I’ve run 13.1 miles countless times. I’ve done it in fun runs, training runs and as part of longer races like marathons and ultras. But as I get older, I’m growing to love the half marathon distance as race in and of itself. The training is (usually) manageable. The distance lends itself well to both building speed and mental strength. And there is definitely still some risk of things going south on you if you don’t prepare and execute well.

Thankfully, my race today at the Pittsburgh Half Marathon is evidence of preparing and executing well:

• I PR’d with a time of 1 hour, 39 minutes, 23 seconds
• My average pace was 07:31 minutes per mile
• I placed 698th overall in a field of 14,011 runners
• In my 45-49 age group, I placed 26th out of 949 runners

I’m really pleased with this result. My only goal going into this race was to beat 1 hour, 45 minutes – the time I clocked at the last half marathon I ran back in December. Shaving 6 minutes off that time is more than I was expecting, but I guess all those interval workouts and tempo runs payed off!

The weather might have helped. It was a crisp 34º at the start. Once the sun came out it warmed up a bit, but for the most part the cool temps prevented me from running hot.

The vibes of the race may have also played a part. Each neighborhood - from the Strip District to the North Side to the West End to the South Side – brought the energy and cheering. There was rarely a point during the 13 miles that didn’t have a group of people ringing cowbells, shouting encouragement, and sending positivity. When I started to feel the fatigue around mile 11, those vibes definitely helped me bring it home.

So, in a nutshell, I’m now hooked on the half marathon and looking forward to finding another one to train up for. If there’s a race on the eastern seaboard you absolutely love, hit me up.

This article from Modern Retail about the retailer rush to develop and integrate their apps into the OpanAI & Claude ecosystems caught my eye.

Having worked in retail for more than a decade, I understand this rush because the industry is reactive. Most of the time it goes down this way: Target or Walmart or one of your competitors does something, then you rush to copy-cat as fast as you can for fear of getting ’left behind.’ This is exactly what’s happening here, especially when you consider the marketing narrative around AI these days.

Having products or services surfaced in ChatGPT or Claude, and then having those apps facilitate a checkout on your behalf is alluring for retail leadership because all they’re hearing is that this future is inevitable. (It’s not.) But if we pull on this thread and think about how this path might evolve, I think there’s a lot of risk associated with it. From the article:

Still, some retailers, brands and other app developers are hesitant to hand off customer information and payments to OpenAI, according to Bloomberg, which also reported that developers have complained about a tedious app approval process, a buggy coding system and the lack of usage data.

If the AI hype comes to fruition, we’ll be mediating our entire existence through these apps eventually. In my opintion, this is our generation’s version of the snake oil pitch. When it comes to retail, if we optimize for the snake oil we’re being sold we will have willingly embraced a layer of obfuscation between our customers and our products. We will have relinquished the most important aspect of retail: our customer experience. If we don’t control the quality and consistency of our customer shopping experiences, what differentiates us?

We will have also lost any position of control over margins & profitability because we will be at the mercy of our new LLM marketplaces. This would create immense market pressure on our business. Just look at Amazon for how this might pan out long term. How is that going for business owners other than Amazon?

I think retailers need to think critically about this rush to embrace a mediation of their shopping experiences and business conditions by LLMs. Curiosity is one thing. Curiosity should be always be encouraged to understand the potential for emerging technologies. But rushing to embrace the vibe-based future we’re being sold is a concerning play in my mind.

Tante pulls no punches in this blistering critique that likens “AI” to a fascist, political, borderline-religious project with a mission to shift power & agency away from people and organizations toward centralized power structures. This mission is often rooted in violence:

The first form of violence “AI” depends on is the violence of data acquisition: “AI” depends on scraping and accumulating all you can get – including taking against people’s explicit will and without their consent.

This is must-read for anyone thinking critically about AI and/or working to subvert it.

Anil Dash explores why NASA published the Artemis II photos on Flickr, of all places:

By having the public’s images preserved in an independent archive in standard formats, we increase the likelihood of future generations being able to access accurate copies of these historical records.

As I get older, cultural memory and the long-tail archive of our digital lives is on my mind. This site serves as that personal archive for me, and at individual scale, it works. I manage the infrastructure, pay the bills and nurture its development.

Anil makes the good point that at institutional scale, self-hosting is often not a viable option. NASA is naturally more concerned with flying humans into space than managing a website, so the outsourcing of this archive to a responsible, ethical 3rd party is the wise choice, if not the only choice.

I’m glad Flickr is still here and they’ve made commitments to cultural longevity with archival intent. We need more platforms to think this way to ensure the cultural artifacts we’ve been producing for the last several decades remain accessible for generations to come.