EFF: Don’t Fall for the Latest Changes to the Dangerous Kids Online Safety Act. KOSA supporters claim it protects kids, but it actually endangers them and unconstitutionally restricts free speech. One of the co-sponsors of the bill specifically says she wants to use it to suppress trans speech.
The season finale of “All Creatures Great and Small” was satisfactory. Drunk Carmody is my role model.
Ezra Klein: Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden. Biden is a great President, but he’s running a lousy re-election campaign. Polling shows him losing to Trump. The solution, says Klein, is for Biden’s closest advisors—people like Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer—to convince Biden to stand aside and not seek re-election, and then to choose a new candidate at the convention.
The New York Times explains the controversy around the 2023 Hugo Awards, hosted by China
The Hugo Awards, a major literary prize for science fiction, have been engulfed in controversy over revelations that some writers may have been excluded based on their perceived criticism of China or the Chinese government.
Suspicions in the science fiction community have been building for weeks that something was amiss with last year’s awards, which rotate to a different city each year, and in 2023 were hosted in Chengdu, China. Now, newly released emails show that the awards were likely manipulated because of political concerns.
Also:
“The Hugo Awards tried so hard to appease the Chinese government they circled back to being racist by preemptively disqualifying Chinese diaspora,” Xiran Jay Zhao wrote on X.
The Cluetrain Manifesto is turning 25.
The Marine Corps credited Mawhinney with 103 kills as well as 216 ‘probable’ kills that could not be confirmed because of the dangerous conditions in which the shootings happened…. The Oregon native recorded all of the kills before he turned 20….. Serving as a sniper “was the ultimate hunting trip: a man hunting another man who was hunting me,” Mawhinney told the Los Angeles Times in 2000. “Don’t talk to me about hunting lions or elephants; they don’t fight back with rifles and scopes. I just loved it.”
Today’s memes: This is love
Superman II (1980) featured some ground breaking special effects, in particular the battle between Superman and the supervillains General Zod, Ursa and Non and here is special effects designer Derek Meddings (1931-1995) on the model “battle” set of Superman II. For his work on Superman (1978), he was awarded a shared Special Achievement Award for special effects by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and shared the Michael Balcon Award of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA). He was also nominated for the 1980 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for his work on Moonraker (1979), for the 1990 BAFTA Award for Best Special Visual Effects for Batman (1989), and posthumously for a 1996 BAFTA Award for Best Achievement (in special effects) for GoldenEye (1995). via
Facebook just sent me notices that it removed two of my posts for violating its rules. It won’t show me what those posts are so I don’t know how I violated the rules, therefore I can’t modify my behavior to be more in line with Facebook terms of service.
RSSParrot turns your Mastodon timeline into an RSS feed reader.
If you’ve been laid off – and especially if you’ve been laid off for the first time – you will blame yourself for being laid off. This post is just for you, and it can be summed up as this: you’re probably facing the consequences of someone else’s mistakes.
Upper management makes bad decisions, and employees face the consequences:
The decision-makers at companies making these layoffs sound like Lord Farquaad from Shrek: “Some of you may die, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”
Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr: How America’s oligarchs lull us with the be-your-own-boss fairy tale. The gig economy, DEI and ESG are the latest iterations of a 70-year-old PR campaign to convince Americans that Big Business is their friend.
Bose introduced pricy open-air earbuds that sit on your ears, rather than in them. Bose is touting the devices as being comfortable enough to wear all day.
I already find my AirPods to be comfortable enough to wear all day. But I don’t because it would be weird, battery life isn’t up to all-day use and I can’t think of a reason why I would want to do that.
After much practice, I am now expert at photographing my own left ear. I do not expect this skill to be useful.
Antisemitic callers overwhelmed a La Mesa City Council meeting with hate speech. timesofsandiego.com. I am a Jewish person who has lived more than 25 years in La Mesa, a suburb of San Diego, California. This is terrorism.
UPDATE: I edited this post to remove criticism of the City Council. I have no reason to believe they behaved inappropriately.
‘A Black Thing.’ Fani Willis’s father explains why his daughter keeps cash: John Clifford Floyd III, attorney and former Black Panther, says that when he was younger, Black Americans couldn’t count on white-owned businesses accepting credit cards from them. And so he taught his daughter to always keep six months' cash on hand. crooksandliars.com
"Stinge-watching" vs. binge-watching
“Stinge watching” is the opposite of binge watching, says Jason Kottke—when you love a show so much that you stingily portion it out, postponing watching episodes to extend the pleasure.
We sometimes binge-watch, but not often. Generally, we watch 45 minutes to an hour of episodic TV every night. Sometimes a movie on weekends—and I like it better when movies are under 1 hour and 45 minutes. I feel like that’s the amount of time I want to spend watching TV. And yes that does have the beneficial side-effect of extending the pleasure of a good show.
We recently raced through the show “Funny Woman,” because it was so engaging. We watched three 45-minute episodes one night and two another. Does that count as binge-watching?
I went out to walk the dog the other day and discovered I’d forgotten to charge my AirPods. I found wired earbuds in a box near my desk, where they’d been unused and unopened for five years since I got them as a free giveaway. They worked fine. This is why nothing ever gets thrown out in our house.
I’ve been hearing about the Perplexity search engine, a competitor to Google. www.perplexity.ai I tried it yesterday and it’s really quite good. It’s like ChatGPT with links to sources. Those links are important because the inaccuracy problem with Perplexity is bad, like any other generative AI.
When I’m using Wikipedia for serious research, I fact-check by looking for the blue footnote links and following those to the source articles. Perplexity seems to work the same way, although Perplexity—like all conversational AI—is significantly less accurate than Wikipedia.