Your Local Epidemiologist: How to (and not to) boost your immune system
Works: “A balanced, nutrient-dense diet,” sleep and hydration.
Doesn’t work: Getting re-infected; dietary supplements (for most people) including Vitamin C, Vitamin D and probiotics; cold plunges; nasal breathing; saunas.
How Cory Doctorow cured his writer’s block:
… the key turned out to be the realization that while there were days when (in retrospect) I wrote well and days when I wrote poorly, and days when I _felt _like I was writing well and days when I felt like I was writing poorly, they weren’t the same days. I could write great material even when I felt like I was writing shit. I could write shit when I felt like I was doing the best writing of my life.
Helpful for any kind of skilled work.
On the futility of blocking spammers on social media
People who spend a lot of time posting to social media often spend time going through their follower list and getting rid of the spammers and bots. I’ve never seen the point of that. As long as the bots aren’t interacting with my account, or otherwise getting in my face, I say let ‘em be. I have other things to do with my time.
No doubt many or perhaps most of my social media followers are bots. Doesn’t bother me. As long as I know real people are following my posts and enjoying them, that’s sufficient to keep me going.
I also distribute these posts via a newsletter. One day I checked the stats there and saw the newsletter had thousands of subscribers, and was growing fast. I was quite pleased.
Then a while after that I looked at the subscriber list and saw that many of those subscribers were bots. So I figured out how to prune the bots, and found that the actual number of human subscribers I had was 24.
Twenty four. Not 24,000 or 2,400. Two dozen.
Sad-face emoji.
The newsletter is up to about 26 subscribers now. But at least a few of those 26 subscribers seem to enjoy the newsletter, and it’s set-and-forget for me—runs automatically—so I’m happy to keep it going.
By the way, if you want to subscribe to the newsletter, you can do that here. Just think—your action alone can increase the subscriber base by nearly 4% and that’s quite an accomplishment!
“Brand New Key” is actually a song about sex! Holy shit!
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.