Jamie Thingelstad

Tammy and I went to a very cool small performance by Gary Louris of The Jayhawks and Golden Smog at O’Shaughnessy Distilling. Just him and his guitar for 90 minutes.

Judged two novice rounds at the Minnesota Debate Teachers Association (MDTA) Jamboree today at Wayzata High School. Was fun to remember how to flow a round and the debaters in general did a great job for their very first rounds in a tournament!

My friend Garrick recently shared about Two AI Bots Discussing His Work — a test he did using Google’s Notebook LM. I listened to the three recordings that he shared and it was incredible.

I had to try this myself so I fired up Notebook LM and decided to throw some issues of the Weekly Thing at it. The results were interesting to say the least!

292 / Signal, Checkboxes, Hope

Notes:

• I found the beginning of this super interesting. It just jumps right into the privacy topic and for some reason even pulls in bee keeping which seems strangely connected to other things.
• The AI really got focused on the featured article about Section 230 and ignores everything else in this issue. There is a good chunk of writing in here about GTD that is entirely ignored.
• The bots totally understand what Section 230 is.
• It cracked me up when the AI’s highlight quotes.
• I found it odd that it mostly pronounces my last name right, but gets it wrong one time.

287 / Plinky, Piccolo, Privacy

Notes:

• This one starts out with a much more traditional podcast introduction, even using a title “The Deep Dive”. Very different from what it did on the other ones.
• The bots talking about stackless interpreters is pretty funny.
• This one works hard to cover all the various things in the newsletter and kind of rambles on.

276 / Contextual, Copilot, Collections

Notes:

• This issue includes the dates that it covers in the header, and the AI clearly sees that and makes an intentional reference to this being somewhat old. “Back in February 2024…”
• The Apple Vision Pro “Ahh, yes. It was all the rage back then.”
• “This guy is writing the user manual for the future.” Okay!
• Even the bots poke fun at blockchain. “Obsessed with the idea of decentralization.” 😂
• It is curious to me that in this one there are more references to “this guy” and “the author”. It doesn’t seem to know who I am like it does in the others.
• I love the “totally random” reference to the blog post about the Minneapolis Downtown Council. The bots can’t help but try to connect it to the rest of the content, which it isn’t at all. But it does make one up! Apparently I’m connecting urban planning to digital spaces.

Multiple Issues

At this point I was pretty impressed and intrigued by what this was doing. I wanted to try something with more content so this time I uploaded 14 recent issues of the Weekly Thing into the notebook and told it to generate. I was curious what it would do with this much material! This one has an entirely different structure.

Notes:

• The bots cover a lot of ground but focus a lot on the variety of topics.
• It is goofy to me when the AI says to the other one “I think I remember that one…” Huh?
• It thinks I switched my whole blog to a web3 platform, which I didn’t. Not sure how it got that.
• “He’s grounded.” If I want some compliments I’ll just listen to this. 😊
• “Jamie doesn’t shy away from any topic. He even went deep on cryptocurrency.”

Tyler is heading to the Minnesota Debate Teachers Association (MDTA) Jamboree today for his very first debate tournament and the official start of the debate season. I’m also going to be there judging rounds. It has been 35 years since I flowed a debate round!

The policy resolution selected for this season is:

Resolved: The United States federal government should significantly strengthen its protection of domestic intellectual property rights in copyrights, patents, and/or trademarks.

Listening to the arguments around this topic had me remembering the resolutions I debated in high school. I couldn’t remember them exactly but did remember the themes well. I found this comprehensive list of High School Policy Debate Resolutions on a blog with a wonderful debate-inspired name “The 3NR”. Love that.

1987/1988
Resolved: That the United States government should adopt a policy to increase political stability in Latin America.

1988/1989
Resolved: That the federal government should implement a comprehensive program to guarantee retirement security for United States citizens over age 65.

1989/1990
Resolved: That the federal government should adopt a nationwide policy to decrease overcrowding in prisons and jails in the United States.

I remember the prison overcrowding one the best for sure. My partner Jeff and I were varsity debaters that year and took that resolution and stretched it very far in various arguments. I’m looking forward to seeing all of these debaters today making their cases around intellectual property.

Another incredible evening for the CIO Wine Tasting event hosted by Dee Thibodeau of Charter Solutions and Terri Naughtin of Naughtin Group. Tony Peleska of Kraus Anderson provides a stunning venue on their balcony in downtown Minneapolis. What a wonderful group of technology leaders to connect with. And the highlight of the evening is Chuck Kanski of Solo Vino providing an incredible array of unique wines with the background on each of the grapes. 🍷

Ordered an iPhone 16 Pro today. I currently have an iPhone 14 Pro. I typically wait three years between upgrades. The camera improvements and ability to use Apple Intelligence pushed me to upgrade earlier.

Nice evening for a fire at Quarterdeck Resort.

The sauna at Quarterdeck Resort is incredible. Enjoyed a couple of cycles through here on our stay.

On the corner of Get Outside Trail and Smore Fun Way at Quarterdeck Resort.

Apple updates tonight:

✅ 4 Macs
✅ 3 iPhones
✅ 4 Apple TVs
✅ 3 HomePods
✅ 2 Apple Watches
✅ iPad Pro
✅ Vision Pro

We watched Tetris and it was great. Tetris is my favorite game ever. I can still get completely lost playing Tetris. We even had a Tetris shower! The movie tells the story of getting the right to distribute the game and is filled with suspense and intrigue.

Triple smashburgers for Tyler and I tonight! 🤤

For many years I’ve had the desire to get a sauna. Usually this has two peaks — one predictably in the winter when I think it would be so nice to have a good sweat, and the other time is during the Minnesota State Fair when we invariably end up looking at multiple sauna on display and even talking through the logistics with some of the builders. This year at the fair was no different and when we walked into the Dairy Building to see the Butter Heads and get our official American Dairy Association of Minnesota Ice Cream we happened upon Urban Wing NorthUp Sauna.

They had two saunas on display and they immediately caught my eye. They didn’t look like other saunas with their translucent walls. One was built on trailer wheels and mobile, the other was on a skid like an ice house. We went inside it and I found the design great, and those translucent walls meant that a lot of ambient light came in easily. My sauna desire was steadily climbing, and fast.

I put myself on the mailing list and grabbed the website address so I could check it out more, which I did.

When we returned to the fair for the third time we again saw the Butter Heads and this time on the way back we stopped and talked to Darin, the owner of Urban Wing, for a while and got a bunch of questions answered. The sauna desire was climbing even more. Uh oh. I scheduled a call with Darin for later in the week to learn more.

Long story short after a couple of calls and detailing the specific sauna configuration that I wanted for our cabin I took the leap and placed the order! The sauna will be delivered in November or December, with plenty of time to get ready for winter saunas. I’m super excited to take the leap.

Now I have to decide if I’m going to do the “sow-nah” or “sau-nah” pronunciation. Darin is a “sow-nah” guy. I may just go with the Old Norse of Baðhús.

I took the pontoon back to La Canne’s for winterization and storage. I got it out on May 10th this year for 127 days on the water. With the flooding this year we have done very little boating. I tried to avoid the rain but ended up getting pretty soaked on the ride in.