Mitch's Blog logo Mitch's Blog

I enjoy delicious schadenfreude watching Trump and his MAGA clowns set their house on fire, notwithstanding that we’re all in the house with them and the doors are locked.

While walking the dog this morning I spontaneously thought of the ending to last night’s episode of “Rooster” and I burst out laughing out loud.

When I make a doctor’s appointment, the doctor sends a notification asking me to arrive ten minutes early. That’s not how appointments work.

This is possibly the least annoying thing in my life that is, nonetheless, still annoying.

“Bikeshedding” is the futile expenditure of time and resources on marginal elements of an important technical decision. It’s based on a hypothetical story about a local planning organization tasked with reviewing plans for a nuclear power plant. They are overwhelmed by the cost and engineering of this advanced technological project, and instead focus on details of the bike shed proposed for plant employees.

Historian C. Northcote Parkinson noted the phenomenon in 1957. “The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum [of money] involved,” Parkinson said.

The idea of bikeshedding became popular in the open source community, which is where I encountered it.

I have been lately overwhelmed by organizing retirement, our estates, finances, decluttering the house and so on. Also, I’ve been dissatisfied with the dental floss I’ve been using. However, I have researched options thoroughly and I believe I’ve arrived at a satisfactory alternative floss.

I was thinking about “The Expanse” the other day, and I abruptly remembered the name of the technology that powered the spaceship engines: The Epstein Drive. That’s unfortunate

A friend shared rumors of poor ratings for Starfleet Academy, undercutting my theory that it was taken off the air because the network had gone anti-woke.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can see where Starfleet Academy might have been doomed by its premise. Young people might consider Trek to be an old people’s show, and say “Pass.” Old people look at a show about teenagers and say, “Pass.”

Plus the show did too much fanservice. I loved Starfleet Academy, but the fanservice coiuld get annoying. An entire episode about the mystery of what happened to Ben Sisko. It was a good episode, but I never was that big a DS9 fan so I did not get so much from it as other fans might have.

Maybe Trek just needs to take a 10-20 year time-out, like Doctor Who did before 2005.

I have been using RSS daily for more than 20 years and I have no clue what the difference is between RSS and a JSON feed, and whether or why I should pick one over the other. This kind of thing is why more people do not use RSS.

I have been thinking for a long time that Mastodon was dying, that fewer and fewer people were posting less and less and that what they were posting was less interesting.

Then yesterday, I followed @lisamelton@mastodon.social. Boy, was I wrong!

Lisa doesn’t post much, but she is a fiend for boosting other peoples posts.

So many interesting posts! So many interesting people to follow!

Mastodon nowadays has a Tumblr vibe. If you want to build your business or brand or get your political message out to the broadest possible audience, you should use YouTube, Twitter, a newsletter, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, LinkedIn and maybe TikTok (though I hear TikTok is fading).

Like Tumblr, Mastodon is just a place to hang out and read fun and maybe informative posts. It has no practical value. I like it.

And unlike Tumblr, Mastodon is not perpetually at risk of money people pulling the plug. As long as a few people are interested in keeping it going, it will keep going.

I just sent this email to @manton: You asked for an update on my experiment using Micro.blog as my sole outpost on the fediverse. It didn’t work for me.

I’ve mentioned before that I’d love it if you’d make Micro.blog into a superset of Mastodon. Today, I’d add Bluesky to that wish. Support boosts/reposts, likes/favorites, quote posts, display names, link previews and the rest. I think based on prior discussions that this is downright antithetical to your philosophy of Micro.blog and I respect and appreciate that — but it frustrates me. I think you ike the peace and quiet of MIcro.blog, whereas I like the noise. On the other hand, It’s been many years since I’ve been the subject of a social media pile-on.

I want one place to post and have it automatically go everywhere. Micro.blog almost gets me there — but then it stops a few feet short of the destination!

I have resumed reading Mastodon and posting directly to it.

I experimented for a while with relying on ActivityPub federation from my blog on Micro.blog and reading Mastodon from the Micro.blog timeline.

But Micro.blog doesn’t support boosts, favorites or display names (it only shows Fediverse addresses). I want to see all those things. So I decided to reactivate my favorite Mastodon account (@mitch@hachyderm.io) and read Mastodon from there.

And then I figured why not reactivate cross-posting from Micro.blog to Mastodon?

Eventually, I suppose I’ll migrate my Micro.blog followers to Mastodon. But I’m in no rush.

