Penn Jillette Wants to Talk It All Out
I was going to move to France with my girlfriend and be a beatnik existential writer — she broke up with me, I was very upset, I said, “Fuck you,” and went to Clown College.
On the importance of agreeing on consensus reality:
We can argue forever about gun control — whether that’s a good idea or a bad idea, including what the framers thought — but if we can’t agree that the shootings happened, then we can’t talk.
Also:
As a good friend of mine said, “I don’t mind being called an asshole — I don’t want to be an asshole.”
He talks about renouncing libertarianism; Bob Dylan; the Smothers Brothers; the risk of monetizing hate, aggression and outrage; Jewish identity; why he doesn’t speak out about Israel and Hamas (pretty much the same reason I don’t); the Three Stooges; fame; ambition; Donald Trump; and why, despite numerous problems, the world is better off today than it has been.
Downworthy: A browser plugin to turn hyperbolic viral headlines into what they really mean:
- “Literally” becomes “Figuratively”
- “Will Blow Your Mind” becomes “Might Perhaps Mildly Entertain You For a Moment”
- “One Weird Trick” becomes “One Piece of Completely Anecdotal Horseshit”
- “Go Viral” becomes “Be Overused So Much That You’ll Silently Pray for the Sweet Release of Death to Make it Stop”
- “Can’t Even Handle” becomes “Can Totally Handle Without Any Significant Issue”
- “Incredible” becomes “Painfully Ordinary”
- “You Won’t Believe” becomes “In All Likelihood, You’ll Believe”
The lost ancient practice of communal sleep. “Until the mid-19th Century, it was completely normal to share a bed with friends, colleagues and even total strangers. How did people cope? And why did we stop?”
Powerful and disturbing: My grandpa was a Nazi, by Bastian Allgeier.
I canceled my ChatGPT subscription. I’m just not using it enough to justify the $20/mo.
I had in mind creating my own GPT—my own individual AI assistant—but I haven’t prioritized doing so, and I don’t see that changing in the near future.
I thought that ChatGPT might make a good writing assistant. But ChatGPT’s first drafts are hopeless. It’s easier and faster for me to write from scratch.
This is not a forever decision. I expect I’ll give it another try soon enough.
Is anyone else having a problem with micro.blog posts propagating out over ActivityPub? Maybe “propagating” isn’t the right word here—I mean that when I go to mastodon.social/@mitchw@mitchw.blog, the newest post I see is from Saturday. @help
Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr):
The most amazing things about monopolies is how the contempt just oozes out of them. It’s like these guys can’t even pretend to give a shit. You want guillotines? Because that’s how you get guillotines.
Big Pharma jacks up the price on Ozempic and other powerful meds because these companies are monopolies, and they can do that. Apple pulls “a malicious compliance stunt that could shame the surly drunks my great-aunt Lisa used to boss in the Soviet electrical engineering firm she ran.” Ello, “the ‘indie’ social media startup that literally promised – on the sacred honor of its founders – that it would never sell out its users,” goes ahead and sells out its users. Also: The Trolley Problem—solved (in the same way that James Kirk solved the Kobayashi Maru).
For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything.
The program was a weird combination of email, databases, and workflow that allowed companies to stand up custom applications and deploy them to relevant groups of workers inside Notes.
Also:
… It provided not just your email, but an internal telephone directory, contact database, booking system for time off, company handbook, and more, all accessible via a single application and a single set of credentials, long before single sign-on became a thing.
Nowadays, it is common for most if not all of these functions to be delivered via separate web-based applications, each requiring a different login so you need to have dozens of different credentials, and each one sporting a different user interface. So I guess you could regard the web browser as an app runtime that is the ultimate successor to Notes?
Also:
Eventually, IBM, which had acquired Lotus in 1995, announced in 2012 that it would be discontinuing the Lotus brand altogether, before offloading Notes to Indian software outfit HCL Technologies in 2018.
The platform still survives, with HCL releasing Domino 14.0 last year, which, as The Register commented at the time, speaks to the “stickiness” of the custom workflows built on the platform.
Also:
But Notes is nowhere near holding the record for the oldest piece of software still being used. The US Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA), which takes care of contracts for the Department of Defense (DoD), is said to have a program called Mechanization of Contract Administration Services (MOCAS), which was introduced in 1958, making it nearly twice as old.
A tale of two cities: one real, one virtual.
Digital city-building has become a legitimate part of urban planning, helping to mirror the present — and map the future.
