"… how is it that some AI's users describe their experience as a hellish ordeal, while others delight in the ways that AI is changing their lives for the better?"

Cory Doctorow:

The answer is contained in the concept of “centaurs” and “reverse centaurs,” found in automation theory:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/rancid-vibe-coding/#class-war

A “centaur” is a human being who is assisted by a machine (a human head on a strong and tireless body). A reverse centaur is a machine that uses a human being as its assistant (a frail and vulnerable person being puppeteered by an uncaring, relentless machine).

Also: AI is a bubble. When it bursts it will leave behind a wealth of useful tools and skilled workers, but at terrible cost.

"I'm not a spy! I read books!" Watching "Three Days of the Condor"

“Three Days of the Condor” is a 1975 thriller starring Robert Redford as a bookish CIA analyst who stumbles on a lethal conspiracy and has to run for his life while unraveling the mystery as he goes. I admired the movie and enjoyed watching it, but I was not engaged.

Redford is cool and handsome. I loved the clothes and cars. The CIA gadgetry is delightfully retro high-tech (transistorpunk). Faye Dunaway is beautiful and warm as Redford’s love interest; she effortlessly steals a scene at a New York deli. Max Von Sydow is delicious as a weirdly friendly assassin. The movie also features Cliff Robertson and John Houseman.

The plot is complicated and confusing. Redford does thriller-movie shtick, using Dunaway as a go-between to deliver a menacing message, getting into brawls and gunfights, racing across town and hacking a phone switching office. He is infinitely resourceful and confounds experienced field agents, explaining that he learned everything from books. In the end, of course, Redford figures everything out, but I don’t know how, and I’m not 100% sure what he figured out.

Although I enjoyed the movie, it didn’t pull me in, partly because it’s been overtaken by headlines. The movie premise is that a hypercompetent conspiracy of government agents drives U.S. affairs. In reality today, the government is run by clowns. I wish “Three Days of the Condor” were an accurate depiction; instead, we’re living in “Idiocracy.”

Redford’s character’s relationship with Dunaway’s character is disturbing. She is a stranger whom he kidnaps at random so he can use her as cover to get out of Manhattan and hide out in her apartment. He holds her at gunpoint and ties her up in her own bathroom for hours while he goes out and does spy things. Nonetheless, she decides he’s a nice guy and has sex with him. Sometimes I’m shocked by how rapey pop culture was in the 20th Century.

It’s a good example of a 1970s New York movie, like “The French Connection” and “Annie Hall,” showing off the grittiness of the city.

The movie takes place just before Christmas, but it’s not a Christmas movie. It’s like “Die Hard” that way. There’s no snow on the ground. There’s almost no discussion of Christmas. You hear some Christmas carols in ambient music and see some Christmas decorations in stores, and that’s it for the Christmas angle.

Sloppy Internet research:

  • Redford wears an excellent, preppy wardrobe. He wears a herringbone tweed jacket or a pea-jacket at different times in the movie, over a navy crew-neck sweater, chambray shirt and tie (the crew-neck sweater and tie are not, to be honest, a good look), flared jeans, and hiking boots. Men’s fashionistas have struggled for decades to find that exact tweed jacket.. The look is iconic, like Steve McQueen’s tweed jacket and roll-neck sweater in “Bullitt,” which set off a fashion trend for men when that movie was released.
  • The film has been interpreted as a political statement or propaganda, but director Sidney Pollack says it’s just a thriller — nothing more. It was released at about the same time as a scandal broke in the news about illegal CIA activities; Pollack says the movie was already well underway when the scandal hit, and he is frustrated by people who think he was sending a message.
  • At the beginning of the movie, Redford’s character orders lunch for his office from a luncheonette, the Lexington Candy Shop. It was founded in 1925, is still in business, and still looks the same.
  • Faye Dunaway is still alive and seems to be still working. I’m happy to see it.

Cheap shots from Letterboxd:

I need to explore the new OpenGraph support in Micro.blog. I saw a truncated post show up as a screenshot of the text when viewed from Mastodon, which I quite like. Presumably, the same thing happens for BlueSky? Thanks, @manton.

Approximately 70% of all people who get cancer have eaten pickles.
Most people who have recently died in car accidents ate a pickle in the past year.
All Americans who ate pickles in 1901 have died.
Therefore, pickles obviously kill people.
(This is a post about Tylenol and autism. )

I just got a notification that my Tumblr blog turned 17 years old today. Tumblr has rarely been my primary social media platform, but it has always been easy to syndicate posts from whatever my favorite is to there, and I’ve come to be quite fond of Tumblr.