I’m still looking for one place to post where everybody who wants to read me can just follow me. In theory, that’s the web, but in reality everybody likes to go off in their own little services — Facebook, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Tumblr, whatever — and not talk to people elsewhere. I have communities on Facebook, Bluesky, Mastodon, my blog and newsletter and Tumblr, and I don’t want to give them up. I have a few automation tools and other tricks for minimizing manual cross-posting, but it also involves too much cutting and pasting. Frustrating!

Science fiction assumes the universe is impersonal and knowable. Fantasy assumes the universe is governed by gods and other supernatural entities and is fundamentally unknowable by humans.

Horror is like fantasy but it also assumes the supernatural entities are cruel.

I’m pretty sure Joe Haldeman gets credit for these distinctions. He noted that by these definitions, the genre closest to science fiction isn’t fantasy — it’s the procedural mystery.

This was more of a big deal in the 20th Century, but even then, the best writers shrugged it off and were happy to play across genres. Poul Anderson said the biggest fantasy is that our understanding of the laws of the universe would be valid in 1,000 years.

I love Star Trek but the science and technology of Trek is less plausible than Game of Thrones. The science and technology of Doctor Who is even more implausible than Trek, but I love Who too.

I prefer science fiction to fantasy but I don’t make a Thing about it, like Some People do (or did — I think perhaps this controversy died in the 90s, and good riddance to it). I literally have friends who are fantasy writers.

From an excellent Bluesky threadlaunched by John Scalzi.

Trump has been doing everything he can to distract the world away from the Epstein files, even starting a war, and Melania just put the spotlight back. That’s interesting.

No email is worth reading that contains the phrase “just wanted to follow up.”

Today I found myself thinking about a science fiction writer named Clifford D. Simak, popular in the 1930s-50s, although he continued publishing until his death in the 80s. He was best known for short stories.

Somebody said that the archetypal Simak story went like this: An old country coot is settin on his front porch, sippin moonshine and whittling a sharp stick. A flying saucer lands in the front yard and a scary purple alien comes out. The alien admires the old coot’s sharp stick and says he’ll give the old coot the design for an interstellar spaceship drive if the old coot will give the alien the stick in return. The old coot makes the trade and to seal the deal they set on the front porch and sip moonshine together.

To feed my RSS habit, I recent I recently switched from Inoreader to Newsblur, which turned out to be well-timed, because Samuel Clay, the developer who runs Newsblur, has had a sudden burst of activity implementing new features. Among these are daily AI-generated summaries that I find to be quite good, if a bit buggy — like news roundups delivered multiple times daily. He’s also implemented natural language filtering, which I haven’t been able to get working.

Fellow RSS addict Jason Snell has more thoughts. Like Jason, I want my newsletters and RSS feeds in the same place, which is a major reason I switched away from Inoreader, because Inoreader’s newsletter support just does not work for me. It’s otherwise a great app — worth trying for heavy RSS users.

Like other Founders, Thomas Jefferson was a contradiction on human rights: He dedicated his life to the United States and individual freedom, and often treated African-Americans with respect, while simultaneously owning 610 people as property. Historian Annette Gordon-Reed collected Jefferson’s own writings about race, both personal and public. “He wrote that all men are born free, but he also enslaved hundreds.”

Here’s some of what I’ve been writing for Fierce Network lately:

Q-Day just got closer — you need to be ready by 2029, Cloudflare says.

Cisco is in the early stages of developing products for space data centers. “I wouldn’t bet against Elon," says CEO Chuck Robbins.

Akamai Technologies’s AI orchestrator puts inference at the network edge, where latency matters.

Telcos are picking up the pace to achieve Level 4 autonomous networks, according to a TM Forum study. Asian telcos are in the lead.

Give me ideas for getting more from my Apple Watch

How do you use your Apple Watch (or other smartwatch)? I use my Apple Watch heavily, but only for a few purposes:

  • Silent notifications. That’s the big one. If I’m not already using my Mac or my phone, the Watch tells me when I have an incoming text message or phone call, and I can decide based on information on the Watch screen whether to answer immediately or dismiss it for later. The Apple Watch is also my silent alarm clock to wake me up in the morning.
  • Workout tracker. I start it when I start walking the dog, turn around at the 1.6 mile mark, and when I hit 3.2 miles I know I’m done.
  • Telling time and setting timers, of course, but I don’t need a smartwatch for that.
  • Notifications of upcoming appointments.
  • I use a brilliant app called Footpath to map turn-by-turn walking directions when I want to walk an unfamiliar route.

