So much of the modern world makes you feel like a widget on a conveyor belt, as our fetishization of efficiency has begun to corrode our souls…. When people rage against the machines, this is a lot of what they are frustrated with. That you are a commodity in a network of apps, phone holds, and confusing websites.
— Chris Arnade, Is it Really So Much Better Now?
While a lot of TV actors were trying to mimic the mush-mouthed vocal delivery of big-screen movie stars like Marlon Brando or James Dean, Shatner went in the opposite direction. He enunciated his words carefully and broke his sentences into bite-sized pieces, making each clause a separate unit of delivery. He would speed up his cadence at times, and then bring it to a near halt. Shatner’s unique speaking style has been parodied countless times. Among living actors, probably only Christopher Walken’s line delivery has generated more parodies.
"Neither a robot nor a human but actually an entirely new entity"
What is Claude? Anthropic doesn’t know either
Gideon Lewis-Kraus at The New Yorker goes in depth with researchers at Anthropic attempting to understand how Claude works and finds AI is even more weird and confusing than we think:
The most candid A.I. researchers will own up to the fact that we are doing this because we can. As [Brown computer scientist Ellie Pavlick] wrote, the field originated with the aspiration “to understand intelligence by building it, and to build intelligence by understanding it.” She continued, “What has long made the AI project so special is that it is born out of curiosity and fascination, not technological necessity or practicality. It is, in that way, as much an artistic pursuit as it is a scientific one.” The systems we have created—with the significant proviso that they may regard us with terminal indifference—should inspire not only enthusiasm or despair but also simple awe.
In the eighteenth century, James Watt perfected the steam engine: a special box of fire that turned archaic fern sludge into factories, railroads, and skyscrapers. The Industrial Revolution happened without any theoretical knowledge of the physical principles that drove it. It took more than a century for us to piece together the laws of thermodynamics. This scientific advance led to such debatably beneficial things as the smartphone. But it also helped us explain why time flows forward, galaxies exist, and our universal fate is heat death.
Now we have a special box of electricity that turns Reddit comments and old toaster manuals into cogent conversations about Shakespeare and molecular biology. The sheer competence of language models has already revamped the human quest for self-knowledge.
Askell describes AI is “neither robot nor human but actually something new.” Based on my use of AI and learning about it, that’s a good way to describe it.
Has AI achieved intelligence? Define “intelligence.” In the 2022 book “Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intellience,” James Bridle argues that our definition of intelligence — which limits the phenomenon to humans and maybe some higher animals — is too narrow. Software is intelligent, as are analog computers, as are bonobos, jackdaws, bees and trees. Bridle is not arguing here that plants have “hidden lives,” like 1970s pseudoscientists argued, but that these machines, birds, animals and plants should be considered intelligent just on the basis of their observed behavior.
I’m skeptical that AI has achieved anything resembling human intelligence. It is not alive. But I’m even more skeptical of people who dismiss AI as just a fancy autocomplete.
Pair the New Yorker article with this essay by Matt Shumer, an AI entrepreneur and investor: Something big is happening.. Shumer says that within a year or two, AI will be better than humans at any job that’s now done at a screen. He compares the present moment to February 2020, the weeks before the pandemic hit, when nearly everyone went about their normal lives but a few people knew that the world was about to profoundly change.
JOB INTERVIEWER: Where do you see yourself in five years?
ME:
Rubio brings Naziism to Munich
Marco Rubio went Nazi on America’s European (former) partners — at the Munich security conference last week, espousing a vision of Western civilization united by whiteness and Christianity.
… officials in the Trump administration and their media allies have embraced the Great Replacement theory that says Brown and Black migration to Europe and the U.S. is destroying “western civilization.” Such migration must be stopped, they argue, and Brown and Black people purged from the U.S. and Europe. The end of equal rights for migrants will enable white Christian men to dominate society and pass laws that reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal hierarchies have embraced the Great Replacement theory that says Brown and Black migration to Europe and the U.S. is destroying “western civilization.” Such migration must be stopped, they argue, and Brown and Black people purged from the U.S. and Europe. The end of equal rights for migrants will enable white Christian men to dominate society and pass laws that reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal hierarchies.
How can people like Rubio (son of Cuban immigrants), Stephen Miller (Jewish) and Peter Thiel (gay) can embrace an ideology that considers them to be second-class citizens at best and vermin at worst?