The Verge staff lists books that changed their lives. My friend Barbara Krasnoff adds class to the list by naming “Little Women,” by Louisa May Alcott. Nobody names “Lord of the Rings” or the Harry Potter books, which I would have expected to see on such a list. However, Harry Potter is now, as they say, problematic. Same for Neil Gaiman, another writer whose work I might have expected to see on a most-influential-books list not long ago.

If I were contributing to a list like this, and being honest, I would name “Red Planet” by Robert A. Heinlein. It was the first chapter book I read, at age 8, and awakened in me a lifelong love of reading, science fiction and Heinlein. It’s no longer one of my favorite Heinleins; I think that would be “Citizen of the Galaxy.”

If I wanted to impress people, I’d pick Mark Twain’s Autobiography, “Life on the Mississippi,” or “Roughing It.” I do love Mark Twain; I am currently reading Ron Chernow’s biography of the writer. Twain’s work has been influential in my life, but honestly, not as influential as the science fiction I read as a boy.

Why your next car should be an electric cargo bike. I am 100% ebike-curious, but I don’t feel like I can justify the expense in addition to the car, and an ebike doesn’t seem like it would be a car replacement. Also, riding an ebike seems like it would be dangerous on our local roads.

In search of Robert Redford’s most iconic jacket. It’s the herringbone tweed he wore in “Three Days of the Condor,” which we watched last night.

American Billionaires Are Competing To Be King Shit of Turd Island

I migrated from Mastodon to Micro.blog, again. Great thing about both platforms is you can just do that, easily and without inconveniencing anybody. I may switch back in a bit because why not?

“Style lessons from Robert Redford, one of the most stylish men in the last century." By Derek Guy.

How Tim Cook sold out Steve Jobs. By Anil Dash. “The son of an immigrant, a child of the counterculture, a man offering an unmistakable fuck-you to Big Brother, and a person who, above all, would never kiss the ass of someone who had absolutely awful taste. This was Steve Jobs.”

Hate the player AND the game: But above all, hate the crooked ump.. By Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr. “The wellspring of enshittification isn’t poor consumption choices, it’s poor policy choices. The reason monsters are able to destroy our online lives isn’t their personal moral failings, it’s the system that rewards predatory, deceptive and unfair commercial practices and elevates their foremost practitioners to positions of power within firms:”

A short history of business cards, from the 17th Century to today. “Today, the format is functionally dead, displaced by email signatures, LinkedIn profiles, and QR codes (see also: the slow decline of paper menus, postcards, and real concert tickets). Without a practical reason to make one, the business card has become something of a fetish object. If one bothers to make one at all, it’s often letterpressed within an inch of its life and on paper thick enough to fix a wobbly table.”

What’s the Difference Between a Sport Coat, a Blazer and a Suit Coat? A sport coat is meant to be worn with pants that don’t have the same fabric or pattern. A blazer is a solid jacket with contrasting buttons, often metal. A suit coat has pants made from the same pattern and fabric as the coat.

Getting Yelled at By Dumbasses. The defining experience of fascism. By Hamilton Nolan

The school shooting industry is worth billions — and it keeps growing. “Tom McDermott, with the metal detector manufacturer CEIA USA, says schools used to be a small fraction of their U.S. business. Now they’re the majority. ‘It’s not right. We need to solve this problem. It’s good for business, but we don’t need to be selling to schools,’ McDermott says. Sarah McNeeley, a sales manager with SAM Medical, is selling trauma kits, which include tourniquets, clotting agents and chest seals. She says their customers are traditionally EMTs, fire departments and military medics, but increasingly, school districts.”

AI psychosis and the warped mirror. Cory Doctorow: “While the internet makes it far easier to find a toxic community of similarly afflicted people struggling with your mental illness, an LLM eliminates the need to find that forum. The LLM can deliver all the reinforcement you demand, produced to order, at any hour, day or night. While posting about a new delusional belief to a forum won’t generate responses until other forum members see it and reply to it, an LLM can deliver a response in seconds.”

Netscape Navigator was released 30 years ago.. By Jamie Zawinski, one of the first Netscape employees.

UPDATED: My initial version of this post said 20 years, and I was sure that’s what the original said.

Read Whatever the Hell You Want charlotteclymer.substack.com/p/read-wh…

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