October 1st and it’s 104 degrees here in Fallbrook. Geez.

You know there’s no end to the corruption with Trump, but this strikes me as a bottom-scraping move. Using food bank programs as a campaign tool. He of course has had absolutely nothing to do with our national program of food banks, run mostly by states and non-profits. But here he is, taking credit. He’s one sick dude.

Just stumbled onto this company, a venture capital darling and an interesting play. It’s basically a private Wikipedia. Now I love Wikipedia, and am comfortable with its crowdfunded and open source content pros and cons. So what’s the market for a privately curated version?

I know they’re not quite the same, but this reminds me of one of my old AI-hopeful companies, Cyc. Cyc (now Cycorp, Inc.) was an effort to encode all the world’s common sense in a data structure useful for AI. Doug Lenat, who is still with the company as CEO, starting working on and publicizing Cyc in 1984! So…36 years in product development. I’ll give kudos to Lenat for sticking with it, even if his “products” and use cases now seem pretty pedestrian (e.g. condition-based maintenance for heavy industry – you don’t need an intelligent machine to do this).

Just talked to my Dad. he sounds a little weak, but in good spirits. I talk to him every day lately. It’s great that he’s lucid and friendly – things were different for the years he was on the heavy pain meds. Nobody wanted to talk to him then. I’m sad for all those years lost, but happy that we’ve got a little back now. Knock on wood, 2020 hasn’t destroyed everything.