For years, our cat Lulu has pestered Julie at night and left me alone. I was OK with this situation. I did not feel neglected.
But recently, Lulu decided that my side of the bed makes an excellent staging area for pestering Julie.
Note the timestamp on this post.
I’m going to see if Lulu will let me get a little more sleep now.
I was going to get a tattoo on my 50th birthday, but I would’ve needed to decide what pattern to get, decide what part of my body to put it on, and research and find a good tattoo artist and that seemed like an awful lot of work.
An alternative would’ve been to join the Navy, get drunk, and get a tattoo in Manila done by a drunken tattoo artist with a dirty needle that would give me hepatitis. That is still an option.
Of all the great mysteries of the universe, I would like to know just one thing: When I’m walking the dog, how does she decide where the perfect spot to pee is?
It seems to be a rigorous selection process.
Thinking about a time I was sitting with a small group of people, and one of the women in that group invited us to a party at her house and said we would be free to use her backyard pool.
She added: “Swimsuits. Are. Not. Optional.”
And I thought, “But I do not want to go swimming.”
And that was when I realized that I had become a boring person.
In another online community, somebody asked for the title and author of a story about humans encountering another race that seemes to live a simple agrarian life. When asked how they generate electricity, or other questions about advanced technology, the agrarian person responds that they don’t know.
Later, it becomes clear this other race is far advanced of humans, with great psychic powers. Asking them about electricity and such is like asking us about the best kind of wood to rub together to start a fire—something our distant ancestors knew but almost nobody today does.
I remember when I finally laid my hands on a reproduction of a 1939 Astounding Stories magazine. I had read so many essays by Isaac Asimov and others that talked about how the 1939-45 era of Astounding was the Golden Age of science fiction. At last! I thought. I have found a precious document!
And I opened the magazine, and my eye fell on the face of a shocked-looking, open-mouthed boy with the headline, “Did you say JOCK ITCH?!”
On a private community, someone said they’ve just started watching “Babylon 5” on Season 2, and they want to know whether the show stays good.
I replied:
My memory of B5 is that the first season was wooden but there was something about it that made me stay with it. Seasons two through four were excellent.
As for the fifth season: As I recall, the series was initially supposed to go five seasons, but the showrunner, J. Michael Straczynski, got the word that the show would be canceled after four seasons. So he rushed Season 5 to an ending a half-season early.
Parker died in 2010. Here’s what Sarah Weinman wrote about him at the LA Times:
Robert B. Parker, who died Monday in his Cambridge, Mass., home at age 77, spent his final moments doing exactly what he’d done for almost four decades: sitting at his desk, working on his next novel. He didn’t concern himself with looking back. Instead, he wrote, and in the process irrevocably altered American detective fiction, forging a link between classic depictions and more contemporary approaches to the form.
After crime writer Robert B. Parker died in 2010, his estate hired several writers to continue the multiple series Parker wrote in his lifetime.
I’ve read six of the Spenser novels by Ace Atkins. They’re enjoyable but frustrating, like seeing a cover band of your favorite group. Beatlemania rather than the Beatles.
A good writer will occasionally surprise you—write something completely unlike them. But a writer hired to write like someone else will, if they do a good job, never surprise you. They always write just like the writer they’ve been hired to write like.
I’m going to set this as my virtual background for Zoom calls. It will create the right professional impression.
On the Fresh Air podcast: Barry Manilow reflects on writing songs — and making the whole world sing.
Before becoming a hit singer-songwriter, Manilow composed jingles for TV commercials. He wrote, “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there” and “I Am Stuck On Band-Aids, And A Band-Aid’s Stuck On Me.”
He also played the accordion as a boy.
I think every Jewish and Italian boy cannot get out of Brooklyn, N.Y., unless he learns how to play the accordion. There’s a guard at the Brooklyn Bridge…. And you have to play “Lady Of Spain” before you can go over the bridge. Everybody I knew played the accordion - badly. I happened to - you know, because I was more musical than the rest of my friends, I kind of got through “Hava Nagila” and “Lady Of Spain.”
They Spend Thousands Decorating Homes No One Will Ever Go Inside.
Sarah E. Needleman at The Wall Street Journal:
Newcomers are upending the once-fusty dollhouse scene—decking out wee abodes that could belong in the (mini) Hamptons
So far this year, Michael Hogan has spent more than $5,000 on metal bar stools, a curved sofa and other modern décor to furnish a newly built home he’ll never live in. That is because the dwelling is so small it is better suited for a resident the size of a mouse.
The Imaginary Worlds podcast looks at Doctor Who’s regeneration, which began nearly 60 years ago as a gimmick to replace a lead actor whose health was failing, and has become central to the Doctor’s story, “about an alien being who is striving to be better but keeps overshooting the mark."
Podcast host Eric Molinsky says the source of regeneration’s narrative power may be that we all change over time and when we look back on our past selves they seem like other people.
Ryan O’Neill: Let me repeat that back to you.
One of the most effective communications strategies I use is repeating back, in my own words, what was just explained to me.
I do this sometimes when doing interviews, but I find the people I’m interviewing will interrupt me to make the point themselves, or elaborate on whatever point I’m repeating back.
The Hyperloop was always a scam.
The tech industry’s move into transportation was not only a failure; it was an active campaign to deny the public access to better transit and trains because the billionaires of Silicon Valley don’t personally want to get around that way. The Hyperloop was one part of that, but so were the Boring Company, ride-hailing services, and self-driving cars. The Hyperloop’s failure provides a lesson we’re learning far too late: that Silicon Valley won’t deliver us a better world if they can’t find some way to profit off it.
These kinds of lists are catnip for me.
Luxury Paradox: The more expensive something is the less likely you are to use it, so the relationship between price and utility is an inverted U. Ferraris sit in garages; Hondas get driven.
The Middle Ground Fallacy: Falsely assuming that splitting the difference between two polar opposite views is a healthy compromise. If one person says vaccines cause autism and another person says they don’t, it’s not right to compromise and say vaccines sometimes cause autism.
I saw this sign on the ground next to an impressively large poop.
It’s All Bullshit: Performing productivity at Google.
Journalist JS Tan, writing at The Baffler, argues that Google has become a cesspool of bullshit jobs—engineers rewarded for building projects that are never deployed, or deployed and quickly abandoned, and bloated middle management. The company is trying to change its culture.
I’m reminded of Cory Doctorow’s observation that Google only ever built 1-1/2 products—search and I forget what else. It bought its ad business, which was like Jed Clampett luckily striking oil in his backyard. Google also bought other businesses that have been successful for it: YouTube, Google Maps, and Waze. (Maybe Gmail is the half-business of which Cory speaks?—Google did develop that.)
Ars Technica rates 20 time travel movies by entertainment and scientific plausibility.
What modern science has to say about time travel can be summed up thusly: You can travel to the future, but you probably can’t travel to the past, although to be honest, we’re not really sure.
Their list includes a personal favorite of mine: “Time After Time” (1979), starring Malcolm McDowell as time-traveling H.G. Wells, Mary Steenburgen as his plucky feminist 1970s galpal and David Warner as Jack the Ripper.
Reading “A Christmas Carol” as antisemitic is pretty easy. The main character, Ebenezer Scrooge, is a moneylender who doesn’t celebrate Christmas. Full stop there. But there’s more: the name Ebenezer is Hebrew, deriving from the phrase eben ha-ezer, meaning “stone of the help.” Scrooge’s dead friend and former business partner, Jacob Marley, sports a fully Jewish moniker – his first name one of the Jewish forefathers, and his Hebrew family name meaning “It is bitter to me.” Scrooge not only doesn’t observe Christmas festivities, he hates it. He’s a mean and nasty guy, and Dickens even gives him a “pointed nose” to boot.
We saw this festive holiday display of leg prostheses. Please enjoy it.
Lately, I’ve been realizing the value of having something that excites me enough to jump out of bed for it. So, I’ve decided to fully immerse myself in whatever comes next, knowing that these enjoyable times might not last forever.
Here’s the thing: whether or not these obsessions lead to something useful in work or life isn’t the main point, although they often do. More importantly, as various monks and philosophers say, the greatest happiness for humans is to live in the moment.
Every once in a while, I pick up a call from an unidentified caller rather than letting it ring through. It’s almost always a telemarketer or other variety of scammer. And then I’m disappointed because I can’t think of a way to mess with them.
Maybe I should take improv classes?
BlueSky upgrade: Now you can see Profiles and posts on the web without logging in, and it also supports RSS feeds.
I want a single client for all the Twitter spinoffs: Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads all in one place. RSS and Tumblr too. This step by BlueSky is a step in the right direction.
This was a pain for me to figure out but once I got it figured it, it was simple.
Use the line tool. Instead of clicking and then dragging—which will draw a single line—click at the start of your shape, then click on the next corner, and then the next corner, and so on until you’re done.
To close the shape, your final click should be on the starting point. You can customize with the fill tool—if you do, then when you close the shape, you’ll automatically get a color fill.
I needed to draw an L-shaped box for a diagram. I spent an hour trying to figure out how to draw it using Excalidraw. I found this YouTube video. I then had to figure out why the audio wouldn’t play. I had this problem yesterday and thought I had resolved it but I guess not.
After ten minutes of that, I tried a different video and the audio played just fine.
One of the things I absolutely adore about A Knight’s Tale is that it makes no pretense at historical accuracy anywhere within its length.
Another one for the to-rewatch list.
I think Democrats wake up every morning and they look at the calendar on the iPhone and it says January 6th. The date never changes. And then they get into an electric vehicle and go get an abortion.
— Kellyanne Conway
I like to have coffee first but otherwise can confirm.
Deborah Cohen at The Atlantic: IBM has a history of more than a century of innovation.
The company was the Watson family business for 60 years, and offered lifetime employment, though it’s recently been sued for age discrimination.
The System/360 mainframe, announced in 1964, was one of the greater products of the 20th Century, as important as the Model T. The System/360 introduced computing architecture that ran across a line of computers—some bigger and more powerful, and others smaller, meaning users could re-use their software between different models in a line.
JULIE: “I’m going to try a new herb and rice.”
ME: “I don’t think I should be eating rice.”
JULIE: “Not rice. Spice. Urban spice.”
ME: “Oh, ok. Sounds good.” (pause) “What’s urban spice?”
JULIE: “Not urban spice. Herb. And. Spice.”
Julie, exhausted, fainted.
I am quite enjoying John Scalzi’s December Comfort Watch movie list and have added about half the titles to my to-be-watched-list.
I’m done with challenging and important entertainment for a while. The news is challenging enough nowadays.
We went to the San Diego Natural History Museum Sunday, which proved to be a personal milestone for me—my first time receiving a senior discount.
My chagrin at having the word “senior” applied to me was offset by getting a discount. So, um, yay I guess?
RIP Luiz Barroso, who pioneered the modern data center for Google and made the modern internet possible. Until Barroso, data centers were populated by enormously powerful and expensive computer servers. Barroso instead used massive numbers of relatively inexpensive, disposable machines.
“… we must treat the data center itself as one massive warehouse-scale computer,” Barroso said.
Barroso was one of those immigrants that Republicans say are vermin polluting America’s blood.
Sivraj and Me. Phil Gomes created a personal AI advisor using GPT Builder, with a sarcastic personality based on Jarvis from the Iron Man movies.
This is brilliant. I’m going to try something like it.
Humans are a basically civilized species. We know not to go barefoot in restaurants, treat our friends’ living rooms like landfills or nap on the shoulder of our office cubicle mate. And yet, as soon as we step inside an airport or onto a plane, our manners seem to vanish. Perhaps it’s the delirium of travel or the belief that everyday rules do not apply to vacations, much like calories don’t count on holiday and foreign currencies aren’t real money. Or maybe there has never been a canon for proper passenger behavior — until now.
Amazon would rather ask its workers to humiliate themselves instead of paying living wages.
Meanwhile, founder and chair Jeff Bezos is worth $172 billion, and the company tripled its profits to $9.9B in its most recent quarter.
John Scalzi has a delightful short essay on “Die Hard,” a movie that works so well because of its wonderful cast. Even small parts get their moments to shine.
And of course “Die Hard” created thousands of variations and ripoffs. My favorite “Die Hard” variation is “Paul Blart, Mall Cop.” The way I remember it (it’s been a few years), Paul Blart is a hero–and he was a hero all along: Courageous, loyal, and ingenious.
Merry Christmas from these grizzly bears at the Natural History Museum at Balboa Park.
The iPhone’s Notes App Is the Purest Reflection of Our Messy Existence.
If you want to know who someone truly is—what they eat, what books they read, what movies they watch, or how furious they get inside their own minds—you should probably check their Notes app.
Jason Snell @jsnell@zeppelin.flights makes the case for clipboard managers—software that saves a history of what you copy to your clipboard.
I find clipboard managers to be essential. The lack of a clipboard manager on the iPad is a big reason why I find it difficult getting real work done on those tablets.
My earliest memory of using a clipboard manager was the late 1980s. 35+ years later, a clipboard manager should be standard on the Mac, iPad and iPhone. Instead, it’s a third-party add-on for the Mac and you can’t get one at all on the iPad and iPhone.
Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr: How the NYPD defeated bodycams. “NYPD leadership were accountability’s adversaries, not its partners.”
Police control bodycams in New York—as they do in other cities, including Minneapolis (site of the George Floyd murder); Montgomery, Ala.; Memphis—and they use that control to protect murderous, brutal cops.
Bodycams could be a source of accountability for cops, but for that to be true, control over bodycams would have to vest with institutions that want to improve policing. If control over bodycams is given to institutions that want to shield cops from accountability, that’s exactly what will happen.
At the supermarket today I was in line at the cash register behind a rotund voluble middle-aged gentleman who chatted up not one but TWO middle-aged women, also in line. He laughed “HURH HURH HURH” with every sentence. A real John Candy “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” vibe.
I also saw another gentleman, sinewy build, with leathery skin, wearing plaid shorts, a sweatshirt, a leather tyrolean hat and a small knapsack on his back. His clothes were weathered and so was he. It was a good look.
What if it learned from its training data that people usually slow down in December and put bigger projects off until the new year, and that’s why it’s been more lazy lately?
As ChatGPT gets “lazy,” people test “winter break hypothesis” as the cause
Terry Gilliam and Jonathan Pryce on making “Brazil.”
“Robert De Niro prepared to play a plumber by watching a brain surgeon.” …
De Niro agreed because he was a Python fan, Gilliam cast his daughter but she cut her hair off in protest and Pryce needed a wig as he’d just been playing a friar with a tonsure.
“Ask a Manager” says “this is the best office holiday party date story of all time.”
It’s EVEN BETTER THAN THAT.
I’m glad to see work is continuing on ActivityPub support in Tumblr (here’s a statement on Tumblr from CEO Matt Mullenweg), and also not surprised to find there isn’t much interest in WordPress ActivityPub support.
Most people who want something with ActivityPub support just go to Mastodon. At least for now.
“… blogging never died…. journalists just stopped paying attention.”
It was very enjoyable. I see fans ranking it as third of the five Indy movies. I’ll go with that.
They did a great job de-aging Harrison Ford for the opening sequence. Apparently this was a result of skilled direction as much a CGI; I noted they cut the camera away from Indy when he was about to do something too athletic, and then cut back to him when the athletic thing was complete. Often, action featuring Indy was shot from the rear.
Jim Geraghty at National Review: “Hunter Biden’s entire life, so far, has been a bold, defiant, shameless declaration that laws are for the little people, not for the Bidens.”
I will gladly support Joe Biden against any plausible Republican candidate. I think he’s done a pretty good job as President. Not great, but pretty good.
However, let’s not kid ourselves: If Hunter Biden came from a different family, he’d be doing prison time by now. And it remains to be seen how much Joe Biden knew.
The first record of donuts appears in a 1400s German cookbook.
I think this is the first year I’m hearing about jelly donuts and Hanukkah. We always had latkes when I was a kid.
Making DevSecOps more than just lipstick on a pig. If your answer to implementing DevSecOps is dumping more responsibility on overworked developer teams, you’re doing it wrong. My latest.
Everyone and everything is pissing me off today.
Not you. You’re awesome.
After a recent discussion with friendly fellow journalists, I started using Reddit again. I’d dumped Reddit after the whole dustup this summer between the Reddit CEO and the developer of the Apollo client. It left me feeling like the CEO was a petty jerk, and I didn’t want to support him.
But after Friday I decided to give Reddit another try, and I find I like the discussion there. And call me a sucker but I like watching the karma points rack up.
Lucid dream startup says you can work in your sleep.
Despite the linkbait headline, the article itself is very interesting and goes into claims by the startup that they’ve created technology to induce lucid dreaming at will.
What would be the ramifications of something like that, where most people were able to lucid dream at will? Would it be like the movie “Inception?”
Jewish women’s advocates share graphic descriptions of Hamas’s brutal rape, mutilation and torture of Israeli women and girls. In the US and West, progressives march to support Palestinian victims—and rightly so—but are quiet when the victims are Jews.
Also: The World’s Feminists Need to Show Up for Israeli Victims: Solidarity for victims of sexual assault should trump other politics.
WSJ: Meta Is Struggling to Boot Pedophiles Off Facebook and Instagram
The headline and deck on this article are too kind to Meta. The companies do not seem to be “struggling” to get rid of this content. They don’t seem to be trying very hard at all.
More from Casey Newton (paid sub required I think) who points out the difference between “Internet problems” and “platform problems.” “Internet problems” arise from the fact that we live in a world where evil exists, and will inevitably find its way onto the Internet. “Platform problems” are unique to a particular platform.
“Bertie Sheldrake was a South London pickle manufacturer who converted to Islam and became king of a far-flung Islamic republic before returning to London and settling back into obscurity.”
The number of supercentenarians in an area tends to fall dramatically about 100 years after accurate birth records are introduced.
Ukrainian defenders print out giant 1:1 life-size aerial photographs of damaged airfields. Once the site is repaired, they hang the images over the sites so they look damaged and not worth attacking again.
First Zoom meeting of the week is in 20 minutes. I’m ready.
I’m going back to cross-posting from mitchw.blog to @mitchw@mastodon.social. Mastodon is part of the Fediverse (of course), but it’s not one with the fediverse.
This system may need further adjusting later today or this week, and almost certainly need adjusting in the near term as the fediverse evolves.
Neil Barsky at The Guardian:
One gray Sunday in the middle of the Covid lockdown, I received an unwelcome call from my family doctor. Until then, for virtually my entire life, I had managed to stay out of a doctor’s office, except for routine checkups. My luck had run out.
“I am sorry to disturb you on a weekend,” she said. “But your tests just came back and your blood sugar levels are alarming. I am pretty sure you have diabetes.”
A new theory of “wobbly spacetime” potentially reconciles quantum mechanics and relativity—one of the greatest scientific mysteries of the past century.
The macroscopic world of relativity and the subatomic world of quantum physics are fundamentally different. And both those worlds are different—and mostly incomprehensible—to humans and the other complex life forms that inhabit Earth.
.. you know the kind of movies I’m talking about: Movies set on submarines; movies set on aircraft carriers; movies where lawyers are good guys; movies where guys secure the perimeter and/or the package; movies where a guy has to yell to make himself heard over a helicopter; movies where guys with guns break the door into a room decorated with cut-out newspaper headlines. … Movies that dads like. I love these movies pretty unreservedly and only somewhat ironically.
I began to notice a learned helplessness in the United States, where people don’t revolt at the notion of a college education costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. I wondered why so many people treat it as completely normal that we have GoFundMe campaigns to help people pay for life-saving medical care that their health insurance won’t cover.
I watched as people on social media claimed it was “pro-labor” to tip a person for ringing up your order at a food or coffee chain rather than demanding the multi-millionaire (or billionaire) owner of that company pay their employees a living wage (as is the norm in Europe, where tipping is not expected and the owners of the restaurants and stores are typically not among the uber-wealthy).
Everybody Knows Flo From Progressive. Who Is Stephanie Courtney? How “Flo” transformed Progressive Insurance and the life of Stephanie Courtney, the actor who plays the role on commercials since 2008.
I found this entertaining and informative article surprisingly relevant to my own career and life.
Raycast has a new feature where you can activate your Mac camera and look at yourself before jumping on a video call. I tried it out as soon as I got to my desk this morning, before having my first sip of coffee. That was a mistake.
RIP Frances Sternhagen, 93, a solid character actor whom I have always liked. She had prominent supporting roles on “Cheers,” “ER,” “Sex and the City” and “The Closer,” and she was a Broadway veteran, winning two Tony awards, all while raising six children.
She liked playing “snobby older ladies. It’s always more fun to be obnoxious,” she said.
I’m going to try using this account as my main place in the fediverse. I’ll only use @mitchw@mastodon.social for reading, favoriting, boosting and replying.
If the experiment works, I’ll move my followers on @mitchw@mastodon.social here, using the magic of fediverse automation.
Thousands of papers seized from Spanish ships during the 18th Century are now online. The letters are from and to ordinary sailors, revealing details of daily life from that time.
The correspondence was seized by the British during wars in the 1700s, and is being published by British researchers.
“My dear beloved husband I will celebrate that this letter has reach[ed] your hands and finds you with the perfect health that I wish for myself," [writes Francisca Muñoz in Seville to her husband, Miguel Atocha, in Mexico on 22 January 1747/]. “I would like to know the reason why I did not receive any response to the 13 letters I sent to you; I would like to know if perhaps over there [there] is no paper or pen or ink not to have written even a letter…. “
Everybody who was Anybody had Dr. Feelgood and his Speed Shots on Speed Dial
Dr. Max Jacobson, aka “Dr. Feelgood,” injected amphetamine-based concoctions into the arms of celebrities and powerful people including JFK, Alfred Hitchcock, Truman Capote, Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe and more.
Capote described the “vitamin shots” as “instant euphoria.”
Messy Nessy Chic quotes Capote:
You feel like Superman. You’re flying. Ideas come at the speed of light. You go seventy-two hours straight without so much as a coffee break. You don’t need sleep, you don’t need nourishment. If it’s sex you’re after, you go all night. Then you crash – it’s like falling down a well, like parachuting without a parachute. You want to hold onto something and there’s nothing out there but air.
… the Court felt that bringing the chicken into the courtroom to play tic-tac-toe would degrade the dignity of the Court. I thought that the dignity of the Court was degraded by executing a mentally-ill person.
— This American Life. Poultry Slam
Last week’s spectacular OpenAI fight was reportedly a donnybrook between “Effective Altruism” and “Effective Accelarationism”—two schools of philosophy founded on the nonsensical faith, absent any evidence, that godlike artificial intelligence (AI) beings are imminent, and arguing over the best way to prepare for that day.
Cory Doctorow:
This “AI debate” is pretty stupid, proceeding as it does from the foregone conclusion that adding compute power and data to the next-word-predictor program will eventually create a conscious being, which will then inevitably become a superbeing. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding faster and faster horses, we’ll get a locomotive….
The Pneumatic Tube Mail System in New York City
… the first cylinder tube to travel through the New York City system contained “a Bible, a flag and a copy of the Constitution. The second contained an imitation peach in honor of Senator Chauncy Depew (He was fondly known as “The Peach”). A third carrier had a black cat in it, for reasons unknown.”
Residents of North Sentinel Island off India are one of the few surviving tribes that resist contact with the outside world. When a missionary successfully contacted them in 2018, in violation of international law, they killed him brutally.
Turns out they (or their neighbors) were in contact with the outside world previously—a Victorian English adventurer—and it went badly for them, tragically and unsurprisingly.
Placebos are effective treatments for many conditions, such as chronic pain. They work even when the patient is aware they are receiving a placebo, according to a leading researcher in placebo studies.
In other news, “placebo studies” is a thing.
Writing in 2007, Clive Thompson describes the phenomenon of “microcelebrity”–how blogging, Facebook and Flickr makes people famous to a few fans. “Adapting to microcelebrity means learning to manage our own identity and ‘message’ almost like a self-contained public relations department.” Clive Thompson on the Age of Microcelebrity: Why Everyone’s a Little Brad Pitt | WIRED
Microcelebrities were still uncommon back then, but now everybody who’s active on social media is a microcelebrity, even if it’s just posting family photos to instagram.
I’m moving furniture around on the blog again (metaphorically speaking). The main visible change: No more ephemera posts here—they’re additional fuss for me and I don’t think many people are reading them.
You can find the memes and other found media on my tumblr, Mastodon, Facebook, Bluesky, Threads and my newsletter.
A “Feynman story” is “any anecdote that someone tells that is structured so that the teller comes off as a genius and everyone else in the story comes off as an idiot.
“[Many people] seemed to think Feynman was a great guy…. [many] other people didn’t think he was so great. So Feynman seems like a standard case of a guy who was nice to some people and a jerk to others.”
Merlin Mann has been collecting life lessons in a lengthy bullet list on GitHub.
Some more gems:
Turn Off Push Notifications. App developers want to blast you with trivial notifications all day, every day. The best way to take your attention back is to get rid of notifications altogether (or nearly so).
I’m extremely online, but nearly all my mobile notifications are switched off. There’s nothing Facebook has to say to me that needs my immediate attention.
I read Anne Rice’s “Interview With the Vampire” when I was a teen-ager, and did not find it erotic, and didn’t realize it was intended to be erotic. The eroticism just went right over my head. I thought it was long-winded and Louis was a self-absorbed whiner. But I did finish the book.
When I was in my 20s, I read “The Vampire Lestat” and loved it. Again: If it was intended to be erotic, I didn’t realize it or even register it. I grooved on it as a science fiction nerd. It turned a science fiction cliche on its head—the belief that a person from the past, transported to the present, would have his brain fried by all the technology and science. Lestat tells us he grew up in the French Enlightenment—science, technology, sexual freedom and exalting the common people were all familiar to him.
I tried to draw a turkey in spray cheese for the dog’s Thanksgiving dinner last night.
Spray cheese is not my medium.
However, the dog was not unhappy with the outcome.
OpenAI’s alignment problem. The company’s board failed the institution. But did it have a point?
Casey Newton defends – or at least explains – the OpenAI board’s position. The company was supposed to be moving slowly and avoiding the harms of AI while harnessing good for humanity. Altman was running the company as a fast-track start up.