I don’t have a lot of interest in fitness trackers or health trackers, other than the simple workout tracker users I just described.

How do you use your Apple Watch (or other smartwatch)? Give me ideas

That moment when you regret buying a frozen food, so you put it in the big chest freezer for future generations of archaeologists to discover.

Today I learned that Gregg Phillips, the FEMA official in charge of responding to fires and floods, says the hand of God suddenly and mysteriously teleported him to a Waffle House in Rome, Georgia.

Phillips was named in December to head FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, overseeing more than 1,000 employees and a budget of $300 million. Before that, he advocated conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, and used violent language in connection with President Biden.

“On Wednesday, Mr. Phillips wrote on Truth Social, President Trump’s social media platform, that the incident took place while he was heavily medicated as part of a cancer treatment. But he also described it as a miracle performed by God,” writes Richard Fausset at the New York Times.

“‘The word “teleportation” was not mine,’ Mr. Phillips wrote. ‘It was used by someone else in the conversation reaching for language to describe something with no easy name. The more accurate biblical terms are “translated” or “transported” — not new ideas for people of faith.’”

Holy shit, Gregg, the word “teleportation” is not the problem here.

“Mr. Phillips’s claims are part of a growing trend among high-profile American conservatives to assert the physical presence of beings from the spiritual realm, or from provinces that are often reserved for science fiction novelists. In 2024, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, said that he was ‘mauled,’ while sleeping, by ‘a demon or by something unseen.’ Former Representative Matt Gaetz recently said that a U.S. Army official had told him about ‘hybrid breeding programs, where captured aliens were breeding with humans to create some hybrid race that could engage in intergalactic communication.’

“Representative Tim Burchett, a Republican from Tennessee, told Newsmax on Wednesday that he had been briefed by government officials about aliens, adding that the country ‘would’ve come unglued, I think, if they would’ve heard all that I’d heard.’”

The Times’s Fausset interviewed people at all three Waffle Houses in Rome, Georgia, and nobody there had ever seen Phillips. If he arrived by teleportation — or any other form of transportation — nobody saw him.

“At the Waffle Houses of Rome this week, Mr. Phillips’s assertion of supernatural travel was met with skepticism. At the branch on U.S. Route 411, close to a Quality Inn and a pest control company, Estelle Mandeville, 27, was finishing up breakfast. Ms. Mandeville, a North Carolinian who was traveling for work, described herself as ‘uncomfortably atheist,’ and noted that she, personally, had come to Rome in a 2018 Kia Niro.

“Grant Sikes, 20, a student at nearby Berry College who hopes to attend an Episcopal seminary one day, said that divine power, from his experience, expressed itself in more subtle ways. He said he felt the presence of God at that moment, as he wrapped up a late, mellow breakfast with his grandfather, Larry Kellogg, 83.”

Grant is normal! Feeling the presence of God when you’re having breakfast with your grandpa is normal!

“Austin Spears, 29, a land surveyor, also found Mr. Phillips’s story to be dubious. But he also acknowledged that all human lives are studded with little mysteries.

“‘I can say I’ve been drunk and ended up in a Waffle House,’ Mr. Spears said. ‘Don’t know how I got there. But I was there.’”

I always suspected that science fiction would come true. But until Trump, I didn’t think it would be “Idiocracy.”

Michael Chabon writes an open letter thanking his seventh grade English teacher, Ms. Goode, who changed his life. Chabon describes how she assigned the class to write a story. Chabon had just read the Sherlock Holmes pastiche “The Seven Percent Solution,” by Nicholas Meyer, and was inspired to write his own Holmes pastiche.

“I decided that Holmes and Watson would take on Professor Moriarty, who had built an ironclad warship to terrorize the seas, and that they would naturally be helped in this mission by Captain Nemo, from ‘Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.’”

That sounds like a pretty damn good idea for a story.

Chabon endears himself to me by namechecking Philip Jose Farmer in a footnote — Farmer is one of a couple of dozen writers who had a prominent reputation in 20th Century science fiction/fantasy and who seem to have been largely forgotten today. Farmer was one of my favorite writers — particularly his Riverworld series — and Chabon reminds me that there are still a few of Farmer’s books that I have not read.

ServiceNow claims a salesman “overachieved” and is not entitled to commissions on more than $27 million sales, according to a lawsuit filed by the salesman.

