Mitch's Blog

A friend asked for recommendations for summer reading. I dipped into my memory of books I’ve read over the past 15 years or so and easily picked four that I loved.

• “The Ministry of Time,” by Kaliane Bradley. A near-future secret British agency retrieves a small group of people from the past — all people who were on the verge of death — and brings them to the present. The narrator is an English woman, the daughter of a Cambodian immigrant mother, who works for the agency. The other main character is a member of a doomed 19th Century arctic expedition. It’s a paranormal romance and workplace comedy about generational trauma and colonialism. It tackles important, serious, difficult subjects and is also a great deal of fun.

• “Summerland” by Hannu Rajaniemi. Another British spy agency, this one in an alternate history 1930s, fifty years after paranormal researchers have discovered how to communicate with the dead. The cold war is fought in both our world and the next, and for intelligence operatives, death is just a step up on the career ladder.

• And if you like Stephen King, I highly recommend “11/23/63” and “Under the Dome.”

Telco networks were built for humans — AI demands something different. To be ready for the next generation of AI, operators need to improve network observability, simulation and organizational culture. My latest on Fierce Network

Meta’s $100B house of GPU cards. “Not since Louis XIV converted a hunting lodge into the Palace of Versailles has the world seen a vanity project on the scale of Mark Zuckerberg’s Hyperion data center in Louisiana.” By my colleague Steve Saunders on Fierce Network.

The FBI built its own replica small town to simulate real-world cyberattacks. Why do you need to build a fake replica small town to train against cyberattacks? The answer is only hinted in this article; the village includes versions of computers and electronics you’d find in a small town.

America’s vast, sunburnt underbelly of sunglassed men with names that end in -ayden and their vacant-eyed girlfriends descended on DC to, at least in theory, celebrate President Donald Trump’s birthday and watch dudes beat the shit out of each other in a ring sponsored by crypto casinos, the now-unwoke Bud Light, and Saudi real estate, soundtracked by Godsmack and Diddy….

I went into this weekend with a fairly open mind. There is something actually endearing about opening up the White House grounds to the public for a fun event that families can go to. But after 48 hours throwing back some of the most disgusting $30 margaritas I’ve ever had the misfortune of suffering through, my conclusion is that UFC’s Freedom 250 could have only been dreamed up by a president and a fighting league that fucking loathes their own supporters.

Garbage Day’s Ryan Broderick and Grant Irving went to the UFC White House event and Broderick’s write-up does not disapoint.

I bought a shirt from a Facebook ad and as soon as I clicked the BUY button, the website hit me with a popup for a review. I was all slow down dude I haven’t even received the shirt yet — let’s finish the appetizers on our first date before we plan the wedding and pick baby names.

I was recently introduced to the concept of “food noise” and realized it is something I have been struggling with my whole life, though I never had a name for it or thought about it.

It started with a tangential comment on this episode of the Ezra Klein Show, where he discusses Ozempic and other GLP-1s and how they reduce your desire to eat. He talked with Julia Belluz, a NY Times contributor who has done a lot of reporting on GLP-1s.

Klein said he was a fat kid, lost 50-60 pounds when he was 16, and added:

Then, ever since, I fight my food desires. If we had a bowl of Oreos on this table, 30 to 50 percent of my mental energy the whole time we were talking would be to not eat the Oreos.

And I said oh my gosh absolutely yes that is true for me. I would be spending that amount of energy thinking about the Oreos, and how many I could have, and maybe I could have just one or two more.

In my work, I go to many professional conferences around the U.S. and occasionally in Europe. Attendees at these conferences are lavishly supplied with food and snacks. Also hotels and airports are stuffed with easily available junk food. I graze the whole time. I come home having gained about a pound and a half for every two days I was out. For much of my adult life, I’ve been gaining and losing the same eight pounds.

When I mentioned the Ezra Klein show to Julie, she named the phenomenon as “food noise,” and apparently it’s a recognized clinical phenomenon.

This has been a lifelong thing with me — not the travel (although at this point I’ve been traveling for work more than half my life) but the constant awareness of food and temptation to eat.

I got very fat through middle age and lost 100 pounds 2009-2011 and have kept it off, and the way I’ve done it is to control my eating to an obsessive degree. When I’m not traveling, I rarely eat out, and I weigh and measure and log everything I eat at home, and count calories. Mostly I eat the same things at the same time every day. Because I only allow myself to make a limited range of decisions about eating, I can resist temptation, but it’s hard and it kind of sucks. I live in San Diego and I almost never partake of our delicious Mexican food and other food culture.

Minnie is on a prescription diet now and we’ve switched her to a vegetarian brand of treats, called Fruitables. Minnie loves them even more than her previous treats. I tried one and they are DELICIOUS.

I type on a keyboard on my Mac all day, either on a desk, table or lapdesk. Often I want to write but not like that. Sometimes I want to capture a thought while walking the dog or shopping or running errands. Alternatives:

• Thumb-typing: Slow, error-prone.
• Voice dictation. Everybody slags on Siri, but I think it’s pretty good. Are there better options? If so, what are they?

Maybe I just want to get better at handwriting in a notebook and then I scan it in or retype it. But I am rubbish at organizing my notes after I’ve captured them and I fear a notebook would fill up with writing I never look at again.

Give me some advice, please!