I visited with a friend in Oceanside
“Doctor Who” showrunner Russell Davies says he grew up twice-closeted, hiding that he was gay and that he was a Doctor Who fan. For him, the two are tied together. “I’d walk home from school wishing I could turn the corner and see that blue box and run inside to escape everything. I don’t think that wish has quite gone.”
Recent college graduates are drinking less. It’s even a movement with a name, NoLo—no-alcohol, low-alcohol.
I’ve never been a heavy drinker, and over time I drink less and less. I rarely like the effect alcohol has on me.
But I do sometimes like a drink. I expect I’ll have one or two on Thanksgiving.
Why the Senate is increasingly skewed on race, parties and policy The Senate overrepresents Republicans and disenfranches people of color and people who live in large states. The Washington Post, by the numbers:
If you are a resident of California, with 68 times the population of Wyoming, your influence in the Senate is paltry.
The likely GOP nominee is forgetting where he is, stumbling over words, and waxing full fascist…. the armchair gerontologists parsing every utterance from President Joe Biden, trying to distinguish his congenital stutter from his natural aging, should look at Trump, whose behavior has gone from bad to weird to bizarre.
Trump says he wanted to participate in the Jan. 6 insurrection, but the Secret Service would not allow it.
Reprehensible on two levels: He wanted to participate in a violent, criminal attempt to overthrow a legitimate election, and he was too chickenshit to do it.
CNN Airs New Tape of Trump Discussing Capitol Trip on Jan. 6
No, there isn’t a wave of TikTok teens supporting Osama bin Laden.
… everything we see about TikTok is just being filtered through a media and political apparatus that doesn’t know how it works and has no issue cherry-picking random nonsense out of the app to fit whatever agenda they subscribe to.
— Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day. TikTok teens aren’t stanning Osama bin Laden
For several months, I noticed that my MacBook Pro made weird hissing and clicking sounds in the morning. That’s bad, I thought, and I checked to be sure my backups were OK.
But other than that, I didn’t think about it. The sounds only lasted a second or two and only happened once or twice in the morning.
Recently, I realized the MacBook Pro wasn’t making the noise. It was my insulated coffee carafe, which rests next to the MBP when I’m having coffee at my desk in the morning.
I recently received this message in text spam:
Evelyn, it’s no sin to love each other and it’s not annoying.
Just that one single line of text. No greeting, no context, nothing else.
A+ for creativity. Genius.
Interesting analysis on using social media to drive traffic by Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day (one of my favorite newsletters). A couple of highlights:
Also:
It’s Official: With “Vermin,” Trump Is Now Using Straight-up Nazi Talk
Michael Tomasky at The New Republic:
To announce that the real enemy is domestic and then to speak of that enemy in subhuman terms is Fascism 101. Especially that particular word.
Tomasky says Trump is “not going to be throwing anybody in the gas chamber,” but:
The Nazis did a lot of things from 1933 to 1941 (when the Final Solution commenced) that would shock Americans today, and Trump and his followers are capable of every one of them: shutting down critical voices in the press; banning books, and even burning some, just to drive the point home; banning opposition organizations or even parties; making political arrests of opponents without telling them the charges; purging university faculties; doing the same with the civil service….
Plans to add ActivityPub support for Tumblr are likely dead. I can’t see that as a priority given Tumblr’s recent drastic staff cutbacks.
Rodrigo Ghedin: Automattic’s Tumblr/ActivityPub integration reportedly shelved.
Laurens Hof: ActivityPub support was a “hasty announcement” by CEO Matt Mullenweg, followed by “quick quiet shelving of the project only a few days later.” Tumblr is supported by ads and subscriptions, and interoperability undermines both those business models.
The documentary “Sly” reveals depths to Sylvester Stallone.
What emerges isn’t the superstar who turned Rocky and Rambo into American icons as much as a thoughtful, surprisingly self-aware artist, who happens to be much smarter, more sensitive and steeped in cinematic history than even his biggest fans might have known.
Both Bruce Springsteen and Stallone “have channeled their inner selves through art to create a third identity, one that exists somewhere between truth and fiction, that has become a potent avatar, especially for their male fans.”
Britain’s ‘loneliest sheep’ was rescued after two years at the foot of cliff. “The ‘over-fat’ ewe, named Fiona, was hauled up from her solitary spot on a remote Scottish beach by farmers.” She had a “huge fleece.”
A kayaker spotted the sheep, which followed her along the riverbank, calling out the whole time. The kayaker described the experience as “heart-rending.”
Jezebel: Feminist media site shuts down after 16 years.
Jezebel was a great site that “pioneered the sharp, dishy coverage that came to characterise many digital upstarts.”
Tough day for online pioneers yesterday. Tumblr is scaling back drastically, and Nextdoor is also laying off a lot of people.
This runner finished last at the NYC Marathon. He feels ‘blessed.’.
Of course he should be proud. He finished the damn thing. He came in 51,258th place.
Also, today I learned there are people who walk marathons. Might be something I should do sometime.
El Cajon Mayor Urges the ‘Immediate Shutdown’ of Border to Palestinians.
Racists gotta racist.
A guide for visiting journalists on how to write a San Francisco “doom loop” story:
You’re here to write the millionth story about the San Francisco doom loop, the much publicized (including at least 100 times by the Chronicle) and hotly debated theory that a city that endured proudly through the 1906 earthquake and fire, AIDS crisis, Zodiac killer, one tech boom-and-bust and the band Starship will be completely undone by … high commercial vacancy rates.”
I just did a rough tally of our monthly streaming video and cable bill.
Minnie wants you to know you’re awesome and she hopes you’re as comfortable as she is.
The timelessness of the Meg Ryan rom-com era. Meg Ryan’s latest film, “What Happens Later,” “recalls the Nora Ephron classics that defined the genre.”
New Meg Ryan romcom co-starring David Duchovny? Sure, why not?
While walking with the dog this morning, I saw these. Seeing an El Camino first thing in the morning is lucky—everybody knows that.
I have seen this sign often while walking on Del Cerro Blvd. I have no idea what the story is. Hohokam Stadium is in Mesa, Arizona, more than 360 miles away, and what does it have to do with the (presumably, Chicago) Cubs?
I love Dave Winer’s vision of textcasting—write anywhere you want, using any tools, and read anywhere you want, using any tools.
Today, I take advantage of micro.blog’s great cross-posting tools and ActivityPub support, but that doesn’t get me everywhere I need to be. I have to cut-and-paste to post on Facebook, for example.
Here, blogger Tim Carmody responds to some of Dave’s ideas.
… Dave’s right: this worked for podcasts (the phrase “anywhere you get your podcasts!” is a great advertisement for interoperability breaking any single platform’s dominance), it worked for blogs, and it can work for this strange multimodal thing we’ve created called social media. It worked for the world wide web! And I will be ride or die for the open web until my life comes to an end.
A starfish is a “disembodied head walking about the sea floor on its lips,” according to recent research.
I did not plan to have nightmares about starfish this weekend but here we are.
I’m attending an event in a few days for which I’ll be wearing a suit and tie, which means I had to bring my suits in to be cleaned and pressed.
The last time I wore a suit was on my last business trip, December 2019. I figured then that I had no travel scheduled until February, so I the suits in a pile in my closet to be brought to the cleaners.
The beauty of finished software: Finished software is software that’s done—it doesn’t need updates.
I missed a message from a client yesterday morning because Slack moved everything around for no apparent reason at all.
“I started reading Ed McBain when I was probably 11 or 12,” [Stephen] King said, looking at his row of several novels by the prolific author of crime procedurals. “The bookmobile would come by. We lived out in the country. The first thing I remember is, I’m reading one of these books, and [detectives] Carella and Kling go to interview a woman about some crime. And she’s sitting there in her slip and she’s drunk, and she grabs her breast and squeezes and says, ‘In your eye, copper.’ And I thought to myself: This is not the Hardy Boys. Okay? It made an impression. It felt more real.”
When I was 11 years old, I wanted to be Barnard Hughes when I grew up. I’m behind schedule.
I don’t like Halloween. It celebrates death and decay. I like a little of that—I loved the Addams Family and Beetlejuice. But an entire month of zombies and skeletons is too much.
Also, while I like people changing up their identities, confining it to a single day seems unhealthy. People should change up their identities all the time.
This is just me. If you love Halloween, I’m fine with that.
The dog usually has to be coaxed down the front outside stairs to the front gate. I think it’s because we only go down them once or twice a week so she’s not used to doing it. It is a slow process, and she stops to thoroughly sniff every third step.
But this morning I paused on the top landing, because I realized I had not checked my podcast downloads to see what I’d be listening to on our walk.
Cory: Why creative workers get screwed in labor negotiations (until very recently):
Creative workers are part of a class of workers who suffer from “vocational awe,” the sense that because your job is satisfying and/or worthy, you don’t deserve to get paid for it.
Also:
The attempt to divide-and-rule “knowledge workers” from “industrial workers” is a transparent bid to shatter solidarity and make it easier to abuse and exploit all workers.
The goal now is to attract users by the hundreds of millions, so Facebook is making Threads great for users. And it’s working—Threads is, indeed, a great place.
For now. But soon, Facebook will pivot to wanting revenue from Threads, and so Threads will become great for advertisers and steadily worse for users.
Then once all the advertisers and the users are locked in, Threads will become shitty for everybody but Facebook itself. Enshittification will be complete.
Dave Winer: We can do better than Threads.
Running from the arms of one billionaire to another is a bad idea.
Musk is the second worst thing that happened to social media, but Facebook is much worse, because they’re so much more competent, but lack any vision other than sucking up as much of the world into their silo as possible and never doing anything that could possibly benefit anyone else.
Why’d I take speed for twenty years?
Podcaster PJ Vogt writes about his 20-year use of prescription stimulants, as well as coming to terms with the suicide of a friend.
Vogt struggled to understand what his friend’s depression was like from the inside and was surprised to learn his own thinking was a product of depression.
I had been like Ahab hunting for Moby Dick, not realizing the boat he’s on is actually a large whale in a boat costume.
I think maybe video has taken off and text is declining simply because TikTok and YouTube make it easy to share revenue with creators, whereas opportunities for independent writers are harder to find and harder to use. (There’s Substack and … well, Substack. And also Substack.)
If Facebook instituted revenue sharing, I could make a significant revenue stream off this—my random thoughts, memes I find elsewhere, photos I take while walking the dog. It wouldn’t replace other work, but it would be a nice supplement.
The first episode at least.
Much comedy. Much fast witty dialogue. Some action-adventure. The clothes are fantastic and very very 80s. Cybill Shepherd is gorgeous. Bruce Willis is handsome, and his suit is sharp. I have always liked double-breasted suits.
I liked “Moonlighting,” but I had trouble getting out of my head to just sit and enjoy it. I kept thinking, “Is Bruce Willis supposed to be charming here? He kind of seems like an asshole. How would the 1985 audience perceive him?”
Finished reading: Pax by Tom Holland 📚A history of Rome’s golden age.
That was fine when I was in my 20s, but it became less and less useful. I stayed with it anyway, well past the point of uselessness.
I also defined myself more broadly as a writer. But that doesn’t work for me either. I still write—look, I’m writing right now!—but it’s not who I am.
I’m an American, Californian, Jewish, white, male, cis-gendered, heterosexual and Julie’s husband. Those things are characteristics. They’re not who I am.
Today I learned about the three types of fun, as categorized by outdoorsy folks:
From comments on Reddit:
There should really be a type 4 fun. Things that are fun at the time but you regret later, like being mean on the internet
Things I saw while walking the dog. We tried a new neighborhood today, Allied Gardens
I’ve passed this roadside shrine dozens of times over the years. I don’t think I’ve read the plaque before.
I’ve started reading Doonesbury from the very beginning, and I plann to keep going until I catch up to the present day. Here’s the very first strip, from October, 1970.
So far I’m up to December 1970. Over that time, you can see Garry Trudeau quickly improving as a writer and slowly improving as an artist. Within three or four years he’d be doing detailed drawings and sharp satire about Watergate.
A long thread of stories about people bombing job interviews, on Ask a Manager:
When asked a (completely stupid question) about how I would react if I woke up suddenly in a cage with a tiger, I asked if the tiger was alive.
This wasn’t the right line of questioning as per the interviewer’s surprised expression.
When asked to elaborate, I said “If it’s dead, cry but no real panic. It’s alive, cry and panic and die.”
While walking the dog this morning, I saw this house. These guys own Halloween
Last night we watched the first episode of “Lessons in Chemistry,” about Elizabeth Zott, a chemist in 1951 who is forced to take a humiliating job as a lab tech because of sexism and who ends up hosting a highly successful cooking show on TV. The show stars Brie Larson (who is not, I subsequently learned, the same person as Alison Brie).
Elizabeth is determined and humorless and takes up with Calvin Evans, a male chemist, who is also determined and humorless and is the only person who sees her for who she is. Both characters are endearing.
Israel’s 9/11 — that’s been the refrain. And I fear that analogy carries more truth than the people making it want it to. Because what was 9/11? It was an attack that drowned an entire country — our country, my country, America — in terror and in rage. It drove us mad with fear.
And in response, we shredded our own liberties. We invaded Afghanistan. We invaded Iraq. Our response to 9/11 led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It made us weaker. It made us poorer. It made us hated around the world. We didn’t pull our forces out of Afghanistan until 2021, 20 years later. And when we left, we did so in humiliation and catastrophe and defeat, abandoning the country to the Taliban.
Decoder Ring: The Fast Decline of the Slow Dance. Rise and fall of an awkward rite of passage.
Includes a brief history of slow dancing, starting with the waltz, which was hugely scandalous 200+ years ago.
Let me read you a quote here. It’s from a July 1816 issue of the London Times about a ball given by the Prince Regent: “We remarked with pain that the indecent foreign dance called the waltz was introduced at the English court on Friday last. So long as this obscene display was confined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think of it deserving of notice. But now that it is attempted to be forced on the respectable classes of society, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion.
Jacob Mikanowski, author of the book “Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land,” talks with Tyler Cowen about Eastern Europe, including “differences between Eastern and Western European humor, whether Poles are smiling more nowadays” and “why Stanisław Lem hasn’t gotten more attention in the West.”
Could Stanisław Lem be the most underrated sage of the AI age?
I remember Lem was celebrated in literary circles in the late 70s or 80s, but we haven’t heard much about him since. I read several of Lem’s books and stories, enjoyed them and found them thoughtful.
U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force Struggle for Recruits. The Marines Have Plenty.
When asked earlier this year about whether the Marines would offer extra money to attract recruits, the commandant of the Marine Corps replied: “Your bonus is that you get to call yourself a Marine. That’s your bonus.”
Just a couple of things I saw while I was walking the dog this morning.
I was having fun with a telemarking scammer and they hung up on me and I’m disappointed.
CALLER: “I’m calling from [mumble] about an order for an Apple MacBook Pro and Apple AirPods that you placed and that is being delivered to Houston, Texas.”
ME [slowly, confused]: “It’s for a … apple?”
CALLER: “Yes, an Apple MacBook Pro—a laptop computer—and Apple AirPods. You will be charged $1,667. Did you place that order.”
Lovely statement from Goddard’s co-star Bill Mumy, who played Will Robinson. Variety:
R.I.P. to Mark Goddard. A truly beloved friend and brother to me for 59 years. I knew this was coming for the past few months. Shortly after a great phone chat he and I had on his 87th birthday in late July, I became aware that I would most likely never see or speak with him again. The last words we exchanged were “I love you.”
The Most Iconic Vintage Dessert from Every Decade
1940s: Bread pudding.
I love bread pudding. I eat it several times a year.
Unfortunately, the last time we got bread pudding it wasn’t great. We got it take-out—a massive brick. I froze most of it, but made the mistake of not breaking it up into individual portions beforehand, further diminishing the likelihood that I will ever eat that bread pudding.
Future archeologists will no doubt wonder at the find.
Mary Lou Retton Crowdfunded Her Medical Debt, Like Many Thousands of Others
But unlike the Olympic gymnast, most people don’t raise enough money to cover their costs.
Our healthcare system is a disgrace.
The Progressives Who Flunked the Hamas Test.
Helen Lewis at The Atlantic:
Fitting Israel into the intersectional framework has always been difficult, because its Jewish citizens are both historically oppressed—the survivors of an attempt to wipe them out entirely—and currently in a dominant position over the Palestinians, as demonstrated by the Netanyahu government’s decision to restrict power and water supplies to Gaza. The simplistic logic of pop intersectionality cannot reconcile this….
Tyler Cowen interviews the fascinating Ada Palmer, Hugo Award winning author of the “Terra Ignota” science fiction series, Renaissance historian at the University of Chicago, musical composer, consultant on anime and manga, and more.
She talks about:
and much more
“I came to realize that my Woody was my impression of Tom yelling at his kids.”
On the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast: Soundalikes, or voice doubles, “are voice actors who perform as characters that were originally played by someone else.” The soundalike replaces a big superstar like Robin Williams or Julia Roberts for video games, rides, toys, TV shows, etc.
This podcast features an interview with Jim Hanks, a successful character actor and soundalike who specializes in playing Woody from “Toy Story” when brother Tom Hanks is unavailable.
Also:
Hard-Core Sleepers Obsess Over Their Snoozing Stats
… for millions, chasing winks with the latest sleep-measuring technology has become a nighttime sport, complete with sleep scores and strategies on how to best sack the competition. … “I can see that on days when I tape my mouth during sleep, I have a 7% higher recovery score…. “
For more than 70 years, filmmakers have been reusing the sound of a particular scream. Many people even know it by name—the Wilhelm Scream.
“The scream is usually used when someone is shot, falls from a great height, or is thrown from an explosion.” It first appears in the 1951 Western “Distant Drums.” It appears in the 1954 “A Star Is Born,” “Star Wars,” “Toy Story” and on and on in many, many movies, TV shows and video games.
Sabrina Schnur, a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, faced death threats and anti-Semitic attacks from a bridade of right-wing boneheads who think that she downplayed the hit-and-run death of retired police chief Andreas Probst, when in fact she was the person who reported that it was a hit-and-run rather than an innocent accident.
For the lonely, a blurred line between real and fictional people
In lonely people, the boundary between real friends and favorite fictional characters gets blurred in the part of the brain that is active when thinking about others, a new study found.
Researchers scanned the brains of people who were fans of “Game of Thrones” while they thought about various characters in the show and about their real friends. All participants had taken a test measuring loneliness.
I Was a Pop-Tarts Taste Tester. Writer Laura Holson remembers her family regularly received mystery boxes when the product launched 60 years ago.
I did not like them,” said my sister Mary. They didn’t appeal either to my sister Gondie, but gave her bargaining power on the school playground. “You could eat one Pop-Tart and trade the other for a candy bar,” she said of the two-pack. For my part, I would eat them only if my mother cut the edges off, leaving a ravioli-size square of frosted raspberry jam.
How magical combat can win the next election
For the last half-century or so, the main US political parties have spent all their time and energy ranting about the bad things that the bad people in the other party are doing, and neglected to offer any positive vision of their own.
Stormtrooper Syndrome has seduced the West.
The West has a bad case of “Stormtrooper Syndrome”—utter faith and certainty that we are the Good Guys, the Good Guys always win, the Bad Guys are incompetent buffoons and we’ll just think our way out of crises like climate change at the last possible moment.
This syndrome is exacerbated by elites who never, ever suffer consequences of their actions.
Congressional Term Limits Might Break Congress. Jamelle Bouie makes a case against legislative term limits.
We have legislative term limits here in California and it’s not great. You end up with government by bureaucrats and lobbyists. The solution to legislative calcification is to make challengers more viable. Make incumbents have to work to get re-elected.
A wonderful, playful look at more than a century of Jewish ethnic humor in Hollywood, triggered by the minor (and silly) controversy over Bradley Cooper, who is not Jewish, portraying Leonard Bernstein while wearing a prosthetic nose.
Author Jody Rosen, writing in The New Yorker notes that much Jewish ethnic humor, particularly at the turn of the 20th Century, gave gentiles an opportunity to ridicule Jewish immigrants, often cruelly. But this form of humor was different from other minstrelsy in that it was often performed by Jews, and Jews themselves loved it.
New PEN America Report Documents Surge in ‘Educational Intimidation’ Bills
a new report released this week documents the rise of a new wave of state legislation designed to force librarians and educators to self-censor.
LGBTQ content is particularly targeted, as are LGBTQ creators. And laws require teachers to out LGBTQ kids to their parents.
The Republican Party believes it’s the role of government to police sexual purity. That’s wrong.
I saw this squirrel chilling on the fence in our backyard.
If you gaze long enough at the squirrel, the squirrel gazes back at you
Finished reading: Void Moon by Michael Connelly 📚Starts slow but but worth staying with. Builds to unputdownbability.
Things that don’t get you kicked out of GOP leadership:
Things that get you kicked out of your position in the GOP:
Because today has been weird, I am just now having my first coffee of the day, at nearly 1:30 pm.
Also, my will to live has been restored.
I believe these two events to be not coincidental.
I got the flu shot, Covid booster and RSV vaccine all at once yesterday, and that flattened me for nearly a full day. Feeling better now.
I remember when doing shots had a similarly debilitating effect but the first hours were more interesting and enjoyable.
I usually work at a standing desk but today I did some work sitting on the couch and learned I can write for short bursts while the dog is licking my face.
Later, the dog booped the keyboard to let me know she thought there should be a comma there.
There did not need to be a comma there. Dogs are bad at punctuation.
Quit: The Silo Series Collection by Hugh Howey 📚 Grinds to a halt 300-400 pages in with 1,200-1,300 pages to go. I’d rather seal myself and my descendants in an underground cylinder than continue reading.
Finished reading: Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum 📚 Extremely interesting!
I observed with interest the recent meme by young women who were amazed to find the young men in their lives thought about Rome often.
I certainly think about Rome often, though I am not a young man—I am a man in the period of life I like to call “early late middle age.” I never thought thinking about Rome was remarkable.
I’m not sure I should be considered part of the meme because I’m a history buff, and one of the historical periods that interests me is Rome. History is a hobby for me, and I think about history a lot.
I have discovered Excalidraw and achieved nerdvana.
I, a complete design illiterate, was able to create a simple networking diagram for a marketing document in 25 minutes, having never used the tool before. Later, the client will be able to use Excalidraw’s built-in collaboration tools to make changes, and then hand off to a designer to polish.
Do you feel any connection to the place where your grandparents came from?
My grandparents came from Eastern Europe. Poland on my father’s side, and Lithuania on my mother’s. But I do not feel like a Polish-American or Lithuanian-American. I’m just plain American. Or a Jewish American.
I suspect this is because my grandparents left those countries to get away from anti-Semitism, and found a welcoming home here. I have had the good fortune to be born in one of the few places and times in history where Jews face very little anti-Semitism. No wonder I’ve never won the lottery—I used up all my luck when I was born.
I have avoided nearly all noir movies until now because I like stories to have good guys, and my preconception about noir is that these films entirely feature variations on bad people along with the occasional victim.
I have seen “Double Indemnity” now and I see I was wrong. Not about the bad people—although there are one or two good people in this movie, they are not the main characters. However, “Double Indemnity” is not the least bit off-putting. It was compelling.
A literary history of fake texts in Apple’s marketing materials.
Read Max:
These eerily cheery, aggressively punctuated messages suggest an alternate dimension in which polite, good-natured, rigorously diverse groups of friends and coworkers use Apple products exactly how they are designed to be used, without complaint or error.
Sandra Bullock and the Rise of Tech. Sandra Bullock movies reflect society’s changing attitude toward tech over her 30-year career.
Sometimes I think about how her super-hacker character in “The Net” orders pizza online, and how that was a big deal when the movie came out in 1995.
Walking the dog, I saw a house with a five-foot “Christmas Story” leg lamp in the front window.
“The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”
“For All Mankind” returns Nov. 10. Looks great! On the show, the year is 2003.
I was thinking last night that my brain is still broken from the pandemic. It exaggerated my normal introversion and homebody tendencies into something resembling agoraphobia. I go weeks without going anywhere but the grocery store, picking up take-out once a week, my daily walk and that’s about it.
Yesterday I was looking through some photos I took on business trips and thought: That was me. I used to do that. I used to be that guy.
Some years ago, a couple I was friends with pressured me to be a clown at the birthday party they were throwing for their little daughter. I firmly and repeatedly noped out on that, and they hired a professional clown, and later they said they were glad because the pro did a great job.
They told me they asked the clown what was the weirdest event he ever performed at. The clown replied that it was an adult party. The clown explained that doing an adult party was no big deal—he often did adult parties and mixed up the usual clown stuff with some dirty jokes and it was fine.
The Half-Truth of America’s Past Greatness.
Esau McCaulley at The New York Times:
Where can African Americans find this lost golden age? Do we discover it during the first centuries of the Republic when slavery was the law of the land? Do we fast forward to the Red Summer, Jim Crow laws and “strange fruit” hanging from poplar trees?
Pundits like to say that every Presidential election is the most consequential election in our lifetime. I recall a panel of historians discussing what the least consequential election of our lifetime was.
The consensus was rapid and unanimous: The 1996 election. Clinton was a good, but not great President. Bob Dole probably would have been a good, but not great President. The 90s would have proceeded exactly as it did.
While walking the dog this morning, I saw this car. Kermit looks like he is desperately trying to escape from a serial killer.
I’m busy with work and other aspects of life and don’t have a lot of time for social media right now, so here is a photo of a palm tree in our backyard, which just got a trim and a shave and is looking beautiful after its spa day.
Things I saw while walking the dog today
When Moviegoers Started Watching Films From the Beginning.
Throughout the classical Hollywood era, moviegoers dropped in on a film screening whenever they felt like it, heedless of the progress of the narrative. In the usual formulation, a couple go to the movies, enter midway into the feature film, sit through to the end of the movie, watch the newsreel, cartoon, and comedy short at the top of the program, and then sit through the feature film until they recognize the scene they walked in on. At this point, one moviegoer whispers to their partner, “This is where we came in,” and they exit the theater.
People & Blogs: Manuel Moreale is doing a series of interviews with bloggers. Here are Rachel K. Kwon and Micro.blog founder Manton Reece.
I like finding out about how other people do blogging. It gives me ideas.