“Digital twins” are transforming urban planning in Barcelona, Ukraine(!), Helsinki, and Singapore and advancing archeology in Pompeii.
A digital twin is a digital model of a real-world object, using sensors to measure changes in real time. Used in urban planning, a digital twin of the city can predict how changes will affect the city over time: For example, how adding a traffic signal would affect traffic patterns.
The goal is “‘to build an oracle,’ says Jordi Cirera Gonzalez, director of the Knowledge Society at Barcelona City Council, and a man not short on ambition. ‘Like the ancient Greeks’: a place where you can ask anything you can imagine and it’s possible to find some answer.’”
Barcelona’s digital twin project “lives within the deconsecrated Torre Girona chapel, on the campus of the Barcelona Polytechnic. Where once one might have prayed to God for an answer, now one goes to a computer.”
I wrote about digital twins for cities for Oracle in 2021: The smart city gets even smarter
The Price of Netanyahu’s Ambition.
Amid war with Hamas, a hostage crisis, the devastation of Gaza, and Israel’s splintering identity, the Prime Minister seems unable to distinguish between his own interests and his country’s.
For liberal, secular Israelis, Netanyahu has always been an object of scorn on a range of social and political issues, but now, across the ideological landscape, he stands accused of failing utterly on his promise of vigilance and security.
A deep and thoroughly researched article on the current state of Israel, by David Remmick at The New Yorker.
The preceding article made me curious whether Lindy was as big an anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer as all that. Hell yeah, he was.
… for more than 200 years, the American people have elected a buffoon’s gallery of rogues, incompetents, empty suits, abysmal spellers, degenerate golfers and corrupt Marylanders to the Vice Presidency with barely a passing consideration that they might one day have to assume the highest office in the land.
From the book “Veeps: Profiles in Insignificance,” by Bill Kelter and Wayne Shellabarger, which is definitely going on my to-be-read list. Reviewed by Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr. Thanks, Cory!
Forget 10,000 steps: 7 tips for step counters.
The notion to take 10,000 daily steps stems from a marketing ploy: As the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics approached, a Japanese researcher decided to nudge his nation to be more active by offering pedometers with a name that loosely translated as “10,000-step meter.” (The Japanese character for the number 10,000 looks a little like a person walking.)
For “men and women younger than age 60, the greatest relative reductions in the risk of dying prematurely came with step counts of between about 8,000 and 10,000 per day,” according to a 2022 study pooling results from 47,457 adults of all ages.
For people older than 60, the threshold was a little lower. For them, the sweet spot for reduced mortality risk was 6,000 to 8,000 steps per day.
The New Yorker: How Ten Middle East Conflicts Are Converging Into One Big War
Ten conflicts among diverse rivals or in different arenas over disparate flash points and divergent goals are now converging. For all the recent punditry warning about a widening war, the trajectory has long been obvious. And for all the American warships, troops, and diplomats deployed in the Middle East over the past hundred days, the U.S. has produced little, if anything, beyond greater vulnerabilities. “The U.S. appears pretty disconnected from regional realities, which may have been an intentional approach to enable withdrawal,” Julien Barnes-Dacey, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “But now that Washington has been sucked back in by the Israel war, it’s looking pretty lost.”
Also:
U.S. intelligence has warned of growing Arab and Muslim support for Hamas, which is designated a terrorist group by the U.S. and Europe. At the Doha Forum last month, I heard from dozens of Arabs who condemned Hamas tactics and disagreed with its ideology, even as they admired or envied its determined resistance to Israel and defiance of U.S influence. “In this kind of a fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin acknowledged in December. “And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat.” He noted, “It would compound this tragedy if all that awaited Israelis and Palestinians at the end of this awful war was more insecurity, more rage, and more despair.”
And:
In 2002, the Houthis' founding slogan was “God is the greatest, death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, victory to Islam.”
The Reason the Office Isn’t Fun Anymore. Employees are hiding out in privacy booths and empty conference rooms, turning workplaces into quiet zones.
Did offices used to be “fun”? I must have missed it.
A company backed by Silicon Valley billionaires is seeking local voter approval to build a walkable city from scratch for 50,000 people on farmland in Solano County, located in northern California between Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Backers include LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. “Eventually, the city could grow to 400,000 people, the group says, but only if it can create at least 15,000 jobs that pay above-average wages.”
I love the spirit behind this idea. California is in a housing crisis. It’s a disaster, like an earthquake or wildfire, and we need bold solutions.
