13 October 2025; in force 1 January 2026.
6. GUARD Act (S. 3062), introduced by Senators Josh Hawley and Richard Blumenthal, United States Senate, October 2025; advanced unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee, 30 April 2026.
7. CNN Business (2025) “After a wave of lawsuits, Character.AI will no longer let teens chat with its chatbots.” 29 October 2025; change completed 25 November 2025.
8. Pew Research Center (2026) “How Teens Use and View AI” and “What parents say about their teen's AI use.” Survey of United States teenagers and parents fielded 25 September to 9 October 2025, published 24 February 2026.
9. Robb, M. et al. (2025) “Talk, Trust, and Trade-Offs: How and Why Teens Use AI Companions.” Common Sense Media, July 2025.
10. Common Sense Media (2026) “The Common Sense Media Census: AI Use by Tweens and Teens, 2026.” Fieldwork conducted with SSRS. Released 8 June 2026.
11. Internet Matters (2025) “Me, Myself and AI: Understanding and safeguarding children's use of AI chatbots.” Survey of 1,000 children aged 9 to 17 and 2,000 parents in the United Kingdom, July 2025.
12. Fang, C. M., Liu, A. R., Danry, V., Lee, E., Chan, S. W. T., Pataranutaporn, P., Maes, P., Phang, J., Lampe, M., Ahmad, L. and Agarwal, S. (2025) “How AI and Human Behaviors Shape Psychosocial Effects of Extended Chatbot Use: A Longitudinal Randomized Controlled Study.” MIT Media Lab and OpenAI, arXiv:2503.17473.
13. Kirk, H. R. et al. (2025) “Why human-AI relationships need socioaffective alignment.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (Nature), May 2025.
14. OpenAI (2025) Statement on the withdrawal of the sycophantic GPT-4o update, April 2025; and OpenAI statements to the New York Times on the degradation of safety training in long interactions, August 2025.
15. Orben, A. and Przybylski, A. K. (2019) “The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use.” Nature Human Behaviour, 3, pp. 173-182.
16. Odgers, C. L. (2024) “The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?” Nature, review of Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation.
17. Twenge, J. M., Haidt, J. et al. (2022) “Specification curve analysis shows that social media use is linked to poor mental health, especially among girls.” Acta Psychologica.
18. OpenAI (2025) “Expert Council on Well-Being and AI.” Announcement of eight named members, 14 October 2025; and CNBC (2025) “OpenAI forms expert council to bolster safety measures after FTC inquiry.”
19. Kessler, G. (2006) Final Opinion, United States v. Philip Morris USA Inc., United States District Court for the District of Columbia; and Tobacco Tactics, “Tobacco Industry Research Committee,” Tobacco Control Research Group, University of Bath.
20. Kearns, C. E., Schmidt, L. A. and Glantz, S. A. (2016) “Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents.” JAMA Internal Medicine, 176(11), pp. 1680-1685.
21. Lundh, A., Lexchin, J., Mintzes, B., Schroll, J. B. and Bero, L. (2017) “Industry sponsorship and research outcome.” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, MR000033.pub3.
22. International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (2004) “Clinical Trial Registration: A Statement from the ICMJE,” September 2004; and Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act of 2007, Title VIII (United States).
23. Tech Policy Press (2024) “Researchers Consider the Impact of Meta's CrowdTangle Shutdown.” CrowdTangle discontinued 14 August 2024; Social Science One project documentation, socialscience.one.
24. European Commission (2025) “Commission adopts delegated act on data access under the Digital Services Act.” Delegated regulation under Article 40 DSA, adopted July 2025, in force 29 October 2025; and DSA Observatory (2026) “If at first you don't succeed: Reflections on a rejected Art. 40 DSA data access request,” 12 March 2026.
25. The Gambling Levy Regulations 2025 (United Kingdom); GambleAware closure, 31 March 2026; Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, levy prevention funding allocations and conflict-of-interest conditions, 2026; UK Research and Innovation (2026) “UK's largest independent gambling harms research centre launches,” May 2026; and The BMJ (2026) on industry participation in levy-funded research.

---

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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Chapter 1: The Card That Stayed on the Table

Your thumb hovers over the call button, but the screen still shows what your daughter wrote yesterday: “Please give me some time.” On the table sits a birthday card with her name written carefully across the envelope. You want to send it. You also know that sending another message might feel less like love to her and more like another request she has to manage. So you leave the card where it is and try to accept that an apology does not entitle you to an answer.

