The metaverse hype bubble popped. What now?
I wrote this:
By now, we were all expecting to be wearing Oculus headsets and piloting legless avatars floating in virtual worlds of dragons, robots, and spaceships. Instead, here we are in a new world of tech austerity, with massive layoffs sweeping the industry. So the metaverse is dead, right?
Wrong. The hype bubble has collapsed. But the metaverse is growing.
Whatever you’re working on right now, whatever it might be, I ask: try to leave a little space for a courtyard.
— “The Courtyard,”, by Caleb Sasser
Get Me Risa Heller! (NYmag.com) If you’re Jeff Zucker or Mario Batali or Jared Kushner and you’re trying to survive a bout of very bad press, she’s who you call.
“Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine,” published in 1958, was one of my favorite books when I was a little kid. I read and reread it many times.
It’s a book about a boy and his friends who teach a computer to do their homework. They read to the machine from their textbooks.
That’s not how computers actually worked …until recently, when voice recognition and machine learning has caught up to 65-year-old kiddie sci-fi.
I’ve been thinking about that book quite a bit recently. And so has David Owen at The New Yorker.
Pink Floyd songwriter Roger Waters is a loud and proud anti-Semite, and Frankfurt canceled his performance there.. (By Rob Beschizza at Boing Boing)
The latest historical American Girl doll is from the 90s and makes zines. It comes with a PC that makes dial-up noises.
Every presidential administration wants to fix America’s ‘crumbling infrastructure’ until they discover the business interests profiting from disrepair.
— It Is Happening Again. By Erik Baker at n + 1
The South Has Got Something To Say (Dissent Magazine)
New books by Adolph L. Reed Jr. and Imani Perry explore the South from the Jim Crow era to today through memoir and interview.
The thing I find most suspicious/fishy/smelly about the current hype surrounding Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, and other AI applications is that it is almost exactly six months since the bottom dropped out of the cryptocurrency scam bubble…. To me it looks very much as if the usual hucksters and grifters are now chasing the sweet VC/private equity money….
— Charles Stross, Place your bets
Jamelle Bouie: The Founders Were More Creative Than You Think
The Supreme Court’s originalism “rests on a cramped view of the framers of the Constitution and their ability to think and reason. In the hands of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and other conservatives on the Supreme Court, the founding fathers are small-minded and provincial, unable to think beyond the narrowest possible interpretation of the words they wrote.”
Putin and the Right’s Tough-Guy Problem. (Paul Krugman)
The right has an unhealthy fixation on men who swagger and act like tough guys.
Belief that the Earth is flat, not round, is having a moment.
The return of Flat Earth, the grandfather of conspiracy theories
It’s the uber conspiracy theory, and a new book goes inside the culture of Flat Earthers.
Diana Gitig at Ars Technica:
The underlying premise behind conspiracy theories is that “They” are hiding the truth for shady, nefarious purposes. But you—because you are so perspicacious, smart, special, or have access to privileged information—can see things as they really are. “They” can be the government, Russia, China, aliens, Democrats, Republicans, the CIA, the FBI, Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Tech, and/or obviously, more often than not, the Jews. (Jewish Flat Earthers do not have it easy.) These entities actually have hidden the truth at times, which makes it that much tougher to argue with conspiracy theorists.
It bothers me slightly that the fundamental core of my political and economic beliefs soundslike a conspiracy theory when I speak it out loud: The world is run for the benefit of billionaires and centimillionaires. To the ruling class, the rest of us are simply livestock or prey.
I’m calling out the writer of this article on a careless error—a dangerous one in the current political climate: “the Jews” have never hidden the truth about anything.
Salary jobs with fake “manager” titles cost workers $4 billion in overtime.
Companies save billions of dollars by giving employees fake “manager” titles, study shows (CBS News)
Showerthought: Why don't the supporting characters in “The Office” just find other jobs?
Why don’t they just go work elsewhere, where they don’t have to put up Michael Scott? Most of them could easily find other jobs. Why do they stay?
Habit is a big part of it. Every day that you do the same thing it becomes harder to do something different the next day.
Beyond that, everybody has individual reasons.
Pam stays in the Scranton reception desk for the same reason she doesn’t dump Roy. She has low self-confidence. She doesn’t think she can do any better.
Jim is in love with Pam, and stays where she is. He also likes thinking he’s superior to everybody else he’s working with—Michael and Dwight first and foremost—while starting to fear he’s no different than they are. And for Jim, Dunder-Mifflin is easy money.
Easy money is the lure for Stanley, too. He just doesn’t give a shit about office politics.
Dwight and Angela get off on their perceived power, and Dwight of course has a massive bro-crush on Michael Scott.
Kelly is oblivious, and in love with Ryan.
Ryan sees the office as a necessary stepping stone to a bigger future.
Meredith is a drunk.
Toby, like Pam, doesn’t think he can do any better. In Toby’s case, he may be right.
Left as exercises for the reader: Kevin, Phyllis, Creed, Oscar, Darryl, and the later-seasons characters.
Fucking knock it off, people. Blogs exist for a reason. Stop being awful.
Fighting the privacy wars, state by state: Treating Congress as damage and routing around it.
An excellent and informative rant by Cory Doctorow. Includes such choice turns of phrase as:
Basically, Congress only passes laws that can be sandwiched into 1,000-page must-pass bills and most of the good stuff that gets through only does so because some bought-and-paid-for Congressjerks are too busy complaining about “woke librarians” to read the bills before they come up for a vote.
…
As Congress descends further into self-parody, the temptation to treat the federal government as damage and route around it only mounts.
…
… there are so many would-be supervillains who just can’t stop themselves from monologing, and worse, putting it in writing.
Roald Dahl Can Never Be Made Nice (The Atlantic / Helen Lewis)
In Order to Keep Our Editorial Page Completely Balanced, We Are Hiring More Dipshits (McSweeney’s / Mike Skerrett) “We believe that the truth lies in the middle. The exact mathematical middle. This holds true no matter how far right ‘the right’ actually is. You know all those things that John McCain said in 2008? Sorry, liberals: that’s left-wing now.”
AI-generated fiction submissions are inundating science fiction magazines. Some 35% of the stories submitted to Clarkesworld monthly are AI-generated. (Boing Boing / Thom Dunn)