Post by @spocko@mastodon.online
@gardengeek here is Obama’s Follow up
I’m old enough to remember when we had an intelligent President who wasn’t an embarrassment every time he opened his mouth.
David Boreanaz will star in a Rockford Files reboot. I am looking forward to this. David Boreanaz is perfect for the role.
But nobody uses answering machines anymore. Text messages wouldn’t be the same.
Me [dropping off my dog’s stool sample at the veterinarian]: Happy Valentine’s Day!
Changing how I handle blogging and social media (again)
I vibe-coded a thing! I coaxed Google Gemini to modify the template for mitchwagner.com to hide a specific category of posts from the home page. I’ve been wanting to do that for a couple of years but lacked the skills — I was able to do it in less than two hours with Gemini (including a lunch break lol).
The category is Mitchellaneous — it’s where I post memes and other Internet curiosities. I had been running that on a separate blog for a few weeks; now it’s all here. And folks who were signed up for my newsletters will now just receive one newsletter with everything (which is how I did the newsletters until a couple of weeks ago when I made the switch to two blogs and two newsletters).
Over the years, I’ve had a few ideas for how I want to handle blogging and social media, but haven’t had the coding chops to implement those ideas. With the help of AI, maybe I can finally do it.
Next up: Can I change my newsletter template so all the Mitchellaneous posts go at the end? Hold my beer….
ICE is preparing to spend $38 billion this year on a network of concentration camps to incarcerate 100,000 people. This is obscene. They are the American Gestapo. Fuck ICE.
An 88-year-old grandmother flew for the first time, on a plane piloted by her grandson. She also took Dramamine for the first time.
I love the idea of a single app that reads RSS, Bluesky and Mastodon timelines, all in one place. I have tried Tapestry, Reeder and the Micro.blog timeline and none of them seem right for me. Am I missing an app that does what I am looking for?
People don't give Gene L. Coon and D.C. Fontana enough credit for Star Trek
When attempting to critique the values of a long-running franchise like STAR TREK, it’s important to draw a distinction between superficial issues and structural ones.
“Superficial” in this sense doesn’t mean “minor” or “unimportant”; it simply means that an issue is not so intrinsic to the premise that the franchise would collapse (or would be radically different) were it changed or removed. For example, misogyny has been a been pervasive problem across many generations of STAR TREK media, which have often been characterized by a particular type of leering-creep sexism that was distasteful at the time and has not improved with age. However, sexism and misogyny are not structural elements of the TREK premise; one can do a STAR TREK story where the female characters have agency and even pants without it becoming something fundamentally different from other TREK iterations (even TOS, although there are certainly specific TOS episodes that would collapse if you excised the sexism).
By contrast, the colonialism and imperialism are structural elements — STAR TREK is explicitly about colonizing “the final frontier” and about defending the borders, however defined, of an interstellar colonial power.
Also:
People don’t give Gene L. Coon enough credit for interrogating the Federation. I know it’s gotten better in recent years and fandom seem to be more willing, on the whole, to credit him and the equally fantastic D. C. Fontana with - quite frankly - doing much more than Roddenberry ever did during TOS’ original run, but it’s still not enough.
Interesting, enjoyable and thought-provoking. Read more: larasramblings.tumblr.com
We need a new amendment: The right to bear phones
The nation’s founders worried that if the state had a monopoly on weapons, its citizens could be oppressed. Their answer was the Second Amendment. Now that our phones are the primary weapons of today’s information war, we should be as zealous about our right to bear phones as we are about our right to bear arms. To adopt the language of Second Amendment enthusiasts, perhaps the only thing that can eventually stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a camera.
Watched: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms S1E1, The Hedge Knight A pleasant surprise! I thought I had enough of Game of Thrones, but this tale of Ser Dunk, a threadbare, sad-sack knight, is good-looking, light and enjoyable. We will keep watching.
Minnie in a raincoat is giving a vibe like Ralph wearing the bunny suit in “A Christmas Story.”
Minnie has a raincoat now.
As far as I can see, the only thing the national Democratic Party is good for is sending text messages asking me for donations. You want my fucking money? Do something!
Pam Bondi did the Guardians of Pedophilia proud today.
