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📷 Here’s something I saw in San Francisco in 2018.

A Chinatown, San Francisco streetscape, with an old-fashioned commercial building with Chinese signage in the foreground, and the Transamerica Pyramid skyscraper in the background.

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog.

Orange vintage Volkswagen Beetle, viewed side-on, nicely centered in the photo, parked in front of and between two suburban houses.

I can envision myself starting to learn Photoshop soon. I look at this photo and think how much it could be improved if we just removed that darn green trash bin.

Lately, it feels like I have to tie myself up in a pretzel to make Obsidian do what I need and want it to do. Today, I’m experimenting with going back to DevonThink. If I get unhappy with that, maybe I’ll just use documents in the Finder.

I rarely use Venmo, and when I do I’m always startled by its news feed. It seems like such a bad idea to broadcast records of payments. I’m not particularly concerned about privacy here—it just seems like a lot of noise. Why on Earth did someone think this was interesting information?

For the past two nights, I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to induce lucid dreaming

This started with my listening to a podcast episode about lucid dreaming on Inner Cosmos, hosted by Stanford University neuroscientist David Eagleman, with guest Jonathan Berent. I can’t find out much about Berent’s background; according to this website, he’s an “entrepreneur” and “lucid dream expert,” and he’s selling an app. Which, tbh, all sounds kind of sketchy. But he seemed reasonable in the interview, and I respect Eagleman so onward.

The podcast advises three techniques to induce lucid dreaming:

Keep a dream journal. Look for common factors in your dreams that can indicate you are dreaming. Berent says he grew up in Indiana, and though he now lives elsewhere, most of his dreams occur in Indiana. So when he finds himself doing something in Indiana, he assumes he’s dreaming. (Must be awkward on family visits.)

I forgot the second thing. Maybe review the dream journal?

Test yourself throughout the day to determine whether you are dreaming. Tap your teeth. Flick a lightswitch on and off. Push one finger against the palm of your other hand. Look at a clock or some text, then look away, and instantly look back.

We know what happens with those things in wakefulness; the behavior will be unexpected and weird in a dream. For example, your finger might push through your palm. The clock or text might change drastically when you look back at it. Your teeth might float away. If any of these things happen, you’ll know you’re dreaming.

I’ve been doing the reality testing several times a day; I set an alarm on my phone to remind me.

I haven’t done well at dream journaling. Ideally, you should wake yourself up after 5-6 hours and journal at that moment. But I have chronic insomnia—difficulty returning to sleep after waking up in the middle of the night, sometimes three or four nights a week—and so I do not want to mess around if I’m getting a good night’s sleep. I did wake up once last night and got out of bed (for the normal reason one awakens and leaves bed—more common in middle-aged prostate-havers and pregnant people) and brought my phone with me and dictated a recap of my most recent dream. I haven’t listened to that recording; it may just be a minute of mumbling, a stream of water hitting water, followed by a toilet flushing.

I woke up many times in the night and was aware of having many dreams, but I could not tell you details of any of them—other than the one I journaled. I remember that one with a fair amount of detail.

From my listening to Eagleman’s podcasts and other reading about sleep, my failure to remember dreams is unsurprising. When we sleep, the part of our brains that records working memories—short-term memory—is switched off. Without recording short-term memory, nothing can get saved to long-term memory. Dreams are forgotten within seconds of awakening.

I said earlier that Berent sounded reasonable on the podcast, and that’s only 99% true. When Eagleman talked about “reality” and “dreaming,” Berent talked about “consensus reality” and “dream reality”—that they’re both equal somehow. This is bullshit. There is only one reality. Anybody who’s ever kicked a coffee table while barefoot knows that.

📷 Here’s something I saw while walking the dog.

Photographer is standing on the top of a hill, with yellow flowers in the foreground and a commercial street in the background. In the far distance is a tall palm tree and small mountain.

No, I will not take your customer satisfaction survey. Not now, not ever.

I’m doing more writing for Silverlinings and the upcoming Fierce Network site and looking for news, feature and trend ideas related to cloud infrastructure and platform, networking and AI for the enterprise. Hit me with your pitches and ideas at mitch@mitchwagner.com.

