The Shirky Principle: Institutions Try to Preserve the Problem to Which They Are the Solution.
Examples: Tax preparers that lobby against laws to simplify tax filing, private prisons that lobby to support increased incarceration, a bus company suing a carpooling service, an employee resisting attempts to automate their work.
Also, British colonial officials in India set a bounty on dead cobras to reduce their population, only to find that people were breeding cobras to collect the bounty. In 1902, in Vietnam, French colonial rulers set a bounty on rat tails—figuring people would kill the rats to cut off their tails. Instead, people captured rats, cut off their tails, and set the rats free to breed more rats. Later officials found that people were raising rats to collect the bounty.
I thought I had invented the Shirky principle because I couldn’t remember hearing or reading about it anywhere else.
Cory: “Vice surrenders: Literally the stupidest publishing strategy I’ve ever heard of (ever).
Predicting that a social media platform will rug the media companies that depend on it today doesn’t take a Sun Tzu – as cunning strategies go, the hamfisted tactics of FB, Twitter and Tiktok make gambits like “Lucy and the football” look like von Clausewitz.
Josh Marshall: The Republican effort to impeach Biden was a Russian operation.
… the ludicrous Republican impeachment investigation has now been exposed as a Russian intelligence op. This, even as Republicans do Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bidding by blocking support for Ukraine and only a few short years after Trump aides welcomed Russian moves to help the Trump campaign in 2016.
The entire Biden impeachment effort was built around a guy who was peddling Russian disinformation. This seems like significant news, unless … [finger to ear] … never mind, I’m being told Biden is still old.
I’d like for micro.blog to become a Mastodon superset, supporting the important features of Mastodon—including likes, boosts and compatibility with Mastodon clients like Ice Cubes. I would cancel my Mastodon account and use micro.blog to participate in Mastodon and the Fediverse. @manton
The Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast does a delightful episode on industrial musicals.
For more than three decades, it was common for American companies to put on “industrial musicals” for their employees. These elaborate productions could rival Broadway shows, and featured original songs about the company and its products. And while this music was never intended for the general public, once you hear it for yourself, you might just get hooked. This is a story about bathroom remodeling, corporate art, and one man’s obsession with a forgotten corner of pop culture. Featuring comedy writer and collector Steve Young
Young discovered industrial musicals in the 1980s when he was a writer for the David Letterman Show. Letterman did an occasional segment where he showed the viewers the covers of weird old record albums, read the title and made a snarky comment about each. Part of Young’s job was to scour old record stores and look for those records. Of course, industrial musicals were ideal for the show.
Young started out mocking the records and productions behind them, but he came to enjoy them noncritically.
I feel the same way about the 70s kitsch and 50s recipes I sometimes post. I started out mocking them, but over time I just came to enjoy it. Midcentury was a courageous, experimental and playful time. We’re more cautious and beige today.
Young says this about people who produced the industrial musicals:
There were so many that said, “We only have one setting: Use all our talent and make it as great as it can be, even if it’s a lawnmower show that’s going to be heard once at 8 am in a hotel ballroom. Because that’s just the reason they got into this world of work, because they enjoyed making things great.
That’s how I try to approach my work as well. I know if I’m writing a whitepaper, case study or guest article that what I’m writing is not literature. But I try to approach it as if I were writing the Great American Novel.
Treat your work as if it matters and it will matter.
Also: I was peripherally involved in the production of an industrial musical in the very early 1990s. It was a production for the computer trade publication I wrote for at the time, Open Systems Today. The writer/director/producer was my friend and then-boss, Evan Schuman, whose day job was as news editor of the publication. The whole experience was a blast—great fun, though I didn’t have much to do with it myself, I just served as a sounding board for Evan for his ideas and helped out a bit backstage during the production.
I did a little blog maintenance yesterday: streamlined the header to mitchw.blog, updating the about page and the my favorite posts page, adding a page on where to find me on social media and deleting several pages nobody was looking at.
I’m trying to make mitchw.blog into my home page (remember “home pages,” kids?) along with mitchwagner.com, which looks terrible and is badly in need of updating.
Micro.blog, the excellent service that hosts this blog, recently made it relatively easy to redirect mitchwagner.com to a single-page website hosted on micro.blog. The keyword here is relatively; I have ten thumbs when it comes to anything having to do with configuring DNS and domains. The mitchwagner.com domain is the domain I use for all my email—professional and personal—so I’m waiting to make the change to that domain until I have time to back out if I botch it.
I love that Pat Gelsinger’s plan for turning Intel around is to make things. He’s not turning to financial mumbo-jumbo, Web3, crypto, advertising, sprinkling AI magic dust and the other nonsense that Silicon Valley and Wall Street dudebros do when they want to grift the last nickel from a dying business.
Gelsinger’s idea is let’s make things! like Americans used to do!
I interviewed Gelsinger a couple of times when he was at VMware, and followed VMware closely during his tenure. He impressed me.
Vice is abandoning Vice.com and laying off hundreds (The Verge). Vice published for 30 years. Engadget is swinging the chainsaw too. Shit.
Google apologizes for ‘missing the mark’ after Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis. Wingnuts on Twitter are crybabying over Google’s alleged white erasure. (Adi Robertson / The Verge)
App review: Map routes with your finger using Footpath
The Footpath app makes it easy for you to plan a route for walking, running, biking or driving, and then follow turn-by-turn directions when you’re out and about. I’ve been using the app several times a month for a few years while taking the dog out for her daily 3.2-mile walk. Footpath helps me vary my route and lets me explore the streets of my neighborhood.
I have plenty of useful iPhone apps. Footpath is the app that brings me the most happiness.
