After much practice, I am now expert at photographing my own left ear. I do not expect this skill to be useful.
Antisemitic callers overwhelmed a La Mesa City Council meeting with hate speech. timesofsandiego.com. I am a Jewish person who has lived more than 25 years in La Mesa, a suburb of San Diego, California. This is terrorism.
UPDATE: I edited this post to remove criticism of the City Council. I have no reason to believe they behaved inappropriately.
‘A Black Thing.’ Fani Willis’s father explains why his daughter keeps cash: John Clifford Floyd III, attorney and former Black Panther, says that when he was younger, Black Americans couldn’t count on white-owned businesses accepting credit cards from them. And so he taught his daughter to always keep six months' cash on hand. crooksandliars.com
"Stinge-watching" vs. binge-watching
“Stinge watching” is the opposite of binge watching, says Jason Kottke—when you love a show so much that you stingily portion it out, postponing watching episodes to extend the pleasure.
We sometimes binge-watch, but not often. Generally, we watch 45 minutes to an hour of episodic TV every night. Sometimes a movie on weekends—and I like it better when movies are under 1 hour and 45 minutes. I feel like that’s the amount of time I want to spend watching TV. And yes that does have the beneficial side-effect of extending the pleasure of a good show.
We recently raced through the show “Funny Woman,” because it was so engaging. We watched three 45-minute episodes one night and two another. Does that count as binge-watching?
I went out to walk the dog the other day and discovered I’d forgotten to charge my AirPods. I found wired earbuds in a box near my desk, where they’d been unused and unopened for five years since I got them as a free giveaway. They worked fine. This is why nothing ever gets thrown out in our house.
Today’s memes: I guess my brain is just really big
I’ve been hearing about the Perplexity search engine, a competitor to Google. www.perplexity.ai I tried it yesterday and it’s really quite good. It’s like ChatGPT with links to sources. Those links are important because the inaccuracy problem with Perplexity is bad, like any other generative AI.
When I’m using Wikipedia for serious research, I fact-check by looking for the blue footnote links and following those to the source articles. Perplexity seems to work the same way, although Perplexity—like all conversational AI—is significantly less accurate than Wikipedia.
Play this video when you want to pretend to be busy so people will leave you alone. Say “yeah” at the three-minute mark.
Enterprise leaders swing between confidence and sleepless terror over AI.
Fear of missing out (FOMO) vies with fear of messing up (FOMU).
Enterprise leaders say they’re well along in their AI implementations and ready for more, but they’re also afraid of falling behind competitors, according to a study by Juniper Networks and Wakefield Research. These leaders are also concerned that employees within their organizations are out of control in their AI use.
My latest on Silverlinings.
“The Hucksters:” A sitthroughable 1947 romcom and satire starring Clark Gable
Clark Gable is a veteran returning home from World War II eager to resume his pre-war lifestyle as a playboy ad-man, but ultimately finding the life empty and unsatisfying. He takes a high-paying job at an ad agency, in the course of which he meets beautiful war widow Deborah Kerr, which causes him to change his values.