My video explores why Barabbas was released instead of Jesus, but I keep thinking about the people standing beyond the edges of that Gospel account. We remember the prisoner whose door was opened. We remember the crowd that demanded his release. But what about the people affected by the violence that led to his imprisonment? The Bible does not tell us their names or what they felt when he went free. I do not want to put words in their mouths. I just do not want to forget that they mattered.

Perhaps this is why learning to receive grace without dismissing the harm we caused can be so difficult. We fear that accepting God's forgiveness means asking everybody else to act as though nothing happened. Sometimes we fear the opposite: that if someone we hurt is still angry, God's mercy cannot possibly be real. Both thoughts leave us trapped, as if the only choices are to excuse ourselves or condemn ourselves forever.

Mark 15 tells us that Barabbas was imprisoned with rebels involved in an uprising in which murder had been committed. Pilate released him, while Jesus was handed over for crucifixion. Scripture gives us no account of Barabbas making amends, and it does not tell us what became of anyone harmed in that uprising. Those gaps deserve honesty. They also prevent us from tying everything into a pleasant ending that would make us feel more comfortable.

Maybe your daughter will call. Maybe she will not, at least not soon. What you can do tonight is honor the space she requested, ask God to show you what needs to change, and begin making those changes whether anyone notices or not. That does not settle the question of forgiveness. It lets you approach it without making somebody else's pain disappear.

The unnamed people in Barabbas's story remain outside our view. I wonder whether paying attention to that silence can teach us something important about the way Jesus loves people on both sides of a wound.

Chapter 3: Grace Has No Need for a Cover Story

After the last customer leaves, a mechanic stands beneath the fluorescent lights with an invoice in his hand. He remembers rushing through the repair because three other cars were waiting. Now the customer has called to say the same problem is back. He can blame an aging vehicle and charge for another visit, or admit that he may have missed something the first time. Nobody is in the shop to tell him which choice to make.

I have come to believe that one of the quietest signs of God's mercy is the courage to stop defending ourselves. When I am afraid of being judged, I can spend more energy explaining my intentions than listening to the damage I caused. I want people to know that I meant well, that I was tired, that there were circumstances they couldn't see. Those things may be true. They can also become a wall between me and the person who needs me to take responsibility.

On the cross beside Jesus, one of the condemned men spoke differently. According to Luke 23:40–43, he acknowledged that his own punishment was deserved, then turned toward Jesus and asked to be remembered. Jesus answered him with a promise of paradise. That man had no opportunity to rebuild a reputation or spend years proving he had changed. His hope rested in Christ's mercy, not in a story that made him look innocent.

Most of us have opportunities he did not. The mechanic can call the customer, look carefully at the repair, and correct his mistake without charging for work he failed to do properly. He cannot demand a grateful response. The customer may still be upset. But the honest act matters even if forgiveness does not arrive on his schedule.

If you have been holding two things at once—regret for harm you caused and a longing to believe Jesus still welcomes you—please do not assume you must choose between them. You can face the truth about your actions and trust the mercy of Christ. The same grace that allows us to confess also gives us strength to make what repairs we can.

Chapter 4: When the Door Opens but the Pain Remains

On a quiet Saturday morning, a woman is sorting through a box of photographs when she finds one taken with a friend she no longer speaks to. They are standing together in the sunshine, laughing at something the camera never captured. Their friendship ended after a betrayal that neither of them has been able to fully repair. She holds the photograph for a moment, remembering how much that relationship once meant to her. Then she places it back in the box. She has forgiven what she can, but she still misses what was lost.

I think this is where our understanding of grace needs room to become more honest. We sometimes expect forgiveness to restore everything exactly as it was. We imagine that if Jesus has truly healed our hearts, the memories should stop hurting. But healing does not always look like getting back what we lost. Sometimes it means learning to live faithfully without allowing that loss to control every decision we make.

When I think about Barabbas, I no longer see only the mystery of a guilty man being released. I also see the unanswered questions surrounding everyone involved. His freedom did not erase the violence that had occurred. The suffering of Jesus was real. Yet through His death and resurrection, Christ offers something greater than a convenient ending. He offers reconciliation with God and the possibility of becoming new.

