Mea Vita: Carpe Diem

Department of War/Department of Defense Trivia

2026-07-23T18:37:18.532-07:00

If you've ever watched Band of Brothers, you'll hear the term "War Department" mentioned several times.

You might think this is referring to what was later named the Department of Defense, but you'd be wrong. The War Department did not become the Defense Department.

Prior to 1947, the Secretaries of the Army and the Navy were cabinet-level positions that oversaw the Department of War and the Department of the Navy, respectively. The U.S. Army was the first military department created for war, so it made sense to name it the Department of War (called the War Office in the early years). This is similar to West Point which was formally established as the United States Military Academy (USMA) in 1802 and later followed by the United States Naval Academy (USNA) in 1845.

The National Security Act of 1947 restructured the military. First, the Department of War was renamed to the Department of the Army. Then, the newly established Department of the Air Force along with the Departments of the Army and Navy were merged into the National Military Establishment (NME), headed by the Secretary of Defense.

The National Military Establishment is an awkward name. So, two years later, in 1949, it was renamed to the Department of Defense.

Of course, today, there's a dust-up over what to call it. Perhaps Congress should simply rename it the Department of the Military since the military certainly wages war and it engages in peacekeeping missions.

Ultimately, I think of the U.S. military as a logistics organization that occasionally dabbles in combat.

Amateurs think tactics. Professionals think logistics.

Clarifying the Measurement Problem

2026-07-20T17:39:47.104-07:00

In quantum physics, there's the concept of the Measurement Problem. This basically states that measuring a quantum system which is in a state of superposition will collapse the wave function. Collapsing the wave function has the effect of altering the state of the observed system. This has given rise to people misinterpreting human observation as having a supernatural effect on a quantum system. In other words, there are no shortages of people who believe that human consciousness can affect outcomes.

In reality, the measurement interaction takes place at some type of detector (photodetectors, particle detectors, qubit detectors, etc.). But, before the detection is interpreted (measured), the particles being measured have already interacted. In other words, the wave function has collapsed before anything is "seen" or measured. As a matter of fact, the wave function can collapse without anyone "seeing" or measuring the outcome. It's effectively the tree falling in a forest philosophical thought experiment.

To put a finer point on it, the wave function collapses before it is measured (seen) since there will always be a delay between an interaction and its interpretation.

Saying Goodbye

2026-07-06T17:00:00.000-07:00

On Friday afternoon, a longtime local friend of 25 years, Ron, told me that he would be ending his life on Sunday through "assisted suicide" (End of Life Option Act). I had known for months that this was his plan due to his terminal cancer, but we didn’t know when it would happen; it all depended on how quickly the disease progressed.

Last night, Ron’s widow told me that he passed away very peacefully yesterday morning. This is the first time that someone I've known personally has opted for assisted suicide.

RIP Ron.

CoxWiFi Hotspots Issue Solved!

2026-07-02T12:56:02.129-07:00

For years, I’ve had trouble connecting my MacBook Pro to Cox’s complimentary public Wi-Fi hotspots (CoxWiFi). Today, I finally set out to solve the problem after noticing that my iPhone and iPad connected to CoxWiFi without issue, while my MacBook Pro connected but had no Internet access.

It turns out the problem was simply related to my DNS settings for that WiFi network. Cox's default DNS servers are 68.2.16.25 and 68.2.16.30. I had overwritten these setting with 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8.

Why was logging into Cox a problem?

Because I needed to sign in through Cox’s captive portal. To do that, my MacBook Pro had to be redirected automatically to Cox’s login page using their own DNS servers. Until I authenticated, the hotspot intercepted my network traffic and restricted Internet access, redirecting web requests to the captive portal so I could complete the sign-in process. But since I was trying to use non-Cox DNS servers, this process failed.

AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive

2026-06-12T08:38:20.550-07:00

I've been meaning to use AWS Glacier Deep Archive for years because it's so inexpensive. I just uploaded 780.7 GB of data into S3 using Glacier Deep Archive, which will cost me 77¢/month compared to $17.96 if I had stored this data as typical S3 Standard storage.