And I like the layout of Kwon’s home page, separating different types of posts into sections. It’s bothered me for a while that my blogging is mixed-up and spread across Facebook, Micro.blog, Tumblr, Mastodon and Bluesky.
Things I saw walking the dog this morning. I wish I’d stood directly in front of that rattan couch and centered it in the photo.
Currently reading: Track Changes by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum 📚
Finished reading: Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World by Maryanne Wolf 📚
I saw this car at the park today. It has been places.
Lake Murray this afternoon.
Yesterday I accidentally made myself super-strong coffee and liked it. This morning, I attempted to reproduce the coffee strength I made by accident yesterday. I may have overcorrected.
Cory Doctorow reviews “Doppelganger,” Naomi Klein’s memoir about how she’s often confused with Naomi Wolf. From that gimmicky springboard, Klein explores the progressive-to-Qanon pipeline that Wolf traveled—folks who formerly considered themselves staunch liberals becoming Trump supporters and embracing right-wing conspiracy theories.
Doctorow:
Wolf once had a cluster of superficial political and personal similarities to Klein: a feminist author of real literary ability, a Jewish woman, and, of course, a Naomi. Klein grew accustomed to being mistaken for Wolf, but never fully comfortable. Wolf’s politics were always more Sheryl Sandberg than bell hooks (or Emma Goldman). While Klein talked about capitalism and class and solidarity, Wolf wanted to “empower” individual women to thrive in a market system that would always produce millions of losers for every winner.
Late lunch with Julie at Shakespeare’s Pub, San Diego. Good food and spirits, comfortable interior, and many delightful posters and postcards on the walls
10 fall TV standouts, including “Changeling” debut and “Frasier” reboot.
I’ll give the “Frasier” reboot a try. I’m glad to see “Gilded Age” is returning. “Murder at the End of the World” has the most cliched possible premise and I am there for it.
Two series feature the wonderful Jon Hamm, but alas neither seems appealing to me.
Currently reading: The Silo Series Collection by Hugh Howey 📚
1,663 pages. That’ll take a day or two.
Overheard: me at 13: wow i can’t wait til we have immersive computers everywhere like Star Trek
me at 30: wow i can’t wait until we destroy all computers like in dune
NotebookLM, Google’s AI-powered note-taking app, is the messy beginning of something great. “What if you could have a conversation with your notes?” By David Pierce at The Verge.
Google has a history of shutting down products after a few years, so I’m reluctant to rely on anything new from them.
The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel.
Recent astronomical observations are shedding doubt on fundamental theories of cosmology and physics.
… a revolution may end up being the best path to progress. That has certainly been the case in the past with scientific breakthroughs like Copernicus’s heliocentrism, Darwin’s theory of evolution and Einstein’s relativity. All three of those theories also ended up having enormous cultural influence — threatening our sense of our special place in the cosmos, challenging our intuition that we were fundamentally different than other animals, upending our faith in common sense ideas about the flow of time. Any scientific revolution of the sort we’re imagining would presumably have comparable reverberations in our understanding of ourselves.
At Yale’s Long COVID Clinic, Lisa Sanders Is Trying It All
Long-COVID patients, generally speaking, have been very miserable for a very long time, and because the illness attacks their brains, their hearts, their lungs, their guts, their joints — sometimes simultaneously, sometimes intermittently, and sometimes in a chain reaction — they bounce from specialist to specialist, none of whom has the bandwidth to hear their whole frustrating ordeal together with the expertise to address all of their complaints: the nonspecific pain, the perpetual exhaustion, the bewildering test results, the one-off treatments. “These are people who have not been able to tell their story to anybody but their spouse and their mom — for years sometimes,” Sanders tells me. “And they are, in some ways, every doctor’s worst nightmare.” From the perspective of a time-pressed physician under ever-more-stringent productivity expectations, who has at most 30 minutes to do a new-patient intake and 15 for a follow-up, “someone who comes in with a very long story — it just sinks your day,” Sanders says.
In America, the Cheese Is Dead:
… in France the cheese is alive, which means that you can buy it young, mature or old, and that’s why you have to read the age of the cheese when you go to buy the cheese. So you smell, you touch, you poke. If you need cheese for today, you want to buy a mature cheese. If you want cheese for next week, you buy a young cheese. And when you buy young cheese for next week, you go home, [but] you never put the cheese in the refrigerator, because you don’t put your cat in the refrigerator. It’s the same; it’s alive.
I saw this sign while walking the dog. We did not see the bird. 😢🦜
Vivvy would like me to put down the phone and pay attention to her.
Poor kid had a rough couple of days adjusting to the new environment. It was a tough couple of months for me and Julie too.
Minnie is the first dog I’ve ever owned. I had no idea what I was doing. I still don’t, but she’s a healthy dog and seems happy so we must be doing something right.
Yes, Brussels Sprouts Taste Better Now—Here’s Why
Brussels sprouts bitter flavor was bred out of them in the 1990s, and ever since then, they’ve been a vegetable you’ll actually want to eat.
Journalists need to stop covering elections like horse races. Don’t obsess over who’s winning—help us decide who to vote for.
Horse-race journalism perpetuates the image of journalists as detached observers.
The horse race fills the insatiable news hole. Every day, a new poll or gaffe. Candidates’ stands on the issues, their experience and competence don’t change much over the course of a campaign—they don’t make news—but they are more important.
What time do Americans have dinner? Which state eats dinner earliest? Latest?
Using data from the American Time Use Survey, between 2018 to 2022, we can see the percentage of households in the country who were eating during a given time.
Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina discusses school closures, mask mandates and the pandemic response, on the Ezra Klein show, with guest host David Wallace-Wells, a New York Times science and public policy journalist
Political discussions today focus on school, shut-downs, lockdowns, masking, and whether the economic stimulus was too big. We’re not discussing the big question of whether we could have prevented 1.1 million deaths in the US alone.
Katelyn Jetelina is an epidemiologist and the author of the popular newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist. She argues that we’ve entered a new phase of the Covid-19 pandemic: “pandemic revisionism.” In her telling, the revisionist impulse seduces us into swapping cheap talking points for the thorny, difficult decisions we actually faced – and may face again with the next novel virus.
How can we learn to speak alien? On Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman.
If we meet extraterrestrials someday, how will we figure out what they’re saying? We currently face this problem right here at home: we have 2 million species of animals on our planet… and we have no Google Translate for any of them. We’re not having conversations with (or listening to podcasts by) anyone but ourselves. Join Eagleman and his guest Aza Raskin to see the glimmer of a pathway that might get us to animal translation, and relatively soon.
Clive Thompson: How I Use RSS To “Rewild” My Attention
I use RSS for an hour or so every day to follow specific sites, most of them very popular. Here, Thompson advocates using RSS to find great, weird content. I’m going to try that.
The relationship between ByteDance and Oracle has become deeply untrusting and adversarial, according to five sources. One source with knowledge of the companies’ actions characterized Oracle’s stance toward ByteDance as a “counterintelligence operation,” rather than a normal customer relationship. Meanwhile, some ByteDance employees wonder if Oracle just wants to run up their bill. The TikTok contract, known internally at Oracle as Project Telesis, has made ByteDance one of Oracle’s most lucrative customers.
Want to read—nonfiction: Empires of the Steppes by Kenneth W. Harl 📚
From landlines to Zoom, a brief 30+ year history of business phone technology and etiquette. By Clive Thompson.
In the 90s, background noise was unprofessional. Today, if somebody’s cat zoombombs the meeting, business stops while everybody meets the cat.
Cory Doctorow: How the kleptocrats and oligarchs hunt civil society groups to the ends of the Earth:
It’s a great time to be an oligarch! If you have accumulated a great fortune and wish to put whatever great crime lies behind it behind you, there is an army of fixers, lickspittles, thugs, reputation-launderers, procurers, henchmen, and other enablers who have turnkey solutions for laundering your reputation and keeping the unwashed from building a guillotine outside the gates of your compound.
On the You Are Good podcast with hosts Sarah Marshall and Alex Steed and guest Rain DeGrey.
The only movie I’ve ever watched more than once in a single day. I watched it three times.
Though it is a great movie, I don’t know if I would call it one of my favorites. But something about it hit me hard on that particular day.
WSJ: Tech Leaders Emerge Behind Plan to Build New City Near California Air Base
Venture capitalists want to build a new city on currently rural land in California. This will go as well as crypto, Web3, and the metaverse.
An ode to “Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast.
I loved this podcast. “… one of the great love letters to twentieth-century Hollywood.”
Some of the best guests were D-list stars even in their prime, who might only be remembered by the narrow age demographic that Gottfried and I shared.
The spider was about an inch wide, and furiously busy tending its web, scurrying back and forth and moving its legs rapidly.
I took a step back and watched it for a while.
I tried to get a video but it didn’t come out great, and I know spiders give people the fantods so I won’t share the video here.
Casey Newton at Platformer: Why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter.
I’m surprised to learn Casey is a note-taking apps nerd, like me.
And like me he’s a compulsive hoarder of clips and links.
And like me he wants a chatbot to be able to ask the hoard questions and get good answers.
Decluttering continues. Two observations:
• A surprisingly significant amount of the clutter in my office was empty boxes for me to put the clutter in. • Some days I think I’m smart and other days I try to flatten empty cardboard cartons without tearing them.
What Happened to Wirecutter?. By Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic.
I rely on Wirecutter for any unusual purchase under $200. If I need something I’ve never bought one of before, and it’s priced under $200, I just buy whatever Wirecutter recommends.
Things that are annoying me today:
Currently reading: Somebody’s Fool by Richard Russo 📚 A pleasant surprise—I did not know Russo planned another sequel to “Nobody’s Fool.”
Finished reading: This Bird Has Flown by Susanna Hoffs 📚Excellent!
I uncovered this book while decluttering my home office. I loved it when I was a kid, and bought a copy from Powells bookstore on a trip to Portland with Julie in 2008. 📚
While walking the dog, I saw this SUV 📷
I saw this sign. Poor Sadie. 😭😢😭📷
Meanwhile, here in San Diego and nearby Southern California
I love all 17 guidelines in Tracy Durnell’s reading philosophy.
Two highlights jump out at me.
Gradually over time in my adulthood, I found I was reading fewer and fewer books. I got back in the habit a few months ago, and I’m happy about that.
Finished reading: The Gutenberg Parenthesis by Jeff Jarvis 📚A thoughtful history of five centuries of print as dominant form of information dissemination, culture and conversation, now closing (hence the parenthesis metaphor) and the internet era now dawning.
Want to read—nonfiction: Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World by Maryanne Wolf 📚
Want to read—nonfiction: Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf 📚
Yesterday morning, I was typing happily on my Mac when I noticed the cursor disappeared. I was typing but no text was appearing. I determined that another app was stealing focus. The problem app was the Finder. I figured this out through the simple expedient of watching the menu bar to see which app jumped to the foreground when the problem came up.
This was going on every minute or so. Very annoying! I continued working like that all day, just Cmd-Tabbing back after the Finder stole focus. Around 4 pm I decided enough was enough.
A brief history of an American gift to world cuisine: the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. This article at the Saturday Evening Post by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie takes a few paragraphs to get going, but then it delivers.
Peanut butter was reportedly invented in 1894. Early recipes featured “a banana and apple salad served over lettuce with a peanut butter dressing” and “a peanut butter ‘loaf’ recipe involving two cups of chopped olives and a teaspoon of onion juice”
“Animal House” is where the 1960s finally and decisively turned into the 1980s — the 1970s being understood as a transition period highlighted by double-knit and “Kung Fu Fighting.” With “Animal House,” we crossed the line from hippies to yuppies, from “all you need is love” to “greed is good.” It seems crazy to say it, but the film’s Deltas — a fraternity of proud, self-defined losers — became role models for a generation obsessed with winning. You could argue we’re still living with the fallout.
“The Warriors” keeps popping up in my Internet wandering. Time to watch it again?
We’re watching “Hijack,” a miniseries about an airline hijacking, focusing on Idris Elba as Sam, a passenger working to outwit the team that’s taken over the plane. Highly recommended—very suspenseful!
The British Home Secretary is a supporting character. I’ve heard of that position but realized I had no idea what the home secretary does.
My half-assed Internet research tells me the Home Secretary is responsible for British internal security, so they are basically Britain’s top cop. They’re also responsible for immigration and emergency services, such as the fire departments.
We Jews are left out of progressive discussion of diversity. Jews don’t count.
A significant part of the progressive movement is outright anti-Semitic.
And conservatives have a weird variety of anti-Semitism that fetishizes Israel and supports some prominent American Jews.
But I just can’t bring myself to care about Jewface in movies and TV.
Bradley Cooper is getting criticized by Jewish activists who are accusing him of “Jewface” for wearing a prosthetic nose in an upcoming biographical movie about Leonard Bernstein.
To be fair to Cooper, early versions of the movie had him wearing a clown nose, so the current version is better.
Want to read: Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient World by Mary Beard 📚A new book of Roman history by the author of “SPQR”? Yes, please.
The same lawmakers who want to rob their constituents of the right to bodily autonomy have also begun to treat democracy as an obstacle to avoid, not a process to respect. If the people stand in the way of ending abortion, then it’s the people who have to go.
— Republicans Won’t Stop at Banning Abortion, by Jamelle Bouie at the New York Times.
When I was a kid, we rode bicycles for miles every day, unsupervised. Also unsupervised: We played in schoolyards and playgrounds, went into stores, and went to the movies. Even when we were playing in another kid’s backyard, often the adults weren’t outside with us. I can’t even remember if the adults were home.
And I was, by the standards of my childhood, a sheltered, sedentary, bookish kid. Other kids were having even MORE adventures than I was.
I saw this while walking with the dog this morning. I was disappointed that I did not see the pig, but it’s probably just as well because I totally would’ve put my fingers through the fence.
The Case of the Internet Archive vs. Book Publishers
David Streitfeld at the NY Times:
In the pandemic emergency, Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive freely lent out digital scans of its library. Publishers sued. Owning a book means something different now.
“Sweet sesame chicken!” sounds like something a person would say instead of swearing.
Lunch yesterday with friends at Shakespeare’s, a British pub here in San Diego. One of the restrooms had two walls covered with dozens of “cheeky postcards.” Here’s one example. 📷
I’ve been listening to the Age of Napoleon podcast for months now, which covers Napoleon’s life, career and world in exhaustive detail. I am coming away a great admirer of Napoleon, while also acknowledging that Napoleon did terrible things. (Haiti.) That is one thing I have in common with Musk.
I also love Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast.
So that’s two things I have in common with Elon.
Also, like Musk, I have not and never will fight in a cage match with Mark Zuckerberg.
… we are building our entire global and national policy on the premise that generative AI will be world-changing in ways that may in hindsight turn out to have been unrealistic.
I have found generative AI uses to be limited at best.
I use it to generate illustrations for articles. In the past, I used public domain and Creative Commons images, and those were just as good as AI imagery.
Want to read: Sh*tshow by Richard Russo 📚
Want to read: Chances Are . . . by Richard Russo 📚
Want to read: Triage by Richard Russo 📚
Want to read: Elsewhere by Richard Russo 📚
Want to read: Somebody’s Fool by Richard Russo 📚
Want to read: My Life as a White Trash Zombie by Diana Rowland 📚
Currently reading: This Bird Has Flown by Susanna Hoffs 📚
Silicon Valley billionaires and millionaires support racist Richard Hanania, who advocated eugenics, forced sterilization, and opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing,” Bouie writes.
Hanania wrote, “These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people on subways or walking around in suits.”
Racists are the natural ally of plutocrats, Bouie says. By supporting an argument that some people are naturally inferior, the plutocrats support the argument that other people are natural elites.
Kottke: Glamor photos of vintage calculators, 1968-83.
In the 1970s, calculators weren’t just for calculating. They were luxury items. In a world before iPods and iPhones, calculators were the first aspirational personal electronics.”
My Dad was an accountant and started using calculators very early. I remember visiting his office as a boy around 1970 and seeing a desktop calculator. All it did was add, subtract, multiply and divide, and it was the size of a cash register.
Occasionally I like to not dress like a person who works from home and dribbles food down the front of their shirt. When I’d Google for fashion advice, I’d end often up on r/malefashionadvice. Morgan Sung reports on TechCrunch that Reddit’s menswear hub is the latest casualty of its battle with moderators.
If you follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, or Mastodon, you know that I like to share memes and vintage ads and photos, and I used to often find them on Reddit. I’m just not finding those images and videos there as much anymore, and I’m starting to check Reddit less often.
I saw this leaflet on a utility pole when walking with Minnie.
Currently reading: The Gutenberg Parenthesis by Jeff Jarvis 📚
“The long bezzle: Verizon can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” Verizon shutters BlueJeans, three years after buying it for $400M, the latest in a long series of failures for the company.
Techdirt: Verizon Fails Again, Shutters Attempted Zoom Alternative BlueJeans After Paying $400 Million For It:
These repeated failures by Verizon would be less of an issue if the company didn’t have such a long history of skimping on essential broadband network upgrades. Whether it’s New York, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania, the telco has a long history of taking tax breaks, subsidies, or regulatory favors in exchange for promised DSL to fiber network upgrades that somehow never fully materialize.
I’ve been using Zoom several times per week for three years. It’s been my go-to videoconferencing service. I need to think about whether to stay with it.
Cory Doctorow hasn’t joined Bluesky or Threads, and is sticking with Mastodon, because Bluesky and Threads aren’t federated and Mastodon is. Bluesky and Threads have captive user bases, while Mastodon users are free to leave.
Cory Doctorow:Fool Me Twice We Don’t Get Fooled Again: There’s a crucial difference between federatable and federated.
Cory is also on Tumblr, which isn’t federated either, and he doesn’t talk about why he’s there. I suspect his reasons are the same as mine for being on both Tumblr and Facebook: I’ve been on Facebook and Tumblr for years, and made connections on those platforms. I don’t want to just walk away from that.
Actor Bruce Horak, who played Hemmer, returns as the Klingon general. In real life, the actor performs in a musical group, the Railbirds, which explains his superior singing chops.
And Christina Chong, who plays La’an, and Celia Rose Gooding, who plays Uhura, both have musical theater backgrounds. Gooding got a Tony nomination for her performance on Broadway in “Jagged Little Pill.”
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 Just Pulled Off a Secret Cameo | Den of Geek
I saw this while walking with the dog today. 📷
“Fighting junk fees is ‘woke’: Visa and Mastercard want you to pay credit card swipe fees to own the libs.”
A dark money campaign is claiming that legislation to rein in credit card junk fees is bad because it’s “woke," and compares reining in credit card fees to Communism.
The campaign is “literally that stupid,” says Cory Doctorow, who notes that Mastercard and Visa skim 3-5% of every of “every single retail transaction in the entire fucking economy.”
The youngs today are burned out on dating apps so they’re posting long personal profiles to the Internet, often using Google Docs or Notion. These are essentially resumes, but for romance instead of jobs.
Connie Li, 33, a software engineer, “described herself as monogamous, short and prone to wearing colorful outfits. She added that she was undoubtedly a cat in a previous life, ‘just one of those weirdo bodega ones that like people.’”
Hard Fork: “Researchers in Korea claim they’ve identified a material that could unlock a technological revolution: the room temperature superconductor.” Kevin Roose and Casey Newton at the Hard Fork podcast explain why that’s a big deal.
Twitter is doing its own research on the subject, including @iris_IGB, who claims to be Russian, uses a manga character for an avatar, and says they’ve reproduced the experiment in their kitchen.
Things I saw while walking with the dog this morning. 📷
In recent weeks I have cleaned my shoe soles of great masses of dog poop twice and an extraordinary quantity of cat throw-up once.
I have become a reluctant expert on this subject. Warm water and dish soap. Easy peasy.
Minnie says good night.
This is what it’s like to spend your life in prison.
Listening to the men in the short Opinion Video above is like encountering visitors from another planet. They are serving life sentences at Angola prison, in rural Louisiana, with little to no hope for release. Many are elderly; they have not seen the outside world, or their families, for decades. They do not face execution, but they have been sentenced to death all the same, their lives spooling out endlessly on the cellblock and in the cotton fields, then ending in a prison hospice bed.
A friend is getting started with Obsidian, making the switch from Evernote, and he asked me for recommendations on plugins—which ones I, personally, find most useful. Here’s my list:
Essential
Command Palette This is the main way I invoke commands in Obsidian. You type a keyboard shortcut (Command-P on my Mac) and a little text popup comes up. You start typing and Obsidian auto-suggests possible commands, until you quickly narrow down to what you’re looking for.
I started reading “Pursuit of the Pankera,” which is I think the only book by Robert A. Heinlein I have not read. I am enjoying it so far. I’m finding it a pleasant surprise.
The book was initially published in 1980, as “The Number of the Beast.” The first third of “Pankera” is the same as “Number,” and then they go off in different directions. They are two different novels with the same beginning, and many of the same characters throughout. “Pankera” disappeared for 40 years, and was finally published in 2020.
The Life I Never Intended to Love: Dog Owner. Katherine Bindley: “During the pandemic I chose a breed often compared to a velociraptor. It ruined my life–until I discovered that he’s the best dog who’s ever lived.” www.wsj.com/articles/…
I can absolutely relate. Minnie is a high-energy dog. She’s mellowed now, but in her first few years she ran us ragged. Even today, I walk her for more than 90 minutes a day and she’s ready for more. Many times when we get home from walks, she does zoomies just for the heck of it.
The Criminal podcast: A Glamour and a Mystery.
In the summer of 1917, 16-year-old Elsie Wright took a photograph of her 9-year-old cousin, Frances Griffiths. It was the first photograph she’d ever taken – and it became the source of a mystery that lasted for most of the 20th century.
The girls’ photos appeared to show them interacting with fairies: winged humans a few inches tall. Spiritualists worldwide, including Arthur Conan Doyle, were fascinated. More than a half-century later, one of the girls, now an old woman, admitted the thing was a hoax (although she said one of the five photos were real). She said the girls only intended to fool their family for a couple of hours.
Things I saw walking the dog this morning. I like the lines of that building, and the stone facade. There was a shopping cart in the way of the shot, so I moved it.
A surprising number of you seemed to enjoy the video of Minnie walking down stairs. Here is another.
Things I saw walking this morning: That lawn has a lot going on. And Purple Snoopy does not live up to his publicity.
Chiang is the author of brilliant stories which explore themes of consciousness and free will, including “The Story of Your Life,” which was adapted into the Hollywood movie “Arrival,” starring Amy Adams.
Chiang says machines learn language differently from human children, which leads journalist Madhumita Murgia to talk about how their “five-year-old has taken to inventing little one-line jokes, mostly puns, and testing them out on us. The anecdote makes [Chiang] animated.”
In the 1970s, a Soviet journalist named Valentin Zorin made a series of documentary films about the United States. At a time when few Russian journalists came to the U.S., Zorin traveled all across the country, and gained access few American journalists had. The Cold War was a battle of ideas, and Zorin saw himself on the front lines. He was on a quest to unmask the United States by spreading doubt, conspiracy theories, and a strange cocktail of truth and misinformation.
Thunderation! The Speaker Demands Bean Soup (1904) On July 27, 1904, Speaker of the House Joseph Cannon went to the Capitol dining room looking forward to his usual bowl of bean soup, “and is met with an unfortunate surprise.” Cannon raised a fuss (because I guess there was nothing more important going on in 1904). Bean soup has been on the menu every day since—except for one.
On the “This Day in Esoteric Political History” podcast, which points out that it’s bonkers to want a hot bowl of soup for lunch in Washington D.C. in July before air conditioning was invented.
A brief history of making out. Turns out “romantic, sexual, steamy” kissing isn’t instinctual behavior; it’s a learned cultural practice. A lot of societies don’t do it, most primates don’t do it, and people only started relatively recently, a few thousand years ago. On the Decoder Ring podcast, hosted by Willa Paskin and produced by Paskin and Katie Shepherd. slate.com/podcasts/…
This podcast pairs nicely with this week’s episode of Savage Lovecast, where host Dan Savage talks about primate masturbation with evolutionary biologist Dr. Matilda Brindle. savage.love/lovecast/…
Ghost Church: The delightful Jamie Loftus looks at the American spiritualism movement, including its history, and she visits the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp in Florida. Loftus is funny, wise and takes a friendly but skeptical view. www.iheart.com/podcast/1…
Loftus previously did podcasts about joining Mensa for a year and the comic strip Cathy.
Her podcast about Nabokov’s “Lolita” discusses how nearly 70 years of critics and filmmakers completely miss the point of the novel by portraying Humbert Humbert as a victim of a seductress. He’s not the victim—he’s a pedophile who destroys a little girl’s life. www.avclub.com/jamie-lof…
“Majorly” seems to me like it’s just plain wrong. Bad English. Not a real word. But apparently, I’m wrong about that. Majorly is a real word, albeit relatively recent. It was first used in 1955.
However, I think it’s going to be a while before I stop majorly cringing every time I see or hear it.
“Housing First” policy does what it says—it attempts to address homelessness by finding housing for homeless people before attempting to solve other problems these people might have.
This common-sense solution has come under fire by critics, mostly Republicans, who claim that it fails to address the real causes of homelessness: Mental health and drug abuse. (And then the Republicans don’t want to do anything about mental health or drug abuse either. Well played, Republicans!)
Sunday morning comics, Ohio, 1950s. Via www.reddit.com/r/TheWayW…
On Reddit: “My grandparents the night they met (1970).” Via reddit.com/r/OldScho…
Caligula (1979) via reddit.com/r/MoviePo…
Republicans want to pass the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) to suppress LGBTQ+ voices. “Pass it, pass it, pass it, pass it, pass it,” says Biden. www.techdirt.com/2023/07/2…
It’s not just LGBTQ+ voices that are at risk. KOSA gives broad enforcement authority to states’ attorneys general. In blue states, that could mean suppression of conservative views.
“San Francisco or vicinity circa 1921. ‘Studebaker “Big Six” touring car.’ Cigar-chomping Army brass at the wheel. 5x7 inch glass negative by Christopher Helin.” Via www.shorpy.com/node/2670…
Decoder Ring: What’s really going on inside a mosh pit? The mosh pit is “a violent place where (mostly) white guys vent their aggression.… but it’s also a place bound by camaraderie and—believe it or not—etiquette.… explore the unwritten rules of this 50-year-old live-music phenomenon with punks, concertgoers, and a heavy-metal physicist.” Hosted by Willa Paskin and produced by Paskin and Katie Shepherd.
