Mitch's Blog

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!

Ladies and gentlemen: The President of the United States.

Is Anthropic’s Mythos a cybersecurity breakthrough, or just ‘criti-hype’? Anthropic claims its Mythos AI model is too dangerous to release widely — but telcos should focus on security fundamentals, not the hype. My latest on Fierce Network.

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.”

Author Rachel Hartigan explores the life and disappearance of Amelia Earhart in a new book. “… the most likely thing to have happened, the simplest explanation that matches with most of what we know, it’s that she got lost, ran out of gas, and crashed.”