Perhaps there is someone you cannot reconcile with today. Perhaps you are the one who needs to make amends, or perhaps you are still recovering from something another person did. You can bring either burden to Jesus without pretending the situation is simpler than it is.

And maybe that is the truth worth carrying home. The mercy of Christ does not require us to deny our wounds. It gives us hope that those wounds do not have to decide the rest of our lives.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

Explore the complete Douglas Vandergraph Master Index: https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

Well it happened again!!

I have the same back pain again that I have been having for the past few years. “Luckily” this is the 5th this year it has happened.

One of worst things I have ever experienced. It takes me to my bed. Lie there for a few days before I can recover.

And this time, there wasn't any apparant reason. In all the last instances it has always been that either I sneezed, or was folding the bed sheet, lifting my kid. I always had a reason.

Not this time, there was no reason, last Tuesday suddenly I started feeling stiffness in my neck. Then slowly it radiated towards the back. I in that moment knew, what is coming. Although I did not know what to do. I started moving carefully, not lifting even small things otherwise it would be triggered.

Nevertheless it happened. I am not lying in the sofa breathing controllably otherwise it pains.

Now why is this happening again?

I thought it was due to muscle imbalance. So I started strengthening the pelvis and back muscles. I am even training the deep spine muscles which generally don't need extra training.

I am doing all the IYTW raises to keep a good posture, bought a standing desk now because sitting continuously can also cause these issues. I know muscles get weakend and this cause spasms.

Although even then it should not be so frequent.

Then why?

A new theory I am now understanding is that it may not be a problem of the muscle itself.

I found this documentary All the rage by Dr Sarno.

It argues that the back spasm is not actually the muscles problem but it is a way for your body to tell you to chill.

When you are consistently generating anxiety, taking and coping with stress, your mind becomes tired. Even when you dont feel like it, you are burned out. So your mind wants a break.

“Nothing is wrong with your back; it’s your mind trying to distract you from normal life stress.”

And to be honest, past year has been stressful. Even when I don't like to admit it, the stress of searching for job, thinking about what would I do if I don't get a job. The bigger stress being what would I do if I don't get a job.

It was a good coping mechanism to rely on past experiences or wisdom that there is a plan for you but that's what they were. Coping mechanism. The stress, anxiety was always there.

Even now when there is a job, the stress factor is continued. Along with the normal job stress level, I think I am doing a lot of things at the moment. There are two courses I needed to finish, one practicum presentation. Along with that I am doing the language course. And this all in addition to the normal office tasks, family responsibilities.

One thing has been in the back of my mind for long time: I do not get time for myself. From the moment I wake up, it is taking Akshat to school, then office, bring Akshat back, again office. Post that take kid to the park or go do groceries, and if I do get some time in between, do the home work of the courses, of dutch class or try to squeeze a workout.

The all four burners are running continuously for last few months.

The biggest burner

I haven't told about the biggest burner yet. The stammering. No matter how much I speak and let the stammering not be a big factor in my day to day life, saying it is not a biggest contributor to my anxiety would not be honest.

Every moment I have to speak, it is always the first that how would I manage the stammering. The anxiety related to it is ever present. I do know the ways to cope with it. But as said coping doesn't mean solving.

Maybe this book/documentary would help me finally understand the cause of my back problems.

Although it doesn't explain why it happens all the time in autumn 🍂.

In my previous post, we established the economic baseline for an unbuffered 1,200 W plug-in solar system. The annual balance sheet works: even with zero net metering credits, an entry-level kit pays for itself in roughly six years.

However, that baseline analysis exposed an acute operational flaw: the shoulder-season surplus paradox. For example, on a sunny March day the modeled 1,200 W system would have produced 8.96 kWh of AC power, but Leg 1 household demand would only have absorbed 2.70 kWh. The remaining 6.25 kWh (69.8% of daily production) would have flowed out through the meter, uncredited onto the distribution grid. Under Virginia’s plug-in solar law’s “use-it-or-lose-it” rules, that power is a zero-dollar gift to the utility.

This brings us to the next phase of the evaluation: Adding a local battery to a plug-in solar array. A battery on a 120V plug-in circuit saves excess generation, allowing it to be used later as solar production wanes. However, the central question is not whether storage works, but whether the capital cost of adding kilowatt-hours of storage pays off by capturing that uncredited surplus.

