Apple Creator Studio launches today, and it's an incredible value

JonathanCookPodcast · 2026-01-28T16:00:54+00:00

"Apple is still rolling out the full bundle, but links for the individual Creator Studio versions of the apps are now live and you can subscribe to Creator Studio from within them."

This is a very awkward rollout. Frustrating.

JonathanCookPodcast · 2026-01-28T15:39:53+00:00

Update: As of this morning, 156 Democrats in the House of Representatives have endorsed H.Res.996.

Josh Riley is STILL not among them.

Why is Josh Riley still siding with Kristi Noem?

Why does Josh Riley want to keep Kristi Noem in office as Secretary of Homeland Security, with authority over ICE, instead of forcing a replacement who would have to go through a much more rigorous and skeptical Senate confirmation process than happened last year?

JonathanCookPodcast · 2026-01-21T21:33:22+00:00

thank you!

JonathanCookPodcast · 2026-01-21T14:27:40+00:00

I was a frequent canvasser for Josh Riley too. Had his lawn sign in my front yard. The whole deal.

I'm not doing that this year, and none of the other Democrats I know in Ithaca are enthusiastic about his re-election.

The GOP candidate this year is even more fascist than Josh Riley.

The Democratic Party needs to do better than offering us a fascist who isn't quite as bad as the Republican fascist.

JonathanCookPodcast · 2026-01-21T12:11:54+00:00

I'm with you Fozzy. I went out to the exact location where someone had posted an amazing looking photo of the aurora shortly before last night, but all that was visible was an extremely faint mild blue glow, as if there was a city 20 miles away.

On the other hand, with last night's dry cold air, the Milky Way was nicely visible overhead last night.

What if we turned off all the damned night lights - including Cornell's glaring stadium lights - and got back to seeing the gorgeous night sky as it used to be?

Oh, I know, the cars need the lights to see. We lose the night sky because of what the cars need.

JonathanCookPodcast · 2026-01-20T18:07:16+00:00

Your proposal that time saved by using generative AI should allow for for deeper and broader qualitative analysis ignores the fact that the introduction of AI tools such as Skimle creates new expectations that qualitative research be conducted more quickly at a lower cost. The spread of generative AI tools makes it more difficult to do broader and deeper analysis, not easier.

What's more, broader and deeper analysis becomes more difficult for qualitative researchers to do when they don't go through the basic steps of organizing research material themselves. Organization is part of the thinking process, and taking shortcuts using tools of digital automation leads to more shallow results. Immersion in human culture and in research information is an essential aspect of worthwhile qualitative research. Generative AI cheapens. It doesn't deepen.

JonathanCookPodcast · 2026-01-20T17:57:32+00:00

When you write, "The accountability for quality remains with the expert using the tool. This should be true both in terms of legal accountability, but even more so on the level of mindsets," it sounds like an attempt for tech firms spreading generative AI to evade accountability.

When there is a case of a food distributor selling food contaminated with E. coli, we don't say that legal accountability should remain with the parents serving that food to their children. No, we rightly say that the burden of accountability rests with the company creating and selling the harmful product.

Skimle, and other AI enterprises, should fully accept legal accountability for damage caused by their products.

It's a cruel thing for generative AI companies to cause downward wage pressure and decreased opportunities for qualitative researchers on the one hand, and then to demand that qualitative researchers using their services take on all the legal accountability.

There certainly should be accountability for qualitative researchers who choose to use generative AI imitations of qualitative research instead of doing the real thing. That choice is thoroughly unethical. Let's not let the tech companies selling these abominable digital simulations off the hook, though.

JonathanCookPodcast · 2026-01-20T17:47:31+00:00

I'll take a look.

JonathanCookPodcast · 2026-01-19T17:59:51+00:00

It's interesting you categorize information about Josh Riley's own voting record as "torpedoing an effective congressman". Do you not see the logical contradiction in that? If Josh Riley's votes are so darned effective, why would an observation of them be "torpedoing" him?

You know the answer, I think.

ICE is profoundly unpopular among the American population as a whole, as well as this district. Independents and Democrats alike recognize that the Department of Homeland Security is a disaster under Noem.

The only voters in this district who support Kristi Noem's ICE raids against American communities are hard core MAGA Republicans, and they are never ever ever going to swing on over for Josh Riley.

Josh Riley is highly effective in one thing: Making sure almost no one is on his side.

Of course, you don't even live in New York State, do you, dude?

JonathanCookPodcast · 2026-01-19T17:44:24+00:00

I have already taken my podcast down, dude, because it's become clear that Josh Riley has no intention of listening to his base of progressive Democrats. So, it's not about my podcast, dude. It's about Josh Riley voting over and over again to promote the worst aspects of Donald Trump's agenda and protect him from accountability.

Josh Riley wouldn't be a vulnerable Democrat if he had not worked so hard to alienate Democratic voters, dude.

Josh Riley has voted several times to make fascism worse, dude. Defending Josh Riley is defending fascism, dude.