The tradeoff is that retrieval of my data from Glacier Deep Archive takes either 9 – 12 hours or up to 48 hours depending how much I'm willing to spend to retrieve this data ($5.07 vs $1.56, respectively).

This type of storage is ideal for backing up large amounts of data. In my case, I backed up my entire Apple Photos library consisting of 176,470 Photos and 6,184 Videos.

Challenges

Copying hundreds of gigabytes over the Internet is not a trivial matter. Not only does it require a stable Internet connection for a dozen hours, but one must also consider if your ISP has bandwidth limits, such as Cox, with a 1,024 GB monthly limit. (ISPs that use fiber optics generally don't have a monthly bandwidth limit.)

Initially, I copied my Photos Library.photoslibrary to my iCloud drive in hopes that it would be synced/backed up to iCloud. But, macOS exempts this file from being synced to iCloud since the iCloud Photos service is specifically designed to backup photos and share them across multiple devices.

A simple alternative solution, in theory, would be to compress (ZIP) my Photos Library.photoslibrary "file" (it's technically not a single file, but many files packaged up to look like a single file in Finder). This would have been my first option except my computer's hard drive doesn't have an extra 800GB to store the zipped up file prior to uploading it.

The best option I found, without the need to install any other software, was to use the Unix tar command while pipping the output directly to my AWS bucket.

tar -cf - "./Photos Library.photoslibrary" | \

aws s3 cp - \

s3://joe-apple-photos/Photos_Library_Backup.tar \

--storage-class DEEP_ARCHIVE

It took me two attempts to pipe the data to S3. The first attempt failed with the following error:

An error occurred (InvalidArgument) when calling the UploadPart operation: Part number must be an integer between 1 and 10000, inclusive

I fixed this issue by running the following AWS CLI command to change the multipart chunk size:

aws configure set \

default.s3.multipart_chunksize 512MB

Bonus Points

One downside to this technique is that I could only guesstimate how long the upload would take since there's no progress indicator. Next time I do this, I'll install and use the pv (pipe viewer) command:

tar -cf - "./Photos Library.photoslibrary" \
| pv -s 700g | \
aws s3 cp - \
s3://joe-apple-photos/Photos_Library_Backup.tar\
--storage-class DEEP_ARCHIVE

I haven't used PV before, but the progress indicator will look like this:

142GiB 0:03:15 [12.8MiB/s]

[==============> ] 20% ETA 12:08:45

OJ and & Knicks

2026-06-06T08:41:00.000-07:00

A close friend texted this me:

The most recent time when the Knicks led in the NBA Finals was June 17, 1994 (they would lose the series), and this occurred on that same day. That was exactly 2 weeks before my I-Day. (Induction Day is when he was sworn into active duty at the start of his Plebe year at the U.S. Naval Academy).

I, myself, clearly remember that day. I had just finished MOS school and was driving from New York to Southern California to report to my permanent duty station at Camp Pendleton.

When I left New York on Monday, I made it to Kent State and saw O.J. in handcuffs on the evening news.

That Friday, when I arrived in Los Angeles to stay with a high school buddy for the weekend, there was a BOLO for O.J. My arrival in L.A. coincided with the manhunt for O.J. and the ensuing white Ford Bronco chase.

Since my buddy and I were from New York, we were trying to watch the Knicks game, but the network put the game in a small box on the screen. We couldn’t see the score because the main coverage was focused on the 35-mph car chase.

Foreign Intelligence Gathering Through Facebook

2026-04-04T16:48:00.000-07:00

There’s an old joke that the CIA set up Facebook for human intelligence gathering since it’s far easier to have people willingly share the details of their lives rather than expend the energy themselves to collect it through surveillance.

Obviously, the CIA has nothing to do with the origins of Facebook, but foreign governments do use it for gathering intelligence, especially through government and military affiliated Facebook groups.

Here’s a Facebook group purporting to be an official U.S. Marine Corps group which has over 19,000 members.