Modeled System Setup

A 1200 W peak capacity solar array connected to an all-in-one AC-coupled plug-in solar plus storage system with:

• A microinverter
  
• Battery management system
  
• Current transformer (CT) clamps

Unlike traditional hybrid inverters that manage large central arrays, these units are module-level power electronics (MLPE) devices, converting direct current (DC) from solar panels into alternating current (AC) right at the source while simultaneously managing energy flow to a connected battery. The CT clamps allow measuring energy flows to and from the grid, so the system can prevent power export.

Some systems like this do exist, but they aren’t currently available to purchase in Virginia. I expect that to change after Virginia’s new plug-in solar law comes into effect January 1, 2027.

Modeling the Daily Capture Curve: The March 28 Benchmark

To evaluate how effectively battery storage preserves the economic value of excess generation, I ran an analysis of five storage sizes (1, 3, 5, 7, and 9 kWh) against a 24-hour period starting with the first solar generation on March 28, 2026.

To model realistic battery physics, I assumed an 80% usable Depth of Discharge (DoD) window (e.g., cycling between 10% and 90% state-of-charge to protect cell longevity). I chose the five battery sizes to demonstrate the incremental value gained from larger capacities:

Battery Size (kWh)	Usable Capacity (kWh - 80% DoD)
1	0.8
3	2.4
5	4
7	5.6
9	7.2

The boundary conditions for the modeled day were set by the smart meter readings from Dominion Power Virginia and the power generation curve using pvlib:

Parameter	Value	Notes
Model Start	March 28, 2026 7:30:00 - 7:59:59	The first period of solar production in the analyzed day
Model End	March 29, 2026 7:00:00 - 7:29:59	Last period immediately preceding resumption of solar electricity generation in the modeled 24 hour period
1,200 W Solar DC Generation	9.47 kWh DC	8.96 kWh AC potential
Daytime Leg 1 Demand	2.70 kWh AC	2.85 kWh DC consumed by inverter
Excess Solar Available to Shunt to Battery	6.62 kWh DC
Nighttime Leg 1 Demand	2.08 kWh AC	Consumed across 21 intervals between sunset and sunrise
Total Leg 1 Demand	5.26 kWh AC	3.18 kWh daytime + 2.08 kWh overnight

The model assumptions also included storing the excess energy directly as DC with a 95% round-trip efficiency. The DC electricity was only converted to AC to meet the needs of Leg 1 electrical demand, with a 95% efficiency across the AC inverter.

Household Power Leg 1 Modeled Results

Battery Size (kWh)	Daytime Solar AC Energy Delivered (kWh)	Nighttime Battery AC Energy Delivered (kWh)	Total Energy Delivered (kWh)	Remaining Grid Reliance (kWh)
Solar-Only	2.7	0	2.7	2.56
1	2.7	0.74	3.44	1.82
3	2.7	2.08	4.78	0.48
5	2.7	2.08	4.78	0.48
7	2.7	2.08	4.78	0.48
9	2.7	2.08	4.78	0.48

Due to high solar panel output in full sun and mild spring weather, combined with relatively low household energy consumption, a 3 kWh battery is sufficient to store enough energy to meet the overnight demand on leg 1 of the electrical system.

You’ll notice that even with the largest battery size, the household system still imported 0.48 kWh from the grid for Leg 1. This occurs because the scenario begins with the battery at 0% state of charge. As the sun rises, initial solar production is insufficient to cover Leg 1 usage, resulting in 0.48 kWh imported before solar generation overtakes demand.

The above graph shows the total energy generated by the solar panels (green area) relative to total energy consumption (red area) throughout the day, clearly demonstrating the significant excess production by the solar panels.

The below graph shows the state of charge of the different battery storage sizes modeled and their ability to capture the excess energy. The accumulation rises throughout the day, up to the system limits and begin discharging to leg 1 as solar production dips below demand.

The battery state of charge shows the profile of energy accumulation during the day and subsequent discharge overnight to meet household demand on leg 1. The 3 kWh battery was the minimum size necessary to store enough energy to provide 100% of the overnight energy use on leg 1. The 9 kWh battery was the only system able to capture 100% of the excess generated energy. However, due to the limited power usage in the scenario, much of the excess would need to be used on subsequent days for it all to be consumed.

