Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2026/03/06/remove-the-ask-gemini-button/
Easy: right-click on “Ask Gemini” and select “Unpin”
Right-click “Ask Gemini” and select “Unpin” …
… and the “Ask Gemini” button is gone! Poof!!
Yet another dull anecdote about Google sucking at UI:
I tried to ask Gemini by clicking the “Ask Gemini” button but it asked me for permission to spy on my stuff and I said no and so it wouldn’t let me ask anything of them.
In my country, Gemini asks you!
So I asked a Search Engine (Kagi) and it pulled up a Reddit post.
Sometimes, the old ways still work best!
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2026/03/09/nihao-baghdad/
The Little Chinese Everywhere lady who makes video blogs about traveling around the overland silk road had to evacuate Iran when the Americans started bombing there. She just posted a video from Baghdad.
She asked her local friend of a friend guide how things were going. He said the economy is about the same as 15 years ago, but they are much safer now. You can see that it’s not prosperous. In Baghdad itself, there are apartment buildings that are empty since the war. The guy explained that there are absent landlords who haven’t been looking after things. You can see the bullet holes still in the facades. On the street, all the prices are cheap.
The locals are extremely friendly. All the street food vendors didn’t want to charge their international guests. It reminded me of Jordan. When I traveled to Jordan 25 years ago, the locals were extremely friendly. They would see me in the streets and call out “helloooo! Welcome in Jordan!” But what is different in this video is that all the kids would call out to the Chinese lady “nihao” “nihao” “nihao” and I found myself wondering if they would be quite as friendly to an American anymore. Probably. It is in the nature of people to welcome guests.
I was glad that she encountered guys who had been to China. In one market stall were folks who imported goods. In a restaurant she encountered a group of guys who had been to China to study civil engineering. I found myself grateful that there is a world power that is welcoming people from around the world and helping them to build up their own countries.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2026/03/26/you-can-not-be-automated/
Oxide.computer will sell you an on-premise cloud. Type some commands into a great big computer and it will build you a network of smaller computers inside the big computer. That is an exciting idea for an old Systems Administrator like me.
Oxide recently shared their internal guidelines on using AI. Good stuff here. The LLM Anti-Patterns are especially decent: don’t mandate that anyone use LLMs, don’t shame folks who do use LLMs, and, this shouldn’t need to be said: don’t date your LLM!
What Oxide advocates is responsibility. An AI is a tool to build things. What you build represents you. LLMs can generate code very effectively, but that needs to be code you understand and vouch for. Because, at the end of the day, it is your code and you are responsible.
It is all too easy to ask AI to take away your responsibility. When the cartoon or the video clip or the email was obviously penned by an AI, we can tell you aren’t representing yourself. Is your audience not worth your time? Worse: do you feel unworthy of being yourself? We can’t see you through the slop!
At the other end are the “never AI” folks. On Mastodon I see posts float by from people who grouse every time an Open Source project reveals that it will leverage AI to expedite the unrelenting work of building, reviewing, debugging, shipping, and supporting free code. Surely, some projects will incautiously ingest “vibecoded” AI Slop, but in general, Open Source maintainers are passionate and responsible volunteers conscientiously leveraging new tools to deliver a better service to their community. We owe these folks respect and good faith.
Use the tools. Or don’t. Both choices are correct. The wrong choice is to be the tool, by letting the tool be you. Having a “relationship” with your AI is a sad move, and expecting other people to have a relationship with your AI’s slop is disappointing and creepy. Step away from the keyboard and spend some time with a kindred spirit. Head outdoors to feel the sun and the cool breeze tango with each other across your skin. You are too beautiful and too precious to be outsourced to a GPU farm.
NOTE: in the spirit of exploration, I sought feedback from an LLM, “Kimi K2.5 (reasoning)” on how to make this post more readable and engaging. It suggested some early revisions to this post, but every word remains my own.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2026/04/07/notes-and-quotes/
Away from the noise of social media, the Internet is still brimming with great stuff to read. The old way of finding a feed reader, subscribing to some sites, and coming back on occasion to be wowed still works great. Kagi has pitched in with their “Small Web” site to help folks find new voices. It takes a little more effort to get this going than it does to visit the increasingly barren FaceBookMegaMart or injecting TikTok into your retinas, but damn it is so much more gratifying.
Unlinked quotes here are most likely taken from The Sun Magazine, which has great writing in the even older and more convenient format of the printed magazine.
But, quickly, the feeling to be without a smartphone changed from anxiety to liberating. I felt really happy not to have a phone on me while outside. I was rediscovering my old way of getting lost in my thought, of sometimes talking to myself to clarify an idea. Which is less weird these days because everybody assumes you have an ear bud and are on the phone with someone else. In fact, when walking alone, I’m often on a call with myself.
—Ploum
“When you bury a parent, you bury the beginning of your life.” –Bob Hikok
No one who isn’t us is going to destroy the Earth, and no one who isn’t us is going to save it. The most hopeless conditions can inspire the most hopeful actions. We have found ways to restore life on Earth in the event of a total collapse because we have found ways to cause a total collapse of life on Earth. We are the flood, and we are the ark.
