Dear friend,

The database. The archives. The sacred texts and the lore.

What are your official files and what can you do about them?

Our US databases are being READ/WRITEed by 20 year old introverted, text-based Slackers. Could it be for AI purposes? Or is it just noise?

Being cracked open to “read” is more than half of the problem for a “read/write” illegal access equation. Generally not very good at all from a security standpoint. Databases are sacred until they're not. And they're inherently imperfect, as you undoubtedly know, if you ever tried to maintain one.

Files live in computers. They also live in our hearts and are pieces of our souls. And I am a bit of a digital hoarder. But I've been making some changes as of late — moved to Proton for estate work and file security + ditched Notion for Monday.com marketing/ops work (and so I could double down on Notion personally). These sacred knowledge systems all needed some separation and cleaning and whatnot. But even for me with my comparatively tiny operational databases, it was difficult to determine what pages in those databases were valuable and what was best left behind.

But what do I know? That's why I want to ask for your help.

Now, please read on you beautiful soul, you.

Very truly yours,

Dr.* Brian C. Thackston, Esq.*, J.D.*

“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

But First, Let's Enjoy The Arts

Treat yourself to some art and entertainment in your life. The art below is from my recommendations list for keeping track of past, present, and future consumption. Because what is life, if not art?

Cunk on Life = 👍👍

Movie, My Couch, Mockumentary, ~1.25 hours

Philomena Cunk makes the biggest issues, thoughts, and discussions simply laughable. Her character’s simplemindedness expose hard-to-answer questions in an expert fashion.

It’s hard to make stupid this properly funny. Being a jester or clown is hard work, after all. You have to give people something to laugh at, which usually means yourself if you’re a clown with your clown-ish antics, or making light of somebody’s situation in jest, if you’re a jester. Tár did this in a different fashion which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Cunk makes you think about the profound in the most deeply stupid terms possible. It’s genius.

1000X RESIST = 👍👍

Video Game, Nintendo Switch, 1 Player, Mystery, ~10 hours

1000X RESIST is more visual novel than video game but it is a game and you do have a bit of agency in your interactions. Canada-built, Australia-published, and out-of-this-world creativity make this one heck of a ride.

You play as a character in a weirdly-isolated post-apocalyptic world ravaged by a mystery disease. Chapter after chapter of brilliant voicework and art direction unveils a story that is uniquely entertaining.

It was like a book that you can’t put down. The pace was perfect, the intrigue was excellent, and the overall production was unlike virtually anything else so I greedily consumed this one.

Recent Jams 🎶

🎵 Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation - jasmine.4.t
🎵 The Worst Is On Its Way - HEALTH
🎵 Another Brick In the Wall - Pink Floyd

Post Script for These Art Thoughts

Please, pray with me for the revival of Annapurna. A Netflix exec was just brought in to build on top of the still smoldering ashes of Annapurna Games that have been trying to stay lit. Annapurna have been my personal favorite Games and Pictures publisher this past decade and they have the upcoming Remedy transmedia project via Annapurna Pictures. So here’s to hoping they can rekindle the publisher’s Games glory.

My recommendations may or may not tickle your fancy. IMO you find critics with taste and use their recommendations for shortlisting your own consumption (or you just blindly walk from thing to thing because there is some virtue in ignorance too).

I also believe you “don’t yuk on somebody else’s yum.” But if my taste is "yuk" to you, then at least my positive reviews are a good proxy of what you should avoid!

Now, Let’s Ponder Together

Trending things found via social, Google Trends, and raw thoughtpower catalyzed by the professionals I work with (attorneys, accountants, marketers, etc.).

This Week's Energy

Gen AI Sloppy Mess

Well… the AI wars are still unfolding. Training sets remain core in my mind — that’s the “we scraped every piece of artwork from Tumblr, libraries, museums, and more, and then we scraped YouTube and Facebook, and then we mixed it with everyone’s Outlook emails and so on and so forth until we had the best auto-suggest ever for text-based output and images and code and whatnot” to create this AI machine.

One type of dataset that hasn’t really been scraped is government databases. But all you really need is “READ” access and maybe a supercomputer center and maybe a few good round the clock LLM script kiddies to grok that data to use for an AI machine… Wait a second.

Anyway, here's some other A.I. thoughts to take away:

• Deepseek + Nvidia: Economic warfare? Or smart people doing smart things (who happen to live in China)? Maybe a bit of column A and column B? It’s hard to pick winners but the Chinese LLM that forked Meta's LLama and did some nifty optimizations under the hood on GPU hardware was cool! It’s still Chinese programmed so it’s got a Great Firewall that we hopefully won’t replicate stupidly for ourselves here soon, but open sourcing for the right or wrong political reasons is still right for all the other reasons.
• Bring on the super models: Deep reasoning is pretty nifty. Same with the voice input oriented models and other AI evolutions that are happening now. The chat based stuff is good. But I want a super model that needs time to think and pull disparate thoughts together but I dunno if I want the all five senses level of observation needed for that sixth sense capability (and perhaps Jetsons-style does my dishes, laundry, etc. is what we all really need).
• Artists and audience still deserve better: LLMs as a tool type is inescapable and will create great things, like computer-based tools did art mediums. But stealing and then forcing folks to watch Coca Cola commercial slop will result in mirroring less and less original slop until there’s nothing new being said from our atrophied and rotted brains.

Legal Thoughts

Law and order will always be needed. Different folks with different interests will always need a professional mediator to determine how to best coexist. Taking that concept and building an industry out of it, well, there’s room for experimentation in terms of how to best handle these laws to serve the public.