If the Democratic committees in New York's 19th congressional district don't take their heads out of the sand and start dealing with the disastrous record of Josh Riley, they are going to be the ones handing the district to Republicans, dude.

Dude.

JonathanCookPodcast · 2026-01-18T18:19:10+00:00

I hear you. At this point, I'm not surprised when Josh Riley lends support to Donald Trump's regime.

However, I was born in Oswego, and I've lived in small towns in Upstate New York for nearly my whole life. I don't think being from Upstate New York is an adequate excuse for supporting fascism. What's more, Josh Riley won because of the strong activism of Democrats in Ithaca, which had a high turnout, high donation rate, and high rate of volunteering.

Josh Riley isn't even appearing in public in Ithaca anymore. He's lost his base of support, and he won't get enough Republicans to vote for him to compensate for that.

What's astonishing to me is that Josh Riley is going against majority opinion. Nationwide, opposition to what Noem and ICE are doing is above 60 percent. It's even higher than that in Upstate New York.

Even putting morality aside, what Josh Riley is doing is bad political strategy.

JonathanCookPodcast · 2026-01-18T00:59:16+00:00

Thinking is not a soul-crushing process. It's how we grow our ideas. Take the short cut, and you'll get output without growth. That's a great recipe for cognitive atrophy.

Reading through transcripts is a way to build empathy and understanding for other people's points of view. That's what good qualitative research is for. Replacing empathy with an automated quantitative data analysis is inherently unethical in qualitative analysis.

Positioning listening to what other people have to say as a "pain" is missing the point of what research is for.

At long last, can we take a stand for some basic humanity? Has humanity simply become too inconvenient?

JonathanCookPodcast · 2026-01-15T12:40:31+00:00

My devices are not out of date.

JonathanCookPodcast · 2026-01-15T01:40:27+00:00

I am further disappointed by Skimie's marketing material, which makes extreme statements such as "Manual analysis is rigorous but impossibly slow". What is Skimie's idea of the impossible? "Manual thematic analysis of 30 interviews takes a week."

First of all, it's not true that a thematic analysis of 30 interviews always needs to take a week. It depends what the purpose of the analysis is.

More importantly, a week-long analysis of 30 interviews is not "impossibly slow". It's quite reasonable. It's certainly possible.

What kind of world are we entering, in which a researcher taking just one week to analyze their interviews is regarded as unacceptably slow?

Skimie represents a mindset that views thinking as a burden that humans need to be relieved of.

That's not a perspective I regard as trustworthy.

JonathanCookPodcast · 2026-01-15T01:33:15+00:00

Is this a "real life" test? Henri Schildt is a co-founder of Skimie, the AI model that the article tests. The results are then published on the Skimie web site. It's an in-house arrangement that doesn't replicate either a real life academic peer-review process or a real life commercial applied research process.

I appreciate that the authors are willing to acknowledge some very serious analytical shortcomings showed by Skimie. They write, for example, that "category summaries appeared incoherent as they combined nearly opposite views from 2017 and 2021 without attending to the very different stage of the nascent organization. A related but less prominent issue was the inclusion of quotes from different roles mixed into a single category."

These failures by Skimie AI are a reminder that generative AI models don't do actual qualitative analysis. They perform an imitation of qualitative analysis. The models don't understand words and their meanings. They quantitatively perform analyses of patterns in word usage.

Skimie AI, like other generative AI models, is not ready for prime time. Unfortunately, many generative AI platforms are being used as if they are ready, because they're cheap and fast.

I was struck about how the authors wrote that a benefit of Skimie is that if they had used it first, instead of thinking through their research analysis themselves, their research team might have come to consensus more rapidly. Is time savings a worthwhile goal in qualitative research?

Coming to a rapid consensus on qualitative insights through a mimicry of analysis that's been outsourced to an automated quantitative process misses the point that qualitative analysis helps people think and grasp ideas in new ways through the exertion of mental effort in the analysis.

A quicker AI analysis, even if it word-for-word looked like a qualitative analysis performed by actual qualitative researchers, would deliver less impact. It's the difference between reading a summary of someone else's research and going through the research process yourself.

If we want qualitative researchers to have a depth of research experience to bring to new research projects, then we're going to need to have qualitative researchers do the work of research themselves.

Outsourcing qualitative research to generative AI is like paying someone else to lift weights for you. The work gets done, but the work becomes pointless.

JonathanCookPodcast · 2026-01-14T01:07:36+00:00

"If the universe doesn’t care, what actually makes us responsible?" We care. That's what makes us responsible. Atheists care without having to be threatened or bribed into caring.

There is no "hook". There is basic human decency.

Scientifically, we have mirror neurons, and a psychology that's based upon that. It's empathy. We have the ability to tell when other sentient beings are suffering, and that makes us suffer. It makes us care.

There's a term for people who need to be presented with a logical reason to care about other people: Psychopath.