I’m inclined to withhold judgment on who’s right here. The lawsuit has excessive truthiness.

JD Vance says aliens are ‘demons’ — With war escalating in Iran, gas and grocery prices soaring, and U.S. airports in chaos amid a partial government shutdown, Vance thought it was a good use of his time to appear on a podcast to share his deranged UFO theories and obsession.

Market participation is exhausting

Society is optimized for people who love to haggle and think you should haggle for everything, says Cory Doctorow.

“For these people, cheating is just bargaining by another means. They embrace bizarre concepts like ‘revealed preferences,’ the idea that if you say you’re dissatisfied with a bargain, but you accept it anyway, you have a ‘revealed preference’ for the deal. In other words, if someone sells their kidney to Sheryl Sandberg in order to make the rent, they have a ‘revealed preference’ for having only one kidney – and if they sell their privacy to Sheryl Sandberg in order to stay in touch with the people they love, they have a ‘revealed preference’ for having their data extracted and exploited by Facebook.”

‘I Think That MAGA Is Dying’: Inside the Youth Movement at CPAC. “At a sparsely attended Conservative Political Action Conference, young Republicans were eager to start the post-Trump era.” By Nathan Tyler Pemberton at the New York Times

Maybe MAGA is dying — but will be replaced by something worse. These young Republicans still seem attached to nativism and LGBTQ-phobia, with resurgent anti-Semitism added to the brew.

On The Enshittification of Audre Lorde: “The Master’s Tools” in Tech Discourse

The enshittification story, at its most powerful, describes a process by which platforms that once served users well came to exploit them. But this framing assumes a prior state of genuine service, a golden age of the open internet, that was for many people never particularly golden. The early internet was structured around the assumptions of its architects: predominantly white, male, Western, educated, and abled.

— Tara Tarakiyee.

The Edmund Fitzgerald Teaches Men How to Feel

Michael Sebastian writes about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (the historical event), “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” (the seven-minute folk ballad that somehow climbed to the top of the charts in the disco era), his lifelong and life-changing fascination with the song and ship, and men’s love of shipwrecks.

I am posting this because it’s clever and also because it’s illustrative of the variety of the podcast universe. Indeed, I listen to 90+ minutes of podcasts daily and the only one of these types that I listen to with any regularity is the “recapping the movie but it’s longer than the movie” type. And it’s usually TV shows rather than movies and I quite enjoy those. And that reminds me — I need to find a good “For All Mankind” recap podcast.

And I know that listening to 90+ minutes of podcasts daily makes me sound like a weirdo — but I’m always doing something else while listening to podcasts, mainly walking the dog, and also driving and chores around the house.

‘Shameless in a Good Way’: Rahm Emanuel Is Already Shaking up 2028

He’s a fighter, which I like. He works hard, which I also like. But he was historically unpopular as mayor of Chicago, which is going to be a problem for him. And he’s already being blamed for everything working people and the left don’t like about the Obama administration. As one opponent says: “The guys who wrecked the economy took their million-dollar bonuses. You never tried to claw them back. It was a disastrous recovery, because you cut it short.”

I don’t support any candidate at this stage, but if I did it would be Pritzger.

I’m an unusual Trek fan in that I just wasn’t into the series in the 80s and 90s. I checked out of TNG and Deep Space 9, which most Trek fans today consider classic Trek.

My history of Trek fandom goes TOS -> TAS -> movies -> Discovery, SNW and Starfleet Academy.

I have never clicked with the current animated Treks, though I did love the 70s animated series, which I rewatched with Julie sometime in the past 25 years or so and it was still pretty good.

I read “Soul of a New Machine,” by Tracy Kidder, who died last week, at about the time I switched from daily newspaper journalism to trade journalism in the technology industry, either just before making the career switch or just after. The book was published in 1981 and I made the career switch in 1989.

In my work, I wrote about Data General, the company that is the subject of “Soul of a New Machine.” I’m pretty sure I interviewed Tom West, the main character of the book, though I did not connect him with the book until after the interview, and the interview was straightforward and unmemorable, focused on company strategy or a new product or something like that.

“Soul of a New Machine” was a major contributor to the belief that a career in the technology industry could be more than just a career — it could be a calling, a life mission. And that was true for my career as well, as a trade journalist. I believed it.

With regard to trade journalism, I now believe that philosophy to be a myth, which of course benefits publishers, who profit from trade journalists’ commitment.