Footpath supports iPhones and Android phones. You can also use it on the Web and iPad, but the phone is the best experience..
When you open the app, Footpath presents you with a map showing your current location. Tap with your finger to set a starting point.
Then tap again to the next point on your route. Footpath prompts you whether you want to walk, bike or drive.
Footpath connects the two points, snapping the route to follow roads and trails on the map. Or you can disable snapping and just map straight lines from point to point.
From there, you tap the next point on your route, then the next and so on until you’re done. Footpath shows you the distance as you go. When you want to get back to your starting point, Footpath presents you with the choice to loop back—in which case Footpath offers you the shortest route—or “out-and-back,” to retrace your path. I like to use the loop option, which often gives me a different route on my return.
You can preview the elevation along your route. I like to do that when planning my route, to check to see if the route is relatively flat, or if it takes me on a steep climb.
Here’s a different route—a steeper climb. The red bits on the line are the steepest.
Footpath doesn’t just know about streets and roads. It also knows about, well, footpaths, even “desire paths”—unofficial paths made by people walking across vacant land between one road and another.
Footpath gives you the option to open the starting point of a route in Apple Maps or Google Maps. I usually drive a few minutes to the starting point of my walk, so it’s useful to be able to easily map a driving route.1
When you’re walking, Footpath will give you audible turn-by-turn directions—that’s a premium feature, for paid subscribers. Footpath plays nice with my podcast app (Overcast), the Audible audiobook player and Spotify; when giving directions from Footpath, the podcast, audiobook or music playback pauses and then resumes when done. You can check turn-by-turn directions and a route map on your screen as you go.
Footpath has an Apple Watch companion app, which I’ve set to tap my wrist diffidently and silently when it’s time to turn again. The Watch app itself is not as easy to read as the phone app, so I mostly just use the Watch app when I am already familiar with the route and just need a couple of reminders about when and where to turn.
Footpath gives you the option to view several different types of maps. I use “Mapbox Streets,” which resembles the default Apple Maps or Google Maps view. Sometimes I use the satellite maps view when planning out a new route, which will show me if there are sidewalks all along the way, for safety. I’m OK walking along the shoulder if I’m alone, but I’m concerned about the dog getting hit by a car.
There are topographical maps, too, to show elevation—this sounds great in theory, but I am not skilled in reading those, so instead, I just map out the view with my finger and then view the elevation.
Footpath is a freemium app. The free version gets you capabilities including tap-to-map and saving up to five routes. The Footpath Elite subscription gives you cue sheets to tell you where to turn, turn-by-turn audio directions, unlimited saved routes, and more. Here’s more information about plans. The subscription is priced at $4/month or $24/year. I pay for an annual subscription.
Footpath works in conjunction with the Workouts app on the Apple Watch. I use both together—Footpath to map my route, and Workouts to record the walk.
Footpath isn’t perfect. The home screen is confusing. Even after using the app for years, I get confused as to how to find a saved route, for example.
I have never been able to figure out how to edit existing routes with Footpath, even though that’s a supported feature.
Routes mapped and saved on the iPad don’t reliably sync to the iPhone.
The controls for manually playing your next prompt are the same controls for pausing a podcast, so when someone stops me on my walk and I pause my podcast to chat, Footpath starts talking with me and I look like an idiot waiting for it to shut up.
Despite a few hiccups, Footpath is a great, user-friendly tool for people looking to inject variety and exploration into their walks, runs, bikes or drives. Footpath does the job when the journey is more important than the destination.
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The dog loves it when I park the car when we’re driving together because she’s sure that means a walk is going to begin. I feel like a fink when we’re actually going to the vet. ↩︎
There is a road called Princess View Drive near our house that I have driven on many times, but I have never seen a princess.
The American Nazis (the organization formerly known as Republicans) aren’t coming for Jews—now. They say they love Jews.
They’re coming for migrants and LGBTQ people. They’re turning women into breeding cows.
But they will come for the Jews soon enough. We will not have to wait long.
“AI search is a doomsday cult…. Does anyone even want an AI search engine?”
when they aren’t hallucinating, what they’re capable of is still impressive, though it’s a bit like watching a dog walk around on two legs – fun, but not exactly an efficient way to get around.
Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day says AI search is worse than conventional search and could potentially kill the web. AI search feeds on existing blogs, articles and other websites, while removing incentives for people to create those things. In this scenario, generative AI is like a wild animal that kills everything in the food chain that feeds it and then starves to death.
Also, Cory notes that we gave Google a monopoly on search and Google in return was supposed to protect us from search spam, a job at which it is utterly failing. “Google literally has one job: to detect this kind of thing and crush it.”
For what it’s worth, I’ve been using ChatGPT for search, and have also used the Perplexity AI search engines. They’ve been fine for quick hits; I haven’t tried either on deep research.
Google is still good for some things, but I’ve noticed it falling down in two areas: Product reviews (I go to reddit or Wirecutter for those) and how-tos, where Google serves up a half-dozen videos before it gets to the actual instructions I’m looking for.
During our last time going out to lunch before the pandemic, my dad (who was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust and later spent years in the Partisans fighting the Nazis) and I were walking toward a restaurant, and he expressed his dismay that Americans weren’t taking the threat to our country seriously enough. I suggested that while most Americans were concerned, they didn’t see the Trump era as being that ominous because they assumed the kinds of things that happened in his life could never happen here. My dad stopped walking, looked at me, and asked, “You think vhen I vas a kid any of us thought it could happen there?”
Apple warns users to stop putting wet iPhones in rice (Gizmodo)
That was a big clue on a crime show. The detective noticed that the murder victim had bought a large quantity of rice, and surmised that the victim was using it to dry out a wet phone, which proved important to solving the murder.