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An example of this phenomenon, showing it’s not limited to young people: I recently re-read “Fer de Lance,” the first Nero Wolfe detective novel, published in 1934. Two of the characters are wealthy heirs, young men, who have become infatuated with flying. One has a private airfield, owns his own plane and employs a full-time mechanic, the other is studying flying with the first young man and plans to found an airline.

The first time I read the novel, when I was in my 20s, I did not make the connection that the Wright Brothers had first flown 30 years earlier. This was new technology then. These two young men were the equivalent of today’s billionaires investing in AI.

Zoomers don’t know what Usenet is.

Allegra Rosenberg has a good explanation, and she continues with a meditation on misconceptions that Generation Z have about life in the 90s and 2000s.

This misunderstanding is not unique to GenZ; I think it’s a phenomenon of being in one’s 20s. I remember reading Dickens...

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Zoomers don’t know what Usenet is.

Allegra Rosenberg has a good explanation, and she continues with a meditation on misconceptions that Generation Z have about life in the 90s and 2000s.

This misunderstanding is not unique to GenZ; I think it’s a phenomenon of being in one’s 20s. I remember reading Dickens (possibly “David Copperfield”) and coming across a casual mention of the main character sending his wife a letter one morning — he worked on one side of London, lived on another side, and expected the letter to arrive that afternoon. Mail delivery in London at that time was twice a day; people used the post like texting or email today — it was slower of course but you could still count on getting a message to someone the same day. I found that fascinating!

Rosenberg doesn’t mention Reddit. I think a good explanation of Usenet is that it was like Reddit but it was primarily text-based and complete distributed. It was not owned by a single company.

An 18-year-old San Diego man pledd guilty to kicking a sea lion on a viral video. Sea lions are generally unthreatening but they are wild animals and will attack if stressed or threatened. They can get up to 200-800 pounds and have sharp teeth. I watched the video of that kid; he was cruelly picking on an animal that did him no harm. He’s lucky that a criminal sentence is the only penalty he received and if the sea lion had attacked him back, I would have thought of it as evolution in action.

“The Social Ritual That Made Me a Better Man: Long live guys' night." “… the couple of evenings a month that I shared with Steve and the others became for me a safe and premeditated truancy from domestic commitments. The ceremony amounted to a pressure valve. Once released, it sent us home tired and inebriated but also kinder, happier, and more giving.” By Thomas Chatterton Williams at The Atlantic.

Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand how to live. “An AI future of sleek, streamlined, and totally empty relationships.” Elizabeth Lopatto shreds Zuck’s AI manifesto. “Look, I am coming to believe we need a better quality of AI booster…. Is the point of life merely to stockpile accomplishments? If that is what Silicon Valley believes, no wonder all the billionaires seem so unhappy all the time!”

Why you can’t find a primary care doctor. Prevention isn’t a priority in US healthcare. The profit is in damage control. Why should healthcare providers invest in primary care physicians to help you lose weight, eat healthy and get fit when there is so much money to be made in prescription meds and heart surgery?

On AI Coding and Its Discontents.

Cal Newport says the honeymoon phase of AI coding is over. Early advocates of using AI to write code are scaling back their ambitions. Turns out AI-generated code is often buggy, hard to fix and hard to maintain. Coders are still using AI in their work, but in controlled and limited ways. “AI is not a magic ‘infinity machine’ that can solve all our problems, and ultimately deliver us a sense of meaning in a cold, confusing world. It’s a normal technology, and perhaps it’s time we start talking about it that way.”