I now think of trade journalism as a trade, like plumbing or carpentry or electrical work. It’s a good job for people like me. It can be an important part of the foundation on which to build a good life. But it should not be your life purpose.

Jessamyn West, longtime Vermont librarian, technologist and one of the first generation of bloggers, remembers Tracy Kidder, author of “Soul of a New Machine,” who died recently. West’s father was the main character of the 1981 book and he and Kidder were friends.

“Tracy basically lived at our house on weekends while he was writing Soul of a New Machine. Sometimes he and my dad would go sailing, sometimes he’d just hang out at the house or go to work with my dad,” West writes.

While Tom West was legendary for his commitment to work, that meant he was an absentee father.

“My message to the men who told me how much the book meant to them when they were entering the world of technology (and it was always men even though I’m sure the book was useful for other genders of people in tech as well) was to find a more well-rounded life for themselves, to value being a good partner and parent as much as being good at their job,” writes Jessamyn West. “I work in technology now, but I’ve managed a balance that I’ve had to work for. Tech will take your life if you let it.”

This was No Kings in La Mesa, California, a suburb of San Diego. We had about a thousand people by my guess, which is a lot, as the big San Diego event was nearby and easily accessible.

I am catching up on expense reports. Why does “Fontainebleau” have so many vowels? How do they expect anybody to spell that?

The FCC’s new restrictions on foreign-produced consumer routers could gut the home Wi-Fi market, as most routers — even American-branded equipment — are manufactured overseas. By my colleague Monica Alleven on Fierce Network.

Rediscovering the iPad: Go commando

A few days ago, in an online conversation with a friend, I said:

I was a heavy, heavy iPad user through the 2010s to about three years ago. Now I barely use it. My MacBook Air is my desk computer, my travel computer and my secondary couch computer. My phone is my main couch computer. Indeed, the iPad lives right next to my couch, and usually I don’t bother picking it up — I just get out my phone instead.

I’ve made this point multiple times over the past few months, maybe years. I’ve gone from using the iPad daily, to rarely, to never. I’ve thought about donating it. I’m a little surprised people are buying them.

Last night I said to the same friend:

My iPad lives in a keyboard case. Tonight I glanced at it while sitting on the couch and reaching for my phone, and I said to myself, “Maybe if I took it out of the keyboard case I might like using it?” And I did and I do.

My Facebook Reels are showing me short videos of cats being dusted with flour and kneaded like bread, cats cooking and eating steak, a cat in a chef’s outfit cooking and serving mac and cheese. The videos are realistic but I think they may be AI-generated.

A Reddit discussion of how people organize their podcast playlists.

I use three playlists: One playlist, called “Queue,” is for timely podcasts that I want to listen to that day. These are generally news podcasts.

I have a playlist I call, imaginatively, “Playlist,” that is filled with episodes of podcasts that I know I want to listen to but they’re evergreen podcasts I can listen to any time over the next few weeks.

And there’s the “All” podcast, where new episodes come in.

When I’m going out to walk the dog, or do chores around the house, or driving somewhere, I check the “All” playlist to see what’s new. I move stuff to the Queue, to the Playlist, remove the episode from the “All” list but leave it on my iPhone if it’s slightly interesting, or I delete the episode entirely if it’s of no interest to me.

Heather Cox Richardson: Just before he became vice president of the Confederate States of America in 1861, Alexander Stephens of Georgia made it clear what that country, and the upcoming Civil War, was about: Slavery, the supremacy of white men, and that “slavery subordination to the superior [white race is [the Black man’s natural and normal condition.” Stephens dreamed of spreading this ideology around the world.

Richardson:

On March 21, 1861, former U.S. senator Alexander Stephens of Georgia delivered what history has come to know as the Cornerstone Speech, explaining how the ideology and power of elite enslavers in the American South were about to usher in a new era in world history.

Speaking in Savannah, Georgia, just before he became the vice president of the Confederate States of America, Stephens set out to explain once and for all the difference between the United States and the Confederacy. That difference, he said, was human enslavement. The American Constitution had a crucial defect at its heart, he said: it based the government on the principle that humans were inherently equal. Confederate leaders had fixed that problem. They had constructed a perfect government because they had corrected the Founding Fathers’ error. The “cornerstone” on which the Confederate government rested was racial enslavement.

