I saw this dog at the park yesterday. He hopes your week is off to a good start.
He’s 16 years old, which is pretty old even for a small dog. (Small dogs live much longer than big dogs.) He’s losing his fur in spots and it was chilly yesterday—hence the stylish couture.
Friends came down from Los Angeles yesterday and we visited the San Diego Zoo
Yes, that is my finger in the preceding photo. I like it anyway.
I picked up annual passes for me and Julie. I want to make a point of going to the zoo and adjacent Balboa Park more often, without needing a goal or making a big deal out of it. They are great places to go and just be and walk around.
A toddler got stuck after climbing into a claw machine looking for a toy in an Australian shopping mall.
It’s me. I am the toddler.
Shorter version of my earlier post about Tapestry: Yes, today I can consume Mastodon, Threads, Reddit, YouTube, newsletters etc. in most RSS readers—but the experience is nowhere near as good as in the native apps. What if there were an aggregator where the experience is just as good as in a native app, but it’s all in one place, on one screen? That seems to be what Iconfactory is doing with Tapestry.
What if you had a universal app to access every social media platform in one screen?
I think I now get the point of what Iconfactory wants to build with the Tapestry project.
After work yesterday I laid down for a bit and did some scrolling on the phone. I checked Facebook, Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky—and I think I then suddenly got what Iconfactory is doing: One client for all those platforms and for RSS too. And Reddit, smart devices, newsletters, news sites like the New York Times and Washington Post, blogs, YouTube, Tumblr and anything else that outputs a stream of information.
Previously I didn’t get it. I thought that existing RSS readers like Newsblur and Inoreader can already do those things. Mastodon, Bluesky and Reddit emit RSS feeds, and many RSS readers can consume newsletters.
But RSS readers can’t give you an experience comparable to a native client. What if you had one stream that gave you a unified view of multiple services and the experience for each service would be just as good as a native client?
If I understand Tapestry correctly, it will be a niche product, at least at first. Most people only use one or two social platforms at most. But for the extremely online—like me—something like Tapestry could be very useful indeed.
Assuming I actually understand the direction the app is going in.
The chief obstacle to all this isn’t technical. It’s legal. Meta and Twitter are outright hostile to third-party clients, and Reddit now wants to charge big bucks for third-party access. The EU is pushing to require interoperability, but it remains to be seen whether the legal and business environment changes to permit something like Tapestry.
Cory Doctorow: Companies like Tesla, Amazon and Cruise that claim to have replaced human workers with AI are often outright lying. Often, they’re instead replacing local employees with remote workers paid peanuts in India and other developing countries.
So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: “AI stands for ‘absent Indian.’”
Sometimes the remote workers aren’t low-paid—they’re engineers making a lot of money and replacing low-wage workers. That works too; the scam allows technology companies to boost their stock prices while failing to deliver on their promises, Cory says.
Journalists and other critics who attack tech companies for stealing jobs aren’t doing the companies any harm. They’re supporting the companies’ inflated claims and elevating stock prices.
I’m upgrading from a five-year-old iPhone XS to an iPhone Pro Max. Any advice? What should I expect to be different?
I wasn’t planning to upgrade. I was planning to not upgrade. I was proud of using an old phone. No conspicuous consumption for me!
But Julie found us a sweet deal—far too good to pass up.
I had a tough decision whether to go for the 15 Pro or Pro Max. I don’t love the idea of the bigger screen. But I want the better camera, and the additional battery life will be nice too.
Kevin Drum: Congress got to yell at social media CEOs today.
… research really doesn’t support the notion that social media is harmful to teenagers. It seems to have both negative and positive effects, but they’re small and the positive effects overwhelm the negative ones.
Also: As Congress Grandstands Nonsense ‘Kid Safety’ Bills, Senator Wyden Reintroduces Legislation That Would Actually Help Deal With Kid Exploitation Online (Techdirt)
Meanwhile, Sen. Tom Cotton doesn’t know Singaporeans and Chinese are different people. Or he pretends to be unaware of that fact to pander to his ignorant racist base. CrooksAndLiars
Boing Boing: “There is no plan beyond blaming Biden.” Trump’s border plan “consists of moats filled with alligators, fences with spikes on top, bombing northern Mexico, and shooting asylum seekers. Trump only speaks about creating misery at the border, there is no plan to improve anyone’s situation there.”
Taylor Swift vs. the manosphere
Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day ties together far-right movements among young men in multiple nations and relates them to MAGA losing its shit over Taylor Swift:
Much of the digital playbook fueling this recruitment for our new(ish) international masculinist movement was created by ISIS, the true early adopters for this sort of thing. Though it took about a decade for the West to really embrace it. But nowadays, it is not uncommon to see trad accounts sharing memes about “motherhood,” that are pretty much identical to the Disney Princess photoshops ISIS brides would post on Tumblr to advertise their new life in Syria. And, even more darkly, just this week, a Trump supporter in Pennsylvania beheaded his father and uploaded it to YouTube, in a video where he ranted about the woke left and President Biden. Online extremism is a flat circle.
The biggest similarity, though, is in what I call cultural encoding. For ISIS, this was about constantly labeling everything that threatened their influence as a symptom of the decadent, secular West.
For our new International League Of Unfuckable Conservative Men, it is, increasingly, about labeling everything that threatens them as feminine and, thus, bad. This is why you only ever see them rant about women journalists — well, usually it’s just The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz tbh. This is also why they’re always angry about whatever wild shit random teenage girls are posting TikTok. And this why they invented the concept of “simping,” the minute sites like OnlyFans began giving direct financial power to sex workers. Because they see masculinity as unquestionable strength and anything that threatens that must be eliminated. And this why they’re all losing their minds over Taylor Swift right now.
Also, from the comments:
I do feel like the mystery of why are women trend so more liberal than men is akin to wondering why didn’t more Jews join the Nazi party. Conservative rhetoric is ever becoming more anti woman.
A Pennsylvania man decapitated his father and posted a video in which the son displayed the older man’s severed head and “claimed that his father was a longtime federal employee who ‘is now in hell for eternity as a traitor to his country,’ and ranted about President Joe Biden, ‘far-left woke mobs’ and the LGBTQ+ community.” huffpost.com
Meanwhile, in Soviet MAGAstan: Transgender People in Florida Face Having Their Driver’s Licenses Revoked