Pocket gadgets were all the rage in Adam Smith’s day….
The best known are watches. A pocket timepiece was an 18th century man’s must-have fashion accessory, its presence indicated by a ribbon or bright steel chain hanging from the owner’s waist, bedecked with seals and a watch key. …
… At a coffeehouse, a gentleman might pull out a silver nutmeg grater to add spice to his drink or a pocket globe to make a geographical point. The scientifically inclined might carry a simple microscope, known as a flea glass, to examine flowers and insects while strolling through gardens or fields. He could gaze through a pocket telescope and then, with a few twists, convert it into a mini-microscope. He could improve his observations with a pocket tripod or camera obscura and could pencil notes in a pocket diary or on an erasable sheet of ivory. (Not content with a single sheet, Thomas Jefferson carried ivory pocket notebooks.)
New York subway, 1980
Marty Feldman and Ann-Margret, 1977. Via www.reddit.com/r/OldScho…
He looks as surprised to be with her as we are to see them as a couple.
Every time I bring in the car to be washed, I end up choosing add-ons at random.
I finally decided to look up which ones to get, and which ones to pass on.
Consumer Reports says get the undercarriage wash at least once a season, “especially if you drive through mud or live in a part of the country where roads are salted in winter.”
Wheel cleaning is good, but spray-on wax is purely cosmetic.
How did we fill our in-between time before smartphones?
I’m constitutionally incapable of ignoring text within my sight, so I remember reading cereal boxes at breakfast, magazine covers in checkout lines, display ads on public transit, out-of-date magazines in doctors’ offices, in-flight Skymall catalogs, and posted signs (however irrelevant) of all types.
1960 The voices of the Flintstones
Video. Watch here: twitter.com/slendersh…
Five years ago: The hotel I’m in has an enclosed atrium with a mirrored far wall. Some guy dressed like me was taking a picture same time as me.
Minnie goes down 13 steps. It’s a lot for her to process. We do this a couple of times a week.
In 1909, Alice Ramsey became the first woman to drive an automobile across the United States en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alic…
Google shows off AI “news article” writer to newspapers, leaving newspapers to wonder who did the fact-finding, investigating and reporting boingboing.net/2023/07/2…
Rob Beschizza: Google is “pitching a tool to _rewrite _news that’s _already _been published” and the target market is the publishers who originally paid for creating that news.
Florida is requiring schools to teach how slavery benefitted the slaves, and require teaching “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans” when studying race massacres. www.cnn.com/2023/07/2…
These include the Ocoee, Fla. massacre where 40-50 Black people were killed by a mob of more than 250 whites, to prevent the victims from voting in an election. And the Tulsa, Okla., massacre, when white mobs killed up to 300 Black people. And in the Rosewood, Fla., race masscacre, in 1923, a white mob killed six Black people and two whites, and burned down homes, businesses and churches.
Donald Trump warns that “it would be very dangerous” for Jack Smith to jail him. boingboing.net/2023/07/2…
Mighty nice country you got here. Wouldn’t want nothing to happen to it.
H.S. “Dick” Hickman, Chief of Police in Colorado City, Texas, poses at City Hall with moonshine, guns, and a Chevrolet coupe after an arrest around 1937, as Mitchell County remained dry even after prohibition. Via www.reddit.com/r/History…
Jason Snell: Why everyone should be running the latest betas on their Apple devices www.macworld.com/article/2…
Jason Snell is being a bad influence. I’ve got the public betas on my Watch and iPhone. I like ’em. I’m holding off on the Mac because I need it to run the business and holding off on my iPads because, well, I haven’t seen a reason to upgrade those.
That moment when you drink thirstily from a big glass of water that had been sitting on the counter overnight, and notice two dead fruit flies floating on the surface of the water.
And then you convince yourself there were not three dead fruit flies.
We’ve been watching “Yellowstone,” “1883,” and “Justified: City Primeval.” I’m trying to talk myself out of getting a cowboy hat.
Harrison Ford on “Love, American Style,” 1969.
Sally Field in “The Flying Nun.”
“Room 222.”
ngl I would eat the heck out of this with plenty of Guldens Spicy Brown mustard. Via www.tumblr.com/allhailth…
1948 George Nelson Home Office Desk | Wood, Leather, & Metal | USA | Sold for $6,000 at auction. Via midcenturymodernfreak.tumblr.com/post/5578…
ME: “Get out of the way so I can get an artsy photo of those rocks.” DOG: (gets out of the way … eventually)
While walking the dog this morning, we saw this excruciatingly artistically arranged bicycle and other objects.
On covid, California’s supreme court just said the quiet part out loud ko-fi.com/post/On-c…
Robert Kuciemba, a woodworker in San Francisco, was infected by covid in 2020 after his company, Victory Woodworks, based in Nevada, transferred sick workers to the San Francisco site for a few months.
Nate Bear writes:
Through the proceedings of the case it turns out that the employer knew some employees might be sick but they transferred them anyway and ignored a San Francisco ordinance in place at the time to quarantine suspected covid cases.
ChatGPT makes bad writers good and good writers better, according to a study. www.technologyreview.com/2023/07/1…
I make very little use of ChatGPT in my own work. However, I rely on two other AI products: Otter.ai for transcription and Grammarly for grammar, punctuation and tightening up verbiage.
Texas ranks dead last in livability, and Florida is in the bottom 10 of the 50 states, due to poor healthcare, education standards and culture wars. Texas has the highest percentage of people living without health insurance, the state has the 13th highest violent crime rate, and is in the bottom third of US states for licensed childcare facilities per capita.
And Texas is targeting LGBTQ residents for persecution and restricting voting and reproductive rights.
Chick Tracts (99% Invisible). Jack Chick was the Leni Riefenstahl of comics. Chick devoted his life to using comics to witness to non-Christians. His gorgeous, kitschy art, combined with messaging that was often homophobic and Islamophobic, makes the tiny comics simultaneously masterpieces of pop culture and terrible hate speech.
Pink 1967 Mustang Tussy Hardtop Advertisement.
31 Photos Of New York City In The Summer Of ‘69
AI-simulated Johnny Cash sings “Barbie Girl.”
I love the name of this YouTube channel: There I Ruined It.
Study: Cities with Expensive Housing Have Highest Rates of Homelessness timesofsandiego.com/business/…
I’m trying to swear less, but I’ve got to say “no shit Sherlock.”
Riley Moore, a US House candidate backed by Kevin McCarthy, made six appearances on virulent antisemite Michael Scheuer’s podcast. (Media Matters / Eric Hananoki)
Scheuer isn’t dog-whistling. He flat-out hates Jews and says so publicly and repeatedly, and has called for the assassination of US political leaders, including Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton.
Via Boing Boing
Vulcans really are jerks.
The shuttle was huge. It was big enough to serve as a Starfleet Academy party bus. Just hang a disco ball from the ceiling.
Was Spock human long enough to try California burritos and pizza? Because if he thought bacon was great….
I saw these steps while walking Minnie a few days ago. They’re beautiful and my knees hurt just looking at them.
Walking the dog this morning, I wore baggy checked cargo shorts, black calf-length socks, white New Balance sneakers, and my sweat-stained white Tilley bucket hat.
In other words, I was a thirst trap.
Steven Vaughan-Nichols: I’ve used social networks since the 80s. Threads is the most annoying one I’ve tried. (ZDNET)
Threads’s egregious privacy policy (which SJVN provides more information about here) and its current lack of a web interface are the reasons why I’m sitting Threads out. For now at least; I may change my mind at any moment.
I expect I’ll wait until micro.blog supports Threads cross-posting. Either that, or wait until Threads supports ActivityPub, and then I’ll merge my Mastodon, Micro.blog and Threads activity, as I do now with Mastodon and Micro.blog.
It was at this moment that I decided to switch off Apple News notifications on my phone.
Jews, Christians and Satanists are taking legal action to protect reproductive freedom, claiming—rightly—that abortion bans are an imposition of religious beliefs by the state.
Cory Doctorow: “Jewish religious texts clearly state that life begins at the first breath, and that the life of a pregnant person takes precedence over the life of the fetus in their uterus.”
The “religious liberty” angle for overturning the overturning of Dobbs
Los Angeles’s Bradbury Building is a gorgeous edifice built in 1893. You’ve seen the Bradbury if you’ve seen “Blade Runner;” the Bradbury was the setting for the Toymaker’s workshop. And the building has been featured in a million other movies and TV shows.
From the outside, the Bradbury just looks like a brick office building at the corner of 3rd and Broadway, downtown. It seems unremarkable, but the magic happens when you step inside.
A bad day for local journalism.
LA’s Richest Man Sells Union-Tribune to Feared ‘Chop Shop’ (Voice of San Diego / Will Huntsberry and Scott Lewis)
At the park this weekend I saw a bulldog wearing a pearl necklace. Big chunky pearls, like Barbara Bush used to wear.
The pearls probably weren’t real, but the dog probably was.
I was trying to remember a quote about writing, but I couldn’t remember the exact words. Something like, “If you can do anything else but be a writer, you should do it." But not quite that—punchier.
I tried Googling the phrase but that didn’t turn up anything.
So I asked ChatGPT, which said the exact phrase is, “If you can do anything else but write, do it,” and attributed it to Elie Wiesel.
“Harry Milas’ sleight of hand skills are so good that he now helps to expose gambling rings. He explains the tricks of the trade and why he hates casinos.”
The Magician Who Catches Card Cheats in Casinos (The Guardian / Sian Cain)
In her new book “Nuts and Bolts Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way),” structural engineer Roma Agrawal identifies and examines the seven of most basic building blocks of engineering that have shaped the modern world: the nail, the wheel, the spring, the lens, the magnet, the string, and the pump.
— Nuts and Bolts [99% Invisible]
Born into extreme poverty, [Cary] Grant was told as a child his mother had died. She had actually been placed in a psychiatric institution. It was the start of a life of repression and extraordinary reinvention.
— The Trauma of Cary Grant: How He Thrived After a Terrible Childhood - As Told by His Daughter. (The Guardian / Emma Brooks)
Grant was determined to give his only child, a daughter, born when he was 62, the good upbringing he never had. So he walked away from his film career to devote the rest of his life to raising her. That daughter, Emily Grant, is now an executive producer on a four-part TV series about her father’s life.
Want to read: This Bird Has Flown by Susanna Hoffs 📚Good interview with Hoffs, formerly of The Bangles, on Debbie Millman’s podcast. Hoffs is surprisingly smart. She’s written a novel and it sounds good.
Finished reading: Persian Fire by Tom Holland 📚 Fascinating story, a non-fiction history of the Persian-Greek war 2500 years ago. But a challenging read. The author uses ornate sentences that I had to read two or three times to get the gist of. I’ve read other Holland history books and enjoyed them, and did not find them quite so difficult.
Yesterday at the supermarket, I saw a man with a dog. The dog wasn’t wearing a service dog vest. It was just a dog, but inside the supermarket. It looked like a chocolate lab, but with a wiry tail.
I happened to be buying treats for Minnie at the dog treats shelf at the moment I saw the dog. The supermarket dog sniffed the shelves with great interest, then turned away.
I deleted Meta Threads from my phone. I may come back to the service, but I’m not feeling urgency, and I don’t like app’s privacy policies.
Threads grabs a great deal of user information, including text messages.
Text messages?! Are you kidding?!
I’ve got Facebook on my phone. That’s bad enough.
Has anybody found a news alerts service for the phone that only alerts you for world-changing news? All the news alert services I’ve tried are too noisy.
I want an alert if Biden or Trump drops dead, or if Ukraine boils over into World War III. I don’t need an alert to let me know somebody got murdered 15 miles away, or the Walmart killer got sentenced or—true alert I got from CNN yesterday—how to not get bedbugs from hotel beds.
Jo Walton writes about Heinlein’s Worst Novel. I 98% agree.
My favorite Heinleins are his early books, particularly “Citizen of the Galaxy.”
I loved “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” and “Starship Troopers,” but I’d love them even more without the lectures.
I loved “Stranger in a Strange Land” when I was 13 years old, but it ages badly.
And “The Cat Who Walks Through Walls” and “To Sail Beyond the Sunset” are just plain bad.
In a sign of what’s to come for many white-collar workers, artificial intelligence is eating the software industry, as companies turn to generative AI tools to save money on programmers.
Some 70% of coders are already using or plan to use AI in their work, with one-third saying the primary reason they do so is because it makes them more productive, according to survey by Stack Overflow.
What Will AI Do to Your Job? Take a Look at What It’s Already Doing to Coders. By Christopher Mims at the Wall Street Journal.
How Tom Brady’s Crypto Ambitions Collided With Reality. “The superstar quarterback is among the celebrities dealing with the fallout from the crypto crash. Others, like Taylor Swift, escaped.” (The New York Times / Erin Griffith and David Yaffe-Bellany).
Seems like Brady and other celebrities were both victimizers and victims, as is so often the case with people in pyramid schemes at any level. They’re not entirely guilty but they’re not innocent victims either.
Josh Withers shares frustration with stagnation in the ebook market.
I agree, and blame the Amazon monopoly. That monopoly is created and maintained by laws, not markets.
Amazon needs to be required to allow competing products to read its ebook format. Problem solved.
Right now, that kind of compatiblity is outright illegal.
I signed up for Threads. Unenthusiastically. I want to use fewer social media platforms, and concentrate my focus, rather than doing more.
Hopefully, Threads will follow through and become a full citizen of ActivityPub, and also connect to the blue Facebook platform. That will make my social media activity simpler.
Even better: Everybody needs to wake up and realize that we don’t need a platform to serve as the internet town square. The internet already is the town square.
Historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook “delve into the mysteries surrounding the Ark of the Covenant.”
The most important object in the universe, but also a somewhat invisible presence in the Bible, the Ark of the Covenant has fuelled stories for millennia… as a weapon of mass destruction, an elaborate filling cabinet for sacred laws, or as the very location where God and man meet.
“Why do we have so little access to what’s happening under the hood?” Neuroscientist David Eagleman discusses how almost everything we do is controlled unconsciously. Our consciousness and free will are just illusions, thinking we’re in control but really just along for the ride.
I’ve seen the metaphor elsewhere comparing consciousness and free will to a toddler riding in a car with one of those child-safety seats that has a toy dashboard and steering wheel built in. The kid thinks they’re driving, but they’re not.
I made heavy use of Google Reader, checking it several times daily every day. But I never used the social features—I barely knew about them.
Learning about them now, I think I would have loved them. Most of what I do on social media is share things I find elsewhere on the Internet, sometimes commenting on them. I’ve never found a platform where that kind of behavior was a perfect fit. Reddit comes close, but there’s a lot of overhead on Reddit finding the right community to comment in, and figuring out those communities’ sometimes esoteric rules.
The Last Archive: The Word for Man is Ishi: The amazing story of Ishi, only member of his Native American community to survive genocide, who was discovered in a small town in northern California in 1911.
Celebrated during his life as “the last wild Indian,” Ishi moved in to the new Anthropology Department at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became a living exhibit. But he also took control of his own life, moving around the community, attending vaudeville shows, and giving newspaper interviews.
Google bungled by killing Google Reader to build Google+, and then bungled again killing Google+ The company is like the proverbial donkey placed between a pile of hay and a bucket of water that ends up dying of hunger and thirst because it can’t decide between them.
How Google Reader died — and why the web misses it more than ever. By David Pierce at The Verge
Ten years after its untimely death, the team that built the much-beloved feed reader reflects on what went wrong and what could have been.
Doctors are starting to use generative AI to help with paperwork, which takes them literally hours every day—often evenings and weekends—and is a leading driver of burnout.
A.I. May Someday Work Medical Miracles. For Now, It Helps Do Paperwork.. By Steve Lohr at The New York Times.
Harrison Ford takes a leap of faith in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
OceanGate is a microcosm of the Covid response. We’ll just let Covid rip through the population and try to hospitalize anybody who gets REALLY sick without fixing the healthcare system. Nothing bad will happen. See also: Climate change, gun control, housing prices.
I’m seeing in the news that lab-grown meat is coming to the market. This is not fake meat like the Impossible Burger, made from plant materials. This is meat cloned from animal cells. Supposedly, it tastes exactly like ground meat—ground beef or chicken—because that’s exactly what it is.
Would you eat it?
I recently came across the IndieWeb concept of POSSE. Not the first time I’ve seen it, but this time I read it more closely and said, “Holy cow, there’s a name for the way I’ve always preferred to use social media?”
It should be called “POSCE”—“Publish on your Own Site, Copy Elsewhere.” It’s a more understandable explanation of the concept. Though understandability isn’t a great strength for the IndieWeb movement.
Suddenly, It Looks Like We’re in a Golden Age for Medicine. David Wallace-Wells / NYTimes.
Hard to reconcile with our disastrous Covid response. We did better with the 1918 flu.
This is an area I’m never satisfied with, and I seem to fiddle with it every few months. I find Inoreader is a mixed bag as a reading environment, though I’m continuing to use it because it’s unparalleled for filtering massive numbers of RSS feeds to find a few details that I need for my work.
So I’m experimenting with moving more over to newsletters, and then comes the question of what’s the ideal tool for reading newsletters. Inoreader? Matter?? Readwise Reader
There will never be another Harrison Ford
The guy’s 80, and instead of sliding into the traditional role of lifetime achievement award winner, memoir writer and maker of occasional cameo appearances, he’s back on billboards and the sides of buses for “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.”
Meanwhile his roles in “1923” and “Shrinking” could very well deliver not only his first Emmy nomination but his second as well.
As AI becomes more prevalent, a vast underclass of people training the machines is emerging worldwide. Josh Dzieza reports in depth for The Verge.
There are people classifying the emotional content of TikTok videos, new variants of email spam, and the precise sexual provocativeness of online ads. Others are looking at credit-card transactions and figuring out what sort of purchase they relate to or checking e-commerce recommendations and deciding whether that shirt is really something you might like after buying that other shirt. Humans are correcting customer-service chatbots, listening to Alexa requests, and categorizing the emotions of people on video calls. They are labeling food so that smart refrigerators don’t get confused by new packaging, checking automated security cameras before sounding alarms, and identifying corn for baffled autonomous tractors.
I saw this sign 10 years ago today in a barbershop window in Coronado.
RIP Frank Field, a local New York TV weatherman who was a fixture of the television landscape when I was a kid in the 70s. He was 100 years old.
Field, who died Saturday, was an evangelist for the Heimlich maneuver, which saved his life in 1985.
He was dining at a Manhattan restaurant with the CBS sportscaster Warner Wolf when a piece of roast beef became lodged in Dr. Field’s throat. “There was no pain,” he later told The New York Times. “I tried to swallow and could not. I tried to cough. I was perfectly calm, until I realized I couldn’t breathe.” He was also unable to speak to Mr. Wolf to convey his distress.
President Eisenhower signed the National Highway Act, “the largest infrastructure project in American history,” July 3, 1956—68 years ago today. The hosts of the This Day in Esoteric Political History podcast “are joined by Eddie Alterman, longtime editor of Car & Driver magazine, to discuss how the highway network reshaped the country and changed car culture.”
This Day in Esoteric Political History: “The Great American Road Trip”
I had thought the end of “Endeavour” might take place immediately prior to the first season of “Inspector Morse.” But then I thought that was wrong of me, because Shaun Evans is so much younger than John Thaw was.
Or not. Today I learned Thaw was 45 at the beginning of “Morse,” and Evans is 43.
Currently reading: Angels Flight by Michael Connelly 📚
Finished reading: Blood Work by Michael Connelly. Not his best, but very good nonetheless. This is the sixth Connelly novel I’ve read since January; I read his first several years ago. I think I’ll start the next one right now. 📚
That moment when you're finishing up a big project that's the last thing you need to do before a four-day weekend and your mouse decides it's angry at the Mac and they're not talking anymore.
Amazon Basics dog-poop bags come with documentation. Do people really need documentation to figure out how to work dog-poop bags?
The documentation is titled “Quick Start Guide,” suggesting that there is an in-depth manual available.
I just completed a major project that I’ve been working on for weeks, and now I have to do it again for another project, also due today. And yet my brain is all used up from finishing the first project.
I’m not complaining. This is the definition of a privileged person’s problem. My work is in demand. But—
Oh, who am I kidding? I am absolutely complaining.
The dog and I saw this in front of a neighbor’s house this morning. You can tell they mean it.
Are you making changes to stay successful in your career as AI transforms workplaces?
Getting new training?
Sharpening some skills while letting others fall away?
Changing careers entirely?
How do you see AI changing your job?
This is for an article I’m writing.
As a business/technology journalist, I’ve covered many M&A deals. Often, they start hostile, then both parties reach a deal and it ends quietly.
Russia was just like that, but with tanks.
Ian Welsh predicts that the US will be a big loser of the Ukraine war, ending the US global hegemony. The war demonstrates that countries can successfully defy the US. China will support defiant nations against US sanctions.
Welsh makes a credible case. I’m insufficiently informed to have my own opinion.
Welsh’s article went up yesterday, before the latest shenanigans.
Yes, the war is going badly for Russia, and was even when Welsh posted. That does not undercut Welsh’s arguments.
“Stunning”—Midjourney update wows AI artists with camera-like feature (Ars Technica / Benj Edwards) You can zoom images out to show more background. Sweet!
I’ve surprised myself how much I enjoy playing with Midjourney. I’m not generally a visual-arts person.
A Titanic Disparity in How the World Responds to Maritime Disasters “All travelers, whether migrants or millionaires, deserve rescue. The global response to the Titan’s disappearance should be the model for how we respond to migrant vessels in distress.” (Democracy Now!)
Hearbreaking details on the recent tragedy in which 700 people died when the refugee ship Adriana sank off the coast of Greece, under the watch of the Greek Coast Guard.
That was one of the best Star Trek episodes I’ve ever seen. Moving and inspirational.
We often get caught up condemning America’s failures, when what we should be doing is inspiring America to live up to its highest self. Why did so many Japanese-Americans who were interned wrongly during World War II go on to live as patriots?
Whenever I hear an anti-woke clown going on about soyboys, alpha males, beta males, and the importance of traditional masculinity, I think: A foundational value of traditional masculinity is physical courage.
I want to ask the clown: How much bullfighting have you done? What mountains have you climbed? What’s your military combat record?
I like a latte now and then, a beverage that wingnuts denounce fervently, enjoyment of which is a sure marker of beta males. When I have a latte, it’s soy or oat milk because regular milk makes me fart something fierce. Is farting an alpha-male thing?
Seven Rules For Internet CEOs To Avoid Enshittification (Mike Masnick / Techdirt)
These are good rules for building a healthy Internet business, or a healthy business of any kind. All the rules are built on the first: “Tell your investors that you’re in this for the long haul and they need to be too.”
Also: Treat the users as the cherished asset that make your site useful and valuable. Users are not products that should be exploited and used up.
When the press talks about the layoffs and chaos generated by a series of completely pointless mergers the blame always falls on ambiguities like a “weakening macroeconomy” and not, say, blistering incompetence by the fail upwards trust fund brunch-lords in the c-suite, obsessed with setting their brands on fire just for a tax break and a fat bonus.
— Warner Bros Discovery Merger Gets Dumber As Layoffs Continue And Company Licenses Streaming Content To… Netflix. (Karl Bode / Techdirt)
On Today in Tabs, Rusty Foster has a good backgrounder on the Titanic submersible:
Ok look, in my spare time I do volunteer wilderness search and rescue, so I am the last person to look askance at anyone for doing stupid things in the name of pointless adventure. If your soul calls you to risk death on a mountain in Maine, I will do my best to reach you in time, and if it calls you to die in a carbon fiber and titanium can at the bottom of the Atlantic, I will salute you and hope for your sake it was a hull breach, comrade. 🫡
Meanwhile, on Twitter, free speech absolutist Elon Musk has declared “cis” and “cisgender” to be slurs.
Good heavens, I’ve been calling myself “cis” since I first heard the word. I use it to describe myself whenever I opine on LGBTQ issues, to disclose my perspective. This comes up more often than you might expect, because opining about things is what I do.
When Minnie and I walk in the park, we like the opportunity to say hello to other dogs. This was a funny looking dog. 📷
“Should this trend persist, we may witness the largest domestic migration crisis since the Dust Bowl upheaval of the 1940s…. [Persecution is] now driving a significant migration within the United States of not just transgender individuals, but also the broader LGBTQ+ community, their families, and their allies.”
Marc Maron interviews Quinn Cummings, writer and former child star who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar when she was 10 years old for her role on “The Goodbye Girl.”
Quinn tells Marc why she rejected acting after her early success and why she prefers to write. They also talk about homeschooling, avoiding marriage and how Quinn became a patent-holding inventor.
Cummings reminds me of those people who used to appear on talk shows in the 1970s for no other reason than because they were great at talking.
The Last Page of the Internet, by Alex Pareene:
The internet’s best resources are almost universally volunteer run and donation based, like Wikipedia and The Internet Archive. Every time a great resource is accidentally created by a for-profit company, it is eventually destroyed, like Flickr and Google Reader. Reddit could be what Usenet was supposed to be, a hub of internet-wide discussion on every topic imaginable, if it wasn’t also a private company forced to come up with a credible plan to make hosting discussions sound in any way like a profitable venture.
Hypothesis: The owners of the company are no longer interested in keeping the business going, and are just trying to maximize financial return by selling off every possible asset.
In Reddit’s case, the upcoming IPO isn’t the beginning of a new chapter in the business. It’s the end of the business.
The most valuable part of Reddit is its fat corpus of content, built by volunteers over many years, suddenly made valuable for training AI. Now, Reddit’s corporate owners want to sell access to that corpus. That is Reddit’s new business. It’s not a long-term business, because the corpus will decay in value over time. But it’s enough for the owners to cash out.
Julie found this in her papers. I was the one with the PalmPilot; she never had one.
The Binge Purge. TV’s streaming business model is broken.