The Horse Girl Fandom Is Melting Down Over Armpits: “Armpits are an advancing contender in the crowded field of “non-censored and ironic ways to be a pervert online….. " — Ryan Broderick (third item at the link)
The Problem With Measuring Bad Bunny's Super Bowl Halftime (And Everything Else)
Ryan Broderick (second item):
… even something like the Super Bowl, arguably the last television broadcast everyone in America sits down to watch together (in theory) is not immune from the larger shift towards non-linear short-form internet content. And, as we’ve seen almost every month since we started compiling metrics for platforms like YouTube and Twitch, the most viral language west of China’s Great Firewall is not English, but Spanish.
A comfort blanket for the managerial class
Ryan Broderick writes about a long, apocalyptic post by an AI CEO named Matt Shumer:
the “artificial general intelligence will destroy the world” narrative is a marketing strategy. It’s the same thing we heard about crypto and metaverse, both of which were meant to mimic how we think the release of the iPhone felt….
The opening of Shumer’s big AI essay is actually not about AI at all. It’s actually about COVID, specifically the creeping fear that, well, something big was happening. “Think back to February 2020. If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren’t paying close attention,” he wrote. “I think we’re in the ‘this seems overblown’ phase of something much, much bigger than COVID.” Which is, beyond AI, the defining philosophy of Silicon Valley — or, even, America — in the 2020s. That you are, simply, not aware of something important that is about to happen, a sort of COVID phantom pain. And once you see it, you’ll start seeing it everywhere. “You are running out time,” “you will be left behind,” “you are not noticing what’s happening.” The only thing Big Tech is selling us is their own unprocessed trauma back to us. It’s not a revolution. It’s a comfort blanket for a managerial class that still can’t fathom that all their tech and wealth couldn’t protect them from the pandemic.
Minnie has a raincoat now.
I went to a Super Bowl party yesterday at the Masonic lodge. This was my first Super Bowl party in many years. Maybe ever.
I barely watched the game. I talked with people. I ate about 75 pounds of food.
12/10 would supe again.
How many books are you currently in the middle of reading? What is the usual number for you?
American concentration camps
The US government is planning to build a network of warehouses to hold thousands of people, writes Heather Cox Richardson:. More than a thousand people turned out to speak at a local government hearing in the city of Surprise, Arizona, where one such prison camp is planned.
One of the speakers reminded the council of Ohrdruf, the first Nazi camp liberated by U.S. troops, on April 4, 1945. He said:
“The U.S. Army brought the leading citizens of Ohrdruf to tour the facility, which turned out to be part of the Buchenwald network of concentration camps. A U.S. Army colonel told the German civilians who viewed the scenes without muttering a word that they were to blame. One of the Germans replied that what happened in the camp was ‘done by a few people,’ and ‘you cannot blame us all.’ And the American, who could have been any one of our grandfathers, said: ‘This was done by those that the German people chose to lead them, and all are responsible.’
“The morning after the tour, the mayor of Ohrdruf killed himself. And maybe he did not know the full extent of the outrages that were committed in his community, but he knew enough. And we don’t know exactly how ICE will use this warehouse. But we know enough. I ask you to consider what the mayor of Ohrdruf might have thought before he died. Maybe he felt like a victim. He might have thought, ‘How is this my fault? I had no jurisdiction over this.’ Maybe he would have said, ‘This site was not subject to local zoning, what could I do?’ But I think, when he reflected on the suffering that occurred at this camp, just outside of town, that those words would have sounded hollow even to him. Because in his heart he knew, as we do, that we are all responsible for what happens in our community.”
When SAM had her final meeting with the makers, I expected her to conclude by saluting and saying nanoo nanoo.
The hoodies that the Starfleet cadets wear are a little unbelievable. Hoodies are great — I’m wearing one now — but I don’t think of them as timeless style that will endure into the 32nd Century.
On the other hand, velour sweaters and Beatle boots on the original series didn’t bother me so I’ll get over the hoodies.
The Starfleet varsity jackets also looked out of place and I want one.
I had to upload a selfie to register for the Social Security website. I think this photo is very flattering.
Sorry ladies — I’m taken.
Please enjoy this photo of Lake Murray that I snapped a year ago.
Watched: M*A*S*H S2E14, Hot Lips and Empty Arms. Margaret wigs out when she learns that a nurse she did basic training with is marrying a wealthy doctor — a man whom Margaret rejected. Margaret requests a transfer back to the US.
This is the first time we see her as a person rather than a caricature. She’s lonely. She settled for Frank Burns because he’s there. Loretta Swit shows acting chops, getting drunk and angry and revealing her character’s true thoughts. Margaret has become disgusted with the person she has become. She believes she deserves better, and she’s right.
