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Yesterday at the supermarket, I saw a man with a dog. The dog wasn’t wearing a service dog vest. It was just a dog, but inside the supermarket. It looked like a chocolate lab, but with a wiry tail.

I happened to be buying treats for Minnie at the dog treats shelf at the moment I saw the dog. The supermarket dog sniffed the shelves with great interest, then turned away.

Later, I saw a teen-age girl with an e-bike in the supermarket. She wasn’t riding it in the supermarket. She was just pushing it. Still, it was odd.

After that, I decided we were just bringing any dang thing we wanted into the supermarket, so I brought in the car and drove it up and down the aisles rather than walking, throwing my purchases from the shelves over my shoulder onto the back seat. I knocked a lot of things over, but it was otherwise very convenient.

I deleted Meta Threads from my phone. I may come back to the service, but I’m not feeling urgency, and I don’t like app’s privacy policies.

Threads grabs a great deal of user information, including text messages.

Text messages?! Are you kidding?!

I’ve got Facebook on my phone. That’s bad enough.

Has anybody found a news alerts service for the phone that only alerts you for world-changing news? All the news alert services I’ve tried are too noisy.

I want an alert if Biden or Trump drops dead, or if Ukraine boils over into World War III. I don’t need an alert to let me know somebody got murdered 15 miles away, or the Walmart killer got sentenced or—true alert I got from CNN yesterday—how to not get bedbugs from hotel beds.

Basically, I only want to get a news alert once every few months. All the news alerts I’ve subscribed to send alerts every few hours.

I fear the service I’m looking for may not exist.

Jo Walton writes about Heinlein’s Worst Novel. I 98% agree.

My favorite Heinleins are his early books, particularly “Citizen of the Galaxy.”

I loved “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” and “Starship Troopers,” but I’d love them even more without the lectures.

I loved “Stranger in a Strange Land” when I was 13 years old, but it ages badly.

And “The Cat Who Walks Through Walls” and “To Sail Beyond the Sunset” are just plain bad.

I often think about the failed US Heinlein describes in “I Will Fear No Evil” and “Friday.”

In a sign of what’s to come for many white-collar workers, artificial intelligence is eating the software industry, as companies turn to generative AI tools to save money on programmers.

Some 70% of coders are already using or plan to use AI in their work, with one-third saying the primary reason they do so is because it makes them more productive, according to survey by Stack Overflow.

What Will AI Do to Your Job? Take a Look at What It’s Already Doing to Coders. By Christopher Mims at the Wall Street Journal.