On the surface, this group seems legitimate and many former Marines, like myself, have joined it. But I became suspicious when I saw posts like the following. (An MOS is a military member’s job that they were formally trained for.)

These two names are South Asian Muslim and Indonesian, respectively, which is far from the typical Marine Corps demographic. Sakib has locked his own Facebook profile, a sign that is a red flag indicating a scammer. Kristin’s Facebook profile is a advertising agency that was created last month with five posts and eight followers with no connection to the Marine Corps.

Let’s take a look at this Facebook group’s admin:

Rubel Miah, the group’s admin, is a long way from having any connection with an official U.S. Marine Corps page.

Creating a Facebook group with nearly 20,000 members takes work; and it doesn’t take long to realize that the creators of this group have nothing to do with the Marine Corps. So why go through all this trouble? Someone’s harvesting intel and AI certainly makes it much easier to collect.

Intel collection through social media has been around since day one. I’m surprised how little effort this Facebook group put into this endeavor, but thanks to mindless doom scrolling, it’s working.

I reached out to Meta (Facebook’s parent company) for comment but haven’t heard back.

Filtering News

2026-03-03T09:39:00.000-08:00

Most national and international news isn't actionable by us as individuals, so do we really need to watch it?

In 2018, I wrote about how to deal with the effects of the continuous flow of bad news.

I have three rules for filtering news:

1. How will it affect my lifestyle?

2. How will it affect my daily activities?

3. How will it change my mind in the voting booth?

For you, if the answer to all three is, "Not much," then ask yourself why you're continually watching the news? Bored? Looking for excitement? Curious?

Keep in mind what it's doing to your mental health.

Many people end up watching the news and then complaining on social media about it which spreads the angst. If you really want to do something, then do something actionable. Instead of going to a protest, contact your member of Congress. Do you even know who your three members of Congress are? Mine are Padilla and Schiff in the Senate and Peters in the House.

Better yet, watch the local news. Everything actionable will be covered there and your local government officials are easier to access when you want to be heard.

Having simple rules helps. Here are My Three Daily Life Goals.

AI Agents For Hire

2026-02-23T08:54:00.000-08:00

In a very near future, corporations will emerge with cultivated AI agents that a person or company could buy, license, or subscribe to in order to do specific tasks. Instead of hiring employees, especially at the junior level, a company could instead use HR, payroll, or organizational AI agents to do that work while putting a human in the loop to supervise and review the final work product.

AI is coming close to knowing all world knowledge similar to humanity in the TV show, Pluribus.

Soon, we may see professionals who’ve trained their own AI agents as extensions of themselves. These individuals could be hired alongside their agents, or even operate as solo CEOs with no traditional staff, deploying AI “employees” to execute work for other companies. In some cases, hiring organizations might interview the AI agent themselves, much like they would a human candidate, before hiring someone.

AI Agents Run Amok: Clawdbot –> Moltbot –> OpenClaw

2026-02-02T14:58:00.000-08:00

It looks like we've settled on a name...

What was called Clawdbot, and renamed to Moltbot, is finally called OpenClaw; and it's dangerous if you don't know what you're doing.

It's doxed people and scammed them out of money very quickly. This video explains the details that moved markets, today, such as Apple and Cloudflare stock.

Claude for Coding a Website

2026-01-11T14:54:00.000-08:00

I was listening to last Friday's Hard Fork tech podcast where the two hosts were discussing how they're saving $89/year by no longer hosting their personal websites on Squarespace; instead they using Claude Code.

Today, I tried Claude Code out myself to modernize my personal website, joemoreno.com, which I originally made with iWeb nearly 20 years ago. Its design, look, and feel were long in the tooth. iWeb, which was discontinued about five years later, was Apple's answer to Microsoft FrontPage. These two tools allowed consumers to create static webpages with the ease of creating a Keynote or PowerPoint presentation.

To make this happen, I simply used Claude from a web browser along with this prompt:

Take the content in these files at http://joemoreno.com/index.html and recreate the same website but with a modern look and feel.

Claude then coded for less than five minutes, and boom, it was done. I could render the website both inside the Claude environment and also publish it with a public URL hosted on Claude.

