Two weeks ago, executives from TikTok’s U.S. operations flew to their company’s international headquarters in Singapore with good news. They told bosses that after years of battling over its fate in the U.S., the popular video app wasn’t in imminent danger of being banned in its most important market.…
— How TikTok Was Blindsided by U.S. Bill That Could Ban It. [wsj.com]
I’m half-bald. I don’t see myself getting a hairpiece, even if they are realistic now. I just get my hair cut down to 1/8 of an inch and wear hats to protect myself from the sun when I’m spending a long time outdoors. And because I like hats.
How Toupees Got So Realistic That Young Guys Started Wearing Them. [robbreport.com] — My feelings on toupees, hairpieces and baldness treatments for men are complicated.
On the one hand, it seems like foolish vanity, insecurity, a wicked waste of money and conspicuous consumption.
On the other hand, if you don’t like your body, you should absolutely change your body.
The road from “I agree; the cat will never sleep in our bed” to “Of course she smacked you, that’s her pillow” is shorter than many imagine.
— @quinncummings [threads.net]
Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots. [theverge.com] — Generative AI is transforming dating apps and spurring real people to romance AI bots. On the Vergecast, hosted by Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel, with reporter Emilia David.
One company lets users set up AI chatbot versions of themselves and then the chatbots talk with each other to decide whether the originals would make good romantic matches. Presumably the people make the decisions, after reading transcripts or summaries of the chats, and the bots are not matchmaking directly.
Looks like there’s a TV series in the pipeline based on the 1993 novel “Manhattan Transfer,” by John Stith, who was active on GEnie back in the day. [imdb.com]
A massive alien ship rips Manhattan out of the ground and brings it on board, along with its 2 million inhabitants. Is this some sort of cosmic zoo exhibit, part of a scientific experiment, or perhaps fresh groceries for the aliens?
It was a fun book.
The cast list includes Casper Van Dien, who starred in “Starship Troopers” (1997), and is heavy with Star Trek alums: Doug Jones (Cmdr. Saru, “Discovery”), John Billingsley (Dr. Phlox, “Enterprise”), Tim Russ (Tuvok, “Voyager”), Walter Koenig (Chekov, the original series and movies).
I don’t see any mention of the series other than this page, so it’s anybody’s guess whether it actually comes to anybody’s screen anytime.
An app called Bless Every Home, backed by some of the biggest names in evangelical circles, is mapping the personal information of immigrants and non-Christians to conduct door-to-door religious conversions and “prayerwalking” rituals.[newrepublic.com]
Nerdy Saturday morning: I’m messing around with having ChatGPT write Drafts actions to automate formatting text for blog posts.
I’ve succeeded in having it create an action that formats link posts on mitchw.blog the way I like them, with the link at the end of a paragraph showing just the domain as the text of the link. For example
I’m now working on converting Markdown to a plain text format suitable for publishing on Facebook and other text-only platforms.
If I can get that working, the next thing I want to do is get ChatGPT to write a Drafts action that will suggest line breaks for Mastodon threads, and eventually BlueSky and Threads.
🦆Today’s memes: Airplane glue will not be sold to minors
Can confirm Step 2. Still shudder at the memories.
I’ll stick with the beef with broccoli.
1920, The Coffee Cup Café, 8901 Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles, Ca.
On the limitations of writing for the fediverse
I’m not bullish on squeezing long-form content into a microblogging platform, whether on Mastodon or X. Long-form content isn’t best consumed as part of a fast-moving stream of short updates.
Yes! This is an ongoing source of frustration for me. I often write posts that are 600-1,000 characters. That’s not long-form by real-world standards, but it’s slightly too long for Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky and the micro.blog timeline, and the resulting posts are ghastly.
Facebook doesn’t have those length limitations, but it also doesn’t permit simple hypertext like links, blockquotes, headers and boldface.
Tumblr is a full blogging platform, without length limitations and with great support for hypertext and embedded media. But it has user-interface and community conventions that seem to be offputting to most people. Also, Tumblr seems perpetually on the verge of shutting down.
I want to publish once, and allow anyone to read what I write on whatever platform they like. Dave Winer calls this “textcasting,”, and it’s a great idea, though he focuses on the needs of the writers and I’m focused on the needs of the readers. (I imagine Dave might say the needs are the same.)
Also, the Web doesn’t seem to have a universal standard for letting folks know you’ve replied to or mentioned them in an article — nothing like @mentions on Mastodon or Facebook tagging. So for this post,, I guess I’ll tag Ben Werdmuller and Dave Winer in Mastodon or Threads, as well as Manton Reece, who builds and runs micro.blog and whose post flagged Ben’s comments to me.
These limitations are frustrating! Why can’t everything be more fluid?
Cory Doctorow: “Bullies want you to think they’re on your side: Bosses (not migrants) take workers' wages, and corporations (not readers) want writers' money." [pluralistic.net]
You know what’s an excellent thing to do when you’re having trouble sleeping? Go through your notes apps and clean up the scraps of ideas for posts.
And now, back to bed to see if I can stack Zs for a couple of hours until the alarm.
I keep bags of dog treats next to the bags of dried fruit that I put in my cereal in the morning. The packaging looks very similar. That is going to make for an interesting breakfast for me one day.
The “True Grit” movies came up in a conversation so I went down an Internet rabbit hole
This 2010 article in The New York Times includes a conversation with Charles Portis, the author of the novel on which the movies were based:
Portis’s characters have a self-conscious manner, a homespun formality of speech, that comes from the effort to inhabit grandiose roles: lone avenger on a quest; nefarious outlaw; besieged moral exemplar. If that sounds like a description of Cormac McCarthy’s characters, the great difference is that Portis finds comedy in the aspiration to heroism, and his characters are forever plagued by a suspicion of their own ridiculousness.
Portis, who died in 2020, was called reclusive, but it seems more likely that he just didn’t like self-promotion, doing interviews, publicity, celebrity and the other trappings of fame.
The Washington Post describes how Portis became a writer: It started when he attended college after military service.
“You had to choose a major, so I put down journalism…. I must have thought it would be fun and not very hard, something like barber college — not to offend the barbers. They probably provide a more useful service.