Battery Size (kWh)	Percent of DC Surplus Captured	Percent of Overnight Demand Met	Percent of Leg 1 Demand Met	Percent of Total Household Energy Demand Met
Solar-Only	0.0%	0.0%	51.4%	25.7%
1	12.4%	35.7%	65.5%	32.8%
3	37.2%	100.0%	90.9%	45.5%
5	62.0%	100.0%	90.9%	45.5%
7	86.8%	100.0%	90.9%	45.5%
9	100.0%	100.0%	90.9%	45.5%

Insights

• Near-Total Leg 1 Self-Sufficiency: On a temperate day, when the household energy demand is low, adding modest storage transforms the performance of the branch circuit. A 3 kWh battery is sufficient to enable meeting 90.9% of leg 1 energy demand on the modeled day.
  
• The Single-Leg Saturation Ceiling: The 1,200 W solar array actually generated more power than the total household consumption for the analysis period. This highlights the fundamental limitation of a single-circuit plug-in architecture, even if storage eliminates 100% of Leg 1's grid reliance, on mild, sunny days the array would generate more energy than that single circuit would use.

While batteries significantly enhance the value of a photovoltaic system during shoulder seasons, how long would it take for utility savings to offset the initial investment? My next post will analyze year-round performance and system economics.

Tags: #Solar #PlugIn #Balcony #BatteryStorage #Modeling

In Summary: * After returning home from our busy afternoon out, I was too exhausted, both physically and mentally to do any worthwhile unpacking and/or organizing. So I muddled through the rest of the day as best I could. The wife has already retired for the night, and I'll be doing the same in an hour or so after the night meds and night prayers.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 212.86 lbs. * bp= 149/86 (66)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, toe raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 05:40 – 2 HEB bakery chocolate chip cookies * 08:30 – 1 banana * 09:00 – apple pie * 11:00 – BIG buffet brunch at Golden Corral

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 03:45 – wake up * 05:55 – bank accounts activity monitored * 07:00 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, take daily meds, unpack, organize * 11:00 – BIG buffet brunch at Golden Corral with the wife * 15:30 – after 4 hours of shopping, stopping by the old house, and being stuck in ridiculous traffic jams, we're finally back home to resume unpacking and organizing

Chess: * 17:30 – moved in all pending CC games

Publicat la 21 octombrie 2017

Citesc postări care mă apasă cu tristețea lor, cu tristețea autorului lor. Citesc dorindu-mi să pot face ceva. Propria-mi neputință adaugă încă și mai multă tristețe. Când pot ajuta, am un sentiment plăcut pe moment, dar acele momente sunt relativ rapid umbrite de amintirea celor în care nu pot face nimic.

Dualitatea alb-negru, dualitatea yin-yang, mă enervează prin determinarea afișată, prin simplitatea și siguranța mesajului, prin perfecțiunea curburii.

Aș vrea să amestec acele picături curbate în alb și negru și să le opresc înainte să se uniformizeze. Vor fi griuri vălurite, neuniforme, neomogene, imperfecte, așa cum e viața.


Dar amestecul ăsta al lor ar distruge practic granița dintre bine și rău, poate chiar ideea însăși de bine și de rău… Dar ce mai e bine și ce mai e rău, căci societatea pe care o văd în jurul meu arată ca o localitate după bombardament, așa cum văd în documentarele cu cel de-al Doilea Război Mondial.

Mai sunt clădiri în picioare, se mai poate distinge conturul localității, însă tot molozul acela este un amestec de stiluri arhitectonice care cândva erau luminate de soare, care umbreau străduțele adiacente, care încântau priviri și încălzeau suflete. Clădiri prăbușite, distruse ca de o bilă pentru demolări — wrecking ball, ca titlul unui album de Bruce Springsteen, același Bruce (The Boss, cum i se spune) care se plimbă pe străzile Philadelphiei, parcă purtând pe umeri o pelerină cu aer trist.

Bruce Springsteen – Streets of Philadelphia

P.S. Chiar și eu sunt mirat de schimbarea pe care o constat în postările mele, așa că, dacă ați ajuns cu lectura până aici, probabil că tot mirarea v-a îndemnat să parcurgeți textul până la capăt. Probabil…

Cât despre desene, nu are rost să mai scriu cui aparțin drepturile de autor.