I then downloaded the index.html, which had the HTML and CSS in a single file, uploaded it to my AWS S3 bucket and I was done.

Now that was quick and easy.

AI Meets Expectations: Personal Turing Test

2025-11-25T12:29:00.000-08:00

Left: What I got. Right:What it should look like

I’ve had two personal tests that I’ve applied to every new AI model, and for years none of them passed.

One test was to generate an image of an absinthe fountain with glasses and absinthe spoons. Last year, AI got this right.

The other test was to take a multi-hours MP3 that I recorded at monthly jazz jam sessions and break it into individual tracks based on either silence between the songs or applause. This week, ChatGPT finally got it right, but I have yet to see success with other AI models.

Coding Tips: Stop Vibe Coding – Start Writing Elegant Code

2025-11-03T10:49:00.000-08:00

Know someone whose code is a bit sloppy or too vibey? This video might be just what they need.

ChatGPT's Atlas Web Browser

2025-10-22T16:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, ChatGPT released a standalone Web browser, called Atlas, with ChatGPT integrated into it. You can download it here for macOS only. Other operating systems are coming soon.

As a web browser, it seems OK.
But it really shines when you're on a web page, like a specific restaurant on Yelp, and ask it how long it'll take you to drive there.
"What time should I leave to arrive here by 6:15 today, accounting for live traffic updates?"

Also, since you're logged into your own ChatGPT account, your Atlas website queries are saved in ChatGPT.

Perhaps, one day, Apple will integrate AI into their operating systems so it can answer questions like this based on what you're looking at on your screen.

AI Calendar Invites

2025-08-27T14:08:00.000-07:00

I live near an event facility and they recently left a door hanger on my front door to let me know about upcoming events that will create parking issues in my residential neighborhood.

I uploaded a photo of the door hanger to ChatGPT and asked it to create a ZIP file of calendar invites for each event.

Boom! It worked perfectly. I downloaded a ZIP file with more than two dozen calendar invites that I added to my calendar.

Very impressive and helpful.

No, That's Not a 10 Minute Call

2025-07-08T19:44:00.000-07:00

I just came across this old screenshot of a 10-hour conference call from 2012, when I worked at Wyndham Hotel Group in corporate IT. (Wyndham owns about two dozen brands like Days Inn, Ramada, Super 8, Howard Johnson, etc.)

Every website deployment was a major endeavor requiring a separate deployment for each brand throughout the night, followed by a quick "smoke test" by QA before moving on to the next brand.

This painful process took many hours. In this case, we began the conference call at 10 PM on a Sunday night and we were on the phone for ten hours straight.

Would you ever believe that AT&T could keep a call connected, without dropping, for ten hours?

Amazon Fulfillment Warehouse Tour

2025-07-01T18:49:00.000-07:00

This afternoon, I took a one-mile walking tour of an Amazon fulfillment warehouse that’s mostly run by robots, here in San Diego. This facility spans 3,330,000² feet, employs 4,500 people, and operates 23/7 in three shifts with one hour of daily downtime.

I highly recommend taking one of these tours which are free and open to the public in nearly 20 states: Amazon Tours. 

The most fascinating part was watching the robots disappear into the darkness as they moved shelves of Amazon products since they don’t need light to see where they’re going. 

Sorry, no photos allowed.

AI for Eating

2025-06-29T13:32:00.000-07:00

Last night, I was at an Italian restaurant and I wanted to know how these two sauces would look on my cheese stuffed gnocchi.

These photos the are AI-generated images I received after uploading the menu photo above and asking what both dishes would look like.

AI-generated Images

I ordered the second option, the Gnocchi Ragu della Nonna, and what I received matched the image perfectly.

My dinner was spot on

AI for Data Science with San Diego Data

2025-06-07T19:20:00.000-07:00

I asked some popular AI chatbots to analyze the open source data that San Diego provides.