In contrast to the government the Founding Fathers had created, the Confederacy rested on the “great truth” that some people were better than others. Black Americans were “not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Stephens believed that the new doctrine of the Confederacy would spread around the world until southerners had the gratification of seeing “the ultimate universal acknowledgment of the truths upon which our system rests.” Stephens expected the old Union to dissolve and the Confederacy to be “the nucleus of a growing power which, if we are true to ourselves, our destiny, and high mission, will become the controlling power on this continent.”

And yet, when we remember the era that elite southern enslavers thought would see their ideology spreading around the globe and ushering in a new era in human history, we do not remember it as the “Stephens Era.” It is the Era of Lincoln, the man who came to represent those who stood against Stephens and his ilk.

How the Midwest Became the Place to Move. By Olga Khazan at The Atlantic. Julie and I have been talking about moving to Columbus, where she grew up, for nearly as long as we’ve been married. We’ve lived in San Francisco and currently San Diego for all that time.

RIP Metaverse, an $80 Billion Dumpster Fire Nobody Wanted

I was a Second Life enthusiast and I still believe something metaverse-ish might prove powerful. But Zuckerberg’s vision was dead wrong.

The complete and utter failure of the metaverse is a reminder not just of the fact that the future Silicon Valley is force feeding us is not inevitable, but that quite often these oligarchs quite simply cannot relate to real people, don’t know how or why people use their products, and very often have no idea what they’re doing.

I’m now seeing this every time I go to my Facebook profile.

What next? Use AI to watch TV for me? To read science fiction? To pet the dog and cats? To drink coffee? To do any of the other things in life that I do only because I enjoy doing them?

Tucker Carlson’s and Candace Owen’s’ antisemitism was in the news lately, and I posted about that because I took it personally because I’m Jewish. Republican Islamophobia is in the news now and though I am not Muslim I say fuck thst.

I support Muslim, Black, Asian, Latino and LGBTQ rights in part because it is right, in part because I have friends in every one of those groups and also because hate becomes anti-Semitidn eventually.

The white supremacists may pretend to be friends to the Jews for a while, but anti-Semitism sleeps lightly.

I withdraw my previous comment about God sending Trump and his cabinet of Ku Klux Klowns to destroy America. That kind of talk is despairing, and despair is not an outlook we can afford.

These buffoons are incompetent and doing serious damage. They must be removed from office and prosecuted to the maximum penalty allowable by law.

In the middle of a war, the Secretary of Defense, whose previous experience was as a weekend anchor on Fox News, bans press corps photographers because they make him look gross. And the director of the FBI, who formerly raised funds for people who attempted the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, is bringing in UFC fighters to train agents.

I’m not a religious man but I am coming to the conclusion that God sent Donald Trump to bring the United States to its knees and make us humble. Or maybe God is just plain done with us and wants us gone.

Something I saw while walking the dog: This sticker on the side window of a car.

When you’re watching TV show set in or around 1970 and Doors music comes on, something bad is gonna happen. When the Doors song is “People Are Strange,” somebody’s gonna OD.

Tokyo University graduate student Takatsugu Kuriyama built an accurate three-dimensional model of Tokyo’s incredibly complex subway system “using multi-colored tubes strung with wire. Different color liquids pulsate throughout all 18 lines, creating a staggering picture of what goes on below the streets of Tokyo every day.”

Looking at this diagram, I realized that I visualize subway systems (like Tokyo’s, New York’s or London’s) operating on a single plane. Flat. But Tokyo’s, at least, is tall as well as broad. It’s like an anthill or termite’s nest.

Cory Doctorow: The web is bearable with RSS. Also, a brief history of Google Reader, Google+ (which Cory doesn’t think much of but which I loved and still mourn), and tips for customizing Firefox for avoiding nag screens and other annoyances. I’m using a Chrome-based browser; hopefully the plugins he recommends have parallels in the Chrome universe.

I am a die-hard RSS user and have been for more than 20 years. I have a love-hate relationship with Inoreader — I am perpetually looking for alternatives and keep coming back to it. Right now, I’m actually looking to use RSS less, and unsubscribe from high-volume feeds, viewing those websites in the browser instead.

Regarding breaking news, I used to say that if I don’t hear the helicopters circling over the house, I can wait to find out about it.

Meet your new phone away from phone

A roundup of phones designed to be used as second phones, to minimize distraction. By Allison Johnson at The Verge.

This is an idea that seems stupid to me at first, but now I find it intriguing.