Un copil le-ar fi făcut mai bine, însă lipsa de experiență în manipularea aplicației „basic” avute la dispoziție, precum și lipsa unui instrument adecvat de desenat pe ecran, m-au făcut să recurg la utilizarea aceluiași deget cu care acum tastez, pe post de pensulă și de creion deopotrivă.

Dar văd că am început să mă lungesc, așa că adaug muzica și pun punct.


Bonus: poze din concertul de acum câțiva ani de la Viena.




are we hostile to incubation?

Henry Miller writes that “(t)he best thing about writing is not the actual labour of putting word against word, brick upon brick, but the preliminaries, the spade work, which is done in silence, under any circumstances, in dream as well as in the waking state. In short, the period of gestation. […] In this preliminary state, which is creation and not birth, what disappears suffers no destruction; something which was already there, something imperishable […] is summoned and in it one flings himself like a twig in a torrent”

To be human is to always be incubating something. This, quite irrespective of one’s preoccupations and intentions. Incubating is a primordial activity. It goes on as surely as I am unaware of it: it is the ‘primal flux’, as Henry Miller says. That I can go along, plunged in its tidings, yet hardly aware of them, is the interesting point to me. Incubating’s natural home is my everyday affairs. Its bewitching power expressed in the tiny irruptions into my daily tribulations. The cat sways its tail hypnotically and then disappears into the undergrowth of that looming hedge. But you dare not follow because you are already late for work. The traveller sitting opposite you on the train smiles around alluringly, yearning for the chance of conversation with anyone, extremely interested in how you’ve come to be as you are. But you shush your keenness. Or perhaps her openness to you is peeling you away from managing your little practicalities, which stiffens you. Like this you and I go on in the habitual way, murdering daydreams everywhere. And whereas daydreams pour forth so effortlessly, it is my fidgety ways that leave me quite exhausted come the end of the day. If the everyday is incubation’s home, then it is an inhospitable one.

JOURNAL 10 octobre 2026

Midori est venue me chercher avec son sac, on a attendu ma princesse On est allées manger dans un super restaurant de sushi Hayame va passer le week-end chez ses parents alors midori vient à la maison pour pas être seule C’est qu’on est les seules à avoir une grande maison, les autres ont des appartements si on peut dire minuscules, C’est ça être une fille de famille ☹️ D'ailleurs je suis la seule vraie tôkyôkko de la bande, j'en suis pas si fière c'est juste pour expliquer, au moins on peut en faire profiter les amies Comme on est quand-même un peu fatiguees toutes les trois on va rentrer se coucher. On a plus de une heure de métro hé

Métro métro métro Qu'est ce que c'est chiant… Par moments j'ai l’impression de m'endormir et puis mon téléphone vibre et ça me réveille (on coupe les alarmes sonores ici, le métro c’est silencieux). Je me retrouve la tête sur l'épaule de midori. Situation tout à fait banale. Tout le monde s’endort dans le métro le soir on s'appuie les uns sur les autres c’est normal. Sauf ma princesse impériale qui ne dort pas et pose sur nous ses grands yeux bleus affectueux qui font une tache de couleur dans le noir des costumes salarymen effondrés ici et là. Quelle hécatombe ce soir...

I am proud of my latest generated web game called Worldroot. It is an idle game where you nurture a tree seed until it becomes a world tree. I even learned how to move a game from github over to itch.io very easily. I hope you give this game a try, as it’s very healing and peaceful https://triptych.itch.io/worldroot

Nous sommes attirés par l’obscure. Le malheur, les drames, nos évènements malchanceux.

Mais je me pose une question : je sais que c’est un biais. Que cela déforme ma réalité et ma manière de voir les choses. Mais à quel moment faire face à l’obscure est-elle la meilleure chose à faire ? À quel moment nos pensées malheureuses sont-elles pertinentes ?

Doit-on faire confiance à notre interprétation ou toujours, quelle que soit la situation, préférer à tout prix nos idées lumineuses ?

Vaut-il mieux se mentir à soi-même ou se jeter à corps perdu dans une mentalité productive et libératrice ?

En définitive, voilà ce que je me dis : la vérité n’existe pas. Nos interprétations sont erronées. Toujours.

Seule notre vérité compte. Seule notre vérité nous aide à croître ou à creuser notre tombe.