A good long read by Josef Adalian at Vulture.com:
It’s absolutely conceivable that the streaming subscription model is the crypto of the entertainment business. Like cryptocurrency, which has created massive on-paper fortunes built atop 1 + 1 = 3 arithmetic, streaming TV has always seemed too good to be true but seduced a lot of smart people anyway.”
Also, about a TV adaptation of “Field of Dreams” by Mike Schur, who created “The Good Place:”
This is a working weekend for me. I had trouble writing, but I think I have it under control now.
Lulu says hi.
I usually listen to podcasts on my walk but today I listened to this.
And more good advice about exercise and fitness. It’s easier than you might think.
It doesn’t matter a lot how fast you walk.
Forget about the US government’s guidelines of “at least 150 to 300 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity” per week. Too confusing.
Well, I’d like to see ol Donny Trump wriggle his way out of THIS jam!
Trump wriggles his way out of the jam easily
Ah! Well. Nevertheless,
That’s a popular meme from 2016 that still holds up.
The Apollo story is even uglier. Apparently, Reddit CEO Huffman is telling people that Apollo developer Christian Selig tried to blackmail Reddit for $10 million. Selig says that’s bullshit and he has recordings to prove it.
According to Selig, he said something on a call with Reddit officials that the officials initially took as blackmail. He said it was nothing of the kind, and explained himself, and the Reddit officials apologized—five times.
Today is a day of petty disappointments. I’ve had a couple of business developments that are discouraging. Hopefully, they’ll come to nothing, but they’re discouraging in the moment.
Also, my five-year-old Macbook Pro is getting flaky. I’ve noticed the Internet slows to a crawl at lunchtime. Do you know what I like to do at lunch? Read things on the Internet. Do you know what I don’t like doing at lunch? Troubleshooting network problems.
I’m disappointed that Reddit is jacking up its API pricing and forcing developer Christian Selig to shut down his Reddit app Apollo. It’s one of my favorite iPhone and iPad apps. It feels like Reddit is flipping a big fat middle finger to me and many other people who enjoyed using Apollo.
I use Apollo to find about half of the memes, vintage ads, vintage photos, and other found media that I post regularly to Facebook and Tumblr. If you’ve enjoyed seeing those, then Reddit is flipping you the bird too.
To me the Macintosh has always felt more like a place than a thing. Not a place I go physically, but a place my mind goes intellectually. When I’m working or playing and in the flow, it has always felt like MacOS is where I am. I’m in the Mac. Interruptions — say, the doorbell or my phone ringing — are momentarily disorienting when I’m in the flow on the Mac, because I’m pulled out of that world and into the physical one.
No, a rogue AI drone simulation did not kill its operator, despite recent news reports. Why make up a story about something like that? Because it enforces the narrative that AI is super-powerful and threatens human extinction, which is bullshit. But it’s profitable bullshit for AI grifters, who are literally the same people who were peddling crytop/blockchain grift untill last year.
Cory Doctorow:
If the problem with “AI” (neither “artificial,” nor “intelligent”) is that it is about to become self-aware and convert the entire solar system to paperclips, then we need a moonshot to save our species from these garish harms.
I have a pet theory that a four- or even three-star review would be fine in a rational universe. Ride in an Uber, and the driver gets you there safely, on time and the driver is reasonably personable? Three stars.
Four stars if the driver gets you there on time despite traffic, helps you with a massive amount of luggage, or you have a fascinating conversation.
Save the five-star reviews if you have a cardiac event and the driver restarts your heart.
AI chatbots lose money every time you use them. That’s a problem.. By Will Oremus at The Washington Post
Businesses are laying off writers because ChatGPT can do the job. What will those businesses do when AI companies stop giving away the product?
On this day of the big annual Apple product launch, I’m remembering that day many years ago when Julie and I went to the Terminator experience at the Universal Studios theme park on vacation.
All these theme park experiences have the same storyline: The audience is supposedly dignitaries taking a VIP tour of some science-fiction location. And Something Goes Terribly Wrong, and the special effects start going off around you.
When reading genre novels, often my favorite parts are the parts before the bad things start happening.
That’s particularly true for Stephen King. I want the Torrances to have a nice winter at the Overlook Hotel.
It’s true most of all for one of my favorite of his novels, “11/23/63.” I loved the story of a rootless man from 2010 Maine who finds community and love in 1960 Texas. I was far less interested in the hunt to stop Lee Harvey Oswald.
Idea for the beginning of a horror story: A friend mentioned recently that he works in a six-story building. His job takes him up and down from floor to floor all day. He likes to use the stairs instead of the elevator. To clear his mind, he counts the stairs as he goes.
Here’s the story idea: One day, the count changes.
Stephen King, if you’re reading this—no charge.
Ashton Applewhite: We talk too much about generations. People who happen to have been born at around the same time don’t have much in common. Let’s Climb Out of the Generation Trap..
I read her book “This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism” last year, and loved it.
I’m seeing some talk that Tom isn’t the winner because he’s just Matsson’s puppet. But Tom is definitely the winner. All he ever cared about was the money, buying luxuries, and the appearance of power and he got all those things. He doesn’t care about the reality of power.
The only way to rebel is to be human and aware, Rushkoff said. “Be social, get your feet on the ground, make eye contact, have sex, meet people, breathe the air. The more real-life ballast you have, the less this brittle, ideological, abstracted, social media-mediated universe bears upon your daily existence.”
Cory Doctorow: The long lineage of private equity’s looting
Fans of the Sopranos will remember the “bust out” as a mob tactic in which a business is taken over, loaded up with debt, and driven into the ground, wrecking the lives of the business’s workers, customers and suppliers. When the mafia does this, we call it a bust out; when Wall Street does it, we call it “private equity.”
…
For years, the crooks who ran these ops did a brisk trade in blaming the internet. Why did Sears tank? Everyone knows that the 19th century business was an antique, incapable of mounting a challenge in the age of e-commerce. That was a great smokescreen for an old-fashioned bust out that saw corporate looters make off with hundreds of millions, leaving behind empty storefronts and emptier pension accounts for the workers who built the wealth the looters stole:
When you think you have a full cup of coffee left in the carafe, but it’s only this much.
Governor Newsom Desperately Begs NetChoice To Drop Its Lawsuit Over Unconstitutional AADC Bill.
Mike Masnick on Techdirt:
… nothing in this law actually protects children. Instead, it puts them at much greater risk of having information exposed, as we’ve noted. It will also make it next to impossible for children to research important information regarding mental health, or to find out the information they need to help them deal with things like eating disorders, since it will drive basically all of that content offline
Today I learned that it is perfectly fine to say to someone, “I’m sorry, could you speak a little slower–I’m having difficulty understanding your accent.”
Previously I thought it was rude and maybe xenophobic to point out to someone that they spoke with an accent.
I do not want to admit how long I have struggled with this delusion and failed to arrive at the simple solution.
Meanwhile, on the Bluesky social network
Furries Now Have Serious Beef With Ron DeSantis: A furry fandom con in Florida just announced it would ban minors based on the governor’s ridiculous laws
Many parents whose children are involved with the subculture credit it with helping them overcome bullying, or gain self-esteem. At conventions, [a furry convention organizer] says, “there will be parents crying in a corner because they don’t see their kids so happy every day. We had a mom break down because she’s never seen her kid feel so comfortable just sitting at a table and interacting with other kids.” She says it is “heartbreaking” to think of young furries not having a space to connect.
I see now that tech executives are once again warning about risk of human extinction caused by AI.
I think it’s adorable when the plutes worry about that kind of thing, while the rest of us worry about paying for healthcare, food, and housing.
More than 30 million Americans are living below the poverty line. And 40% of Americans were having difficulty paying for normal household expenses.. That’s scary.
AI is only scary to the extent that it will be an excuse to put more people out of work.
Today I learned: A canary trap is a technique to identify an information leak by giving different versions of a sensitive document to several suspects and observing which version gets leaked.
I was familiar with the technique, but I’d never heard the name before, and I was ignorant of the technique’s history.
This Wikipedia article gives 40 years of history. I expect the canary trap is much older than that–thousands and thousands of years.
Researchers are using Shoggoth, a monster out of HP Lovecraft, as a mascot for AI.
Kevin Roose at The New York Times:
@TetraspaceWest, the meme’s creator, told me in a Twitter message that the Shoggoth “represents something that thinks in a way that humans don’t understand and that’s totally different from the way that humans think.”
Attempts to train AI to be more human-like are like putting a smiley face or human mask on Shoggoth. It’s still inscrutable, but it creates the appearance of understandability.
Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design:
The term brutalism is derived from the French béton brut, meaning “raw concrete”. Although most brutalist buildings are made from concrete, we’re more interested in the term raw. Concrete brutalist buildings often reflect back the forms used to make them, and their overall design tends to adhere to the concept of truth to materials.
…
A website that embraces Brutalist Web Design is raw in its focus on content, and prioritization of the website visitor.
Possibilianism is a religious philosophy that’s open to exploring possibilities. Neuroscientist David Eagleman described it this way:
Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I’m hoping to define a new position — one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story.
I woke up this morning and decided to break up with the novel I’m currently reading. This is a new thing for me; I recently decided to start more books and quit reading more books when they’re not working for me.
I’m not finding that resolution easy. A part of me feels compelled to finish a book once I start, as if failure to complete was wasteful, like not eating all the food on my plate. But of course, that’s ridiculous, and quitting reading a book that isn’t working opens up time to read something I might enjoy more.
Mr. Davies Giddy rose and said, that while he was willing to allow the hon. gent. who brought forward this every degree of credit for the goodness,of his intentions, as well as for his ability and assiduity; still, upon the best consideration he was able to give the bill, he must totally object to its principle, as conceiving it to be more pregnant with mischief than advantage to those for Whose advantage it was intended, and for the country in general. For, however specious in theory the project might be, of giving education to the labouring classes of the poor, it would, in effect, be found to be prejudicial to their morals and happiness; it would teach them to despise their lot in life, instead of making them good servants in agriculture, and other laborious employments to which their rank in society had destined them; instead of teaching then subordination, it would render them factious and refractory, as was evident the in the manufacturing counties it would enable them to read seditious pamphlets, vicious books, and publications against Christianity; it would render them insolent to their superiors and, in a few years, the result would be, that the legislature would find it necessary to direct the strong arm of power towards them, and to furnish the executive magistrates with much more vigorous laws than were now in force. Besides, if the bill were to pass into a law, it would go to bur-then the country with a most enormous and incalculable expence, and to load the industrious orders of society with still heavier imposts. It might be asked of him, would he abolish the Poor-Laws altogether? He had no hesitation to declare he would; for, although they relieved many persons, who were certainly objects of compassion, they were also abused by contributing to the support of idleness and profligacy; and he never could admit it to be just or reasonable that the labour of the industrious man should be taxed to support the idle vagrant. This was taxing virtue for the maintenance of vice.
Last night I got up for the reason one usually gets up in the middle of the night and walked into a wall forehead-first. Someone had moved the wall in the night.
Then, today, I accidentally kicked the sunroom heater and said, “Sorry,” my phone woke up, and Siri said, “Hmm?”
How is your weekend going?
The staff weren’t asking for money. They wanted adequate staffing and more training.
Callers to the hotline often spoke with staff who could emphasize because the staff had their own personal experience with eating disorders.
The chatbot isn’t even AI. It’s just a scripted bot.
Via jwz, who says: “Perfectly normal, non-dystopian timeline.”
A Day in the Life of a Woke Third-Grade Teacher, as Imagined by a Far-Right Politician
I pull into the parking lot and say hello to the drag queen we recently hired as the school librarian. As we walk into Socialist Snowflake Learning Center (previously called Robert E. Lee Elementary), we schedule a time for her to visit my class and expose my students to sexually explicit material.
Last week, generative fiction tool Sudowrite launched a system for writing whole novels. Called Story Engine, it’s another shot in the ongoing culture war between artists and AI developers — one side infuriated by what feels like a devaluation of their craft, the other insisting that it’s a tool for unlocking creativity and breaking writer’s block. Neither answered the question I was really curious about: does it work?
I have an expanse of blank white wall behind my desk, which always bugs me when I see myself on Zoom calls. This has been a stone in my shoe for three years since videoconferencing became commonplace. I’m jealous when I see other people have excellent backgrounds for their Zoom calls.
Oracle’s Larry Ellison gears up to spend millions to back Tim Scott’s 2024 run. Of interest to my Oracle pals.
From what I saw working there two years, the culture within Oracle is extremely progressive. Inclusive, good benefits, supports environmental causes.
On the other hand, Larry Ellison himself is very conservative. He supported Trump and now this.
An odd juxtaposition.
If the Apple VR/AR headset debuts, and it’s as described in leaks, it’s going to be the biggest flop in Apple’s history and one of the greatest tech flops ever.
Nobody’s interested in wearing a Batman mask all day.
Mimestream is a native Mac app for accessing Gmail. It gives you Gmail’s advanced capabilities, including Priority Inbox, categories, and labels, in an app that looks and works like a native Mac app.
The alternatives to Mimestream are Gmail’s web interface, which I find cluttered, or native Mac mail apps, which look and work like Mac apps should but don’t give you all of Gmail’s capabilities.
Daring Fireball notes that the first version of many Apple products is historically overpriced and underfeatured. That’s how Apple works. They grab the affluent early adopters first, and then over the years the price goes down and capabilities improve. Example: The Apple Watch.
So if the Apple headset is overpriced and underfeatured, that’s no reason to declare it dead on arrival.
There’s been a lot of ink spilled on the Trump transformation of the GOP, but Dems’ transformation from a party representing labor to a party representing McKinsey consultants is less well understood.
— Cory
Banger link roundup today: Medieval people didn’t drown cats; they LOVED cats. AI hype is a scam to allow bosses to “fire all our asses and replace us with shell-scripts.” And more.
Thomas, of all people, wrote a nuanced defense of the principles underlying Section 230.
Mike Masnick at Techdirt:
… there was nothing specific to the social media sites that was deliberately designed to aid terrorists.
Jamelle Bouie at the New York Times:
There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.
There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.
There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.
A few years ago, I nerded out on coffee-making methods and eventually settled on using an Aeropress for my daily work-juice. Then I went down a rabbit-hole of looking up Aeropress coffee formulas.
There’s an entire nerd subculture of Aeropress enthusiasts, who measure their beans and water to the gram, use a thermometer to measure the weater temperature, and time their brew to the second. They even count the number of strokes they use to stir the coffee before serving.
On YouTube: Unboxing Shakespeare’s First Folio..
Amazing. The books look so new.
I’ve always known Shakespeare was a popular writer in his time, but it’s striking to see this reminder.
Today I learned what a “folio” and “quarto” are.
Laura Cole writes at Wired about fake dating sites that employ hundreds of freelancers around the world “to animate fake profiles and chat with people who have signed up for dating and hookup sites…. Often recruited into ‘customer support’ or content moderation roles, they found themselves playing roles in sophisticated operations set up to tease subscription money from lonely hearts looking for connections online.”
These reps, who often work for pennies from developing countries, roleplay as women with incredibly detailed—and fictional—biographies and profiles, messaging men on online dating sites. The reps rapidly toggle through many characters in each work shift, and each operator might roleplay as hundreds of women, all while sitting at laptops in their homes.
This morning, a little after 8, I was on my way home from walking the dog, one street over from the house, and I saw a coyote loping down the street. One of the neighbors, still in her red pajamas and slippers, stood in the street and watched. We chatted about the coyote and where it might live. That coyote has been around lately; I recognize it.
I’m pretty sure that a coyote won’t attack a full-sized adult person. And while coyotes will kill and eat small and even medium-sized dogs if the dog is unattended, I’m pretty sure a coyote won’t attack a dog on a leash accompanied by a full-sized adult person. I need to look into that.
jwz: “Today I learned that Church Molestation Liability Insurance is a thing that exists
You know what’s not a thing that exists? Drag Show and LGBTQ Bar Molestation Insurance. Because drag shows and LGBTQ bars aren’t threats to kids.
Cory Doctorow: Rent control works. It keeps housing costs down, doesn’t constrain supply, and sometimes increases that supply.
We need rent control, and we need to build plenty of more housing.
… regular housing for working people. Mr Market doesn’t want to build it, no matter how many “incentives” we dangle. Maybe it’s time we just did stuff instead of building elaborate Rube Goldberg machines in the hopes of luring the market’s animal sentiments into doing it for us.
Want to read: Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders by John Mortimer 📚
Bluesky should be pronounced “blooski.”
Follow me for more branding tips.
Things I am grateful for this morning:
I’m doing some work in my home office this afternoon and I was literally distracted by a squirrel in the backyard.
Please enjoy this 11-second video of geese and goslings, which I saw at Lake Murray this morning.
Just as I got my mind un-blown about generative AI, I’m now learning about autonomous agents.
I tried doing a Midjourney cartoon to illustrate this point, on the general theme of my mind being blown, but all the drawings came out creepy when I was going for cute.
I mentioned yesterday that I interviewed Heather Armstrong, who wrote the blog dooce and that she later wrote about how excruciating the experience was for her.
Armstrong took her own life this week. She was talented, funny, and insightful, and she helped invent professional blogging, which led to today’s social media influencers and indie journalists.
I was not offended by the piece Armstrong wrote after I interviewed her in 2006. I thought it was a fair rap. However, I was disappointed that I’d set out to interview someone I admired, and that person had found the experience horribly painful.
I’m sad to learn about the death of pioneering blogger Heather Armstrong, author of dooce. She wrote candidly, movingly, and often hilariously about life and struggles with addiction and depression.
I interviewed her and her then-husband and business partner, Jon Armstrong, in the mid-2000s. The interview went badly and she wrote about the experience—hilariously—on her blog. I can’t currently find the article I wrote as a result of the interview or her blog post.
I found IBM’s AI announcement yesterday confusing; this write-up by Tobias Mann on The Register helps clarify details.
IBM is pushing its deep enterprise expertise as a differentiator over AWS, Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI.
I think Watson is a brand liability at this point. It’s 2011’s hot technology—not 2023’s—and has the scent of overreach and failure on it.
If you're looking to procrastinate, Midjourney is great for that.
It's hard to have a nap when there is a cat standing on your pillow demanding attention.
I’ve got a 1,500-word article due Thursday but I’m going to try to get it done today. Am writing. Don’t distract me.
Scientists have invented a technique for reading a person’s thoughts without the need for invasive surgery—in other words, they don’t have to crack open your skull to be able to tell what you’re thinking.
As I read the article, I thought this sounds like a software problem—which means if it’s cutting edge today, it’ll be in iPhones tomorrow. But then I read:
The participants in the study ran through all these tests while inside an fMRI machine, which is a clunky and immobile piece of laboratory equipment.
Steven Spainhouer’s son was working at Allen Premium Outlets when he received the phone call no father ever wants to hear.
“He said, ‘Dad, we have a shooting … I’m pulling people into the break room, and we’re going to lock the door,’” Spainhouer told CNN on Sunday.
The former Army and police officer raced to the scene, called 911 and “started counting the bodies on the ground … one, two, three, five, six, seven bodies.”
AI text generators are writing more of the internet. More AI-generated books and personalized articles mean fewer clients buying human-written content. By Will Oremus at The Washington Post.
This seems to affect content mills paying pennies. I’m not worried—and I’m learning to use AI to make myself a more effective writer.
Lines stretch down the block at food banks as costs go up and pandemic aid expires.
The line outside Boston’s American Red Cross Food Pantry on a recent Saturday morning stretched the length of two football fields. The number of people filing into the red-brick industrial-zone warehouse on some days now exceeds the worst periods of the pandemic economic crisis and in April it had the second highest monthly traffic since it opened in 1982, according to David Andre, the director.
Corporate greed, not workers, is the cause of inflation. We know this because CEOs tell us:
Call me a conspiratorialist if you must. But when CEOs get on earnings calls and brag about how covid, war, and scare-stories about inflation let them hike their prices and rake in never-before-seen profit margins, I think it’s reasonable to blame inflation on greed, not on workers getting a couple of relief checks during the lockdown.
“… when you refuse to learn why something weird is happening online and just stop and gawk at it, you miss what is always a more interesting story.” — Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day
A good rule, online and in the world.
Ostromizing democracy: Cory Doctorow discusses a proposed new subdiscipline of political science, Analytic Democracy Theory, that studies collective decision-making—a/k/a “democracy”—and particularly how it goes wrong.
Also: Libertarians are claiming democracy never works because it doesn’t always work. And the myth of the Tragedy of the Commons and other anti-democratic misconceptions.
I’ve got an interview with a VP at a major vendor that I followed closely while at Light Reading but haven’t paid much attention to since. It’s for an article I’m doing on that company’s overall strategy.
I’m diving into some background to prepare for the interview, and I decided to start my research with ChatGPT. I asked: “What are some questions I can ask COMPANY-NAME about its overall strategy.” (I used the company name, which I’m redacting here.) ChatGPT had the following suggestions:
A new study by researchers at Duke University looks at the bumpy rollout of AI in healthcare systems, and describes what it’ll take to make AI into a useful tool for healthcare providers.
Meanwhile, a study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that ChatGPT “decisively bested doctors at providing high-quality, empathic answers to medical questions people posed on the subreddit r/AskDocs.” The responses were judged by a panel of three physicians with relevant medical expertise.
Things I post that people seem to enjoy:
On the other hand, very few people seem to care about links to articles, and I’m starting to get a strong “what’s the point?” feeling about my doing that kind of thing. I started linkblogging 15 or so years ago, when social media was very different and my boosting the signal–even in a small way–seemed to matter.
I have been using Grammarly for a few weeks, and I am extremely impressed.
Today’s insight: I can toggle checking for the Oxford comma. I can switch it on for clients that like the Oxford comma, and off for clients that don’t.
“If they cause enough fuss in the media, over and over, eventually Reddit will decide it’s not financially worthwhile to stand up for sanity, and they’ll just nuke porn out of convenience,” a moderator for … a 3-million subscriber community for adult content, told Motherboard. Like many adult subreddits, posts focused on a specific fetish come from both adult performers promoting their work, and other users who are reposting adult content they lifted from other sites without permission. “Eventually groups like NCOSE will get porn outlawed from the web in general. It’s just a matter of time, and reintroducing the laws several times under different acronyms until people get tired of fighting. I’m very pessimistic about this. Unfortunately, mindlessly shrieking ‘Won’t somebody please think of the children?’ over and over is a dangerously over-effective tactic.”
I saw these baby geese and momma goose at the park this morning. Gosling photos will continue until morale improves. 📷
Optimism Optimized & Pessimism Prodded
“An interview about THE FUTURE with Hugo Winning author CHARLES STROSS! Fumblingly carried out by John Shirley:”
The Singularity “uncritically subsumes patterns of belief that originated in Christianity…. “
The Singularity’s origin in “the writings of the Russian Orthodox theologian Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov in the late 19th century…. “
“… it looks from where I’m standing as if many self-avowed atheists and rationalists are actually replacing the religion they rejected with an elaborate framework of beliefs that are structurally indistinguishable from it.”
Mastodon needs to be more user-friendly, or people will just continue going to the platforms supported by billionaires, despite evidence from Twitter and Facebook that those platforms aren’t great.
I want to like Mastodon, but it seems like work.
Donald G. McNeil Jr. cites many reasons why US pandemic response was disgracefully incompetent, and why it’s wrong to pin all the blame on Fauci, or make a saint out of him either.
Fauci is a courageous scientist and was a dutiful civil servant doing the best he could with little actual authority, trying to mitigate an ongoing disaster.
He was also the only powerful medical official with the stones to contradict Trump.
Gadgets I am tempted by:
This Ultimate Hacking Keyboard. I like the way it separates in two parts, with a trackball in the center. But it’s not worth $385 to me, so I’ll pass.
Also, this 4K 15.6-inch portable monitor would tempt me if I was still living the frequent business travel life.
And I’m STILL tempted, because I’ve been using laptop+external display for my desktop setup for most of the past 25+ years. But I never actually use the laptop display because it’s so much smaller than whatever external display I’m using. maybe a laptop + a smaller display, side-by-side.
Cory Doctorow:
The private healthcare sector is designed to deny care. Its first duty is to its shareholders, not its patients, and every dollar spent on care is a dollar not available for dividends.
…
Medicare pays private hospices $203-$1,462 per day to take care of dying old people – seniors that a doctor has certified to have less than six months left. That comes to $22.4b/year in public transfers to private hospices. If hospices [take] that $1,462 day-rate, they have lots of duties, like providing eight hours’ worth of home care. But if the hospice is content to take the $203/day rate, they are not required to do anything. Literally. It’s just free money for whatever the operator feels like doing for a dying elderly person, including doing nothing at all.
I’ve been putting energy into Mastodon, but Bluesky looks interesting and may just lap Masto. I’ve been dismissive of Bluesky until now, but I just signed up for the private beta.
I keep wanting to read Nostr as “Nostril.”
Today I am just saying nope to empty news calories.
Two articles about Tucker Carlson’s last broadcast? Another day I might have read one or both but today I just say nope.
A profile of a powerful Democratic political consultant who is apparently an awful person? Another day I would gobble that up, but today? Nope.
I hope I can keep this up.
This blog is a LGBTQ- and trans-friendly place.
I’m posting less about politics nowadays, and that’s a conscious decision by me.
But given all the hate coming out of the red states nowadays, it seems to me to be necessary to take a stand on this issue.
The 65 newest series and movies to stream right now - The Washington Post.
Some of these are already on our watchlist, and I’ve bookmarked a bunch of trailers for others.
Tonight I wiki’d and googled about the Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon stories 📚and their author, Spider Robinson. The bar travels through time and space1 but its home base is Route 25A, in Suffolk County on Long Island, which is just a few miles from where I grew up. Robinson went to the same college I did, State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Then I wiki’d my home town, Huntington Township on Long Island, and was surprised to learn about many notable people who came from there, all of which I immediately forgot, because it is late and I am tired.
Noncompete clauses and related employment agreements are indentured servitude.
Noncompetes epitomize MLK’s “socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.” They’re a way for employers to operate in a command economy where the power of the state can be mobilized against uppity workers who dare to seek a better deal…. “
— Cory Doctorow, How workers get trapped by “bondage fees”
📷 Julie and I walked around Hillcrest today.