Do you do lucid dreaming? If so, do you find it beneficial? Harmful?

Whenever I talk with someone with a New York/Jewish accent, I start reflecting it back to them. One minute I’m just a regular middle American dude, and the next minute I’m Tevye from “Fiddler on the Roof.”

Here's why AI search engines really can't kill Google

AI search tools are improving but they don’t match how we use search. [David Pierce / theverge.com]

Search can be divided into three types, says Pierce: People primarily use search just to find websites.

… my favorite fact of all: … a vast number of people every year go to Google and type “google” into the search box.

People also use search for specific facts, such as who won last night’s big game.

And the third type is the “exploration query.”

These are questions that don’t have a single answer, that are instead the beginning of a learning process. On the most popular list, things like “how to tie a tie,” “why were chainsaws invented,” and “what is tiktok” count as explorational queries. If you ever Googled the name of a musician you just heard about, or have looked up things like “stuff to do in Helena Montana” or “NASA history,” you’re exploring.

I needed to get my glasses repaired, but I couldn’t remember what you call the person who does that. I came up with “optimist.”

📷 Good morning! Here’s something I see on my walk every day.

She says she has been a good dog and would like a treat now.

Black buff-colored dog with a long nose, looking at the camera from the end of a leash. The dog is wearing a safety-yellow harness. Black buff-colored dog with a long nose, looking away from the camera and making a squinty face. The dog is wearing a safety-yellow harness. Black buff-colored dog with a long nose, coming in to boop the camera.

Overheard: “My teacher told me years ago not to worry about spelling because in the future there will be autocorrect. And for that I am eternally grapefruit.”

Death and typos: Writer/musician David Safran describes his six strange years screening online obituary comments. His job was overwhelming and rich in errors. And it drove home one message: we’re always on the clock. [theguardian.com]

Elon Musk has fully bought into the ‘great replacement.’ Musk thinks Democrats are using immigration to bolster a favorable voting demographic. But that’s not how immigration works. [theverge.com] — It is, at most, a short step from “great replacement” to “The Jews will not replace us.”

Margaret Atwood on Stephen King’s “Carrie,” which turns 50 and is still relevant today. Like much of King, it’s about the white underlcass in America. [nytimes.com]

First impressions of my new MacBook Air, after using it just a few minutes

  • Holy cow, this thing is fast compared with my 2018 MacBook Pro. I did a thing where I open 30+ tabs simultaneously. Took a couple of minutes on the MBP, but is virtually instantaneous on the MBA.
  • Migration Assistant seems to have worked flawlessly. I had to authenticate and give permission for a few things, but that only took about a minute.
  • Unexpected benefit: With a 15" built-in display, I now have a usable second display for my desk. My previous 13" display wasn’t usable when the MBP was on my desktop attached to the external Cinema Display, keyboard and trackball, except under limited circumstances. I hadn’t considered that when I decided on 15".
  • Hmmm… I hope this thing fits into my favorite computer bag. If not—MOAR shopping!
  • I can switch back to Safari from Vivaldi now, but I don’t know if I will. I’ve come to like Vivaldi.

Before upgrading to my new MacBook Air, I am being responsible, updating the operating systems and making sure my backups are all up-to-date. But really I just want to hold-my-beer this bitch and let Migration Assistant rip.

My new MacBook Air is here!

My current machine is a 2018 MacBook Pro. It works fine,although of course it’s slow. But I have to reboot several times a week—twice in one morning last week—and this suggests to me that it’s going to die on me at any moment and leave me possibly unable to meet deadlines. Better to arrange the transition on a schedule more under my control. So I pulled the trigger on an upgrade last week.

The old Mac has just 8 GB of memory and a 13" screen. The new machine is 15"/24GB/2TB. I’m looking forward to having that bigger screen to spread out on when I take the MB off my desk and use it elsewhere.

But now I’m on deadline and don’t even have time to open the box!

Excellent post from Cory about how widespread corruption in public institutions leads to anti-vax, MAGA and other conspiracy theories.