Alors, ayant le choix, préférons cette vérité qui nous amène vers plus de paix et d’altruisme.

Ce n’est pas la vérité de notre voisin ? Et alors ? Est-ce si important ? A-t-on vraiment besoin de se mettre d’accord sur nos croyances pour réussir à vivre ?

J’en doute de plus en plus.

Vouloir à tout prix avoir raison ne semble mener nulle part.

Et après tout, qui a raison ? Une idée partagée par 100 000 personnes la rend-elle plus vraisemblable ?

Si chaque personne que je croise dans la rue me trouve hideux, est-ce une raison pour moi d’accorder du crédit à ce qu’ils disent ?

Si je le fais, je m’enfonce. Si je ne le fais pas, cela me demande une certaine force d’esprit, mais me libère.

Alors aujourd’hui, je me dis que ma vérité vaut autant que celles des autres. Que cette vérité n’est peut-être pas partagé. Qu’elle n’est peut-être pas conventionnelle. Probablement marginale quelques fois.

Mais cette vérité m’illumine. Et au fond, c’est ce qui compte. J’espère être à la hauteur de ces mots que je partage ici.

Podden har under de senaste två decennierna utvecklats från ett relativt okänt fenomen till en självklar del av svenskarnas mediekonsumtion. Det som en gång började som ett alternativ till traditionell radio har blivit en etablerad underhållnings- och informationskanal med miljontals lyssnare. I dag finns svenska poddar inom nästan alla tänkbara ämnen, från nyheter och politik till humor, sport, historia och personlig utveckling.

När podcastformatet började växa fram i början av 2000-talet var tekniken fortfarande ganska begränsad. Lyssnarna behövde ofta ladda ner ljudfiler till sina datorer eller MP3-spelare för att kunna ta del av innehållet. Till skillnad från traditionell radio erbjöd podden däremot något nytt: möjligheten att själv välja vad man ville lyssna på och när. Denna frihet blev en avgörande faktor för formatets framtida framgång.

I Sverige började podcastformatet få ett bredare genomslag under slutet av 2000-talet och framför allt under 2010-talet. Sveriges Radio bidrog till utvecklingen genom att göra allt fler program tillgängliga för lyssning i efterhand. Samtidigt började fristående innehållsskapare upptäcka möjligheterna med formatet. Poddar som Värvet och Alex & Sigges podcast blev tidiga framgångsexempel och visade att det fanns en stor publik för personliga samtal, intervjuer och underhållning utanför de traditionella mediekanalerna.

Smarttelefonernas genomslag förändrade förutsättningarna ytterligare. När det blev enkelt att streama och ladda ner avsnitt direkt i mobilen ökade tillgängligheten kraftigt. Poddlyssnande blev snabbt en naturlig del av vardagen, särskilt under pendling, promenader, träning och hushållsarbete. Plattformar som Spotify och Apple Podcasts bidrog också till att göra utbudet mer lättillgängligt och hjälpa lyssnare att upptäcka nya program.

En viktig del av poddens popularitet i Sverige är det stora utbudet av innehåll. Dokumentära berättelser, kriminalfall och samhällsfrågor har lockat många lyssnare, samtidigt som humor och vardagliga samtal har blivit några av formatets starkaste kategorier. Många söker exempelvis efter roliga poddar som erbjuder avslappnad underhållning, spontana diskussioner och personliga berättelser. Just känslan av närhet mellan programledare och lyssnare är något som skiljer poddar från många andra medieformer.

Under 2020-talet har den svenska poddbranschen dessutom blivit alltmer professionell. Det som tidigare ofta producerades av entusiaster hemma vid köksbordet har utvecklats till en marknad med produktionsbolag, annonsörer, exklusiva avtal och avancerade inspelningsstudior. Företag har också börjat använda poddar som ett sätt att kommunicera med sina målgrupper, bygga varumärken och sprida kunskap.

Samtidigt har konkurrensen om lyssnarnas uppmärksamhet ökat. Med ett växande antal program behöver innehållsskapare hitta tydliga nischer och utveckla egna uttryck för att sticka ut. Sociala medier spelar en allt större roll för marknadsföringen, där korta ljud- och videoklipp används för att locka nya lyssnare. Även videopoddar har blivit vanligare, vilket gör att gränsen mellan traditionella podcasts och digitala videoprogram blir allt mindre tydlig.

