Mitch's Blog

Here’s something else I saw walking the dog today: This tiny dog wearing a coat and shoes.

I love a dog wearing shoes.

Something I saw while walking the dog

We watched the first episode of the new Dexter prequel series: “Dexter: Original Sin.” Dexter’s back and he’s got lots of plastic wrap.

Many readers feel compelled to finish any book they started. I am one of those readers. But that’s a bad compulsion. It makes you cautious about trying new things. You read more books, and greater variety, if you quit reading any book you’re not enjoying.

I’ve been reading an acclaimed science fiction trilogy that totals 1,100 pages. I liked the first book, but did not love it. I liked the second book less. Tonight I got within 100 pages of the end of the third book and said, “I’m done.”

I went to the Wikipedia page for the book and read the plot summary, which is something I do when I’m considering abandoning a book, and confirmed I was not interested in finishing.

The trilogy could have been a single good novel. Say, 250 pages.

Though the series is hard science fiction, the structure is fantasy. A band of characters, led by a hero, travel through a series of lands populated by strange aliens to defeat an antagonist that’s essentially a powerful evil wizard. This is not a genre I enjoy.

I’m intentionally not saying the name of the series or author. The author is aging, and I hear they’re having a hard time. I don’t want the karma of saying anything bad.

“My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Conjure by it at your own risk. I’m a wizard. I work out of an office in midtown Chicago. As far as I know, I’m the only openly practicing professional wizard in the country. You can find me in the yellow pages, under ‘Wizards.’”

Currently reading: Storm Front by Jim Butcher 📚

Flipboard’s Surf joins several existing apps designed to view Mastodon and other ActivityPub platforms, as well as BlueSky and ActivityPub.¹ I love Flipboard CEO Mike MkCue’s vision of the “social web,” as described by David Pierce at The Verge with feeds superseding websites.

“You won’t put in, like, theverge.com and go to the website for The Verge, but you can put in ‘the verge’ and go to the ActivityPub feed for The Verge.” Your Threads timeline is a feed; every Bluesky Starter Pack is a feed; every creator you follow is just producing a feed of content.

Surf’s job, in that world, is to help you discover and explore all those feeds.

I have tried Tapestry and Reeder, which have a similar philosophy of combining feeds from multiple sources and platforms into a single place. I found those apps not quite ready for me to use regularly, but I love the promise of that direction.

It’s what Dave Winer calls Textcasting and I’m eager to see it mature.

The Take It Down Act, written to combat non-consensual intimate imagery posted to the Internet, has the best intentions, but the implementation is a disaster, says Mike Masnick at Techdirt. After receiving a complaint of such imagery, the law would require platforms to act to take down images and duplicates quickly. But the proposed law does nothing to combat false complaints.

The only current law in the US that has a similar notice and takedown scheme is the DMCA, and, as we’ve been describing for years, the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown provision is widely and repeatedly abused by people who want to takedown perfectly legitimate content.

There have been organized attempts to flood systems with tens of thousands of bogus DMCA notices. A huge 2016 study found that the system is so frequently abused to remove non-infringing works as to question the validity of the entire notice-and-takedown procedure. And that’s the DMCA which in theory has a clause that is supposed to punish fraudulent takedown notices (even if that’s rarely effective).

Here, the law doesn’t even contemplate such a system. Instead, it just assumes all notices will be valid.

On top of that, by requiring covered platforms to “identify and remove any known identical copies” suggests that basically every website will have to purchase potentially expensive proactive scanning software that can match images, whether through hashes or otherwise.

Yet another proposal to regulate the Internet that would see to it that only billion-dollar-companies can afford to run platforms.

Ageism and ableism are the stupidest prejudices. Most of us will become old and disabled. Ageism and ableism are delayed self-hatred.

It’s OK if you want to argue that Gerry Connolly is a hack, incapable of inspiring Democrats, and his health makes him physically incapable of doing the work as party leader on the Oversight Committee. I love AOC and was extremely disappointed to see her passed over.

But age has nothing to do with it. If Connolly is unfit, it’s not because of his age. The MAGA leadership, except Trump himself, is young. The leaders of the MAGA-manosphere are even younger.

Bernie Sanders was 75 in 2016, a year older than Connolly is today

Calling out party leadership for their age sends a message to progressives over 60 that we are not welcome. We are merely tolerated.