“Conspiratorialism and the epistemological crisis: We may not know what’s in the box, but we can tell if it’s been damaged in transit.” pluralistic.net/2024/03/2…

The revolving door of senior personnel between regulatory agencies and the companies they’re supposed to regulate means that the agencies don’t do their jobs.

The FAA has been overlooking problems with Boeing planes for years and we’re seeing the damage in headlines now.

Likewise, while vaccines are safe and powerful enablers of public health, Big Pharma lied for decades about the safety and efficacy of opiods, so it’s reasonable for people to disbelieve everything Big Pharma says.

Few of us are qualified to judge the safety of vaccines, medications, buildings and airplanes, but we can look at the regulatory process and see if it’s sound. And that process is broken. Corrupt.

Facebook and TikTok aren’t to blame here, the fault lies in the failure of government.

If the Biden Administration has been tackling this problem, I’m not aware of it. That doesn’t mean I support Biden’s re-election less, because Biden’s done a lot of good and in areas where Biden has failed, Trump would be a thousand times worse.

Roman Mars Describes Santa Fe As It Is [99percentinvisible.org] — A podcast tour of Santa Fe. Beautiful city. We visited a few years ago and loved it. Love that New Mexican food.

Photos of the original McDonald’s in in Illinois, which opened in 1955, and has been preserved as a museum, showing what it was like to dine there back then. [businessinsider.com]

The “Reitoff principle”: Why you should add “nothing” to your work-life schedule. [bigthink.com] — Taking time to do nothing, and letting your mind wander, is important to productivity and living a good life.

The Reitoff principle is the idea that we should grant ourselves permission to write off a day and intentionally step away from achieving anything.

William Shatner is 93

Kevin Mims makes the case that Shatner is a superb actor, and his much-parodied over-the-top style was due to a couple of factors: TVs at the time had small screens and often lousy picture and audio quality; performances had to be big because the medium was small. Also, Kirk and Spock were a duo; Kirk had to be loud to offset Spock’s stillness.

[quillette.com]:

While a lot of TV actors were trying to mimic the mush-mouthed vocal delivery of big-screen movie stars like Marlon Brando or James Dean, Shatner went in the opposite direction. He enunciated his words carefully and broke his sentences into bite-sized pieces, making each clause a separate unit of delivery. He would speed up his cadence at times, and then bring it to a near halt. Shatner’s unique speaking style has been parodied countless times. Among living actors, probably only Christopher Walken’s line delivery has generated more parodies.

Also:

It isn’t just a coincidence that names like Richard Matheson, Harlan Ellison, and Rod Serling crop up frequently in discussions of Shatner’s career. Academics frequently celebrate the work of various American literary schools–the American ex-pats of the so-called Lost Generation, the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, the Beats–but few literary salons have influenced American popular culture as profoundly as the Southern California fantasists who were all brought together by Rod Serling for his Twilight Zone series and later worked on other fantasy and sci-fi shows, including Star Trek.

Go read some Vernor Vinge

Noah Smith [noahpinion.blog]:

Vinge was perhaps the most technologically visionary sci-fi writer of the past 50 years — a worthy successor to H.G. Wells and Isaac Asimov. And yet in some ways he excelled even those august predecessors. Vinge imbues his characters with an emotional depth that very few sci-fi authors can match, and his plots are consistently complex and engaging. He’s the rare writer who really could do it all.

In the early part of his career, Vinge was a staunch libertarian, but over time he came to see that government is essential to keeping society functioning and preserving freedom.

My encounters with Vernor Vinge

I used to enjoy doing panels at science fiction conventions. Fear of public speaking is supposedly the most common fear, but not for me. I’m the opposite. I love public speaking, though I rarely get opportunities. So, for a few years, I leveraged my meager cred as a tech reporter to get myself put on panels at science fiction conventions. Those panels often focused on AI, and Vernor Vinge was often a speaker at those, too.

One panel turned out to be just me and him. It was the last panel of the day on the last day of the con, and yet the room was packed. “All these people here to see me, I said. “Poor Vernor. Gosh, I hope he doesn’t feel bad.” jkjkjk They were there to see him. We sensibly turned it into a Q&A with Vernor, with me asking a lot of questions and trying to minimize my contributing my own opinions. Which is hard for me, because I have so many opinions and would feel selfish if I did not share them promiscuously.