I started off analyzing the data for parking meters, since that's a hot button issue for the city, recently. Two separate chatbots gave me similar answers when I asked what's the most amount of money that these 10,978 parking meters could generate if they were in use continuously for the times they're in effect. The answers came back remarkably close: $75,772.75 and $75,796.75. That's an impressive $24 difference between the two AIs. Close enough for me.

Crimes committed within half a mile of a local high school

Next, I downloaded the 190 MB file of crimes committed in San Diego since 2020 and asked it to plot on a map all of the crimes committed within half a mile of a local high school. I was genuinely impressed with the static HTML file it generated which included listing the crime with each pin. Upon digging deeper, I noticed that I didn't see my police report for my stolen catalytic converter from three years ago. But after a bit of investigation, I realized it wasn’t included in the SDPD’s dataset, so the omission wasn’t the AI’s fault.

Shared Proof Theory

2025-05-02T14:47:00.000-07:00

I enjoy learning new things, especially if it involves a paradigm shift that changes my perspective. But what's a trusted rule that yields objective truth?

Objective truth is a fact or reality that exists independently of individual beliefs, feelings, or perceptions. It’s considered true regardless of who observes or thinks about it.

So, how do I evaluate and arrive at objective truth? I've adopted the following as my own personal philosophy:

If something can’t be shared, measured, or observed, then it’s subjective; it becomes very difficult to prove to others.

In other words, if an experience is accessible only to a single individual, it is subjective; but if it can be seen, tested, or agreed upon by others, it is objective.

We connect through an objective shared reality, while it is the inner, unseen truths that give our connections depth and meaning.

AI Let Down

2025-03-23T15:52:00.000-07:00

AI is great at manipulating text and documents, and it does a very nice job at examining photos and transcribing text from images. But today AI let me down with what seemed like a simple task: to take a single, three-and-a-half-hour MP3 recording and break it down into individual tracks.

I used to belong to 3rdSpace, which was a coworking space for creative people. They had monthly Jazz Jams along with other music events. I would typically turn on my audio recorder on my iPhone and let it record the entire event as a single audio file. Occasionally, I’d then take that MP3 file, load it up in GarageBand, and slice it into individual music tracks. But more so than not, instead of doing the work myself, I’d upload the single MP3 to AWS’s Mechanical Turk and pay someone a few dollars to slice up the music into individual tracks.

This morning, I thought, for sure, that one of the big AIs could do this for me. After trying ChatGPT, Gemini/NotebookLM, and DeepSeek, they all failed me. The closest was ChatGPT, which kept apologizing for timing out on me. Gemini referred me to other applications, and DeepSeek was beyond its depth.

Perhaps one day; but, for now, AI’s sweet spot is language, not action.

Gravity and Philosophical Cosmology: A Work in Progress

2025-03-23T15:26:00.000-07:00

Gravity is not a a fundamental force in the universe.

Gravity is one of the four fundamental interactions in the universe, but it’s not a force since it has no messenger (carrier) particle that transmits it. (Gravitons are similar to tachyons: they don’t exist.)

The electromotive force is transmitted by photons.

The strong nuclear force is transmitted by gluons.

These two forces, photons and gluons, seem to be the only forms of massless energy that we are aware of. Photons act over an infinite distance, whereas gluons travel only within a proton to bind the quarks that make up a proton.

The weak nuclear force is transmitted by w and z particles (which do have invariant mass, better known as rest mass). Rest means that, if a particle of energy could stop moving at c, it would literally have zero mass - in other words, all the mass of an energy particle is a result of its momentum.

The leads to another phenomenon I’ve been trying to better understand, which is how do attractive forces work, such as the attraction of the north and south pole of a magnet? While this interaction seems as obvious as gravity, at first glance, I’m wondering if it’s truly an attractive force? Rather, could it be a push force where the space between the north and south poles creates an “energy vacuum” or lower energy state? In other words, is what we see as an attraction actually the magnets being pushed into a lower energy state from the space or forces around it?

