Jarrod Blundy loves his Meta smart glasses for rock climbing and running
I’ve been using the Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses for about a month now, and I’m finding even more reasons to wear them all the time.
If Apple came out with something like this that took prescription lenses and cost under, say, $1,500, I’d be tempted. If those glasses were equipped with a Siri version that had GPT-4’s excellent language recognition, I’d be even MORE tempted. If those glasses included facial recognition, I’d be in love—I am moderately faceblind and I hate that I go around not remembering people’s names.
The Sci-Fi Writer Who Invented Conspiracy Theory
Analee Newitz: Paul Linebarger was a US Army intelligence officer who pioneered psyops and wrote science fiction under the pseudonym “Cordwainer Smith.” His stories read today like Qanon conspiracy theories. [theatlantic.com]
Linebarger, who died of a heart attack in 1966 at age 53, could not have predicted that tropes from his sci-fi stories about mind control and techno-authoritarianism would shape 21st-century American political rhetoric. But the persistence of his ideas is far from accidental, because Linebarger wasn’t just a writer and soldier. He was an anti-communist intelligence operative who helped define U.S. psychological operations, or psyops, during World War II and the Cold War. His essential insight was that the most effective psychological warfare is storytelling. Linebarger saw psyops as an emotionally intense, persuasive form of fiction–and, to him, no genre engaged people’s imagination better than science fiction.
Newitz’s latest book is Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.
77 Types of Notes to Keep in #Obsidian [amerpie.lol] Also: 10 Lesser Known But Super Useful Obsidian Plugins [amerpie.lol]
Inner Cosmos with Stanford University neuroscientist David Eagleman: Is AI truly intelligent? How would we know if it got there? [eagleman.com]
Alt Text Hall of Fame [alttexthalloffame.org] — Honoring the excellent use of descriptive text on images for the benefit of the blind and vision impaired.
I’ve been trying to do more of that. AI is a big help.
The Comfortable Problem of Mid TV [nytimes.com] — We are entering a golden age for mediocre television, says critic James Poniewozik.
Mid is … what you get when you raise TV’s production values and lower its ambitions. It reminds you a little of something you once liked a lot…. It is prestige TV that you can fold laundry to.
Federico Viticci talks about his homemade MacBook-iPad hybrid with John Gruber on The Talk Show
Viticci sawed the display off a Macbook Air, attached an iPad in its place, and has been using that hideous chimera as his primary computer for a couple of months. The iPad functions as a display for the MacBook using Universal Control, or it can be used as just an iPad. [daringfireball.net]
They also talk about the importance of blogging, microblogging in the post-Twitter era, Viticci’s Macstories turning 15 and Gruber’s Daring Fireball turning 22, X’s resurgence as a place worth visiting, the European alternate app store, alternative browsers and more.
Doctor Who: “The Man in the Box"
On the Last Archive podcast, Harvard journalist and historian Jill Lepore reads and discusses her respectful and affectionate 2013 New Yorker essay on Doctor Who. [open.spotify.com]
When I was growing up, science fiction was still fighting for respectability, so I’m still amazed whenever I learn a respected intellectual is a fan. Lepore is more of a mystery fan, but still.
Read the essay here: [newyorker.com]
Meeting Alaska’s broadband infrastructure challenge [fierce-network.com] — MTA’s Jessica Gilbert talks with my colleague Diana Goovaerts about connecting rural communities in the sprawling Alaska back-country.
1968 is making a comeback
Rusty Foster [todayintabs.com]:
Now we have a historically unpopular Democratic President stubbornly maintaining American involvement in a historically unpopular foreign war, for idiosyncratic ideological reasons. We have an anti-war protest movement blazing up among young people across University campuses nationwide and being met with panicked repression from sclerotic college administrations wielding a post-BLM police force that recognizes no need for restraint and the right wing gangs who work alongside them to create the conditions of violence required for police to justify the use of force on protesters, in the unlikely event they ever need to justify it.
Extremist militias are prepping for the ascension of a vindictive authoritarian monster, bent on revenge against the political and cultural elites who are paradoxically delighted at the prospect of having him to kick around again.
Also, “pro-Palestinian protesters and pro-Israel counter-protesters at the University of Alabama took turns earnestly screaming ‘Fuck Joe Biden’ at each other.”
I'm packed and ready for my first business trip since December 2019
I was a frequent business traveler from the 90s through the 2010s, but I’ve only done one plane trip in the past four-plus years. Funny the things you remember (stuff underwear inside shoes to keep the shoes in shape and save space) and forget (do hotels give you free toothpaste? I know they give you free soap and shampoo but toothpaste? Google says no).
Also, the bits and parts of my previously neatly consolidated travel pack of wallwarts and cords were spread allllllllllll over the house.