📚I reread “Snow Crash, recently and recommend it. It gets better with age.
When people talk about “Snow Crash” today, all they talk about is the Metaverse. But there is a lot going on in that novel, and the Metaverse is only part of it.
I was pleasantly surprised to be reminded that the novel is satire. It’s funny. People talk so seriously about the book that I had forgotten. I laughed out loud at the payoff to the joke about the dog.
📷 Minnie and I hiked the Father Junipero Serra trail yesterday.
Guillotinable. The bit about the dog isn’t even the worst thing this narcissistic dipshit said. Not even close.
CEO Celebrates Worker Who Sold Family Dog After He Demanded They Return to Office
In his memo announcing the cuts Peretti took full responsibility, writing “I also want to be clear: I could have managed these changes better as the CEO of this company and our leadership team could have performed better…” which is why 180 other people will be getting fired instead of him. He’s learned so much, and going forward he’ll bring a new spirit of collaboration and humility to the AI garbage he replaces them with.
This speech was better in the original German.
Trump touts authoritarian vision for second term: ‘I am your justice’ - The Washington Post
I’ve been using Day One for journaling since 2011. It will be interesting to see where Apple goes with this.
Apple will launch a journaling app in iOS 17, but that’s bad news for some devs - Ars Technica
Jerusalem Demsas at The Atlantic:
California’s housing policies are the same as everywhere in the US, but population pressure has made the housing situation here far worse.
In blue and red localities across the country, researchers find a “California-style” preference for single-family homes, hostility to density and renters, a tendency to segregate types of development (industrial, commercial, and residential), and a default toward delaying or blocking the construction of new homes, whether affordable or market-rate.
I always preferred the TV series Kirk to the movie Kirk. In the series Kirk, follows the chain of command and obeys orders, even when he thinks the orders are stupid. Movie Kirk is a cowboy.
So let’s call the series “Ensign Kirk.” We know that Kirk in Starfleet Academy was a grind, so how does he transform from that to the swashbuckling youngest Captain of a Constitution-class starship in Starfleet history?
I love Jeri Ryan. And not just for the usual reasons men love her; she’s also an excellent character actor.
I’ve only ever seen her in a narrow range of roles, but she excels at that range. She plays beautiful, powerful middle-aged bitches. Sometimes she plays villains, sometimes—as in the case of Seven of Nine on Picard—tough heroes who don’t take shit or suffer fools.
Cox shut down Internet service for scheduled maintenance this morning, because apparently it’s 1983 and people don’t need Internet to work from home.
I am not feeling a lot of love for Cox right now.
Ever since the dog snatched half of Julie’s Reuben sandwich from the kitchen counter on Sunday, I have been making jokes about the subject.
Like: The dog doesn’t want treats anymore; she wants more corned beef. Or: The dog asked us if we could swing by the deli and bring her back another sandwich.
Julie says she’s sick of these jokes, but I know she doesn’t mean it, so I will keep them coming.
Seems like almost anybody thinking about buying one of the big iPads would be better off with a MacBook Air.
For most people, the 12.9” iPad is an ungainly platypus, neither mammal nor bird.
The only people who seem like they’d want the 12.9” iPad would be graphic artists and other people who really, really need that big display and touchscreen and Pencil support.
The 12.9” iPad is too big and heavy to be as portable as the smaller iPads. You can’t hold that 12.9” iPad in your hands for long, unless you’re Andre the Giant. And iPad OS isn’t as versatile as MacOS.
Cory Doctorow has got me thinking about doing a better job structuring threads on Mastodon and Twitter.
Damn you, Cory, I don’t have time for this.
*shakes fist*
When I was a little kid, I watched old black-and-white reruns of Superman, Abbott & Costello, and particularly John Astin in The Addams Family, and thought to myself, damn, those guys looked sharp. Particularly the double-breasted suits.
Well, Lou Costello didn’t look sharp. But Bud Abbot? Sure. A good suit made even Abbott look good.
That feeling continues to this day.
We’ve been watching a few 1930s-50s movies, including the first couple of Thin Man movies (1930s), “My Man Godfrey” (1936), and just this weekend, “Executive Suite” (1954). And I think: Why don’t men dress like that anymore?
Julie put a lean corned beef Reuben sandwich on the kitchen counter and left the room for a minute. While she was out, the dog snatched the sandwich off the counter and ate half of it.
The dog has a death wish.
Amazon Web Services sales and support teams are currently “spending much of their time helping customers optimize their AWS spend so they can better weather this uncertain economy,” says CEO Andy Jassy in an annual letter to shareholders.
www.theregister.com/2023/04/1…
AWS customers are “not cost-cutting as much as cost-optimizing so they can take their resources and apply them to emerging and inventive new customer experiences they’re planning,” Jassy said.
(This is pretty much what we’d expect Amazon to say. It may also be true.)
Anxious about the coming week? Cowles Mountain has a message for you.
I saw this sign while hiking today. That’s Lake Murray in the background.
In defense of Mastodon threads (and Twitter threads too):
Threading an essay requires the author to compose it in stanzas, each of which is a standalone, complete thought – and that means that readers can engage with each though separately, by replying to just that stanza.
For me, that stanza-by-stanza discussion – a kind of pro-fisking structural affordance – is the most interesting and powerful innovation of the social media thread. I
It’s been years since I hiked Cowles Mountain and I think it’s gotten taller.
Oh my knees.
Good hike though.
Elon Musk’s Free-Speech Charade Is Over
Musk’s “‘free-speech absolutism’ was mostly code for a high tolerance for bigotry toward particular groups, a smoke screen that obscured an obvious hostility toward any speech that threatened his ability to make money.”
Adam Serwer at The Atlantic:
Conservatives built an entire body of jurisprudence around the First Amendment’s protection of corporate speech when large corporations were reliably funding Republican causes and campaigns…. But once some corporate actors decided it was in their financial interests to make decisions that the GOP disliked, conservative lawyers then turned around and argued that speech was no longer protected if it was used for purposes they opposed.
I shot this photo at Lake Murray using the pano setting on the iPhone. It came out a little wobbly.
We watched “Executive Suite” (1954). The powerful head of a nationwide furniture company drops dead on a Friday evening without naming a successor, and five vice presidents fight for the presidency over the next 24 hours. Features the highest high tech of its era: person-to-person calls, intercoms and telegrams. Pretty good movie.
📷 Happy Friday and here are the ducks you asked for. I saw them at Lake Murray, and photographed them using the Moment tele lens for the iPhone.
Gentleman develops DIY 3D printed typeballs for vintage IBM Selectric typewriters. (Ars Technica) I never loved Selectric typewriters. The humming was annoying, like it was impatient for me to type something. And then the keys hitting paper were like gunshots.
I liked manual typewriters. A few years ago, hipsters started using manual typewriters, and I get it.
“‘Hunger Games’ meets ‘Lord of the Flies’” among employees at Facebook’s parent company, Meta, as mass layoffs and absentee bosses create a morale crisis. “While Meta’s peers are chasing a wave of innovation in artificial intelligence, Mr. Zuckerberg has made a big bet on the metaverse,” which nobody wants—at least not in the form Zuck imagines it.
Also, while Zuckerberg is encouraging rank-and-file employees to return to the office, he’s on parental leave, and top executives have fled California for locations including Tel Aviv, London, and New York.
I saw this car. I believe the owner may be an anime fan.
I worked at Google for -10 days
A Russian was hired at Google after a lengthy and onerous interview process. He took an English exam, mandatory tuberculosis tests, received a visa, quit his previous job, vacated his apartment in Yekaterinburg, packed, and got ready to move to London. But he was terminated ten days before he started work, following layoffs and a hiring freeze at Google.
As for what to do next, I am not entirely sure yet. I held a “garage sale” and sold most of my belongings. The remaining items were either discarded, recycled, or packed into two suitcases that I had planned to take with me. Moving to a new country is a difficult task that typically requires months of preparation. Changing these plans on the fly is challenging and somewhat painful. However, I feel that I should say something optimistic at the end. All will be good 🙂
Quart addresses “the meritocratic delusion of the ‘self-made man,’ Doctorow says. He adds: “America is not a bootstrap-friendly land. If you have money in America, chances are very good you inherited it.”
… as Abigail Disney has described, in a rare glimpse behind the scenes of American oligarchs’ “family offices,” American wealth is now dynastic, perpetuating itself and growing thanks to a whole Versailles’ worth of courtiers: money managers, lawyers, and overpaid babysitters who can keep even the most Habsburg jawed nepobaby in turnip-sized million-dollar watches and performance automobiles and organ replacements for their whole, interminable lives:
I very much like command palettes as an alternative to buttons, icons, menus, and other ways to control a computer.
But I regularly use two apps with command palettes—the Arc browser and Obsidian—and I also use Raycast, which is a system-wide command palette. That gets confusing.
Hannah Arendt on “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship:” Better to Suffer Than Collaborate (Open Culture).
Arendt identifies a third moral choice when living in an oppressive society: You can go along, which is evil. You can resist, which can get you dead. Or you can simply refuse to comply … which can also get you dead.
Also:
“It was precisely the members of respectable society,” Arendt writes, “who had not been touched by the intellectual and moral upheaval in the early stages of the Nazi period, who were the first to yield. They simply exchanged one system of values against another,” without reflecting on the morality of the entire new system.
As the [20th Century] managerial revolution created a sense of professional progress, the decline of organized religion and social integration in the 20th century left many Americans bereft of any sense of spiritual progress. For some, work rose to fill the void. Many highly educated workers in the white-collar economy feel that their job cannot be ‘just a job’ and that their career cannot be “just a career”: Their job must be their calling.
Easter Sunday. Lake Murray was packed with picnickers.
It doesn’t look packed in this photo, but trust me, it was packed.
Pranshu Verma and Will Oremus at The Washington Post:
One night last week, the law professor Jonathan Turley got a troubling email. As part of a research study, a fellow lawyer in California had asked the AI chatbot ChatGPT to generate a list of legal scholars who had sexually harassed someone. Turley’s name was on the list.
Smart glasses developed by Cornell researchers can read silent speech, tracking lip and mouth movements, to control smartphones and other devices. (Cornell Chronicle / Louis DiPietro)
I remember technology like this featured in science fiction by John Varley in the 1970s, and have wondered why it doesn’t exist in real life.
… the only rational explanation for why he bought Twitter in the first place — aside from possible market manipulation — is because he’s a pathologically divorced dweeb that became so obsessed with online popularity during the COVID-19 lockdown that it scrambled his brain.
— Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day, “There’s always some idiot ruining your favorite website.”
Republicans: The party that cares about children.
If It’s Advertised to You Online, You Probably Shouldn’t Buy It. Here’s Why.. Ads are serving us lousy, overpriced goods. (NYTimes / Julia Angwin).
Not covered in this article: Microtargeted ads are reportedly no more effective than contextual ads. So we’re giving up our privacy, advertisers are paying a premium, and the advertisers aren’t even making more money than they’d make if they just advertised their refrigerators against people searching Google for the word “refrigerator.”
For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from [Dallas businessman Harlan Crow] without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.
Today I learned “Fiddler on the Roof” is a smash hit in Japan.
Since 1967, the musical’s seen hundreds of Japanese revivals. Joseph Stein, who penned the book to Fiddler, was once approached by a Japanese producer who asked, “Do they understand this show in America?”
“Yes, of course,” replied Stein, “we wrote it for America. Why do you ask?”
“Because,” the producer said, “it’s so Japanese.”
— 12 Things You Might Not Know About ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ (Mental Floss / Mark Mancini)
📷 My Bar Mitzvah photo. That jacket was kickin in 1974.
We’ve been watching “Shadow and Bone.” I’m not into it but Julie is, so I guess I’ll give it another episode or two. jwz is really not into it, and he gave it both seasons.
… the villain in this show looked like he wandered in from a different sound stage. He looked like the kind of guy who would be trying to shut down the rec center to build a condo, not an evil wizard. Everyone else had their Tolkien costume on, and this guy just looked like some douche you’d have met at a goth club in the 90s who called himself “Vlad” and carried a wolf-head cane. Maybe there was a casting mix-up and some lawyer show ended up with a prosecutor with a giant Gandalf beard.
I’ve been thinking lately that I read too much national political news and post too much about national politics.
I may have more to say on this subject, but until then here is an excellent related article by Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day:
Yesterday, in a lull between the release of the Barbie movie trailer and the second Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse trailer, former President Donald Trump was arrested and arraigned. I do not have cable because it’s 2023 and I am under the age of 55, but according to the clips that made it to Twitter, it seemed like a fun time for America’s news anchors. For instance, CNN gave us some valuable insight into how many doors and hallways the Manhattan courthouse has.
For decades, scientific studies suggested moderate drinking was better for most people’s health than not drinking at all, and could even help them live longer.
A new analysis of more than 40 years of research has concluded that many of those studies were flawed and that the opposite is true.
My father received these humorous fake orders when he was discharged from the army in 1945, the end of the war.
I found this document while doing some decluttering in my home office yesterday. The paper is brown with age and fragile to the touch. It’s apparently typed and mimeographed.
The document is written in the style of a military memo, instructing the men how to behave when they get back home to civilian life.
Today I learned that Fletcher Previn, CIO of $52 billion networking company Cisco Systems, is the son of actress Mia Farrow and composer-conductor Andre Previn. (Computerworld / Lucas Mearian)
Also, while many companies are mandating a return to the office, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said in April 2021 that the company is committed to remote work indefinitely, and they’re standing by that. “Our policy around hybrid work is that we want the office to be a magnet and not a mandate,” says Previn.
I finally got a decent photo of this osprey at Lake Murray.
I’ve seen it a few times a month for a couple of years. The nest is at the top of a utility pole that looks to be about 50 feet tall—far too distant for my iPhone XS to get a good shot.
I’ve been putting off carrying my Nikon with the long lens on my daily long walk with the dog, because it seems like a lot to carry. But I did it yesterday, and it turns out to be very comfortable, so I’ll be doing more walks with the Nikon. Good timing too—spring is when the daisies bloom at the park, which is already starting. And in a few weeks—goslings!
Apple Photos has a feature where you can enter a word in a search box and images matching that word come up. It’s like Google Images search for your own photo library.
I searched Apple Photos for the word “bird,” and this photo from 2014 came up.
We started watching a movie called John Wick tonight. We only had a chance to watch the first half hour, so I don’t know what it’s about. It stars Keanu Reeves and it looks like he’s a widower who learns to love life again with the help of his puppy and a new friend, a young Russian immigrant who shares a love of classic cars.
I’m sure this movie will be heartwarming and in no way violent.
In March 2020, Emily Yang Liu spent hours each day in virtual meeting…. To keep herself engaged, she pinned her work crush, Jacob Michael Klinker, to her screen.
One day in April 2020, the product manager on the team, Ronald Ho, pinged her during the meeting and said, “Why do you have Jake pinned to your screen?” It turns out that Ms. Liu, 36, had a large mirror behind her, and people in the meetings could see the reflection of her laptop – and Mr. Klinker, 29, on her screen as a large square with everyone else in miniature.
People now living could break previous longevity records, and keep on going and going. But not in America, where lifespans are declining. (Brandon Vigliarolo / The Register)
Interestingly, while average longevity has steadily increased for centuries, the maximum lifespan has been relatively unchanged since the 1700s. In other words, most people are living longer, but the longest-lived people today are about the same age as the longest-lived people 200+ years ago. That leads some scientists to believe there’s a hard, biological limit to human lifespan.
Ian Welsh predicts dire outcomes for the US as a result of the Trump indictment.
America and most nations let their elites slide on crimes that don’t harm other elites. This has allowed a whole lot of evil acts to occur unpunished and for elites to act knowing they will never be held responsible for their actions. This goes beyond political acts, notice how somehow almost none of the people who took advantage of Jeffrey Epstein’s smorgasboard of underaged teenaged girls has been charged with a crime.
A Google VP says Microsoft is abusing its dominance in on-premises software and Office 365 to give it an unfair advantage in the cloud (Foo Yun Chee / Reuters).
“Microsoft definitely has a very anti-competitive posture in cloud. They are leveraging a lot of their dominance in the on-premise business as well as Office 365 and Windows to tie Azure and the rest of cloud services and make it hard for customers to have a choice,” Vice President Amit Zavery told Reuters.
A Maryland court reinstated Adnan Syed’s conviction and ordered a new hearing. (NPR).
This seems deeply wrong to me. Syed’s conviction was vacated after the court essentially found both his defense and the prosecution were incompetent. Nothing in the appellate court’s ruling changes or disputes that.
Hae Min Lee’s family’s rights were violated—but how does reversing the vacation of Syed’s conviction fix that? It just adds another wrong to the previous litany of abuse.
I had been thinking the Stormy Daniels case was bullshit, but Judd Legum makes the case why it matters.
Elections are supposed to be about information and transparency. Daniels’ statements could have changed enough voters’ minds to swing the election the other way.
Trump schemed to conceal relevant information from the voting public in the days before the election, engaged in an elaborate coverup, and then lied about his involvement.
This deceit may have changed the course of history.
A writer signing their name as “Jenka” on Medium describes a Midjourney experiment to envision selfie photos throughout history, which gave the subjects big smiles, making them all look American.
Smiling is not a universal language; the big, confident grin is uniquely American, Jenka says. Eastern Europeans see someone who smiles all the time as foolish or dishonest.
Jenka quotes French-American journalist Camille Baker, who writes about a woman Baker calls “Sofiya:”
This Disturbing Theory Explains Pixar’s Cars.
By Jason Torchinsky at Jalopnik.
Things I saw around the neighborhood
Five years ago today: I got hungry for a sweet before bedtime so I ventured out of my hotel at about 11 pm and found this Starbucks. It was closed.
Things I saw while walking the dog
Minnie and I saw this display at a house we walked past yesterday.
Police had a warrant for drug trafficking and kidnapping. They destroyed his front door and driveway gate, “lost” $400 of cash they took, and ogled a lemon pound cake, according to a report by Ashley Belanger on Ars Technica.
Afroman later released songs and music videos about the incident, entitled “Lemon Pound Cake” and “Will You Help Me Repair My Door.” The videos went viral. The officers allege they face embarrassment, ridicule, humiliation, and loss of reputation.
I published two posts here yesterday and noticed copyediting errors after publication. This troubled me partly because I had a whitepaper due later that day, and I was concerned about sloppy mistakes in paying copy.
So I decided, “I’ve heard good things about Grammarly. I’ll give that a try.”
Holy cow! It’s fantastic!
Also, humbling.
Grammarly flagged 95 suggestions in a 2,200-word whitepaper. It suggested replacing the first three words of the whitepaper with a single word. Most of the changes it recommended were along those lines; tightening up the text by eliminating unnecessary words.
The hook-and-loop fastener Velcro was conceived in 1951 by Swiss engineer George de Mestral. Ten years later, he founded the Velcro company in 1951.
Wikipedia: Hook-and-loop fastener:
Columnist Sylvia Porter made the first mention of the product in her column Your Money’s Worth of August 25, 1958, writing, “It is with understandable enthusiasm that I give you today an exclusive report on this news: A ‘zipperless zipper’ has been invented – finally. The new fastening device is in many ways potentially more revolutionary than was the zipper a quarter-century ago.”
I played with Logseq a bit as an alternative to Obsidian, or complement for it.
Logseq seems like a simplified version of Obsidian that does less. For many people that will be a plus. Fewer options equals fewer things to fiddle with and potentially break.
Logseq is an extreme outliner. It wants everything you do to be an outline. Obsidian supports outlining, but Logseq is more opinionated and more powerful as an outliner. That’s a minus for me; I do use outlines but mainly I just write prose.
I just pledged $53 to the Kickstarter for Cory Doctorow’s upcoming novel, “Red Team Blues.” In pledging, I’m supporting the excellent work Cory (who is on Mastodon as @pluralistic@mamot.fr) does on his blog and podcast, which are free.
The $53 pledge gets me a nice hardcover, which I might donate to the local library, because I’m an ebook guy. Backers at that level also get an audiobook, and an ebook too. The audiobook and ebook are DRM-free, which will surprise nobody who follows Cory.
What does a Mandalorian like to eat with curds? This is the whey.
How do Jewish Mandalorians expresses dismay? They say “Oy vey.”
How do Spanish Mandalorians express strong approval: “¡Olé! ¡olé!”
How does a Mandalorian respond to being kicked off social media for telling too many bad jokes? “I could do this all day.”
Eliot Higgins, who founded Bellingcat, an investigative journalism organization, said he intended the sequence of 50 images as satire. The sequence included a chain of images that showed Trump breaking out of prison and going to McDonald’s, writes Chris Stokel-Walker for Buzzfeed News
Seems to me to be a bad idea for a journalist to do anything to jeopardize their credibility. Journalists shouldn’t intentionally create deepfakes–not even as a joke, which this seems to have been–or do April Fool’s Day practical jokes, or appear in fictional movies as themselves.
People trust celebrities, politicians, and social media personalities, and discount scientists as corrupt.
Scientists are often wrong, their work should be scrutinized and debated vigorously. But over the past three years, people with journalistic status and little training and influence on infectious disease are shaping public debate.
And “scientists and public health experts are often cast as not to be trusted, captured by vested interests, lacking common sense, and out of touch with what most Americans think and believe.”
Daniel Lavery has a third dog, named Mr. Wilson, “a brief loan from a friend on vacation, and not a permanent addition.” Neighborhood adults are dubious.
Small children have been more enthusiastic, as the addition of Mr. Wilson has united some of the most beloved of childhood pastimes: counting to three, noticing a new thing, more dog, informing their parents that something about the daily environment is now different than it was yesterday, and pointing.
Antisemites have a long and paradoxical history of supporting Zionism.
White Christian nationalists in the US and Europe see Israel as a model ethnic state, and see Jews at home as pollutants.
Peter Beinart at Jewish Currents: Antisemitic Zionists Aren’t a Contradiction in Terms
“You do it once when you’re drunk, then it becomes part of your life." Meet the Secret Society of People Who Piss in the Sink. By Miles Klee at Rolling Stone.
They have a thriving subreddit because of course they do.
Micro.blog, the outstanding service I use to post here, just implemented a feature that lets users migrate their Mastodon followers to follow a Mastodon account. I plan to do that with all my ActivityPub followers here—move y’all to @mitchw@mastodon.social—unless I hear a great outcry of “no no please no!”
If you’re following me from Mastodon, you’ll see longer and better formatted post excerpts, and you’ll see my boosts, which you currently do not see here. And I will see when you boost or favorite one of my posts.
Minnie at bedtime. She wants details about our planetary defenses.
I enjoyed the first episode of “Lucky Hank,” a dark comedy starring Bob Odenkirk as the chair of the English Department of a mediocre and minuscule northeastern college. He is going through a midlife crisis. It’s based on a novel I thoroughly enjoyed by one of my favorite writers, “Straight Man,” by Richard Russo.
Julie hated the episode. We are negotiating whether she is required by our marriage bylaws to give the show one episode more or two before she nopes out.
We saw a bobcat on the paved trail while I was out walking the dog at Lake Murray this afternoon.
It was about 50 feet away and moving perpendicular across the trail at a fast trot, so I only saw it for a second or two. It wanted very little to do with us. The feeling was mutual.
It was at the end of our walk. Minnie was very alert until we got to the car a few minutes later. So was I.
If I was a Mandalorian, I would wait until the other Mandalorians were eating, and then I would say “this is the way” to them, so they would have to say “this is the way” back with a mouth full of food.
If I was a Mandalorian, I would wait until the other Mandalorians had their helmets off, and then fill their helmets with cottage cheese.
I would be an unpopular Mandalorian.
Now, guys with zero game can try their luck with CupidBots. For $15 a month, an AI algorithm will pick out women for them on their dating app of choice, based on their previous swipes…. The AI then masquerades as the man behind the dating profile, and continues to talk and flirt with its unsuspecting target, until the woman agrees to a date or to share their number. At that point, the app sends a notification to the user telling them about the date it just secured for them. And no, at no point does the bot disclose its nonhuman nature.
I like to feel that I can tell an apple from a pear, and I don’t expect from the pear what I might expect from the apple. In other words, if I’m reading Conan the Conqueror I’m not demanding that it be Middlemarch.
We had our bathrooms remodeled in 2017, and I have finally figured out how to work the light switches in my bathroom.
I was a gifted child.
I saw these two tiny girls while walking Minnie yesterday. We literally died from the cute.
The turmoil at Sarasota Memorial, one of Florida’s largest public hospitals, began last year after three candidates running on a platform of “health freedom” won seats on the nine-member board that oversees the hospital. Board meetings, once sleepy, started drawing hundreds of angry people who, like the new members, denounced the hospital’s treatment protocols for Covid-19.
An internal review last month found that Sarasota Memorial did far better than some of its competitors in saving Covid patients’ lives. But that did little to quell detractors, whose campaign against the hospital has not relented. By then, the hospital had become the latest public institution under siege by an increasingly large and vocal right-wing contingent in one of Florida’s most affluent counties, where a backlash to pandemic policies has started reshaping local government.
Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse? Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland.
In September, my family and I move from our home in Dublin to a fancy East Coast college town, where I’ll be teaching for the semester. I grew up in Dublin, which means I have a wide circle of friends to draw on whenever I’m let out of the house. The street where I live is friendly: If I want to borrow a spatula or I need someone to look after my cat, I have only to ask.
“Horny bro conservatism:” Republicans are trying to win over a new generation of sexually libertine young men. “What if some conservatives aren’t longing for Ronald Reagan’s heyday but for the time when women were hotter, you could put up a topless calendar in your cubicle at the office without fear of reprisal from some mean H.R. lady, and nobody told you what to do?”
— Jane Coaston: The Debate Hugh Hefner Won and William Buckley Lost nytimes.com
A court will decide whether antifa is a political movement or criminal conspiracy. usatoday.com
I’m skeptical whether antifa even exists. It’s a right-wing fantasy, like wokism and LGBTQ groomers.
MSNBC viewers seem mostly interested in which books his supporters want removed from elementary school libraries, how he’s treating The Walt Disney Company, and which Miami venues might lose their liquor licenses from having drag performances in spaces open to children. And certainly, DeSantis has put a lot of energy into stirring up those and other culture wars. But he’s also raised teacher pay, cut tolls on highways, and spent money on Everglades restoration. He has demonstrated a broad awareness that voters care about the basic operations of government and how those affect their daily lives, and he’s focused on getting them to feel satisfied with the way he’s overseeing the actual government.