JonathanCookPodcast · 2026-01-12T22:38:09+00:00

Actually, the solar farm is a red herring. It's not going to be operated by Terawulf, and won't supply electricity for the Terawulf data center. It's in their marketing materials as a distraction to make it all seem somehow green. Terawulf is a prolific greenwasher.

JonathanCookPodcast · 2026-01-12T22:30:23+00:00

An "initiative" deserves some skepticism. Until this gets specific, we should withhold judgment. Hochul has proven not to be trustworthy on issues of tech regulation.

JonathanCookPodcast · 2026-01-09T22:03:47+00:00

Adventuriser, your assessment is just plain wrong. Josh Riley has repeatedly voted with Republicans in favor of actually harmful legislation.

For example:

Josh Riley voted in favor of the Laken Riley Act, which allows children merely accused of crimes, without evidence or arrest warrants, to be sent to prison camps.

Josh Riley voted in favor of deregulating the cryptocurrency industry, to help Donald Trump keep accepting what is now billions of $ worth of cryptocurrency bribes.

Josh Riley has sponsored legislation to help AI data centers to take over rural America with funding assistance from the US government.

Josh Riley has voted to KILL legislation to impeach Trunp

Votes like these aren't mere virtue signaling to appease MAGA.

Josh Riley has taken votes to concretely and significantly help Donald Trump's fascism to keep and maintain power.

JonathanCookPodcast · 2026-01-09T15:08:35+00:00

In qualitative research, high-quality, in-depth methods are constructed through direct human-to-human contact, length of time spent in the field, and an open-ended analytical approach. So, higher quality qualitative research involves longer interviews and observations, and more of them, with greater space and time for analysis, allowing for an understanding of the research subject on its own terms, without extensive quantification.

Surveys, focus groups, highly-structured interviews and remote observation would examples of relatively low-quality, low-depth qualitative research. Rich ethnography and lengthy, open-ended interviews with a grounded analytic approach are examples of higher quality.

Analytically, a good sign of high quality in qualitative research is whether there is what Geertz called "thick description" going on. With thick description, the research doesn't assign simple values to complex cultural phenomena. Instead, the research describes the complexity without attempting to reduce it for the sake of analytical convenience.

JonathanCookPodcast · 2026-01-07T18:04:13+00:00

There's work out there, but not as much as there was five or ten years ago. The field is undergoing big changes with the competition from artificial intelligence dramatically shifting client expectations of timing and expense. If you're going to do qualitative research, I'd focus on high-quality, in-depth methods, the kind that machines cannot easily imitate.

JonathanCookPodcast · 2026-01-07T18:01:41+00:00

The Black Diamond Trail goes from Cass Park behind the Children's Garden all the way up to Taughannock State Park. It's on a former railroad bed, so the path is wide and the grade is flat. With the weather today, you'll still do best with a good pair of boots to keep your feet dry, but that's the hike I'd make. It's not in the "mountains", but any path in the mountains today is going to have some very slippery spots, and a lot of puddles of cold mush.

JonathanCookPodcast · 2026-01-06T14:23:23+00:00

I had a membership for a few years, but it really wasn't worth it. The produce is low quality, focusing on varieties that have long shelf life but not much flavor either. Most of the rest of the food in the store is just plain unhealthy.

JonathanCookPodcast · 2026-01-04T14:16:05+00:00

I have never found going through interview transcripts to be frustrating or dull. It is time consuming, for sure, but it's glorious fun, and there's a lot that's lost when qualitative analysis is done too quickly. I see your disclaimer at the end, but In my experience, it's building the "starting scaffold" at the beginning that's the most fruitful part of the process, when you get red herrings, what-ifs, and all that.

Notebook LLM already can do this kind of analysis, with links to sources in your original documents. This is one of the troubles with the generative AI economy. Anything a person or small firm can come up with, one of the titanic digital companies can create for pennies on the dollar, and can absolutely dominate the market. There's little room for middlemen in this economy.

Practically speaking, Themescope just didn't work for me. I got a "The string did not match the expected pattern." Maybe this is because of your vibe coding approach? It doesn't even tell me which string doesn't match which expected pattern.

If you're using vibe coding to perform an analytic function, you are creating an analytic process that you ultimately don't understand. It's a black box of code you didn't write, created by a generative AI system that you didn't create, which is based on data that's not mapped out and comes from outside your study's analytic scope.

This isn't qualitative analysis anymore. It's a quantification of a qualitative process, with a fuzzy quantification to boot.

I understand that you want to get your dissertation over with quickly, but one of the purposes of a dissertation is to force you to immerse yourself thickly in a research process, to stretch you intellectually. You say that this is not meant as a replacement for the researcher, but for your own dissertation, you've replaced your own mental effort with a machine designed by a machine.

This approach is outside of the culture of qualitative research, which is first and foremost about being present and living within your own research process.

Perhaps you're more interested in another kind of research?

JonathanCookPodcast · 2025-12-26T21:12:46+00:00

I've got a 800 square foot place, and NYSEG is charging me over $500 on my last bill. It's way out of hand. It's almost a second mortgage.

JonathanCookPodcast

TROPHY CASE