Mitch's Blog

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.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency in California over bird flu.

“This proclamation is a targeted action to ensure government agencies have the resources and flexibility they need to respond quickly to this outbreak,” Newsom said in a statement. “While the risk to the public remains low, we will continue to take all necessary steps to prevent the spread of this virus.”

With the federal government about to be taken over by bumbling criminals, Newsom reminds me why I’m relieved to live in California, which has a functioning government.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren: “RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine misinformation campaign helped cause a measles outbreak in Samoa [in 2019] that killed 83 people, mostly kids."

Since I upgraded to Apple Intelligence a couple of days ago, it has twice started talking to me while I’m wearing my AirPods and conversing with an actual person. I was on a videoconference with my boss’s boss this afternoon, and the AirPods started talking and would not shut up. This is highly annoying at best and it potentially made me look like an idiot in front of someone who signs my paycheck. Utter failure on the part of Apple product design; I am highly dissatisfied.

Following up on my friend Steven J. Vaughan-Nicols' article praising the Perplexity search engine, I decided to do a fast, spontaneous test.

Reading the news over lunch, I saw that an actress named Jill Jacobson had died. The obit said she was in Star Trek.

I said to myself, “I wonder who she played on Star Trek?”

The article said she appeared on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “Deep Space Nine.”

First I asked ChatGPT what characters she played. ChatGPT replied that she only ever appeared on TNG. I asked about DS9, and it said she had not appeared on that show.

I searched Kagi. Interestingly, Kagi turned up several articles titled “Who did Jill Jacobson play on Star Trek”—the exact words of my query.

I know that’s a common SEO trick (“What time is the Super Bowl?”) but would not think that would be implemented for such a specific question.

Google’s AI summary says “Vanessa” on TNG, with no mention of DS9.

And here is Perplexity’s answer — complete, concise, and impressive.

What’s the real answer? I can’t say for sure; I’m not a superfan of those particular iterations of Trek. However, I consider the Memory Alpha wiki definitive on issues of Trek lore, and it agrees with the IMDB.

“All eyes are on Bend, Oregon, where a mysterious vandal (or group of vandals) has been sticking large, plastic googly eyes on public art sculptures around the city." The photos alone are worth a click.

Looking around for places to have Christmas dinner. I asked ChatGPT what restaurants are open. First two on the list: Denny’s and IHOP. lol no