Elswehwere on the internet, a friend observed that his blog is “scattershot” and I think he wished his blog was more organized. However, a scattershot blog is a perfectly reasonable kind of blog. I’m very, very old school when it comes to blogging. It’s a weblog – a log of things you saw on the web – and also an online diary, where you can publish any thought that you want to share with the world.

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Cory Doctorow compares living in the present to early 2020, when Covid was approaching. It’s a throwaway comment in his blog post yesterday, and it has stayed with me since. Julie and I are fortunate enough to be spectators to the news — it does not touch us personally yet — but I can see in the headlines that something bad is coming, it’s going to hit hard and I don’t know what to do to prepare for it.

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I learned yesterday about the death of Scot Finnie, my editor and friend. We worked together for a few years in the 2000s. He and I and Brad Shimmin launched blogging for CMP Media back when CMP was a big company in the trade press and blogging was new. Scot was a good editor, good friend and championed my career. We shared a common interest in productivity tools and could nerd out about that kind of software for a while — for a few years, he ran a newsletter about Windows productivity, Scot’s Newsletter, and he and I switched to Mac at about the same time.

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The Democrats have a shot at taking the House and Senate this year. Will they have the courage to launch hearings and pursue criminal prosecution to its end-point — even if that means throwing DJT in prison? Or will they wimp out, as the US has done since the Reconstruction after the Civil War, and give oligarchs a pass? In the United States today there is no penalty for flagrant corruption and attempting the overthrow of the US government — if you’re a billionaire.

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Infrastructure AI stalls before ROI, research finds — Separate research from Gartner and IDC finds AI adoption in infrastructure and networking isn’t meeting expectations. My latest on Fierce Network.

No email containing the phrase “bumping this to the top of your inbox” is worth reading.

A grandmother of ten went to work for Doordash after burning through her life savings to pay for her husband’s cancer treatments and Trump thinks this is a flex.

T-Mobile’s Ankur Kapoor: Here’s why 5G-Advanced matters to consumers and businesses. T-Mobile’s chief network officer, details how 5G-Advanced delivers faster, more consistent performance today, and is “training wheels” for AI-native 6G. My latest on Fierce Network.

I enjoy delicious schadenfreude watching Trump and his MAGA clowns set their house on fire, notwithstanding that we’re all in the house with them and the doors are locked.

While walking the dog this morning I spontaneously thought of the ending to last night’s episode of “Rooster” and I burst out laughing out loud.

When I make a doctor’s appointment, the doctor sends a notification asking me to arrive ten minutes early. That’s not how appointments work.

This is possibly the least annoying thing in my life that is, nonetheless, still annoying.

“Bikeshedding” is the futile expenditure of time and resources on marginal elements of an important technical decision. It’s based on a hypothetical story about a local planning organization tasked with reviewing plans for a nuclear power plant. They are overwhelmed by the cost and engineering of this advanced technological project, and instead focus on details of the bike shed proposed for plant employees. Historian C. Northcote Parkinson noted the phenomenon in 1957.

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I was thinking about “The Expanse” the other day, and I abruptly remembered the name of the technology that powered the spaceship engines: The Epstein Drive. That’s unfortunate

A friend shared rumors of poor ratings for Starfleet Academy, undercutting my theory that it was taken off the air because the network had gone anti-woke. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see where Starfleet Academy might have been doomed by its premise. Young people might consider Trek to be an old people’s show, and say “Pass.” Old people look at a show about teenagers and say, “Pass.” Plus the show did too much fanservice.

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I have been using RSS daily for more than 20 years and I have no clue what the difference is between RSS and a JSON feed, and whether or why I should pick one over the other. This kind of thing is why more people do not use RSS.

I have been thinking for a long time that Mastodon was dying, that fewer and fewer people were posting less and less and that what they were posting was less interesting. Then yesterday, I followed @lisamelton@mastodon.social. Boy, was I wrong! Lisa doesn’t post much, but she is a fiend for boosting other peoples posts. So many interesting posts! So many interesting people to follow! Mastodon nowadays has a Tumblr vibe. If you want to build your business or brand or get your political message out to the broadest possible audience, you should use YouTube, Twitter, a newsletter, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, LinkedIn and maybe TikTok (though I hear TikTok is fading).

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I just sent this email to @manton: You asked for an update on my experiment using Micro.blog as my sole outpost on the fediverse. It didn’t work for me. I’ve mentioned before that I’d love it if you’d make Micro.blog into a superset of Mastodon. Today, I’d add Bluesky to that wish. Support boosts/reposts, likes/favorites, quote posts, display names, link previews and the rest. I think based on prior discussions that this is downright antithetical to your philosophy of Micro.

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I have resumed reading Mastodon and posting directly to it. I experimented for a while with relying on ActivityPub federation from my blog on Micro.blog and reading Mastodon from the Micro.blog timeline. But Micro.blog doesn’t support boosts, favorites or display names (it only shows Fediverse addresses). I want to see all those things. So I decided to reactivate my favorite Mastodon account (@mitch@hachyderm.io) and read Mastodon from there. And then I figured why not reactivate cross-posting from Micro.

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Ladies and gentlemen: The President of the United States.

Is Anthropic’s Mythos a cybersecurity breakthrough, or just ‘criti-hype’? Anthropic claims its Mythos AI model is too dangerous to release widely — but telcos should focus on security fundamentals, not the hype. My latest on Fierce Network.

Science fiction assumes the universe is impersonal and knowable. Fantasy assumes the universe is governed by gods and other supernatural entities and is fundamentally unknowable by humans. Horror is like fantasy but it also assumes the supernatural entities are cruel. I’m pretty sure Joe Haldeman gets credit for these distinctions. He noted that by these definitions, the genre closest to science fiction isn’t fantasy — it’s the procedural mystery. This was more of a big deal in the 20th Century, but even then, the best writers shrugged it off and were happy to play across genres.

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Trump has been doing everything he can to distract the world away from the Epstein files, even starting a war, and Melania just put the spotlight back. That’s interesting.

No email is worth reading that contains the phrase “just wanted to follow up.”