Microsoft confirms it found a way to make Crocs even uglier – with Windows XP and Clippy

I discovered Crocs a few weeks ago and I love them and want to wear them 24x7 and be buried in them when I die. They are very fashionable and I look great in them.

Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark:

If you were expecting Triumph of the Will, you were disappointed because what you got instead was fat, disoriented Elvis stumbling through his set. Except that it wasn’t funny. It was dangerous.

I promise you that the flag officers in attendance were more alarmed than amused. And you should be, too.

1. “The Enemy from Within”

President Trump did not have many bad things to say about America’s foreign adversaries. He spoke about Vladimir Putin in largely neutral terms (only saying he was “disappointed” in him) and barely mentioned China.

He did, however, speak with great moral clarity about certain classes of Americans whom he views as a grave threat:

• The American left: “They’re really bad. They’re bad people.” Again, he’s talking about Americans here.

• His own domestic political opponents: “They’re vicious people that we have to fight, just like you have to fight vicious people. Mine are a different kind of vicious.”

• American journalists: “sleazebags.”

• Residents of American inner cities: “animals.”

I fit three out of four of those categories. I also support LGBTQ rights and DEI, which Trump and his supporters have declared war on.

“I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.”
— General William Tecumseh Sherman

They have declared war on 1/3 to 1/2 of the American population: Three of our largest cities plus San Francisco, the residents of America’s inner cities in particular, LGBTQ people, women, nonwhite people, the American Left and all Trump’s political opponents.

He’s 100% hero, lives by the Scout oath (trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent¹), loves his fellow humans and is never even tempted by evil.

I’ve never liked Batman, because he seems to me to be on the edge of being a supervillain himself. On the other hand, a friend who is a deep comics fan once said I was doing Batman a disservice. Batman, he said, has all those qualities I love in Superman, but Batman is in a bad mood about it. Superman loves humanity because of our capacity for good, while Batman sees the capacity for good and is angry that so many of us choose evil.

Looking at online reviews of this year’s “Superman” movie, I’m surprised that many people say they’d never seen a good Superman movie before, or that this was the first good Superman movie they’d seen. I guess the Christopher Reeve Superman is lost to the mists of prehistory.

Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day:

The MAGA movement needs violence and intimidation to function, both online and off. Without its central bundle of grievances and universe of enemies — LGBT people, people of color, leftists, Democrats — Trump’s supporters might notice that he’s ransacking the country’s institutions and making their lives worse. So they can’t acknowledge that a decade inside the pressure cooker of political violence has turned Trump supporters in spree shooters in waiting.

And the U.S. will have to weather that storm under the most inept and corrupt national government we’ve known.

How should I prepare for that? I have no answers, and have been continuing along as we always have been.

I hope that living in California will provide protection.

This is something that keeps me awake staring wide-eyed at the ceiling at 4 am in the dark.

Previously

Here’s something I saw walking the dog, giving a Lincoln Lawyer vibe. I have not seen this car or license plate before. It was parked about a half-dozen houses away from us on our street.

Lately when I think of going to the movies I think of driving across town, parking and paying money to sit in a dark room and watch things on a screen. I have screens at home.

Hamilton Nolan: “The ‘imperial boomerang’ is the concept that all of the methods of oppression that a mighty nation visits upon its far-flung imperial subjects will one day be turned back upon its own population. And here we are.”

“Workslop: Bad study but an excellent word”, by David Gerard at Pivot To AI:

The word of the day is: “workslop.” There’s a new article in Harvard Business Review: “AI-Generated ‘Workslop’ Is Destroying Productivity.” [HBR]

Workslop is when a coworker sends you some obvious AI-generated trash and you have to spend your time redoing the whole thing. They save time by wasting your time:

Workslop is a result of top-down AI mandates, Gerard says. However, the report identifying the trend is an “unlabeled advertising feature” for enterprise AI, not a real study. The report blames workers, but bad management is the real culprit.

Cory Doctorow: " … a third of the stock market is tied up in seven AI companies that have no way to become profitable and … this is a bubble that’s going to burst and take the whole economy with it…. "

I firmly believe the (economic) AI apocalypse is coming. These companies are not profitable. They can’t be profitable. They keep the lights on by soaking up hundreds of billions of dollars in other people’s money and then lighting it on fire. Eventually those other people are going to want to see a return on their investment, and when they don’t get it, they will halt the flow of billions of dollars. Anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops.

Cory’s advice to Cornell University, during a visit to lecture there:

I told them that they should be planning to absorb the productive residue that will be left behind after the bubble bursts:

https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Plan for a future where you can buy GPUs for ten cents on the dollar, where there’s a buyer’s market for hiring skilled applied statisticians, and where there’s a ton of extremely promising open source models that have barely been optimized and have vast potential for improvement.

There’s plenty of useful things you can do with AI. But AI is (as Princeton’s Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, authors of AI Snake Oil put it), a normal technology:

https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology

That doesn’t mean “nothing to see here, move on.” It means that AI isn’t the bow-wave of “impending superintelligence.” Nor is it going to deliver “humanlike intelligence.”

It’s a grab-bag of useful (sometimes very useful) tools that can sometimes make workers' lives better, when workers get to decide how and when they’re used.

That’s what a big business should do. But what about individuals? That’s something I’ve been thinking about, and getting nowhere.

People today aren’t more productive than they were in 1975, despite advances in computers and the Internet.

I spent a couple of hours this weekend processing and closing browser tabs.

I’m sure these two things are completely unrelated.

‘We’re insanely hubristic’: how The Rest Is History became the world’s biggest history podcast. “If you found history boring at school, this podcast will have you intently listening to 20 hours on the French Revolution – and that’s before even getting to the Terror.” Can confirm. I love this podcast.

Small Acts of Good, US as Third World Country, and How Culture Changes. By Chris Arnade. American decline is much on my mind lately. I take it very personally – I am not built to do well in a failed nation. Arnade, like me, is cautiously optimistic, seeing our current rapid decline as reversible.