Hawkeye and Trapper’s abuse becomes a kind of friendship. Sort of. MASH was shockingly misogynistic in its first season; now that we’re well into the second season, it’s toned down. This is one of the better episodes I’ve seen so far.
Another thing that stands out rewatching MASH in the 21st Century is the relative absence of Asians. You’d think there would be more Asians in a show set in Asia. But we don’t see a lot of Asians in MASH, and 99% of the Asians we do see are prostitutes, helpless peasants and the occasional murderous North Korean. Jack Soo and Pat Morita, who appear in early episodes, are delightful exceptions. 🍿
The Qanon cult believed political and financial elites were conspiring in a global sex-trafficking network that preyed on children, and that this conspiracy included billionaires, the Royal Family, Hollywood elites and even one of the two major-party candidates for US Presidency in 2016.
Reasonable people — including me! — found this cult to be both ridiculous and scary. Oh, come on. Those kinds of conspiracies don’t exist except for paranoid entertainment.
Plot twist! Turns out that was happening but — further plot twist! – the guy Qanon thought was the hero (Trump) turned out to be in cahoots with the chief villain (Epstein), and maybe was himself one of the top pedos.
Humain leverages abundant Saudi power infrastructure for AI advantage. My latest on Fierce Network.
'The assaultive cleansing of American society'
Josh Marshall: MAGA’s energy is focused on mass deportation and, perhaps even more than that, “the assaultive cleansing of American society, of both those who are ‘illegal’ and/or brown, but also white people whom through various forms of sexual license, gayness, uppity womenhood and non-traditionalism, are collectively standing in the way of Making America Great Again.”
This is why I will never support Republicans. They hate me, my friends, family and people I admire and see us as enemies of America.
Like FDR said: “They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”
Republicans haul Netflix before Congress for being too ‘woke.’ Republicans love free speech — their freedom to say what they want, and their freedom to force you to say what they want.
Crypto Bros Nauseated After Realizing Bitcoin Itself Was Funded by Jeffrey Epstein. “We’ve basically funded an elite global pedophile ring since 2015. I feel sick.”
Epstein and Bannon thought they were running a global conspiracy to burn down global democracy and replace it with a network of fascist states. Maybe they were really doing it, maybe they were just kidding themselves.
Epstein’s messages give us a glimpse, one we were never meant to see, of a shadowy world of international espionage, deregulated finance, far-right politics, eugenicist race science, information warfare, and unfathomably intricate human trafficking networks. Epstein wanted to break the internet and, eventually, democracy, to cover his tracks and cash in on the chaos…. Were Epstein and Bannon really building a crypto-funded far-right coalition of pro-Russian dictators across Europe? Or were they just LARPing as kingmakers with each other over email?
Now that I’ve split my meme posts into a separate blog on Micro.blog, I might migrate all my Mastodon followers to my Micro.blog account. I’m sure I will not regret it and change it back, like every other time I made that transition. I am also sure this transition is an effective use of my time.
I’ve decided to split this blog in two. I’m going to use mitchellaneous.net for the memes and other curiosities I’ve found on the Internet. I want to keep that ephemera separate from what I post here — when I resume posting here. I haven’t been feeling it lately because (gestures broadly to the world).
Those of you who receive my newsletter will now receive two newsletters. Feel free to unsubscribe from one or both; I view blogging as like having a model train set in your basement. Not everybody is going to be interested.
Mecha Comet is a handheld, modular computer that runs Linux. It looks sweet, and it tempts even my Apple-pilled heart.
Word of the day: “Yegg.” A safecracker or tramp and thief.
Word of the day: “fantods.” “A state of irritability and tension.”
I’m making travel plans for conferences in the first half of the year. Visiting the press page for the DTW Ignite conference in Copenhagen in June, I saw this banner photo at the top. I’m second from right.
A friend and former colleague mentioned Xenix this morning.
I got a PR pitch for an article on integrating cannabis into healthcare. I am tempted to respond, “We are a telco pub. Why would you think this pitch is relevant to us? Are you high or something?” Cheap, obvious joke.
Federal agents continue to rain terror on Minneapolis, Minnesota, and other U.S. cities including Portland and Lewiston, Maine. That violence has made it crystal clear that the goal of attacking immigrants is not simply to create a white nation; it is also to terrorize Americans into accepting the domination of MAGA Republicans.
— Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From an American, January 28, 2026 (Wednesday)
This powerful and disturbing Lincoln Project video is a lesson in truth-telling. “We’ve lost two American citizens, but if we don’t stop Trump and MAGA in 2026, we’ll lose more than innocent lives; we’ll lose America.”
Democrats, do this.
Bell is mobilizing ‘sovereign digital spine’ for Canadian AI. Bell Canada is investing strategically to position itself as a full-stack AI provider amid escalating U.S.-Canada tensions. My latest on Fierce Network.
Gun Rights Activists Briefly Pause MAGA Cheerleading To Half-Assedly Defend Rights Of Murdered Minnesotan. “They don’t honestly care how many people are killed by law enforcement officers. The only thing they care about is being able to open carry while shopping at Walmart or invading federal buildings to overturn elections. Everyone to the perceived left of their core membership can continue to get fucked.”
The nation’s founders worried that if the state had a monopoly on weapons, its citizens could be oppressed. Their answer was the Second Amendment. Now that our phones are the primary weapons of today’s information war, we should be as zealous about our right to bear phones as we are about our right to bear arms. To adopt the language of Second Amendment enthusiasts, perhaps the only thing that can eventually stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a camera.
Want to Reach Nirvana? Try a Colonoscopy. “It turns out that despite everything you’ve heard, getting a colonoscopy is wonderful.” No. No, it’s not.
Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof, Now a Rich Man, Receives a Letter from His HOA. McSweeney’s: “Your contract allows for a modest structure in the prevailing style of the neighborhood. It does not allow for a big tall house with rooms by the dozen.”
This just keeps getting better and better.
Journalist Adam Serwer goes out on patrol with the brave resistance in Minnesota
The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.
No matter how many more armed men Trump sends to impose his will on the people of Minnesota, all he can do is accentuate their valor. No application of armed violence can make the men with guns as heroic as the people who choose to stand in their path with empty hands in defense of their neighbors. These agents, and the president who sent them, are no one’s heroes, no one’s saviors—just men with guns who have to hide their faces to shoot a mom in the face, and a nurse in the back.
Researchers ran a simulation in October of civil war breaking out in the United States and the scenario closely resembled what’s playing out now in Minneapolis.
In that exercise, a president carried out a highly unpopular law-enforcement operation in Philadelphia and attempted to federalize the Pennsylvania’s national guard. When the governor resisted and the guard remained loyal to the state, the president deployed active-duty troops, resulting in an armed conflict between state and federal forces. While the location and sequence differ, the core danger we identified is now emerging: a violent confrontation between state and federal military forces in a major American city.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is sounding sensible now. We live in the Upside-Down.
I did my entire 94-minute dog walk this morning without listening to podcasts, music, audiobooks or anything but the world. One of the lenses popped out of my glasses and that’s the third time that’s happened in the past year so time for new glasses. I went to a Masonic event where all they had was Folgers coffee made in a drip machine with no creamer or sweetener and I enjoyed it, so now I’m rethinking my entire relationship to coffee. And I got a haircut. So I’m experiencing a lot of change now.
President Trump posted a long Truth Social rant about his new ballroom — amid devastating winter storms and fallout from federal agents shooting a protester in Minneapolis.
He complained that his “gift to the American people” is not being properly appreciated.
ICE agents killed a mother of three and emergency room nurse Despite blatant video evidence of the victims’ innocence, Trump, Vance and Noem smeared the victims with lies. Any of us could be next.
… the Trump administration is embracing Nazi propaganda, trying to convince Americans that the nation’s roots are not in human equality but in the hierarchical system of European fascism. Rejecting the idea of liberty and equality proposed in the Declaration of Independence and defended by people like Abraham Lincoln as the nation’s foundational principle, they are trying to define the United States of America in an entirely new way: one made up of white Protestants who, in their minds, “belong” to the land here. Rather than a nation based in ideals, they want a nation based in “blood and soil.”
In the 1770s, and again in the 1850s, everyday Americans recognized the radicalism of those extremists who were trying to erase the nation’s principles and the rule of law, ignoring the longstanding rights of the people to liberty and equality and instead trying to impose a despotism.
Today a protester in Minneapolis, one of those tens of thousands who filled the streets in below-zero weather to demand that ICE end its violent occupation of their city and its abuse of immigrants and people of color, made it clear that Americans in 2026 still believe in the nation’s founding principles of equality and the rule of law, and they utterly reject the right wing’s blood-and-soil radicalism.
— Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From An American, January 23, 2026
Noem Says ICE Is Being Menaced By Ice Cubes, Protesters Should Be Cooped Up In ‘Free Speech Zones’
This administration only knows two moves: bluster and gaslighting. Whatever you saw, you didn’t see. Whatever violations the government committed never happened. Whatever can be disputed by facts is just the ravings of leftist liars and mainstream media losers. As for everyone caught in this crossfire, fuck ’em. This party only serves itself. If there’s any silver lining here at all, it’s that Noem is too busy being Trump’s Bigot Barbie to kill her children’s pets any time soon.
Why this winter storm will likely be a wild one
“People say, ‘Oh, well, it’s really cold or we’re getting a lot of snow — how is the world warming?’ Climate change is an increase in the baseline temperatures, but it’s also an increase in extremes from both ways,” says Kaitlyn Trudeau, a senior research associate at the nonprofit Climate Central. “It can make more extreme cold outcomes; it can make more extreme warm outcomes … judging climate change by a cold storm is like judging a baseball season by a single inning.”
Charter accused of backdoor attack against fixed wireless
The Wireless Internet Service Providers Association complained to the FCC that Charter Communications is blocking WISP backhaul access.
“In rural areas where there are no or few other options for these services, Charter’s internal policy could have the effect of cutting off internet service to the communities WISPA’s members serve or increasing costs resulting from a reduction in competition for upstream wholesale services,” wrote WISPA.
The dispute comes as cable companies like Charter are getting hammered by competition from telcos.
ICE Is So Bad At Immigration Enforcement That It’s Detaining Native Americans
Trump’s version of ICE has always assumed that if your skin shade is anything darker than right-wing podcaster translucent, your ass needs to be gone from this country.
…
When you’re rounding up Native Americans, you’re rounding up the people who have done the least amount of immigration ever.
…
It’s been obvious since the inception of this so-called “immigration enforcement” surge: anyone not white would be rounded up.
…
And the surge in Minnesota is proving that being white is no protection either, not if you’re opposed to what this regime is doing. With threats of a military deployment to Minnesota looming, no American worth their citizenship should continue pretending this is anything more than white nationalism draping itself in executive power
Hang on, there’s a Trump Phone Ultra coming too? Trump Mobile wants to build on the success of the nonexistent Trump Phone to ship an Ultra model, which users are clamoring for even though nobody’s ever heard of it before this minute.
Facebook keeps showing me the same ad for a $60 sling bag, over and over. It’s a nice-looking bag, looks like a good alternative to cargo pants and shorts, which I am getting tired of wearing. And $60 isn’t a lot of money.
But $60 isn’t a small amount of money either. And I. Do. Not. Need. Another. Bag.
Quantum computing threatens to trash telecom security — get ready. Cybercriminals are already stealing encrypted data to decrypt once quantum computers arrive — here’s why telecoms need to start preparing now for “Q-Day.” My latest on @Fierce Network
The Woman Who Spent Five Hundred Days in a Cave
By D. T. Max at The New Yorker:
I asked her what she’d missed down below, and she told me roast chicken with French fries—“the kind where you can soak the bread and the potatoes in the sauce.” The caterer had sent down decent food, but never that. Over all, she insisted, the time had passed quickly: “For me, it was just a moment—a single night. I didn’t have time to miss anyone.” In a vibrant, emotive voice, she spoke about her happiness underground so adamantly, and repeatedly, that it was a little hard to believe.
RIP "Uncle Floyd" Vivino, who hosted the cult "Uncle Floyd Show" starting in the 1970s
Fans included David Bowie, who said in 2002:
“Back in the late 70’s, everyone that I knew would rush home at a certain point in the afternoon to catch the Uncle Floyd show,” Bowie said. “He was on UHF Channel 68 and the show looked like it was done out of his living room in New Jersey. All his pals were involved and it was a hoot.
“It had that Soupy Sales kind of appeal and though ostensibly aimed at kids, I knew so many people of my age who just wouldn’t miss it. We would be on the floor it was so funny. I just loved that show.”
Vivino was 74
I bought a new strap for my computer bag the other day and now I’m on the luggage company’s mailing list. This could be one expensive luggage strap.
DHS memo declares the Fourth Amendment optional. “The DHS is acting as if the US Constitution, a document conservative wingnuts used to demand we revere in its original form, does not apply to them.”