How does attraction work? Good question. I came to imagine repulsion in a classical sense. I can imagine “pushing.” For example, classically, I can envision two atoms emitting photons directed at each other like two people standing in a rowboat while throwing a ball back and forth to each other. The ball leaving one person’s hands is analogous to a photon emitted from an atom. As this process continues, the boats, like the atoms, are pushed apart. They’re repulsed. So, how do we imagine an attractive force?

Additionally, it seems that gravity doesn’t originate outward from mass, rather inward; otherwise, how could the gravity of a black hole be detected outside the event horizon? How could a fictitious graviton travel faster than light to escape out of the event horizon?

Rather, it appears that the Cosmos (spacetime) is flowing, like a river, into mass. Crossing the event horizon is analogous to going over a waterfall.

A final thought…

What happens or what exists in the space where the event horizons of two black holes overlap? The flow of the spacetime aether would be in opposite directions. Would it simply be a void of nothingness? 🤷‍♂️

AI in the Federal Government

2025-03-04T11:16:00.000-08:00

I was recently speaking to some Veterans Administration (VA) consultants who told me that they're seeing a big shift in the time it takes to review a veteran's disability benefits.

In the past, VA benefits could take many months of review following medical appointments. Now, the consultants are sometimes seeing VA benefits finalized within days to a couple of weeks thanks to AI.

I asked AI to expand on my two paragraph blog post and this is what it came up with:

I recently had the opportunity to speak with some consultants who work closely with the Veterans Administration (VA), and they shared some fascinating insights about a major shift happening in the way veteran disability benefits are being processed. According to them, the time it takes for the VA to review and finalize disability claims has seen a dramatic improvement, largely due to advancements in AI.

Historically, veterans applying for disability benefits often faced lengthy wait times. After completing their necessary medical evaluations, it could take many months—sometimes even longer—for their claims to be fully reviewed and approved. This extended waiting period placed a significant burden on veterans who needed timely support and resources.

However, the consultants I spoke with explained that AI is now playing a pivotal role in expediting this process. In some cases, claims that once took months to navigate through various layers of review are now being finalized in a matter of days or just a couple of weeks. AI-powered systems are helping to analyze medical records, cross-reference data, and flag key details more efficiently than traditional manual processes.

While these advancements are promising, they also raise important questions about accuracy, fairness, and the role of human oversight in decision-making. Nevertheless, for many veterans who have long struggled with bureaucratic delays, this shift represents a significant and much-needed improvement in the VA benefits system.

As AI continues to evolve, it will be interesting to see how technology further reshapes government processes, particularly in areas that directly impact the lives of those who have served our country.

Saturday Night: Live

2025-02-27T18:00:00.000-08:00

Last week I watched some clips from the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live. As a kid, growing up in New York, I used to stay up late to watch it, like many of my fellow New Yorkers.

My uncle used to work at 30 Rockefeller Center, so he would occasionally get me tickets to NBC programs like Late Night with David Letterman and Saturday Night Live.

Although I didn't get a chance to see a live broadcast of SNL, I did get to see the two-hour dress rehearsal that occurs each Saturday night from 8 PM – 10 PM. Based on the audience's reaction, a couple sketches are cut from the show to make it fit in 90 minutes.

So, I had a chance to watch the dress rehearsal on December 17, 1994 with Courtney Love's band, Hole along with George Forman as the guest host.

After the dress rehearsal, my buddy and I went to a local NYC bar and we were thrilled to watch the live broadcast while knowing what was about to happen.

DOGE and the Shakeup in Government: A Culture Shift

2025-02-21T10:55:00.000-08:00

Without a doubt, the entire world has seen the shakeup in the U.S. federal government led by the President and DOGE.

In a nutshell, the fundamental culture of the federal government has been impacted by a shift from a traditional bureaucracy to an entrepreneurial, cost-cutting mindset.

Each type of organization has one keyword that's a driving force in its organization. For the federal government, that word is "risk." What's the risk of doing this or what's the risk of doing that?

For entrepreneurial organizations, the key driving force is "opportunity." How can I turn this challenge or setback into an opportunity?

Opportunity prioritizes speed of change over security, whereas risk prioritizes security over speed. Each has its appropriate place and time.