Did we really need the most screen time given to the Math Notes feature of the all-new and astonishing Calculator app for iPad? Probably not.
“The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.”—Aldous Huxley
In a secret recording, Justice Alito’s wife vowed revenge for the flag controversy.
“You come after me, I’m gonna give it back to you,” Martha-Ann Alito said in the recording of a private conversation at the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner on June 3.
“There will be a way, it doesn’t have to be now, but there will be a way they know,” she added.
The Alitos claim to be devout Christians. Where in the Bible did Jesus say, “You come after me, I’m gonna give it back to you”?
A study found that a quarter of bosses hoped return-to-office mandates would make employees quit
A study claims to have proof of what some have suspected: return to office mandates are just back-channel layoffs and post-COVID work culture is making everyone miserable.
To do the study, HR software firm BambooHR surveyed more than 1500 employees, 1/3 of whom worked in HR.
According to the report, most employees working remotely and in-person both feel the need to demonstrate productivity, which for more than a third of employees means being seen socializing and moving around the office.
…
Away from the office, employees feel the need to demonstrate presence by being hyper-available and never going offline - the so-called “green status effect,” the data suggests.
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22 percent of HR professionals who responded to the survey admitted that, despite going the RTO route, they had no metrics in place to measure success.
In other words, companies have been hasty with RTO plans, some have no way to gauge whether it’s been positive, and meanwhile employees are miserable (even those who work remotely) because of an increase in workplace surveillance culture.
Random thoughts about today's Apple news
AI? I guess it’s cool, but none of the demos I’ve heard about look all that interesting. If Siri is better able to understand what I tell it to do, that would be a breakthrough. If I say, “remind me to… “ Siri should know that I want it to add a reminder to Omnifocus, not Reminders. I don’t use Reminders.
AirPods are getting the ability to respond to Siri shaking your head. That sounds useful. I wonder whether my four-year-old Airpods Pro will support that.
Apple is bringing automatic window tiling to Sequoia. I’ve been happy with Raycast for that but we’ll see what Apple does with it.
Standalone Passwords app? Yes please. We’ve never been able to get 1Password family sharing working right.
New photo search and magic eraser look interesting. Yes, I know Android has had those things for a while.
The ability to mirror the iPhone on the Mac seems great, but I wonder whether I would ever use that.
The iPadOS update is disappointing. I’m far from the first person to point out that the iPad is Maserati-class hardware paired with a 1968 Volkswagen operating system.
The customizable control center on the iPhone looks nice. Voice memos app including transcriptions, and the ability to record calls and transcribe them can be extremely useful in my line of work; I currently rely on pricey third-party services for that kind of thing.
Justice Alito was caught on tape “discussing the difficulty of living ‘peacefully’ with ideological opponents in the face of ‘fundamental’ differences that ‘can’t be compromised.’ He endorsed what his interlocutor described as a necessary fight to ‘return our country to a place of godliness.’ And Alito offered a blunt assessment of how America’s polarization will ultimately be resolved: One side or the other is going to win.'”
Alito swore an oath to the God he claims to worship that he would uphold the Constitution. But that oath was a lie.
The Economic Theory That Explains Why Americans Are So Mad — The economy is great, so why are Americans angry? The answer is inflation, particularly essentials like housing, healthcare and education, says Annie Lowrey, economics reporter for The Atlantic, appearing on The Ezra Klein Show. (Klein is her husband.)
Dave Winer @davew@mastodon.social says that “there’s a new interest in linkblogs." I was intrigued by that comment because linkblogging and sharing memes seem to be my primary blogging activities, and sometimes, well, it seems like it might be a waste of time. I was unable to find evidence of renewed linkblog interest (hopefully that link will point to my search on Perplexity). Dave, please provide pointers? Where are you seeing this interest?
The Breslin Era: The end of the big-city columnist.
Jimmy Breslin was and is one of my heroes.
Ross Barkan at The Point:
” J.B. Number One," as he affectionately called himself, never graduated college. Why bother with classrooms when the barrooms, pool halls, police precincts and political clubhouses had far more to teach? His father had abandoned the family and his mother was distant, rarely hugging young Jimmy. Once, he caught her holding a pistol to her head. Around age ten, he was publishing his own neighborhood newspaper, The Flash, and he had a headline ready: “Mother Tried Suicide.”
Breslin was one of an era of powerful big-city newspaper columnists that hardly exist anymore, including Mike Royko of Chicago, Herb Caen of San Francisco, Carl Hiaasen of Miami and Steve Lopez of Philadelphia and later Los Angeles. Today, we have a lot of pundits—everybody’s got an opinion—but few combine reporting with opinion as Breslin did, and nobody has his stature.
The death of Breslin’s kind of journalism is part of the death of local journalism.
Breslin was a liberal without being subsumed into the party structure; he didn’t canonize the people he wrote about even when he admired them.
I haven’t thought about Breslin in years. I need to re-read his work, and internalize it.
Glyph: A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle: — “I’m sorry, but as an AI language model, I cannot repeat history exactly. However, I can rhyme with it.”
My hour of memoryless lucidity — For Eric Neyman, the hour after being sedated for oral surgery “turned out to be a fascinating experience because I was completely lucid but had almost zero short-term memory." He used the time to do simple experiments on the links between memory, consciousness and free will, with the aid of his girlfriend.
Conspiracy theories and the people who love them: What QAnon supporters, butthole sunners and New Age spiritualists have in common.
A 2021 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 23% of Republicans believe that “the government, media and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles … 8% of self-identified Democrats and 14% of independents also agreed with that statement."
Those people are batshit crazy.
A Republican Election Clerk vs. Trump Die-Hards in a World of Lies [NYTimes] — Cindy Elgan has overseen elections in rural Nevada without incident for 20 years, but now even her neighbors wonder if she’s part of “the deep state cabal.”
Elgan is a Republican Trump supporter—or former Trump supporter—who flew a Trump campaign flag at her house in the 2020 election. The county went 85% for Trump. And yet Elgan’s MAGA neighbors, some of whom used to be her friends, are convinced she’s part of the Deep State conspiracy and are seeking to recall her.
There’s something deeper going on here than just “MAGAs be stupid.” Americans have lost faith in their institutions, because their institutions have betrayed them over and over, and so Americans lash out at the nearest target.
The Internet blew up the publishing industry. Content used to be expensive to create, but now it’s trivial to create and distribute, which gutted publishers, etc. AI will do the same for software.
Vogue wasn’t replaced by another fashion media company, it was replaced by 10,000 influencers. Salesforce will not be replaced by another monolithic CRM. It will be replaced by a constellation of things that dynamically serve the same intent and pain points. Software companies will be replaced the same way media companies were, giving rise to a new set of platforms that control distribution.
I think the unknown author here may be oversimplifying. The Internet alone doesn’t disrupt industries like publishing. Financialization and regulatory capture play major roles as well.