“Cellphones were for emergencies, or for calling people when you were drunk.” Dan Kois at Slate asks fellow GenXers to reminisce about technology, work, socializing and entertainment in the long-ago time of 2002.
VMware’s plan for cross-cloud conquest. I talked 1:1 with Vittorio Viarengo, VMware VP of cross-cloud services, about plans to prosper by delivering software to unify applications across multiple clouds and on-premises. But will those ambitions survive the Broadcom acquisition? Read about it on Silverlinings—and read to the end for links to Viarengo’s music videos.
On Today in Tabs, Rusty Foster has a good backgrounder on the Titanic submersible:
Ok look, in my spare time I do volunteer wilderness search and rescue, so I am the last person to look askance at anyone for doing stupid things in the name of pointless adventure. If your soul calls you to risk death on a mountain in Maine, I will do my best to reach you in time, and if it calls you to die in a carbon fiber and titanium can at the bottom of the Atlantic, I will salute you and hope for your sake it was a hull breach, comrade. 🫡
Much of it is in the form of a FAQ:
Is this submersible, like… safe?
Lmao no….
Meanwhile, on Twitter, free speech absolutist Elon Musk has declared “cis” and “cisgender” to be slurs.
Good heavens, I’ve been calling myself “cis” since I first heard the word. I use it to describe myself whenever I opine on LGBTQ issues, to disclose my perspective. This comes up more often than you might expect, because opining about things is what I do.
Businesses have been laying people off and breaking promises to workers for 40+ years, and now these businesses think remote work is the reason employees aren’t committed. So therefore these businesses are banning remote work—thereby breaking another promise, made in 2020-22, that remote work would be forever.
When Minnie and I walk in the park, we like the opportunity to say hello to other dogs. This was a funny looking dog. 📷
I’m surprised the Republicans don’t like Hunter Biden. Guns and tax dodging are essentially the party platform.
“Should this trend persist, we may witness the largest domestic migration crisis since the Dust Bowl upheaval of the 1940s…. [Persecution is] now driving a significant migration within the United States of not just transgender individuals, but also the broader LGBTQ+ community, their families, and their allies.”
Samuel L. Jackson Is Confused Why He’s Not in ‘Black Panther’ Movies (Samantha Bergeson / IndieWire) “I’m still trying to figure out why I’ve never been to Wakanda.” Also, he has a healthy attitude toward not winning Oscars or doing prestige movies. “… once I got over it many years ago, it wasn’t a big deal for me.”
Can IBM bring Watson back to life?. Watson never fulfilled the promise it showed during its spectacular 2011 Jeopardy debut. But IBM has a bold plan to restore the AI’s faded stardom. My latest, on Silverlinings.
Every self-help book ever, boiled down to 11 simple rules. Outstanding life advice. I plan to write a short outline of this article and consult it regularly. (Chris Taylor / Mashable)
We get a lot of ravens and/or crows around here. Julie found this article about how to tell them apart. Still, I remain low in confidence as to my ability to distinguish them.
A toymaker and doctor partnered to create Resusci Anne, a doll to teach people how to perform CPR. The face of the doll was based on an unknown woman believed drowned in the Seine in the 1880s, who was celebrated in books and poetry as l’Inconnue de la Seine, or the Unknown Woman of the Seine. On the Criminal podcast: “The Unknown Woman.".
Marc Maron interviews Quinn Cummings, writer and former child star who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar when she was 10 years old for her role on “The Goodbye Girl.”
Quinn tells Marc why she rejected acting after her early success and why she prefers to write. They also talk about homeschooling, avoiding marriage and how Quinn became a patent-holding inventor.
Cummings reminds me of those people who used to appear on talk shows in the 1970s for no other reason than because they were great at talking.
“We are living through the end of the useful internet.”
The Last Page of the Internet, by Alex Pareene:
The internet’s best resources are almost universally volunteer run and donation based, like Wikipedia and The Internet Archive. Every time a great resource is accidentally created by a for-profit company, it is eventually destroyed, like Flickr and Google Reader. Reddit could be what Usenet was supposed to be, a hub of internet-wide discussion on every topic imaginable, if it wasn’t also a private company forced to come up with a credible plan to make hosting discussions sound in any way like a profitable venture.
We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information. Finding unbiased and independent product reviews, expert tech support, and all manner of helpful advice will now resemble the process by which one now searches for illegal sports streams or pirated journal articles. The decades of real human conversation hosted at places like Reddit will prove useful training material for the mindless bots and deceptive marketers that replace it.”
Reddit is speedrunning enshittification.
Hypothesis: The owners of the company are no longer interested in keeping the business going, and are just trying to maximize financial return by selling off every possible asset.
In Reddit’s case, the upcoming IPO isn’t the beginning of a new chapter in the business. It’s the end of the business.
The most valuable part of Reddit is its fat corpus of content, built by volunteers over many years, suddenly made valuable for training AI. Now, Reddit’s corporate owners want to sell access to that corpus. That is Reddit’s new business. It’s not a long-term business, because the corpus will decay in value over time. But it’s enough for the owners to cash out.
I’m inspired in this thinking by yesterday’s edition of Rusty Foster’s “Today in Tabs.”. I don’t think he’s making this exact point, but he’s putting all the dots down, without necessarily connecting them.
John Gruber at Daring Fireball notes that OpenAI already scooped up Reddit’s corpus of data when the APIs were free. The data has no value anymore.
Reddit already gave all its data to large companies for free. Huffman is trying to charge now for horses that were let out of the barn years ago. And he obviously doesn’t care about Apollo or other third-party Reddit clients, or what these moves do to Reddit’s reputation as a platform vendor. He’s just trapped in a fantasy where investors are going to somehow see Reddit as a player in the current moment of AI hype.
Also, on Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day: “Platforms Don’t Really Make Sense Anymore”:
We tolerated large platforms, that were never all that good to begin with, because they were convenient and useful and part of a larger interconnected network of tools and apps and systems that made the digital world safer and more dynamic. So you’d think, if they were actively deciding to stop being part of that larger system and no longer interested in making the internet, as a whole, function better, they would, at the very least, try and be more convenient! But instead we’ve ended up in a situation where all the local stores are gone, Main Street is deserted, and the large Walmarts on the edge of town are being set on fire and left to rot.
I’m going to move linkblogging to other platforms, primarily Facebook, atomicrobotlive.tumblr.com, @mitchw@mastodon.social, and maybe mitchw.bsky.social. I’ll keep using mitchw.blog for my own original writing, images, and other content. This will continue until it doesn’t.
An Anti-Porn App Put Him in Jail and His Family Under Surveillance. After an Indiana man pleaded not guilty to possession of child pornography, courts installed Covenant Eyes spyware on the phones and other electronic devices of everybody in his family as a condition of his release before trial. The man went to jail after the software reported someone using his wife’s phone went to Pornhub. She says it never happened—it’s a bug in the software—and tests of the software confirm that’s very possible.
