Jarrod Blundy loves his Meta smart glasses for rock climbing and running
I’ve been using the Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses for about a month now, and I’m finding even more reasons to wear them all the time.
If Apple came out with something like this that took prescription lenses and cost under, say, $1,500, I’d be tempted. If those glasses were equipped with a Siri version that had GPT-4’s excellent language recognition, I’d be even MORE tempted. If those glasses included facial recognition, I’d be in love—I am moderately faceblind and I hate that I go around not remembering people’s names.
The Sci-Fi Writer Who Invented Conspiracy Theory
Analee Newitz: Paul Linebarger was a US Army intelligence officer who pioneered psyops and wrote science fiction under the pseudonym “Cordwainer Smith.” His stories read today like Qanon conspiracy theories. [theatlantic.com]
Linebarger, who died of a heart attack in 1966 at age 53, could not have predicted that tropes from his sci-fi stories about mind control and techno-authoritarianism would shape 21st-century American political rhetoric. But the persistence of his ideas is far from accidental, because Linebarger wasn’t just a writer and soldier. He was an anti-communist intelligence operative who helped define U.S. psychological operations, or psyops, during World War II and the Cold War. His essential insight was that the most effective psychological warfare is storytelling. Linebarger saw psyops as an emotionally intense, persuasive form of fiction–and, to him, no genre engaged people’s imagination better than science fiction.
Newitz’s latest book is Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.
📷Something I saw while I was walking the dog
77 Types of Notes to Keep in #Obsidian [amerpie.lol] Also: 10 Lesser Known But Super Useful Obsidian Plugins [amerpie.lol]
Inner Cosmos with Stanford University neuroscientist David Eagleman: Is AI truly intelligent? How would we know if it got there? [eagleman.com]
Alt Text Hall of Fame [alttexthalloffame.org] — Honoring the excellent use of descriptive text on images for the benefit of the blind and vision impaired.
I’ve been trying to do more of that. AI is a big help.
The Comfortable Problem of Mid TV [nytimes.com] — We are entering a golden age for mediocre television, says critic James Poniewozik.
Mid is … what you get when you raise TV’s production values and lower its ambitions. It reminds you a little of something you once liked a lot…. It is prestige TV that you can fold laundry to.