Mitch's Blog

I am reading John Irving now and enjoying his habit of italicizing keywords in dialogue. Helps me to hear the dialogue as I read it.

Today I learned that Arnold Schwarzenegger has a son named Patrick, who is a successful actor in his own right. And I also learned what a “glow-up” is, and used it in a headline.

One Million Checkboxes

My colleague Diana Goovaerts has a juicy exclusive:AWS is challenging NVIDIA with a 1,000+-watt Trainium chip that will go head-to with Nvidia’s Blackwell GPU, part of an overall push to make AWS data centers ready for the next wave of GenAI demand. Nice work, Diana!

“One would think that a story like this would be out of 1890, not 2024.” Schools on the Fort Apache reservation expel students for taking part in Native American religious ceremonies that the schools claim are satanic. [The Guardian]

I thought we as a nation were done with this kind of white supremacist bullshit, but apparently not. There’s a direct line from 19th Century “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” evangelism to today.

I had 2.7 pounds of fresh fruit, raw vegetables and cottage cheese for lunch today, which is tasty and healthy, but now I’m freezing my fingers and toes off so I have closed the a/c vents in my home office and am opening all the windows to let in the lovely 83-degree summer air.

Surfed tracks your entire surfing history. You can tag individual URLs and add them to favorites, so it functions as a bookmark manager too.

Nicely done, but I don’t know whether I will stick with Surfed. I just don’t seem to have use for it.

Paul Lynde, Charles Nelson Reilly and Rip Taylor “get a cursory mention in a new documentary about queer stand-up, but they were groundbreaking.”

… these Stonewall-generation funnymen with dippy but dark-edged sensibilities … were shaped by decades of self-hatred and fear the likes of which a 20-year-old today cannot fathom.

Michael Chabon on Threads:

If you grew up with Lidsville, Hollywood Squares, Bewitched, Match Game, read this and think about what you knew & did not know about Lynde, Reilly, & Taylor, & how you knew what you knew without anyone saying anything, and how much was lost because no one said anything.

… there is a much bigger opportunity for the fediverse by focusing on long-form content and forums, than on recreating a microblogging Twitter-like experience. Selling the same product that people already know, but now with less of their social graph, is always going to be an incredible hard task. Exploring how new products can be build that stimulate thoughtful conversation is a much more interesting direction to me.

— Laurens Hofs on Last Week in the Fediverse

Yes to this. So far, Mastodon and Bluesky have been Twitter, but without most of the people you followed on Twitter. Threads is trying to become Twitter like you used to know it, but deemphasizing news and politics and bigger. X is Twitter with more Nazis and porn. Tumblr is Tumblr, and seems to have lost interest in joining the fediverse. Facebook is Facebook, and Meta seems to have lost interest in it.

If the fediverse is going to catch on, it needs to become something more than recapitulating the past. I don’t know whether long-form content and forums are the answer, but they’re at least different than Twitter-that-was.

I personally chafe at the 300-character limit of Bluesky and the micro.blog timeline, and the 500-character limit of Mastodon. My posts are often untitled and longer than 500 characters and I dislike the way they get arbitrarily lopped in the middle on microblogging platforms.

I feel like we’re halfway to a new, healthier and more open form of social media (something like Dave Winer’s vision of textcasting) and I want us to move faster. Sometimes it seems like we’re stalled.

Greg Miller, a 37-year-old software engineer in Astoria, Queens, is walking every street in every borough of New York City—8,000 miles. He started in the pandemic and has already done 2,400 miles. He is part of a subreddit of like-minded perambulators: /r/EveryBlockNYC

I walk 3.2 miles daily, almost always with the dog, and on weekends I often use the Footpath app to plot a fresh course through nearby streets, favoring streets we haven’t been on before. Miller is orders of magnitude more methodical than I am.