Mitch's Blog

“Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.”—Dorothy Parker

BookTokker wants books to have a list of tropes in front.. She gives “romance, love triangle” as an example.

It started off well. I put the AirPods in my ears and tried lying down in bed to see how it felt. I’m a side-sleeper. I laid on my left side. Felt good. Right side. Felt good. Used the Dark Noise app to play background noise into the AirPods. Noise cancellation worked well enough; it muffled but did not stop sound in the room.

Then the trouble started.

The AirPods Pro have a safety mechanism to prevent you from pushing them too far into your ear. As I laid in bed on my side, the weight of my head began pushing the AirPods Pro deeper. They started to beep. That woke me up—but not fully awake. Just awake enough to move my head a bit so the beeping stopped.

This seemed to repeat dozens of times until I woke up enough to get the AirPods out of my ear. I couldn’t get back to sleep so I sat up for a bit until I got tired enough and went back to bed.

If you’re a back-sleeper or belly-sleeper, sleeping with the AirPods Pro will probably work well for you.

Edward Zitron’s apocalyptic vision [wheresyoured.at]:

Every bit of excitement for this technology is based on the idea what it might do, which quickly becomes conflated with what it _could_do, allowing Altman – who is far more a marketing person than an engineer – to sell the dream of OpenAI based off of the least-specific promises since Mark Zuckerberg said we’d live in our Oculus headsets.

…

I believe that artificial intelligence has three quarters to prove itself before the apocalypse comes, and when it does, it will be that much worse, savaging the revenues of the biggest companies in tech. Once usage drops, so will the remarkable amounts of revenue that have flowed into big tech, and so will acres of data centers sit unused, the cloud equivalent of the massive overhiring we saw in post-lockdown Silicon Valley.

I fear that the result could be a far worse year for the tech industry than we saw in 2023, one where the majority of the pain hits workers rather than the ghouls who inflated this perilous bubble.

Things that don’t work [dynomight.net]

Vernor Vinge, father of the tech singularity, has died at age 79 [arstechnica.com]

I had an opportunity to talk with him several times, and always enjoyed our conversations. He was down-to-earth and liked hearing contradictory ideas, which I, as a singularity/AGI skeptic, was able to easily provide. He liked a good laugh.

Vinge invented the idea of the Singularity, though Ray Kurzweil gets credit, and the idea has long antecedents in occult beliefs. He wrote many good novels and stories, and at least one brilliant novel, “A Deepness in the Sky.” His 1981 novella “True Names” pioneered the concepts of cyberspace and virtual reality, and anticipated the 2020s practice of “doxxing.”

He was local to San Diego, and although I only ever saw him at cons, I sometimes thought about just ringing him up and seeing if he might like to get a cup of coffee.

It’s taken her 11 years, but Minnie now has me trained to let her back in the house from outside in the yard.

ME: “You are REALLY into grabbing my junk.”
HIM: “Sir, I am a urologist.”

I just activated the new, beta ActivityPub integration for my Threads account. We’ll see where this goes. I’m reluctant to commit too much to Threads because of Facebook’s deep history of making its products wonderful at first and then gradually enshittifying them over time.

Just Out There Running For Prez As A Straight Up Mob Boss [talkingpointsmemo.com] — “Trump is a sending a powerful signal that as long as you stay loyal and don’t cross him, even if it means serving jail time, you will be protected. Your loyalty counts, it’s noticed, and it’s rewarded.”

Tapping around in the Lose It app yesterday, I learned that I’ve been using the app since 2009. I weighed 271 pounds then and today I weigh 165. Lose It has been a big help to me in losing weight, keeping it off, getting healthy and staying healthy. [loseit.com]

I’ve been futzing with saved sessions, tab stacks and tab groups in the Vivaldi browser. Tab stacks seem to be better than tab groups because they’re easier to create and they stay visible. Sessions seem to be the same as bookmarks but bookmarks are for old people so let’s give them a new name.

I tried the API version of ChatGPT, which is supposedly more flexible and less expensive, but it’s tempermental. The last straw was its failure to genetate an image with an aspect ratio of 7:4. So it’s back to the $20/mo. pro plan on the web.

Is Apple a monopoly? Does it engage in illegal anticompetitive behavior? Perhaps. But I’d rather see the Justice Department go after the healthcare monopolies that are literally killing people.

Tim Cook gave the wrong answer when he said that guy’s Mom should buy an iPhone. Cook should have pointed out that the guy and his Mom could use Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram DMs, Signal, Telegram or a bunch of other options to share videos between the iPhone and iPad.

Only idiots or children think “green bubbles” make somebody else inferior. Apple is not responsible for the existence of idiots and children.

We’re an Apple-only household. Between us, Julie and I have three Macs (soon to be four—I have a MacBook Air on order), four iPhones (only two in use) and three iPads, as well as various accessories. We are loyal Mac customers. And do you know what I say to Android, Windows and Linux users? I might say, “Good morning,” or “nice weather” or “Have you seen Dune 2?” Or I might ask them whether they like their devices, because I’m interested in that kind of thing. I don’t work for Apple marketing, I don’t think people who use other platforms are inferior. I assume they are making the right choices for them.

If you have people on your service who like to argue and use insulting language, give them a place where that’s OK. Many of these arguers and insulters will prove perfectly civil outside that little playground.

I recently stumbled across a subreddit called /r/stupidpol which describes itself as a “Subreddit focused on critiquing capitalism and identity politics from a Marxist perspective.” A better desription would be “liberals are stupid.” I was called “Blue MAGA” and an “idiot.” I was not angry; I understood the rules of that place and modified my behavior accordingly.

That said, Redditors can be a rough crowd, and if you’re going to post or comment there, you need to be ready to be insulted.

Kevin Roose/nytimes.com:

The site’s journey from toxic cesspool to trusted news source illustrates the business value of keeping bad actors at bay.

Elon Musk and other MAGA wingnuts decry moderation as censorship, but:

• Only Nazis and trolls want to be on a platform with Nazis and trolls. Fortunately there still aren’t a lot of Nazis out there—not enough to sustain a big business. I don’t like being on platforms with political scolds; that’s true even when the scolds agree with my politics.
• Even Nazis and trolls don’t want to be on a platform that’s only Nazis and trolls.
• Moderation is arguably the business that social media platforms sell. They’re selling access to a pleasant place for people to visit. (This observation is not original to me, or, I think to Roose—at least it’s not a point he’s making in this article.)

That said, Reddit is not a business success. It’s 15 years old and still hasn’t made a profit.

And since the summer crackdown, Reddit’s volunteer-led forums are seeming exploitative. Reddit no longer seems to be operating in good faith—if it ever was.

DOJ sues Apple over iPhone monopoly in landmark antitrust case [cnbc.com]

Building an “online local chronicle:” a website that would list facts and news about a location, such as a city or town, in chronological order, as a complement to news sites and Wikipedia [doc.searls.com]

Frank Bruni ruminates on friendships that just drift apart, because of geographic distance or reduced involvement in once-shared interests. [nytimes.com]

We simply stopped fitting with ease into each other’s lives. And that, as surely as any ugly conflict or any cruel betrayal, can make someone disappear.

That’s why I’m still on Facebook: to keep a connection, however slender, with friends and family with whom I don’t get to talk anymore.