I did another panel with about a half-dozen people, including Vernor, David Brin, a renowned physicist who has done groundbreaking research into AI, and me. Again, I realized that the people in the room were not there to see me. How can I contribute? I said to myself. And I answered myself: A panel is a show. Every show needs a villain. So when it was my turn to present, I took my iPhone out of my pocket, held it up for the audience to see, and said, “This is my iPhone. It doesn’t know who I am when my finger is wet. You’re telling me this thing is going to achieve superintelligence in a few years? Pfui. The Singularity is bullshit.”

Vernor, who was sitting next to me, turned to me and his face lit up. He was delighted.

In the 2000s and early 2010s, I attended one or two SF conventions per year and encountered Vernor walking the floors of the dealer room, checking out what was for sale while I did the same. We’d stop and chat for 15-30 minutes. I always enjoyed our conversations, and I think he did, too—it would have been easy enough to escape if he did not. I wish I’d taken the opportunity to get to know him better.

Researchers analyzed digital archives of an obscure document thought to have been written by Shakespeare’s father and learned that it was actually written by the Bard’s sister. [phys.org]

Shakespeare had a sister?

Overheard: “As you age, it’s ridiculous how fast bird-watching creeps up on you. You spend your whole life being 100% indifferent to birds, and then one day you’re like “’is that a yellow-rumped warbler’”

Wind project in San Diego’s backcountry runs into turbulence [sandiegouniontribune.com] — Residents oppose construction of 60 wind turbines that would stand hundreds of feet high.

California regulators want to protect indoor workers from oppressive heat. Politicians are blocking the protections. This is part of a nationwide trend. [kpbs.org]

For seniors, medical care can be a slog, but there are ways to rein it in. [washingtonpost.com] — Scheduling appointments, going to and from and managing treatments takes a lot of time.

Fresno High School in California limits kids to two seven-minute bathroom breaks per day and tracks student bathroom breaks with apps. [govtech.com] — We’ve streamlined the school-to-prison pipeline by turning schools into prisons.

“Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.”—Dorothy Parker

I tried using the AirPods Pro as sleep earbuds. That didn’t work.

It started off well. I put the AirPods in my ears and tried lying down in bed to see how it felt. I’m a side-sleeper. I laid on my left side. Felt good. Right side. Felt good. Used the Dark Noise app to play background noise into the AirPods. Noise cancellation worked well enough; it muffled but did not stop sound in the room.

Then the trouble started.

The AirPods Pro have a safety mechanism to prevent you from pushing them too far into your ear. As I laid in bed on my side, the weight of my head began pushing the AirPods Pro deeper. They started to beep. That woke me up—but not fully awake. Just awake enough to move my head a bit so the beeping stopped.

This seemed to repeat dozens of times until I woke up enough to get the AirPods out of my ear. I couldn’t get back to sleep so I sat up for a bit until I got tired enough and went back to bed.

If you’re a back-sleeper or belly-sleeper, sleeping with the AirPods Pro will probably work well for you.

Have We Reached Peak AI?

Edward Zitron’s apocalyptic vision [wheresyoured.at]:

Every bit of excitement for this technology is based on the idea what it might do, which quickly becomes conflated with what it _could_do, allowing Altman – who is far more a marketing person than an engineer – to sell the dream of OpenAI based off of the least-specific promises since Mark Zuckerberg said we’d live in our Oculus headsets.

…

I believe that artificial intelligence has three quarters to prove itself before the apocalypse comes, and when it does, it will be that much worse, savaging the revenues of the biggest companies in tech. Once usage drops, so will the remarkable amounts of revenue that have flowed into big tech, and so will acres of data centers sit unused, the cloud equivalent of the massive overhiring we saw in post-lockdown Silicon Valley.

I fear that the result could be a far worse year for the tech industry than we saw in 2023, one where the majority of the pain hits workers rather than the ghouls who inflated this perilous bubble.

