Laid Off in Your Living Room: The Chaos of Remote Job Cuts. (NYTimes/Emma Goldberg).

First time getting laid off is lonely and scary.

A Happy Memory Can Help You Fall Asleep, if You Know How to Use It. “Lying in bed each night, Andy Buelow often finds himself thinking one thought over and over: How awesome it was to ride the ferry across Lake Michigan as a kid.”

Fort Walgreens The recent spike in shoplifting is both overblown and real. And almost everyone is profiting from it (including you)..

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.”

None of the boosters interviewed for this story could name someone who shoplifted for any other reason than to support a drug habit.

“Mandy” was Barry Manilow’s first #1 pop hit this month in 1975. He scored 21 more top-40 hits between 1975 and 1983.

Seth Godin nerds out about typography for a bit. “Typography is a signal, not just a way to put letters on a page.… They say you can tell a lot about someone from their handwriting. For my professional life, my handwriting has always involved a keyboard.”

“When I tell people I earn my living as a copyeditor, I am typically met with one of two responses: rapt admiration or an almost physical revulsion.”

“… a close examination of the work produced by CNET’s AI makes it seem less like a sophisticated text generator and more like an automated plagiarism machine, casually pumping out pilfered work that would get a human journalist fired.”

A brief history of the Apple Lisa computer, lavishly illustrated with historical images. Released in January, 1983, the Lisa was a commercial flop, but it pioneered the graphical user interface still in use in Windows and Macs today.

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.

Also: " … the internet is giant machine that turns harassment against women into advertising revenue."

And Mutekimaru, a Japanese YouTuber, “created a system that lets his fish play Pokémon.”

Well, last week, the fish were playing the newest Pokémon release Pokémon Scarlet. The problem is the game is very buggy and during the playthrough it glitched out and the game crashed, but the fish continued controlling the Nintendo Switch’s buttons. The fish opened up the Nintendo Store, bought a game, and, for a brief moment, flashed their owner’s credit card number on the screen. Whoops!