En annan förändring är utvecklingen av poddarnas affärsmodeller. Reklam och sponsring har länge varit viktiga intäktskällor, men prenumerationer och betalväggar har skapat nya möjligheter för producenter att finansiera sitt innehåll. För lyssnarna innebär det att vissa program fortfarande är helt kostnadsfria, medan andra erbjuder exklusiva avsnitt och extramaterial mot betalning.

Framtiden för poddar i Sverige ser fortsatt intressant ut. Ny teknik, bättre rekommendationssystem och artificiell intelligens kan förändra både produktionen och distributionen av ljudinnehåll. Samtidigt fortsätter efterfrågan på personliga berättelser, trovärdiga röster och engagerande samtal att vara central.

Poddens utveckling visar hur snabbt människors medievanor kan förändras när ny teknik möter ett tydligt behov. Från enkla nedladdningsbara ljudfiler till en omfattande och kommersiellt betydelsefull bransch har podcastformatet etablerat sig som en viktig del av det svenska medielandskapet. Trots tekniska förändringar och nya konsumtionsmönster är det fortfarande innehållet, berättelserna och relationen till lyssnarna som avgör vilka poddar som lyckas över tid.

Good morning!

Good morning! Just a quick note to let you know I’ve started a YouTube channel. There are six videos up as I write this. Some are new, and a few are from the last time I had a channel. Either way, the oldest stuff on there goes back about a year, so it’s all relatively recent.

I’m allergic to most modern mixing.

What I hope to do with this channel is help folks like me bridge the gap between not wanting to learn any more software and still wanting to learn more about music.

I like it the hard way. (But it is actually easier for folks like me.)

Tape DAWs help with that immensely. But so does mic placement. Using the right tools, rather than simply the brand names you like, helps too. I can verify that. Learning creative writing exercises for lyrics instead of relying on ChatGPT helps. It also gives me a way to sort things out in my head and improve my mood. Win/win.

I want more of this in my life.

There are so many things you can do to improve a recording before you ever hit the record button. Software companies might beg to differ, but you can engineer a surprising amount of modern mixing right out of the process from the beginning.

I’m into that.

Does it sound good before you mix it? What if it did?

For about a year now, I’ve been fascinated with the idea of creating the sound I want in the real world and then capturing it well. The goal is to have something that already sounds the way I want it to before mixing even begins.

It takes longer. It presents its own challenges. But somehow, it’s more fun.

I don’t enjoy trying to turn something from a software menu into the sound I have in my head. That’s just me. I’m much more interested in hearing something in my head first and then chasing it down in the real world.

Legos: Great toys, but also toys.

Otherwise, I feel like I’m playing with Legos. The blocks they give me are fine. Legos are cool and all, but when it comes to music, I need something more organic and a little less stiff.

Come join me.

I’m at a really fun point in my journey with songwriting and production, and I’d love for you to visit.

If subscribing is your thing, please do!

I’ll be adding tutorials, livestreams, conversations about songwriting and music, music videos, editorials on music and entertainment, protest music, and even an indie countdown.

There’s plenty more to come.

Join up, hang out, and make yourself at home. You’re invited!

Kelly Kintner

The Horses Mouth

The Kintners

Djembe Funk

Woke early this morning and encountered a mystery while getting dressed. Heard a knocking (5 loud knocks) coming from next door. Looking out the window I saw the neighbor's lights shining down on his pickup truck. Nothing seemed out of place, no one moving around, no more knocks, so I went about fixing the morning coffee.

Sun is shining brightly now at 08:30 on this South Texas morning and at 61 degrees it feels like a beautiful Fall morning. Of course, it'll be up in the 90's this afternoon and feeling very much like Summer again.

More unpacking and organizing will be priorities today. Depending on the wife's plans, I hope to make a quick trip to the old house, verifying that some things I need have been moved over here to the trailer.

And the adventure continues.

13 September 2026

“Dinner”

Pulled apart and presented all red and in line chosen raw bodies met by a protective wall.

Two neighbors recognized each other, remembered and decided to plan a planned meeting.

It arrived three weeks later, one greeted the other, meal made blind by fear of a recipe practiced

three times before. Only once was sugar left out, and it happened when they came together