I do not see something like this as a solution to the distraction problem. If you’re distracted by your phone, the problem is not with the phone, it’s between your ears. (Says the guy who is 100% too distracted by his phone.)

But maybe we’d be better off with something limited-purpose but elegant, like these devices, to use as phones, and something like an iPad mini for video, gaming, apps, etc.?

It would be better for my mental health if I did not check the news as often as I do. Surely I am the first person ever to have had this insight.

What do you use for breaking news? I check in with a few sources a few times a day to see what the latest crisis is. I check Google News, Apple News and my RSS reader. How about you?

I stopped using Grammarly on the desktop earlier this week. It’s too intrusive with popups and insists I add Oxford commas, which violates my employer’s style guidelines and annoys my editors. I’m using a Claude project for proofreading instead, and it seems to work better while being less annoying.

A Complimentary Profile Of Jason Lee That Was Surprisingly Difficult To Publish

Jason Lee threatened a national publication that planned to publish a profile of him that included his involvement in Scientology, even though the profile was highly complimentary, the bits about Scientology didn’t make him look bad, and he cooperated in the whole interview process, including talking at some length about Scientology.

The national publication spiked the article, which now appears on Defector.com: A Complimentary Profile Of Jason Lee That Was Surprisingly Difficult To Publish

But why does writer Nate Rogers suppress the names of the national publication and the editor who spiked the story? That seems tribal — journalists protecting each other — and maybe like Rogers doesn’t want to threaten future paychecks.

Also, it’s tempting to think what Lee did is an example of the Streisand effect, but it could work to Lee’s benefit by intimidating future publications from bringing up his Scientology connections. And also intimidate publications from bringing up Scientology in profiles of other celebrities linked with the church. So a win for Lee and for Scientology.

They Haven’t Even Started Spending Yet. Hundreds of millions of dollars spent on buying elections represent unnoticeable amounts of money to oligarchs like Musk, writes Hamilton Nolan. For oligarchs, hundreds of millions of dollars is like a normal person spending $75.

‘The Epstein files won’t knock him out’: what Anthony Scaramucci learned in Trump’s inner circle

Like Trump, Scaramucci was from the outer boroughs of New York and found himself among the privileged elites of Manhattan. That makes their backgrounds similar, even though Trump was born to wealth and Scaramucci’s parents were working class.

Steve Rose at The Guardian:

Early on, it seems, Scaramucci realised that the privileged elites were really no smarter than he was. “You have to get comfortable with being an outsider. Trump is an outsider, but he’s an uncomfortable outsider, and so he has a chip on his shoulder. He’s angry that he can’t get into the salons of the uber-wealthy, the establishment. So now he’s trying to lord over them. He couldn’t get into certain golf clubs that the blue bloods were members of, so he built himself golf courses.”

Psychopathy is a zombie idea. Why does it cling on?

Zombie ideas are social science theories that have been thoroughly debunked, but which are still widely believed, even by social scientists, writes Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen at Aeon. Race science is an extremely toxic example.

Psychopaths are widely believed to have no emotions or empathy, yet research shows they have both.

Doesn’t explain why some people are serial killers and otherwise monsters.

People want to believe that psychopaths are broken people — not like us — but they are just people who made bad choices.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

That’s from “The Great Gatsby,” published 101 years ago, and perfectly describing the Epstein White House and its sexual predation and wars.

Ars Technica Fires Reporter Over AI-Generated Quotes.

My reaction on reading the headline: “Hell yeah! Kick that sad bastard to the curb!”

But the article provides details that make the situation more complicated:

  • The reporter was working while sick in bed with Covid and a fever.
  • The quotes were paraphrases, not complete fabrications

Yes, what that reporter did was wrong and unprofessional and he has acknowledged that publicly and apologized on social media.

Where was his manager to tell him that he was impaired and should just stay in bed and watch YouTube?

I’m glad we stuck with “Starfleet Academy,” because the most recent two episodes, which we watched Saturday, were brilliant. The most recent episode may have been the only time I’ve been deeply emotionally moved watching “Star Trek.”

And now I want to see “Our Town” again. I love that play and haven’t seen it since 2003, when the Paul Newman production aired.

Jay-den has seemed to be a delicate, hesitant character, but when his shipmate is threatened, Jay-den goes full Klingon. No hesitation there!

Caleb can be a dick a lot of the time, but he understands consent in his bones. And he and Nahla have great bantering repartee.