RIP Vernor Vinge

Vernor Vinge, father of the tech singularity, has died at age 79 [arstechnica.com]

I had an opportunity to talk with him several times, and always enjoyed our conversations. He was down-to-earth and liked hearing contradictory ideas, which I, as a singularity/AGI skeptic, was able to easily provide. He liked a good laugh.

Vinge invented the idea of the Singularity, though Ray Kurzweil gets credit, and the idea has long antecedents in occult beliefs. He wrote many good novels and stories, and at least one brilliant novel, “A Deepness in the Sky.” His 1981 novella “True Names” pioneered the concepts of cyberspace and virtual reality, and anticipated the 2020s practice of “doxxing.”

He was local to San Diego, and although I only ever saw him at cons, I sometimes thought about just ringing him up and seeing if he might like to get a cup of coffee.

It’s taken her 11 years, but Minnie now has me trained to let her back in the house from outside in the yard.

ME: “You are REALLY into grabbing my junk.”
HIM: “Sir, I am a urologist.”

I just activated the new, beta ActivityPub integration for my Threads account. We’ll see where this goes. I’m reluctant to commit too much to Threads because of Facebook’s deep history of making its products wonderful at first and then gradually enshittifying them over time.

Just Out There Running For Prez As A Straight Up Mob Boss [talkingpointsmemo.com] — “Trump is a sending a powerful signal that as long as you stay loyal and don’t cross him, even if it means serving jail time, you will be protected. Your loyalty counts, it’s noticed, and it’s rewarded.”

Tapping around in the Lose It app yesterday, I learned that I’ve been using the app since 2009. I weighed 271 pounds then and today I weigh 165. Lose It has been a big help to me in losing weight, keeping it off, getting healthy and staying healthy. [loseit.com]

I’ve been futzing with saved sessions, tab stacks and tab groups in the Vivaldi browser. Tab stacks seem to be better than tab groups because they’re easier to create and they stay visible. Sessions seem to be the same as bookmarks but bookmarks are for old people so let’s give them a new name.

I tried the API version of ChatGPT, which is supposedly more flexible and less expensive, but it’s tempermental. The last straw was its failure to genetate an image with an aspect ratio of 7:4. So it’s back to the $20/mo. pro plan on the web.

US DoJ v Apple

Is Apple a monopoly? Does it engage in illegal anticompetitive behavior? Perhaps. But I’d rather see the Justice Department go after the healthcare monopolies that are literally killing people.

Tim Cook gave the wrong answer when he said that guy’s Mom should buy an iPhone. Cook should have pointed out that the guy and his Mom could use Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram DMs, Signal, Telegram or a bunch of other options to share videos between the iPhone and iPad.

Green bubbles

Only idiots or children think “green bubbles” make somebody else inferior. Apple is not responsible for the existence of idiots and children.

We’re an Apple-only household. Between us, Julie and I have three Macs (soon to be four—I have a MacBook Air on order), four iPhones (only two in use) and three iPads, as well as various accessories. We are loyal Mac customers. And do you know what I say to Android, Windows and Linux users? I might say, “Good morning,” or “nice weather” or “Have you seen Dune 2?” Or I might ask them whether they like their devices, because I’m interested in that kind of thing. I don’t work for Apple marketing, I don’t think people who use other platforms are inferior. I assume they are making the right choices for them.

Here’s a moderation tip I observe on the GEnie online service more than 30 years ago

If you have people on your service who like to argue and use insulting language, give them a place where that’s OK. Many of these arguers and insulters will prove perfectly civil outside that little playground.

I recently stumbled across a subreddit called /r/stupidpol which describes itself as a “Subreddit focused on critiquing capitalism and identity politics from a Marxist perspective.” A better desription would be “liberals are stupid.” I was called “Blue MAGA” and an “idiot.” I was not angry; I understood the rules of that place and modified my behavior accordingly.

That said, Redditors can be a rough crowd, and if you’re going to post or comment there, you need to be ready to be insulted.

Reddit's I.P.O. Is a Content Moderation Success Story

Kevin Roose/nytimes.com:

The site’s journey from toxic cesspool to trusted news source illustrates the business value of keeping bad actors at bay.