• Washington State non-lawyer law firms: KPMG is moving into the legal space via Arizona (where referral fees are also not exclusive to attorneys!) and now Washington State is opening up the legal profession to non-attorney owners. Washington pioneered some apprenticeship models for becoming an attorney (which I love) as an alternative to law school. Now, they’re looking to more competition to improve the legal market, but there’s still far more folks that claim the legal space needs to be a self-regulated, exclusive guild since it’s more akin to a parochial calling to public service than it is a business.
• AI impersonation leads to child porn: Maryland teacher who spoofed the school principal’s voice via AI to circulate fake racist rants was not a good guy. He apparently was also into child porn based based on his search history and with AI able to make anything you have to wonder if this is what brought him down the AI for nefarious means rabbithole. Google’s extolling the virtues of it’s AI tech for "adversarial misuse" AKA scammers as well, which is in part akin to the “AI will end the earth” doom-marketing that has been quite effective for the /r/singularity crowd. But voice cloning is gonna be trouble so I get why it's thankfully been held back a bit.
• “Hacking” databases: Unauthorized access to files is “hacking the database” as they say in the movies. These DOGE moves are being cheered on under the notion that Elon’s Twitter management plan still works when it may not have worked as an ongoing business interest. The undoubtedly successful part of the plans indisputably helped him get in on the presidency and temporarily cut costs short term, but Twitter’s long-term health is far from secure and the U.S. government in its totality is definitely not comparable to a business. Especially when you remember the whole public service part of it and stop forgetting about the U.S. Constitution. I'm not really sure what's going on here, but I do not love giving access to sensitive and secure national files to an inexperienced team led by an empathy-less, reality-denying foreign national lacking security clearance and who believes the world is simply a simulation.

Marketing Thoughts

The web is (hopefully) going to get weird again. Video consumption preferences with faster internet, web tracking possibilities and limits, ai, and all kinds of other intangible zeitgeist zest means we’re in for another exciting decade of change.

• Short form video wars are heating up: TikTok is still around because they likely bribed the president of the US via $TRUMP and $MELANIA (although in fairness that could have been other bribes and callousness). But you can smell imminent and real competition in the air as Bluesky and others start swirling together video options that’ll hopefully compete alongside Snapchat and Instagram Reels (and YT Shorts, I guess).
• The Browser Wars are reheating up: Google’s move to upgrade Chromium web technology means the most popular ad block tool is going to break, we are going to move back into a cookie gray area, and we will hopefully see a resurgence in weird browsers (e.g. I’m daily-driving Brave browser, which definitely qualifies as weird, but is built on Chromium AKA Chrome’s open source code that Microsoft’s Edge and all other browsers other than Firefox run on).
• The bloodboy guy is selling supplements: He’s measuring his son’s boners and he’s moving past bloodswaps with his son to biomarkers. And he’s embracing it all in a silly, public spirit! Ah but to of course also Tsell supplements. $2mm a year on these experiments is noble in a twisted Victorian fantasy sense, but in reality it’s an anxious min/maxer that got all crossed up from $700mm+ acquisition who is now finding new meaning in selling the idea of living forever to his overanxious self and others. And after all, $700mm keeps going down if you aren't stacking more of that generational wealth for your son's and grandson's and granddaughters' boners. Such is life.

Post Script

Thirsty is as old as time. From the first cave painting to the LinkedIn humblebrags to the TikTok flaunts. Thirst all the way down, just like Socrates thought.

Let's Also Get Good At Computing

Before we talk A.I., here's an optional pep talk about you, your computer, and using the "Ctrl" key on your keyboard. This part should not be scary. I’m a simple-minded man who studied English Literature (who is now allegedly set to continue thriving in a post-AI world) so I know you too can learn how to use the “Ctrl” key.

Try this RIGHT now: Press the "Ctrl" key once. It doesn't do anything by itself! But if you combine it with other keys it does nifty things (e.g. holding "Ctrl" then pressing "T" = new browser tab).

For Mac users, you'll need to use "Cmd" instead of "Ctrl". The premium price of Mac devices doesn’t just stop at the price tag. And for mobile, see pg. 14 and please stay patient with me.

The very conveniently placed "Ctrl" key on the bottom left of your keyboard makes computing and surfing the web much easier. It's quite possible to do anything on a computer without a mouse thanks to “Ctrl”!

Quality of Life Suggestion: Try sprinkling just ONE "Ctrl" command into your routine per month (e.g. RIGHT NOW hold “Ctrl”, then press “T”, then type "sheet.new", and then press "enter").

I put together this guide of easy-to-master keyboard tricks that will help you work smarter when on the computer.

Life is short and you owe it to yourself. And AI is just another computer tool so it will favor those who already know how to use a computer well.

One more tip to try right now: Hold down both "Ctrl” and “Shift” then press “T" while in your browser.

Please, Share This

I hope you share your insights and thoughts and ire and whatnot with me via Twitter, LinkedIn, email, etc. I would enjoy hearing from you.

I also hope you share my stuff with other good folks with sharp minds such as yours.

Please, Holler At Me

Do you want to talk about a legal/business/operations/entertainment project thing? Simply want to chat? You can always schedule time here or contact me here and then let’s make great things happen.

Now onwards and upwards, you beautiful soul.

*Obtained a Juris Doctorate (J.D.) from the University of Baltimore School of Law, member of the Maryland State Bar Association (Esq.), and this fellow on the ABA Journal website said I can call myself a doctor (Dr.). Plus, I'm just jooooking from time to time.