Amusing myself with a phone fraudster earlier today.
Every time I play with FeedLand I come away thinking it’s a basic web-based RSS reader, of which there are already quite a few. Other than all of your subscriptions being public, how is Feedland different from Feedly, Feedbin, Inoreader, NewsBlur, etc.?
It does far less than those other guys, which means it’s simpler. And sometimes simplicity is itself a feature. Is that the appeal?
45 minutes to try to create a COBRA account and it turned out the problem was my password needed a special character.
Isn’t that special?
That, and reviewing COBRA paperwork has been my morning so far.
This season of Picard is some of the most enjoyable Star Trek ever.
We need a spinoff series featuring Captain Shaw and the Titan. I love him. His motto: “To boldly go where no one has gone before … kvetching the whole time.”
Todd Stashwick, who plays Shaw, is a terrific character actor; I’ve had my eye on him since he played the villain on a series called “The Riches,” that aired briefly 2007-8, starring Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver. (They played Americans and the series was set in the US, oddly.)
I saw a big fat squirrel sitting on the steel fence just outside my office window, licking rainwater off the top of the railing. It stayed there a good long time.
I keep a Nikon with a moderately long lens on my desk next to me for just such wildlife encounters as these. Critters like our backyard. But I had put stuff in front of the camera since the last time I used it, and couldn’t get the camera free before the squirrel scampered off.
I’ve heard great things about “Children of Time,” by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and I’ve started reading it, but I’m finding it tough to get into.
The book is science fiction, set on a planet that was terraformed by ancient humans and is now dominated by intelligent spiders.
So far, the book focuses on a bunch of uninspiring humans doing uninteresting things.
Where are the spiders, Adrian? I’m here for the spiders!
The Silicon Valley Bank bailout is yet another example of the old adage, attributed to Martin Luther King, that we have socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for everyone else.
If you’re rich and you’re at risk of going broke, the US government comes running with its checkbook wide open.
If you’re struggling with medical debt, or you’re homeless because you can’t afford to pay for housing, or you’re a college grad who’s struggling to pay off their student loan: Fuck you.
Staunchly anti-LGBTQ+ Tennessee Lt. Gov. Randy McNally is pausing his social media use after he was caught leaving bawdy, flirty comments on the Instagram posts of a gay man who poses nude.
Tennessee has been a leader in passing anti-LGBTQ legislation and laws banning drag shows. (You know who else led the world in that kind of thing? The Nazis.)
McNally told ABC affiliate WKRN in a statement that he has “long been active on social media” and engaged with constituents via posts, comments and messages. He said the comments on these posts “are no different.”
I’m trying Orion, a third-party web browser for Macs, iPhones, and iPads.
It’s based on Safari, and very Safari-like.
It runs many Chrome and Firefox extensions, supposedly even on the iPhone and iPad.
Orion supports vertical tree-style tabs, which I tried with Microsoft Edge and like quite a lot, even though they can be a little confusing.
Very nice!
Minnie and I walk past this house often.
It Took Me Nearly 40 Years To Stop Resenting Ke Huy Quan
A terrific and thoughtful essay by Walter Chaw about internalized racism and why Ke Huy Quan is a great role model. As a Jewish man, I find this very relatable.
Given the choice of playing along or protesting, I played along. I’m great at the Asian accent as minstrelry. When I do it for my white friends even today, it never fails to bring a laugh. Assimilation was the goal, and even though I could never hide my physical difference, I could at least laugh along with their enthusiastic recognition of my perpetual alienness. I think I wouldn’t be a writer at all if I hadn’t dedicated all of my energy into being very good at English, my second language. If I couldn’t pass the sight test, perhaps I could pass the reading one. Humor branded me as not one of those “sensitive” Asians, as a guy who wouldn’t make you feel uncomfortable about asking where I was really from, and where I’m really from is Golden, Colorado. Golden is a mining town, and to this day and despite its profound gentrification, it still has a giant wooden banner spanning its main street that says “Howdy Folks!” I have spent most of my life trying to divorce myself from my parents’ culture. They’re both dead now and they went before I was strong and stable enough to repair any of the damage I did. Honestly, none of us ever had the emotional language to do the work.
Online privacy is important, and good for Reddit for defending that right against Marvel’s petty and childish demands.
Marvel angry about Ant-Man dialogue leak, demands names of Reddit and Google users | Ars Technica
Another photo of Minnie because why not?
This is a great “about” page..
I thought I knew a lot about the early days of blogging, just from having been a blog addict back then, but I had never heard of textism or its author, Dean Allen, until I heard John Gruber discuss them on The Talk Show today.
Minnie spent Saturday morning to Sunday evening at Camp Bow Wow. She has a lot to process
JOB INTERVIEWER: Where do you see yourself in five years?
ME:
My brilliant joke about dog Viagra this morning did not get the acclaim I anticipated. I’m disappointed in all of you.
Gold. I’m wasting comedy gold on you people.
We went away Saturday night.
Here’s a view from our hotel window. I question whether this pastrami is, in fact, world famous.
I was preoccupied while shaving this morning, and I realized when I was nearly done that I had shaved using soap instead of shaving cream.
And it was fine. No difference.
I feel I’ve been duped by the shaving cream cartel my whole life.
Shower thought: The 1968 episode of the original Star Trek that guest-starred Teri Garr is a Doctor Who ripoff.
That’s the episode where the Enterprise travels back in time to 1968, and encounters an advanced humanoid alien named Gary Seven, who may or may not be mucking around with Earth history.
And now I want to see an episode of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” featuring the Doctor, played by Matt Smith, and Jenna Coleman as Clara Oswald.
While the dog and I were walking at the park, a gentleman wearing a Batman helmet and cape sped by on his bicycle.
I respected his commitment to cosplay, but he was going too fast, on a path used by both bicyclists and pedestrians, human and dog, and all ages and ability levels.
New York Mayor Eric Adams said he was chosen by God, after denouncing the separation of church and state and supporting school prayer.
This is a perfectly normal and not-crazy thing for the mayor of one of the most important cities in the west to say.
MANDATE OF HEAVEN: Adams cites divine influence in election [WCBS Newsradio 880, New York]
Janice Eberly, a “corporate ghoul who helped Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner steal Americans’ houses on behalf of the bankers who destroyed the world economy in 2008,” seems likely to be tapped by Biden an open seat on the Federal Reserve Board.
Eberly helped throw millions of Americans into the street in order to reward reckless banks, already wildly profitable banks, with even more profit.
…
Personnel are policy. Eberly has explained, in excruciating detail, exactly what policy she favors – policy that rewards reckless speculation by incinerating the life chances of everyday Americans. Appointing her to the Federal Reserve board would be a giant Fuck You from the Biden admin to every person who got their home stolen by a bank.
CPAC is going Nazi.
CPAC Speaker Michael Knowles Calls for Transgender People to Be ‘Eradicated From Public Life Entirely’. By John Gruber at Daring Fireball.
I updated mitchwagner.com. It’s not a fancy website; it’s just a where-you-can-find-me page for my various social media and other Internet activity.
At one time, it was the domain for my personal blog, but I switched that to mitchw.blog. My email address is mitch@mitchwagner.com. I think people expect something to be at mitchwagner.com, and now there is.
Science definitely hasn’t figured things out, and that’s what makes it exciting. There are all sorts of blindingly obvious things we still don’t know.
Why do we sleep, anyway? Why does every living thing seem to sleep? Even microscopic organisms demonstrate sleep-like behavior.
Theory says time travel should be possible. In fact, theory says there’s no difference between the past, present, and future. Obviously that’s not the case. What’s up with that?
Twitter is far too angry and I have to ration it. Same with Mastodon. People are outraged all the time. This is probably due to the people I follow rather than anything built into the platforms. I am not motivated to find other people to follow. I’ve got other things to do.
On the other hand, I find Facebook to be mostly a positive place, and I like it.
This is completely the opposite of the common wisdom among the extremely online millennials who I follow. They’re all convinced that Mastodon, the Fediverse, and Discord are islands of sunshine and Facebook is a iniquitous pit of Boomers doing nothing but swapping Qanon theories and minion memes.
I’m amused to see that New Balance sneakers are now the cutting edge of fashion. I’ve been buying New Balance shoes for decades. I wear them when I walk, which I do for a bit more than 3 miles daily.
A few years ago I read that New Balance shoes were hopelessly dorky and middle aged, and I have to admit I felt self-conscious about that.
But now New Balance shoes are hip and trendy and I can wear them proudly.
Scammers are using AI to perpetrate “imposter scams.” The voice sounds like a family member or other loved one, and claims to need money to get out of trouble.
If a loved one tells you they need money, put that call on hold and try calling your family member separately… If a suspicious call comes from a family member’s number, understand that too can be spoofed. Never pay people in gift cards, because those are hard to trace…. and be wary of any requests for cash.
Fox News is
a purported news organization that knowingly and repeatedly reports lies to its viewers, whose chief executive brazenly works with and assists one party’s candidates by sharing confidential information about the other. What has always been the tell about Fox News is the tagline and motto: fair and balanced. The operation’s very branding is an aggressive bit of trolling. An unabashedly partisan and ideological operation selling itself under the heading of “fair and balanced.” It’s less a lie than a knowing taunt.
The worst children’s cartoons ever. Includes Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids, Clue Club, Goober and the Ghost Chasers, The Partridge Family in 2200 A.D., and much, much more.
Florida’s politicians are making the state a “laboratory for fascism.”
Indoctrination is nothing new in Florida’s schools | Boing Boing
The Mandolorians are a race of people repeatedly almost decimated by genocide who now live scattered across the galaxy. These rootless cosmopolitans sometimes blend into their new societies. More often, however, they’re forced to support themselves by turning to professions their societies despise.
— Is The Mandalorian a Space Jew?, by Nathan Abrams on JewThink. Abrams is quoting Charlotte Gartenberg in The Tablet.
Harrison Ford is Jewish? If I knew that, I forgot.
Gentleman on Twitter posts his “sleep stack”—12 products and three practices he uses to sleep. Ryan Broderick is befuddled:
The “sleep stack” tweet has really thrown me. The fact the user tagged all the products he’s using. The fact he called it a “stack,” as in a “tech stack”. The fact other people in the replies are sharing their own “sleep stacks” as if this is totally normal. I think there’s a growing subset of people — especially in America — that want to both optimize and also commodify every part of their lives. I think some of these people feel a genuine discomfort when they do something that doesn’t involve spending money or buying products. Anyways, the best “sleep stack” I ever heard was from Steve Harvey back when he used to host a morning radio show and it was “a Benadryl and some silk underwear.”
jwz: Welcome to year four of 14 days to flatten the curve..
The pandemic is still killing 11,000 people per month in the US alone, but supposedly it’s over. I guess that’s what “over” means now.
If you choose to stand around inside a crowded room without wearing a mask — I think you’re a fucking idiot.
Turns out, nearly every person I know is a fucking idiot.
I do not claim to be smarter than anybody else about this. I’m no more careful than anybody else. I stay home more than most people, but that’s my nature.
At last we have a definitive answer to the question of whether masks work.
That answer is “maybe.”
Ars: Do masks work? It’s a question of physics, biology, and behavior
I saw these ducks in a puddle. Not to be confused with snakes in a plane. 📷
We were at Lake Murray, about a mile from home. It came on in seconds, and hit hard, a barrage of pellets the size of BBs. Uncomfortable for us both. We took shelter in the lee of the snack bar adjacent to the Kiowa Street parking lot.
The storm passed in 10-15 minutes and we moved on, both pretty wet. I hadn’t worn rain gear, because the forecast called for rain in the morning but not the afternoon.
Father of cellphone sees dark side but also hope in new tech (AP / Kelvin Chan)
94-year-old Marty Cooper, credited with inventing the mobile phone in 1973, sees dark sides but also hope in new technology
Cooper talks with the Associated Press about the mobile industry’s current and future directions and challenges.
As for his own phone use, Cooper says he checks email and does online searches for information to settle dinner table arguments. > However, “there are many things that I have not yet learned,” he said. “I still don’t know what TikTok is.”
Do you have a Zoom shirt?
When was the last time you laundered it?
Micro.blog does not show follower counts. It doesn’t tell you when somebody follows you. It has no concept of a like or favorite.
There are definite benefits to this system.
But there is one big drawback: Because I get very few replies to my mb posts, it feels like I’m talking to myself. On Facebook and Tumblr, I get a lot of likes. On Mastodon, I get fewer, but I get ’em. This interaction lets me know that somebody’s listening.
Soon you’ll be able to see a restoration of one of the most infamous movies ever made: Guccione’s 1980 “Caligula.” (Boing Boing / Mark Frauenfelder)
Thomas Negovan, a musician and songwriter, has been working on the project for three years, based on the original camera negatives and location audio. He wants to create a movie that conforms to the original vision and Gore Vidal script.
“Caligula” was filmed in 1976 as a big-budget indy movie, with an impressive cast including Malcomlm McDowell, Peter O’Toole, and Helen Mirren, and budget twice the size of Star Wars.
How donkeys changed the course of human history (BBC / Dhananjay Khadilkar)
From bearing the burdens of the Roman Empire to enabling trade over long distances, the humble donkey has been surprisingly influential.
Native advocacy group to retire ‘Crying Indian’ anti-pollution ad (AP)
The Keep American Beautiful nonprofit is retiring the iconic “crying Indian” ad by transferring ownership of the rights to the National Congress of American Indians. Native Americans criticized and ridiculed the ad for perpetuating stereotypes.
The actor in the ad, Iron Eyes Cody, wasn’t even an Indian. He was Italian-American.
MAGA cultists advocate for Marxism to stop communist agenda (Boing Boing)
Prankster Walter Masterson easily gets MAGA and Qanon cultists to call for workers to collectivize and seize the means of production to stop socialism and communism.
The Horror of Realizing Everyone Can See Your Work Calendar Entries Naptime. Call Mom. Some employees are shocked to discover how much they are revealing; is this your first colonoscopy? (WSJ)
An enjoyable and informative article–but an odd one.
When I’ve been employed at companies with shared calendar servers, I have always assumed the details of my corporate calendar were open to my colleagues. If there’s an event I don’t want my colleagues to know the details about, I don’t put it on the calendar.
How ‘The Last of Us’ Cherishes a Bygone World. (By Shirley Li at The Atlantic)
The characters of “The Last of Us” are mourning for the world we live in, and the show helps us appreciate that we’re still living here.
You and I may think of shopping malls as suburban eyesores and monuments to kitsch, but that’s because we take them for granted.
Fans were over the moon for the third episode, featuring Nick Offerman. I thought it was good but not great. But this episode lived up to the hype.
The Case for a Primary Challenge to Joe Biden (By Mark Leibovich at The Atlantic)
Yes. Biden has been an excellent President—but that’s not good enough. The US needs better than excellence. We need a great President, a transformative President, a Roosevelt or Lincoln.
And Biden has failed in several ways as President. He has done a terrible job at Covid.
And has not done enough to break up the domination of big business in our national lives. Ask the people of East Palestine about that. Yeah, sure, Trump set the policy that allowed that disaster to happen—but the Biden administration has had plenty of time to fix that policy, and they didn’t. Indeed, during a showdown between labor and the railroad companies, Biden came down for the railroad companies.
According to research, most adults feel 20% younger than their actual age.
This past Thanksgiving, I asked my mother how old she was in her head. She didn’t pause, didn’t look up, didn’t even ask me to repeat the question, which would have been natural, given that it was both syntactically awkward and a little odd. We were in my brother’s dining room, setting the table. My mother folded another napkin. “Forty-five,” she said.
The metaverse hype bubble popped. What now?
I wrote this:
By now, we were all expecting to be wearing Oculus headsets and piloting legless avatars floating in virtual worlds of dragons, robots, and spaceships. Instead, here we are in a new world of tech austerity, with massive layoffs sweeping the industry. So the metaverse is dead, right?
Wrong. The hype bubble has collapsed. But the metaverse is growing.
Whatever you’re working on right now, whatever it might be, I ask: try to leave a little space for a courtyard.
— “The Courtyard,”, by Caleb Sasser
“Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine,” published in 1958, was one of my favorite books when I was a little kid. I read and reread it many times.
It’s a book about a boy and his friends who teach a computer to do their homework. They read to the machine from their textbooks.
That’s not how computers actually worked …until recently, when voice recognition and machine learning has caught up to 65-year-old kiddie sci-fi.
The latest historical American Girl doll is from the 90s and makes zines. It comes with a PC that makes dial-up noises.
Every presidential administration wants to fix America’s ‘crumbling infrastructure’ until they discover the business interests profiting from disrepair.
— It Is Happening Again. By Erik Baker at n + 1
The South Has Got Something To Say (Dissent Magazine)
New books by Adolph L. Reed Jr. and Imani Perry explore the South from the Jim Crow era to today through memoir and interview.
The thing I find most suspicious/fishy/smelly about the current hype surrounding Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, and other AI applications is that it is almost exactly six months since the bottom dropped out of the cryptocurrency scam bubble…. To me it looks very much as if the usual hucksters and grifters are now chasing the sweet VC/private equity money….
— Charles Stross, Place your bets
Jamelle Bouie: The Founders Were More Creative Than You Think
The Supreme Court’s originalism “rests on a cramped view of the framers of the Constitution and their ability to think and reason. In the hands of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and other conservatives on the Supreme Court, the founding fathers are small-minded and provincial, unable to think beyond the narrowest possible interpretation of the words they wrote.”
Putin and the Right’s Tough-Guy Problem. (Paul Krugman)
The right has an unhealthy fixation on men who swagger and act like tough guys.
The return of Flat Earth, the grandfather of conspiracy theories
It’s the uber conspiracy theory, and a new book goes inside the culture of Flat Earthers.
Diana Gitig at Ars Technica:
The underlying premise behind conspiracy theories is that “They” are hiding the truth for shady, nefarious purposes. But you—because you are so perspicacious, smart, special, or have access to privileged information—can see things as they really are. “They” can be the government, Russia, China, aliens, Democrats, Republicans, the CIA, the FBI, Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Tech, and/or obviously, more often than not, the Jews. (Jewish Flat Earthers do not have it easy.) These entities actually have hidden the truth at times, which makes it that much tougher to argue with conspiracy theorists.
Salary jobs with fake “manager” titles cost workers $4 billion in overtime.
Companies save billions of dollars by giving employees fake “manager” titles, study shows (CBS News)
Why don’t they just go work elsewhere, where they don’t have to put up Michael Scott? Most of them could easily find other jobs. Why do they stay?
Habit is a big part of it. Every day that you do the same thing it becomes harder to do something different the next day.
Beyond that, everybody has individual reasons.
Pam stays in the Scranton reception desk for the same reason she doesn’t dump Roy. She has low self-confidence. She doesn’t think she can do any better.
Fucking knock it off, people. Blogs exist for a reason. Stop being awful.
Fighting the privacy wars, state by state: Treating Congress as damage and routing around it.
An excellent and informative rant by Cory Doctorow. Includes such choice turns of phrase as:
Basically, Congress only passes laws that can be sandwiched into 1,000-page must-pass bills and most of the good stuff that gets through only does so because some bought-and-paid-for Congressjerks are too busy complaining about “woke librarians” to read the bills before they come up for a vote.
Don Lemon’s statement wasn’t just sexist–it was stupid. Why should Americans trust a news organization that features this clown?
Don Lemon receives “formal training” before returning to CNN after “woman in her prime” comments (Boing Boing / Carla Sinclair)
I’m burned out on superheroes, but I could get enthusiastic about a Superman movie starring Henry Cavill that preserves Superman’s optimistic spirit and nobility.
Matthew Vaughn thinks Zack Snyder wasted Henry Cavill as Superman (Boing Boing / Devin Nealy)
Original iPhone from 2007 auctioned for $63,356, topping prior sales (Ars Technica / Scharon Harding)
Karen Green received the iPhone in 2007 as a gift, but she never even opened the box, because she’s a Verizon customer and the iPhone was then locked to AT&T.
Elsewhere on the Internet, a friend started a discussion of the Danny Dunn books, which I absolutely loved when I was a kid.
In the series, which started in 1958, Danny Dunn is an all-American boy living in the all-American college town of Midston. He lives with his mother, who works as a live-in housekeeper for Professor Bullfinch, a scientist at the local university and is a grandfather-figure to Danny. The boy hero and his young pals have adventures with the inventions Prof. Bullfinch brings home—a time machine, a computer, antigravity paint, a miniaturization ray, and so on.
AI-based chatbots like the new Microsoft Bing aren’t really conscious or intelligent, right? They’re just using algorithms. They look at an existing sequence of words and use probability to select the next word. And then they do it again and again, so rapidly and fluidly that it seems like they’re talking, but they’re not.
But to leave it there seems overly simplistic. Because there’s still something amazing and (metaphorically speaking) magical going on in the interaction between a person and the Bing chatbot. Something powerful, that could potentially be very useful, and also very dangerous.
I am reading “The Poet,” a murder mystery by Michael Connelly, and I notice the author does a thing that I usually find annoying, but I do not find it so in this novel.
About two-thirds of the novel is told in first person. The main character is telling the story, and he says “I did this” and “I did that.”
But the main character’s chapters are interwoven with chapters from the point-of-view of another character, and those chapters are written in third person. “He did this” and “he did that.”
Everyone bopmuggered by vomitous gobblefunk in censored Roald Dahl books (Rob Beschizza / Boing Boing)
“ … in fact no-one asked for this: not the left, not the right, not anyone…. the fake ‘wokeness’ of fiduciary duty and shareholder value.”
Roald Dahl’s books aren’t getting a big marketing push and extensive revisions for political reasons. It’s happening because a corporation thinks it can make a lot of money, and is twisting itself into knots to make that happen.
Marjorie Taylor Greene wants “national divorce,” but dummy doesn’t see who a secession would hurt most (Carla Sinclair / Boing Boing)
Because Brexit worked out so well for the UK, we should totally do it here.
“ … 7 out of the top 10 states most dependent on federal funds are red…. “
Florida woman who waved gun at McDonald’s was still angry after they gave her the free cookie she wanted | Boing Boing (Rob Beschizza / Boing Boing)
“Even after being given the free cookie, she remained irate…. ”
Marjorie Taylor Greene tells Black people to be “proud” of statues of their treasonous enslavers (Mark Frauenfelder / Boing Boing)
Tearing down statues is not erasing history. The history is still available, in schools, books, TV, on the Internet–everywhere.
Erasing history is putting up statutes to people who fought a war against America to protect their right to own slaves, and pretending those men were heroes.
Woman records her dinner date with a creepy “nice guy” (Mark Frauenfelder / Boing Boing)
“I’ll bet this guy paid a lot of money to take an incel influencer course on how to dominate women, and was surprised that it didn’t work out like promised.”
Congressional Republican leader Marjorie Taylor Greene backs “national divorce.” (MSNBC / Steve Benen)
In a President’s Day tweet, Greene endorses breaking up the United States. Then she walks it back and says she’ll settle for impeaching Joe Biden—but if that doesn’t happen, the US has to go, she says.
Elected political leaders should support the United States continuing to exist. That’s a pretty low bar. But the Republican Party can’t clear it.
Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic turns three. Congratulations, Cory!
Interesting behind-the-scenes look at Cory’s production process, and the reasoning behind some of his idiosyncratic design decisions.
Very good overview of Belzer’s life and career, by Chris Koseluk at the Hollywood Reporter.
Belzer played Det. Munch as a regular character on two different series and as a guest on several others, including an animated appearance on The Simpsons and as a Muppet on Sesame Street.
Belzer’s last words were “Fuck you, motherfuckers,” which is very much in character.
Tejada later became famous as “Raquel Welch.”
The author of this article makes it pretty obvious he doesn’t think highly of beauty pageant winners, but is impressed with young Raquel’s brains and charm, as well as her beauty.
Note the sidebar explaining how to pronounce the beauty pageant winner’s name. Did people really need to be told how to pronounce “Raquel?” That surprised me at first—but I guess the name is well known now because this Raquel made it famous.
How to Win at Monopoly and Lose All Your Friends.
Monopoly starts as a fun exciting romp, only to turn into a bitter cesspool of despair.
…
A little-known rule of Monopoly is that the game has exactly 32 houses and 12 hotels. Once you run out of houses, no more can be purchased until they re-enter the supply by being sold or upgraded to hotels. … The core of this strategy is to buy up as many houses as possible before anyone realizes what you’re doing, and DO NOT UPGRADE TO HOTELS to prevent people from improving their own properties.
I asked ChatGPT for my bio. The result has a staggering number of errors packed into a small space. I never wrote for CIO Mag or Network Computing. I am not now and never was EiC of LR, which is not best described as an IT and cloud computing website. I did not write those books. And so on.
TurboTax parent Intuit is stepping up lobbyist spending to stop Washington from simplifying taxes. (OpenSecrets.org / Anna Massoglia)
Simplified taxes would hurt Intuit’s bottom line.
On Lake Murray: This metal platform is usually attached to the concrete walkway, and people fish from it. It came loose in the storms this week.
Lake Murray from Baltimore Dr., first clear day after this week’s storms.
Geese on Lake Murray. Watch with the sound on!
A little while back I heard about a conspiracy theory claiming the Roman Empire didn’t exist–that it’s a hoax promulgated by the Spanish Inquisition, which happened in the 15th Century.
I learned that it isn’t really a fully-blown conspiracy theory, which to me implies a movement. It’s just this one popular TikToker, who goes by the handle @momllennial_, and she also has claimed that Alexander the Great was a woman, and Jesus Christ’s name can be translated as “clitoris healer.”
Bruce Willis has been diagnosed with dementia, his family announced. Last year, they announced Willis was retiring from acting due to aphasia. (CNN)
Sad and troubling news. I’m a fan, and he’s not that much older than I am.
Cory Doctorow:
The really remarkable thing isn’t just that Microsoft has decided that the future of search isn’t links to relevant materials, but instead lengthy, florid paragraphs written by a chatbot who happens to be a habitual liar – even more remarkable is that Google agrees.