Elon Musk and other MAGA wingnuts decry moderation as censorship, but:

  • Only Nazis and trolls want to be on a platform with Nazis and trolls. Fortunately there still aren’t a lot of Nazis out there—not enough to sustain a big business. I don’t like being on platforms with political scolds; that’s true even when the scolds agree with my politics.
  • Even Nazis and trolls don’t want to be on a platform that’s only Nazis and trolls.
  • Moderation is arguably the business that social media platforms sell. They’re selling access to a pleasant place for people to visit. (This observation is not original to me, or, I think to Roose—at least it’s not a point he’s making in this article.)

That said, Reddit is not a business success. It’s 15 years old and still hasn’t made a profit.

And since the summer crackdown, Reddit’s volunteer-led forums are seeming exploitative. Reddit no longer seems to be operating in good faith—if it ever was.

Building an “online local chronicle:” a website that would list facts and news about a location, such as a city or town, in chronological order, as a complement to news sites and Wikipedia [doc.searls.com]

Here’s something I saw on a 2017 business trip to San Francisco: The retro-futuristic lobby of the Hyatt Regency San Francisco.

The hotel was a primary location for two movies I loved: Mel Brooks’s “High Anxiety” and “Time After Time,” where Malcolm McDowell plays a time-traveling H.G. Wells.

I have no doubt that Adam Mosseri and his team are talented, hard-working and sincere about making Threads a great citizen of the fediverse. And I have little doubt that they will change those intentions or be replaced when Threads hits the final stages of the “embrace, extend, extinguish” cycle.

Filipino police freed hundreds of slaves toiling in a romance scam operation [theregister.com] — One worker, who tipped off police, was “promised a job as a chef. Police said he bore signs of torture in the form of electrocution marks.”

Thomas Friedman: What Schumer and Biden Got Right About Netanyahu [nytimes.com] — Israel needs a plan for peaceful coexistence with Palestinians after the war, and Netanyahu has nothing to offer.

A conversation with Stephanie ‘Snow’ Carruthers, Chief People Hacker at IBM X-Force Red [securityweek.com]

Her partner planned to attend DEFCON. She went with him, more for Vegas than DEFCON. But after falling asleep in a reverse engineering malware presentation (“It went completely over my head,” she explained) she was encouraged to go and find something of more interest. She did, and found a lock-picking village. Within a couple of hours, she had picked her first lock.

via

17 percent of Americans report experiencing long Covid. That is an extraordinarily high number of sick people. [usnews.com]

“How Are You? Just Give Me Your Stock Answer. No, really. I want to know your stock answer." [ironicsans.beehiiv.com] — Me: “I’m good. You?” Or, if the other person asks first, I just say, “I’m good.” Except often I forget and say, “I’m good, you?” leading to an infinite “How are you” loop.

My editor won’t sent me to to KubeCon in Paris, France. She says if KubeCon comes to Paris, Texas, she’ll talk about it.

It’s sunny and clear and I just got a weather alert to expect severe thunderstorms in 40 minutes. WTF?

The air does smell ozoney, though.

I’m trying to be more mindful about adding articles to my read-it-later list. It becomes just another to-do list to add stress to my brain. I want to stop adding “that might be interesting” articles to the list. But that’s hard to do because those articles, well, might be interesting.

My latest on Silverlinings: Oracle climbs to the hyperscaler A-list — Oracle’s growth and multi-cloud strategy elevates it to the big leagues. Its deeper partnership with Microsoft will burnish the Crimson Cloud Conglomerate’s shine.

Read to the end for a failed comparison to “Goodfellas.”

I tried steel-cut oats for my morning oatmeal and the texture was like tiny styrofoam pellets. Not recommended.

Something I saw while walking the dog.

This would have been a fantastic photo if not for that frickin green blurry stick photobombing the right side.

LED light bulbs have gotten great—inexpensive, energy-efficient, bright and reliable.

Kevin Drum: We are living in a golden age of light bulbs. [jabberwocking.com]

Wirecutter: It doesn’t matter if you turn them off when you leave the room. The energy usage and financial cost is trivial. [nytimes.com]

Via Jason, who says: “LED light bulbs are like every conservative outrage— once the fight against them is won, we all move on and just live in a better world.” [json.blog]