–Jonathan Safron Foer
“Grief doesn’t make an appointment. It just shows up while you’re doing the dishes.” –Lalaie Ameeriar
To argue that the current extinction event could be averted if people just cared more and were willing to make more sacrifices is not wrong, exactly; still, it misses the point. It doesn’t much matter whether people care or don’t care. What matters is that people change the world.
–Elizabeth Kolbert
When you travel, consider skipping the Big Sites. Go where tourists are relatively few. You have a better chance of connecting with the local culture. Craig Mod makes a compelling case for visiting Nagasaki.
Doomscrolling is a protection racket. Every horrifying headline you consume without acting on is a toll you pay to the algorithm in exchange for the feeling of engagement without the inconvenience of actually engaging. Power loves this arrangement. Power has always loved a population too exhausted and too demoralized to walk out the front door. The algorithm is doing work for authoritarianism that authoritarianism used to have to do itself. It’s very efficient. You should be furious about it. Preferably while moving.
—Rook T Winchester
“Being ethical under capitalism is like trying to pray the rosary on a pirate ship.” –Sparrow
The night I sat with a peach, the sensuous experience of licking it, nibbling it, sucking it, juice dribbling down my chest, my belly.
We all learn there’s no substitute for love, but sex and food both run a close second.
–Sy Safransky
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2026/04/11/to-emeryville/
We started with brunch, after a walk of less than a mile downtown. We ate at our usual brunch spot. The lady there who is the soul of the operation but not the owner will be around some weeks more, before she moves to an affordable part of California with her new husband. We rode Caltrain a few stops down to Santa Clara and had nearly two hours until the Capital Corridor train was to arrive. Fortunately, it was Saturday, and the Historical Railroad Society was open. Bonus: it was their Open House weekend. The volunteers held our luggage in the Historic Waiting Room. We gazed at the model railroads, the boys with less sustained interest than me. Plenty of time to check out the signal tower. “You know, Older Son has toured the interlocking before, strapped to my chest.”
Ready to board Caltrain, the first leg of our adventure!
Signal towers are some impressive under-rated problem-solving. Train lines come together at junctions, and you need to ensure they don’t crash into each other. The signal tower is built high enough to look things over. And a siding is added so trains can pass. A little yard. Now there are a dozen switching points for half a dozen tracks and they all need to be coordinated correctly and consistently, so they get tied together with cables, such that if one switch between tracks is thrown, the matching switch is also thrown, and the appropriate cables that control the semaphor signals are pulled to the correct positions so the engineers know if they need to stop, or if they are allowed to go.
Touring the Santa Clara Signal Tower with Older Son, in 2014.
The earliest versions were “Armstrong” systems, so-called because it took strong arms to pull the levers that pulled the cables to correctly set the switches and signals. At Santa Clara, they had a more modern 1920s signal tower, where switches activated electrical relays that triggered the switches and signals. The regular trains ran through on schedule, special trains had orders made up on the typewriter in triplicate thanks to the miracle of carbon paper, and work went on until the work of the signal tower was replaced by a central computerized operations center in 1993, and handed over to the Historical Preservation folks for historical preservation.
Touring the Santa Clara Signal Tower with Younger Son, in 2026.
Appreciating the sweep of history I made mention of the future which we hope will eventually arrive: California’s High Speed Train system. It will run through the Santa Clara junction, passing below the old preserved tower. The guide got a glimmer in his eye, and said that what isn’t said enough is that we were standing over the first operational high-speed segment. If you took a high speed trainset and set it on the tracks here, it could pop up its catenary to Caltrain’s overhead wires and run between San Jose and San Francisco as Caltrain currently does. Today trains can run up to 79 miles per hour. With improvements to the signaling and tracks that will come along with the High Speed Rail construction, our new Caltrains are rated to 110 miles per hour. They ran faster than that when they were tested in Pueblo, Colorado.
The view from inside a Capital Corridor train, bound for Sacramento.
The Sacramento train arrived, to take us on the branch that has no pretensions of High Speed travel. North through the salt ponds. Why are they red, asked Younger Son? The Internet suggests that the algae that most enjoy the saltiest water are red. We cruised through the industrial backyards of the Bay Area, where all the cool equipment gets stored amid the graffiti. There seem to be fewer homeless folks camped along the way than there were on my last ride, two years ago. My hunch is that two things are true: in some cases we have done decent work of helping people move up from homelessness, and also that we have sent the cops in to shove The Problem further out of sight. Which is more true I could not tell you.
Our Sacramento train viewed from the overpass at Emeryville. The rightmost track is where we would board the California Zephyr the next morning.
Off at Emeryville and over the tracks to the hotel where we met Grandma. For a few dollars more, you can book a Bay View, but I correctly inferred that for a few dollars less, I could book a Train View. And the train view was fantastic: the Capitol Corridor stopped by at a regular cadence, then the Amtrak Coast Starlight, as well as freight trains. Sometimes in the night the horns heard softly on the fifth floor would prompt me to look out through the picture window and smile. The hotel has a restaurant but it was closed, so we walked to the Food Court across the street. Oakland offers no shortage of variety in cuisine, but the vendors were mostly consistent in serving their respective foods in garbage, collected in bins. The burger place flaunted convention, serving Younger Son and I drinks in used glass tumblers, incurring the endless toil of washing.
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