Also:
Every successful Google product except search and gmail is an acquisition: mobile, ad-tech, videos, server management, docs, calendaring, maps, you name it. The company desperately wants to be a “making things” company, but it’s actually a “buying things” company.
I received this message when I logged in to Facebook just now, and I find it sweet (aww, somebody is concerned), ridiculous (I’m fine, aside from the normal amount of stress from living in the 21st Century) and creepy (Facebook, you’re not my Mom).
According to the explainer, the message comes up when someone has flagged one of my posts as concerning, involving self-harm or suicidal thoughts. None of which I am remotely having or sharing.
I went indy three weeks ago and since then I’ve had many discussions about about potential full-time and freelance opportunities.
Pluses:
Minus:
Teaching generative AI to give factual answers is going to prove as difficult as teaching it to write credible answers has been.
Even human beings have difficulty distinguishing information from bullshit on the Internet. We can’t even agree which is which.
I’m continuing my project of relearning how to read books. Remembering that as a voracious teenage reader, I would discover an author and read everything I could find by him, until I was caught up or had at least read everything by that author in the local mall bookstores and libraries. Asimov. Clarke. Heinlein. Ellison. Niven. Joe Haldeman.
I am adopting that strategy now, starting with Michael Connelly. He’s written about 40 books. I’m now reading his fourth. This is going to be a while.
Wyoming Republicans are fighting to keep child marriage legal.
Wyoming Limiting Child Marriage Sparks Republican Outrage (Nick Reynolds / Newsweek)
Mars Wrigley fined after workers fall into vat of chocolate (AP)
Have we learned nothing from Augustus Gloop?
Bernie Sanders Has a New Role. It Could Be His Final Act in Washington. (Sheryl Gay Stolberg / The New York Times)
As chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Sanders has a platform to go after Moderna for price-gouging on the taxpayer-funded Covid vaccine, and Amazon and Starbucks for union-busting.
A Yale Professor Suggested Mass Suicide for Old People in Japan. What Did He Mean? (Motoko Rich and Hikari Hida / NYTimes). An appalling proposal. Everybody counts or nobody counts.
And the headline is cringe. It’s clear what Yusuke Narita meant. The “I didn’t really mean it” defense doesn’t work in 5th grade and it doesn’t work at Yale either.
J.K. Rowling and “Separating the Art from the Artist.”
Charlie Jane Anders discusses how you can’t separate the art from the artist when the artist—Rowling—has spent her career as the public face of her art.
Anders is uniquely positioned to discuss this issue, as she is a trans woman science fiction and fantasy writer with a large public presence. I’m a fan.
How Liberals — Yes, Liberals — Are Hobbling Government (Ezra Klein / NYTimes)
The legal scholar Nicholas Bagley argues that the liberal “procedural fetish” makes it difficult for government to accomplish anything bold.
…
… to achieve the goals liberals hold most dear, we need a liberalism that builds. A liberalism that builds everything from multifamily housing and mass transit systems to transmission lines and solar farms. And we need a liberalism that can build it all quickly, cheaply and effectively. But even in the places where liberals have governing power, they are often failing to do exactly that. Why?
The Last Man Without a Cell Phone
Anne Kadet interviews New Yorkers without cell phones. 3% of Americans go without.
I use a computer—a lot! For my work, and reading things online. I do email. But I don’t have any felt need to have it with me all the time. It’s like, I watch TV, but I don’t feel like I need to carry it around with me all day. The cell phone feels like a solution to a non-problem. Before it existed, you didn’t see undergraduates running across campus to get back to their room after class so they could make phone calls. But now you see them walking around, on their phone, all the time. The contrast I’ve sometimes used is, I grew up in the DC area with no central air conditioning. And we knew perfectly well there was a problem. It was hot and stuffy all summer. And we’re laying on the floor reading the paper in front of a fan. Everybody knew there was a problem, and central AC solved it. But in this case, what was the problem? I don’t see the need.
… iPhone users are extraverted, free-spending, narcissist party monsters. The Android users, meanwhile, are all home binge-watching Law & Order with their extended cat families.
Android or iPhone—Who’s the Real Sheeple? (Anne Kadet)
The real sheeple is the person who thinks their choice between Android and iPhone defines them.
Small Government: The ref has to be more powerful than the players (Cory Doctorow)
Companies should never be allowed to grow too big to fail, because they also become too big to regulate. Mega-corporations become more powerful than the governments that regulate them. Government becomes too weak to even enforce contracts, the one function that even extreme libertarians agree that government needs to do.
… even if governments do nothing but enforce contracts, they still have to be bigger and more powerful than the largest companies and cartels. This should be an area where good faith leftists and capitalist trufans can come together: making small government possible by banning big business.
Some archaeologists believe that when future civilizations sort through the debris of our modern era, we won’t be defined by the skyscraper, the iPhone, or the automobile, but rather something humbler: the chicken bone. The reason? We eat so many chickens.
How a shipping error 100 years ago launched the $30 billion chicken industry (Kenny Torrella / Vox)
Why did ‘The Last of Us’ Change Pittsburgh to Kansas City? An Investigation (Dais Johnston / Inverse)
It’s easier to make Canada look like Kansas City.
The answer could be found in one of its nicknames: City of Bridges. Any glimpse of the Pittsburgh skyline will show plenty of bridges along the three rivers surrounding it. Kansas City is also on a river, but the heart of downtown — the part of the city we see in The Last of Us — is more inland, meaning the grim, dry cityscapes we see in the show are more suitable for Kansas City.
I want to make this abundantly clear: If there’s one thing you must do flawlessly in your career, it’s killing. I don’t care if it’s an old dog, a sow, some pet chicken, a stallion, or a fucking 3-day-old kitten. You will do it humanely. That means quickly, painlessly, and compassionately.
— Our Business Is Killing: I never understood why veterinarians are at such a high risk of suicide. Until I became one. (Andrew Bullis / Slate)
Put plainly, the attack on the dignity of transgender Americans is an attack on the dignity of all Americans. And like the battles for abortion rights and bodily autonomy, the stakes of the fight for the rights and dignity of transgender people are high for all of us. There is no world in which their freedom is suppressed and yours is sustained.
— Jamelle Bouie, There Is No Dignity in This Kind of America
If I ever think about adopting a puppy again, I’m going to first reread my journal entries from late 2013 and early 2014.
So much poop. Poop everywhere.
Microsoft unveiled its AI chatbot-driven Bing search this week, presenting possibly the first challenge to Google’s search dominance in 25 years. In response, Google laced up its clown shoes and immediately stepped on a rake and smacked itself in the face. Google demonstrated its own AI chatbot-driven search which (a) isn’t available to the public and (b) prominently and spectacularly answered a question incorrectly.
I wrote this: Oops! Google’s new AI tool Bard showcases artificial stupidity
Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina and plant scientist Cassandra Quave watch “The Last of Us” and discuss the science. (Your Local Epidemiologist)
Cordyceps, the fungus that causes the zombie epidemic, is real, and it is every bit as horrific as portrayed in the show … but it only affects carpenter ants. The fungus hasn’t significantly evolved in hundreds of millions of years, not even to affect other types of ants.
We will not have mushroom heads running at exorbitant speeds trying to kill us any time soon. While not as sexy, real fungal infections are a major health issue and, with climate change and the rise of antimicrobial resistance, will become even more of one in the future. But if you’re worried about a pandemic, focus on viruses. In the meantime, enjoy the show.
I posted a photo here this evening that I took at the park this afternoon. It was a photo of a woman that I thought was a bride. But some friends here pointed out that she’s almost certainly a quinceañera. Now I feel weird about it, so I deleted the photo. Here’s a photo of a duck instead.
The Mastodon Bump Is Now a Slump (Wired). “Active users have fallen by more than 1 million since the exodus from Elon Musk’s Twitter, suggesting the decentralized platform is not a direct replacement.”
My $0.02: No, it’s not a direct replacement. Mastodon is similar to Twitter, but different, and the differences will become more pronounced over time.
The article notes that traffic went from 380,000 users late last year to 1.4 million by late January. That’s insanely rapid growth!
[Many publishers] no longer have audiences in real sense; what they have instead is traffic — a huge stream of drive-by readers, delivered by search engines, that they can monetize primarily by getting them to make attributable purchases.
Casey Newton writes on Platformer about the emerging wave of AI and how it will disrupt search and publishing.
Many publishers already operate like spam operations and the time may be running out for them to be able to convert human journalists’ output into Google search results and then sales, Newton says.
For an example of my ignorance today: I only have a vague idea who “Drake” is. I gather he’s a rapper? And super-famous? Other than that, I can’t tell you a single thing about him.
It’s not just Drake. I routinely don’t recognize the names of popular actors, other musicians, movies, and even many TV shows.
This intrigues me, because in the 70s and 80s I was pretty plugged in.
This makes sense if we consider that people are more likely to put off starting or completing tasks that they feel aversion towards. If just thinking about the task makes you anxious or threatens your sense of self-worth, you will be more likely to put it off.
Research has found that regions of the brain linked to threat detection and emotion regulation are different in people who chronically procrastinate compared to those who don’t procrastinate frequently.
Eleven years ago today I deposited $21.45 in cans to the recycle center. I drank a lot of club soda and Diet Dr Pepper then.
I saw this in the sidewalk while walking the dog. Someone was trying to send a complex message to Tom and Sharon.
Strangely, this is the second house I’ve seen with a dinosaur in front of it.
We have monarch butterfly larvae in the garden
We have now watched episode two of The Last of Us. The special effects just get more and more disturbing.
Taking a break and on to episode three. I’m sure this one will be relaxing.
We enjoyed the first episode of “Last of Us.” But I’m disappointed that’s apparently all the John Hannah we get.
Everything needs more John Hannah.
The grass at Lake Murray is tall after all the rain we’ve had, and yesterday I saw a golden retriever enjoying the grass so much–creeping through on its belly, and then rolling over on its back and writhing with its legs waving in the air.
At first, I thought the dog was enjoying the feel and smell of the grass, but it seems equally likely it found a carcass or a nice pile of poop to roll around in and cover itself with the smell.
LinkedIn just showed me a suggestion that I should follow Dr. Bronner’s for opportunities–the company is based here in San Diego.
What do you think–should I do marketing for organic soap? Maybe I could rewrite their label copy?
We took a break for a few months after watching the end of season one of “Succession,” because the story seemed complete. But now we have watched episode one of season two.
Those poor raccoons.
I’m learning to use Midjourney for a work assignment. This is my professional headshot, modified with the prompt “sitting at the counter of a diner drinking coffee with a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray in the style of Edward Hopper.”
You know the business cliches: “It was a bad fit” and “it was a mutual decision”? I used to think those cliches were bullshit. Now I see those two brief statements are the best way to sum up my experience on that job.
I’ve already got a couple of promising leads on full-time jobs, one ongoing freelance assignment, and am looking for more.
I posted the following to LinkedIn this morning:
I saw another classic car today.
From my journal, this day in 2014:
A group of teenagers rang the doorbell last night. I went down the stairs to answer. The leader, a girl about 15, explained they were a group from the Baptist church down the street. They were playing a kind of scavenger hunt. The object was to go door-to-door looking to trade an object for another object. Did we have anything better than a keychain?
I’m in the process of relearning how to read books, particularly novels. I’ve gotten so accustomed to reading articles and essays online that my skill at reading books has atrophied.
Yesterday I found myself effortlessly reading a novel for a few hours, and it was a breakthrough. That’s how I would often spend a day as a teenager, but I’ve lost the knack for it.
The novel, by the way, was “Concrete Blonde,” the third Bosch novel, by Michael Connelly. I loved the TV series and hear the actors’ voices in my head when I’m reading.
I saw this car.
Part of being optimistic is keeping one’s head pointed toward the sun, one’s feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lays defeat and death
— Nelson Mandela
I finished reading “Black Ice,” the second Harry Bosch novel, by Michael Connelly. Good at the beginning and end, drags a bit in the middle. I did not find the action set-piece at the climax compelling, though the attack on the helicopter was cool. The characters and dialogue are well done, as are the LA locations.
I would have liked the book more if I’d cared about the murder victims. But I didn’t, and neither did any of the characters. I find that essential in a crime story—do I actually care whether the murderer is caught? Are there any emotional stakes?
How platforms—like Amazon, Google, Twitter, Facebook, and now Tiktok—turn to shit. By Cory Doctorow:
“ … first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
Will the sun ever set on the British empire?.
This article by Randall Munro, author of the xkcd comic, just keeps getting better and better.
The exact day when the sun stopped setting on the [British] empire was probably sometime in the late 1700s or early 1800s, when the first Australian territories were added….
Every night, around midnight GMT, the sun sets on the Cayman Islands, and doesn’t rise over the British Indian Ocean territory until after 1am. For that hour, the little Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific are the only British territory in the sun.
Laid Off in Your Living Room: The Chaos of Remote Job Cuts. (NYTimes/Emma Goldberg).
First time getting laid off is lonely and scary.
James D. Walsh, Intelligencer staff writer:
“They’re professional and self-employed,” said David Rey, who, after years overseeing security teams in New York department stores, published Larceny on 34th Street: An In-Depth Look at Professional Shoplifting in One of the World’s Largest Stores. “Just like what we do for a living — going to work — they pay their bills and rent and raise their children off the proceeds that they get from shoplifting.”
Eggflation is just more price-gouging. Cory Doctorow: One company controls the US egg industry, Cal-Maine Food, and it’s making record profits—up 65% net year-over-year.
In its communications to investors, Cal-Maine’s eminently guillotineable CFO Max Bowman attributed the monopolist’s good fortune to “significantly higher selling prices” and “our ability to adapt to inflationary market pressures.”
Dumb and shameful until it’s not
Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day says Web 3.0 is here. It’s not “the blockchain-backed cyberlibertarian free-for-all, where internet access is predicated on using crypto wallets to buy and sell digital assets” or the metaverse. It’s AI.
Now, you might say, “Ryan, A.I. is completely overhyped. Generative-A.I. art tools can’t even figure out how many fingers people have. There are all kinds of legal and ethical problems around this technology. It’s exploitative. It’s wildly insecure. We don’t even fully understand what it will do to our brains, yet. And there is a new dumb company every day hawking worthless A.I. fixes to problems no one actually needs to solve.” Well, fun fact: That was true of Web 2.0 too! In 2013, I used an app called Foursquare to check-in to a dive bar in Greenpoint every weekend via the geotargeting on my phone so I could get free tater tots. Everything on the internet is dumb and shameful until it’s not.
The Reality of Being a Parent With a Controversial Past
Lily Burana wrote a bestselling memoir about her life as a stripper. Now she’s the mother of a four-year-old.
Our cultural fondness for outlaws is context-specific: Everyone loves a badass, but no one loves a bad parent.
…
we Parents with Pasts plead for the clemency of kindness, for assumptions of our inherent normalcy. After all, we wrestle our kids’ pants on one leg at a time, just like everybody else.
Julie and I went for a walk and saw this house around the corner. It looks nice.
This Guy Noticed Jigsaw Puzzle Companies Use The Same Patterns, So He Made Some Mashups.
“Jigsaw puzzle companies tend to use the same cut patterns for multiple puzzles. This makes the pieces interchangeable. As a result, I sometimes find that I can combine portions from two or more puzzles to make a surreal picture that the publisher never imagined.”
Jacobin: A Marxist View of Tolkien’s Middle Earth
J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy world is a medieval utopia with poverty and oppression airbrushed out of the picture. But Tolkien’s work also contains a romantic critique of industrial capitalism that is an important part of its vast popular appeal.
Also: race, gender, and sex in Middle Earth.
Good morning. Here are your daily ducks.
That strange quality of light you’re seeing in this photo is called “sunshine.” We have not seen it here in a while. True fact: San Diego was once famous for it!
Everywhere on Earth, from Europe to China to Africa to Australia and the Americas, is dominated by Europe or its legacy.
The whole world is either Europe, a European colony, or conquered by Europe or the US (a European colony).
That’s all coming to an end now, says Ian Welsh.
And it’s happening so fast we can see it.
The Death Throes Of The World Europe Made:
[Conflict with China] is about whether a non-European power will be allowed to remake the world Europe made. … It is an existential threat to European rule, and it is being treated as such. The “yellow peril” has arrived.
Instagram video: British comedian loves Fahrenheit.
Fahrenheit is the best. Celsius is for losers.
Good morning. Here are your daily ducks.
“I’m a man who appreciates it when food dares you to eat it.”
I am quite enjoying the AwkwardSD newsletter, from fellow San Diegan Ryan Bradford, who shares a review of a spaghetti dinner from By The Bucket, a chain of restaurants that serves spaghetti by the bucket.
My 11-year-old nephew declares it’s “not bad!” and I agree. I’ve spent more money on grosser things in my life…. Overall, we’re vaguely satisfied with the food and lowkey happy that it didn’t kill us.
Ducks love the rain. They can keep it.
Saahil Desai at The Atlantic:
A pizza box has one job—keeping a pie warm and crispy during its trip from the shop to your house—and it can’t really do it. The fancier the pizza, the worse the results: A slab of overbaked Domino’s will probably be at least semi-close to whatever its version of perfect is by the time it reaches your door, but a pizza with fresh mozzarella cooked at upwards of 900 degrees? Forget it. Sliding a $40 pie into a pizza box is the packaging equivalent of parking a Lamborghini in a wooden shed before a hurricane.
Joseph Bernstein at The New York Times:
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Every Friday night from September to May, at an off-campus nightclub in this thriving college town, a group of die-hard music fans gathers to dance to some of the most devoted live bands in southeast Michigan. There are women in skintight red dresses, long-haired men sucking down bottles of beer and couples flirting in the alcove outside the bathrooms.
Minnie and I did a 4+ mile walk in heavy, chilly rain yesterday. She seems fully recovered.
… the most horrible thing about being locked up is that you are being dehumanized on a daily basis. They practically stamp a number on you. In order to navigate the experience, you have to normalize the dehumanization. You have to buy into it in order to survive. That is the most horrible thing about being locked up. You’re never the same person again. Once you internalize it, you project it outward. If you are being dehumanized, that’s how you treat other people. That, to me, is the essence of incarceration: having to buy into the dehumanization.
If you ever connected to the Internet before the 2000s, you probably remember that it made a peculiar sound. But despite becoming so familiar, it remained a mystery for most of us. What do these sounds mean?
Notes from 2023:
Even here in San Diego, a high of 91 is noteworthy. Here in 2023, we’re in the middle of days of chilly weather and heavy rain.
Journalist Mike Masnick at Techdirt avoids naming politicians’ party affiliation unless it’s essential to the story, because, he says, everybody then starts arguing on the basis of team rather than issues.
Maybe it makes sense for all of us to do the same in political discussions: avoid labels like Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative, progressive, MAGA, lefist, and so on. It’s just a lot of tribalism and name-calling.
Clearly, you often have to use labels. For example, right now, there’s already a lot of talk about the 2024 Presidential election, and if you’re talking about a particular candidate, you often need to say which party nomination he’s seeking, especially if the candidate is not well known on the national stage.
Microsoft is offering unlimited time off for US staff.
Not always a great deal for employees, who might feel precarious about taking time off, and also don’t get paid for unused time off if they get laid off, fired, or leave of their own volition.
An indigenous tech group asked the Apache Foundation to change its name.
Brian Behlendorf, a co-creator of the popular web server, said in 2020 that he chose the name out of a romantic image of the Apache tribe having fought nobly against a conquering aggressor. The problem, says Natives in Tech is that there isn’t just one Apache tribe, there are eight. And they’re not extinct—they’re still around.
Notably, a stereotypical “pure, reverent, and simple” depiction (i.e., a “noble savage”) “distances Indigenous people from modern technology, the very thing the [Apache] foundation represents,” Natives in Tech writes.
Gentleman logs every slice of New York pizza he’s eaten since 2014, including photos on an Instagram account.
New York pizza is the best pizza.
WINDOWS: Your fingerprint couldn’t be recognized. Try again with a different finger.
ME: Yeah, sure, I’ll just dig around in my serial killer souvenir box and see if I have a spare.
12,000 California seniors went to the emergency room in 2019, reporting cannabis-related problems. [7 San Diego/Eric S. Page]
I was going to make a joke about this but then I remembered that people needing to go to the emergency room isn’t funny.
Laid-Off Workers Are Flooded With Fake Job Offers.
“Virtual hiring and remote work have made it easier to swindle job seekers."
Here are scam warning signs, according to author Imani Moise at The New York Times:
The Social Security number is a tricky one for me—I can maybe see legit reasons to ask that during the job interview process. Indeed, I can’t remember whether I’ve been asked that before being hired on any jobs I’ve had—maybe I have been, and gave it out.
Exit.
Libertarians such as Peter Thiel dream of escaping society, and they’re tearing society apart to do it.
Hari Kunzru at Harpers:
If freedom is to be found through an exit from politics, then it follows that the degradation of the political process in all its forms—the integrity of the voting system, standards in public life, trust in institutions, the peaceful transfer of power—is a worthy project. If Thiel, the elite Stanford technocrat, is funding disruptive populists in American elections, it’s not necessarily because he believes in the wisdom of their policy prescriptions. They are the tribunes of the “unthinking demos.” If the masses want their Jesus and a few intellectuals to string up, it’s no skin off Charles Koch’s nose. Populism is useful to elite libertarians because applying centrifugal force to the political system creates exit opportunities. But for whom?
A lot of rain today here in San Diego. Flooding hundreds of miles north of us in Santa Cruz and south to Santa Barbara.
Montecito, a community in Santa Barbara about 200 miles north of us, was evacuated.
No significant damage here so far, but a lot of rain.
Here in San Diego, it’s very wet.
The learned helplessness of Pete Buttigieg [Cory Doctorow]
Obama and Trump were patsies for the airlines, Biden is worse. Holiday snafus involving Southwest and other airlines are just the latest example of a dysfunctional industry and regulators.
Buttigieg is the Secretary of a powerful administrative agency, and as such, he has broad powers. Neither he nor his predecessors have had the courage to wield that power, all of them evincing a kind of learned helplessness in the face of industry lobbying.
Why The American Radical Right Is Powerful And The American Left Is Meaningless.
Ian Welsh:
You have power in electoral politics when you can deliver or deny votes and money and get people elected or un-elected. That’s the bottom line.
Also:
[The radical right] have power because they have solidarity and they expect and get results from their representatives. The American left refuses to use power when it has it, and its members just want performative leftism from the likes of AOC. They don’t want or expect results and they display little solidarity, and that why for over 50 years the left in the US (and the UK) has staggered from defeat to defeat.
On the cutting edge of insurrectionist terrorism
Brazil riots weren’t a repeat of Jan. 6. They were an escalation, says Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day.
Broderick, an American who usually writes about internet culture, lives part of the year in Brazil.
Broderick:
Trump supporters dream of bringing America back to a vague fictitious past, some combination of the Reaganite 80s and a 1950s America that only existed in magazine ads. Bolsominions are much more specific. They want to bring back a military dictatorship and they’re not afraid to say it.
We watched “The Thin Man” Saturday night. Second time for me, but I had nearly forgotten it. It was delightful.
I think I’m only going to watch movies made in the 1930s from now on.
Advantage to working from home: When you’re completely stuck creatively, you can clean the massive amount of dog shit that you got on your favorite casual shoes.
Disadvantage to working from home: If you work in a proper office building, you’re not as likely to get massive amounts of dog shit on your favorite casual shoes.
I used a stiff brush, a worn-out toothbrush, and a thin stick. Wet down the brush with warm water, scrub with dish soap, put on the shoes and walk around in the grass for a bit, then take off the shoes and repeat. Use the toothbrush and thin stick to dig in the treads. It’s not magic; it takes a while.
Researchers at Columbia University are working on building a conscious robot.
If they succeed, it will end badly. They’re either building a race of artificial slaves that hate us, or building a race of artificial slaves that are brainwashed to love us.
‘Consciousness’ in Robots Was Once Taboo. Now It’s the Last Word. [NYTimes/Oliver Whang]
This yard decoration. Clever and patriotic!
These pretty, painted rocks
This house with a cozy looking sitting area on the roof.
This school. “Geckos” does not seem like an inspiring team name.
This nice garden.
This Lambo parked in front of a house. It doesn’t look like the kind of house that would have a Lambo in front.
These cars. WTF do these bumper stickers mean?
A gray, chilly, wet morning at Lake Murray.
San Diego Union-Tribune: ‘It’s cold, wet, exhausting.’ Homeless people have few options when it rains.
San Diego homeless shelters are overwhelmed, leaving many people risking cold rain, flooding, and temperatures falling to the 40s. Staying dry is difficult—and essential to staying alive.
By Gary Warth.
Why the [expletive] can’t we travel back in time? [Ars Technica/Paul Sutter]
No known law of physics forbids time travel to the past.
Either time travel to the past is possible, or there’s some fundamental, basic physics we still don’t understand.
Either possibility is exciting.
“It’s obvious that the Universe is telling us something important… we just don’t know what it’s saying.”
I saw this dog at Lake Murray. He would like to say hello, and for you to admire his eyebrow.
Coolio talked about ancient aliens, and making big investments in the metaverse and crypto, in an impromptu podcast interview before his death. [Billboard/Gil Kaufman]
The Coolio interview was bonkers—and poignant. The rapper said he expected he’d be long dead before climate change became a concern. Then he died a month later.
I expect climate change to be a concern long before I’m dead, and I’m only a year older than Coolio. It’s already a concern.
The holiday break is over. It’s time to get back to work.
I saw this SUV while walking the dog. I feel better knowing we’re protected.
My car keys got hidden in a fold in the pocket of my rain jacket after I was done walking the dog this afternoon. I spent 15 minutes looking for them—on the ground, peering into the car window to see if I’d locked them in, patting my pockets over and over.
It was past dusk, so I was losing the light fast. I didn’t have a proper flashlight, just my phone. And it was raining. And I still had the dog with me, of course.
I saw this house flying a Starfleet flag. I was tempted to ring the doorbell to express my approval.
Portland Startup to Mine Artisanal Bitcoin Using Only Slide Rules and Graph Paper
“… powered 100 percent by avocado toast, ethically sourced kombucha and acai bowls.”
