Sailors in the USS Lincoln and their families are suffering low morale and mental illness due to long deployment. Multiple sailors have tried to go overboard.
Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand how to live. “An AI future of sleek, streamlined, and totally empty relationships.” Elizabeth Lopatto shreds Zuck’s AI manifesto. “Look, I am coming to believe we need a better quality of AI booster…. Is the point of life merely to stockpile accomplishments? If that is what Silicon Valley believes, no wonder all the billionaires seem so unhappy all the time!”
Why you can’t find a primary care doctor. Prevention isn’t a priority in US healthcare. The profit is in damage control. Why should healthcare providers invest in primary care physicians to help you lose weight, eat healthy and get fit when there is so much money to be made in prescription meds and heart surgery?
On AI Coding and Its Discontents.
Cal Newport says the honeymoon phase of AI coding is over. Early advocates of using AI to write code are scaling back their ambitions. Turns out AI-generated code is often buggy, hard to fix and hard to maintain. Coders are still using AI in their work, but in controlled and limited ways. “AI is not a magic ‘infinity machine’ that can solve all our problems, and ultimately deliver us a sense of meaning in a cold, confusing world. It’s a normal technology, and perhaps it’s time we start talking about it that way.”
Bobby Brainworms comes to San Diego to make homelessness remediation as successful as the war in Iran and fixing the reflecting pool.
Anthropic will watermark text and other file types to identify AI-generated content. I’m intrigued by how that would work in text — seems impossible.
I loved the movie “Up In the Air,” starring George Clooney and Anna Kendrick as contractors who break the bad news to employees during corporate layoffs.
I saw it the night I was laid off from a job. It was, I think, my second time being laid off, not my first. The first time you’re laid off it’s traumatic. After that — the second, and subsequent occasions — you’re like yeah sure whatever just tell me about my severance and COBRA.
Also, I have been a frequent business traveler nearly all of my career (though nowhere near as frequent as George Clooney’s character).
Bluesky’s active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app. X is shrinking too but Threads is growing.
Democratic Socialists and anti-Semitism
I spent a few minutes on the Democratic Socialists of America website, paying particular attention to their platform. Much of it is aspirational and utopian and entirely agreeable. This is the world we’d like to see in 25, 50 or 100 years, not necessarily tomorrow.
However their singling out of Israel of all the nations of the world for criticism sets off a bright, blinking red light for me. I’m fine with people criticizing Israel — I am highly critical of it myself, as are many Israelis — but when a political organization or candidate criticizes Israel exclusively without also criticizing countries like Saudi Arabia and China, with which the United States also has strong ties, I strongly suspect that candidate or organization of anti-Semitism.
The DSA says Israeli and American officials who committed genocide against Palestinians should face criminal prosecution. I have no objection to that. But the DSA says nothing about Palestinians who commit atrocities against Israeli civilians. That’s a big red anti-Semitism flag for me.
Both major political parties in the US now have powerful anti-Semitic wings. I’m sure this is fine and will be no problem at all.
If you want to respond to this post by pointing out terrible things Israel did with US support, go ahead, but you’re missing the point.
I updated the template for my newsletter to set the maximum width for the body to 600 pixels, so the newsletter doesn’t stretch alllllllll the way across a widescreen. I had Claude do the code and it appeared to get it right in one shot, which is too good to be true.
If you’re reading this in the newsletter and the formatting is funny, please let me know. And if the newsletter is so badly formatted that you can’t read it, well, I hope my attempt at mental telepathy is working.
This is cool: The cast of “The Pitt” will do a live table reading of the first broadcast episode of “Star Trek” to celebrate the show’s 60th anniversary and benefit the Writers' Guild Foundation. Noah Wylie will play Kirk, and other cast participating include Katherine LaNasa, Fiona Dourif, Taylor Dearden, Shabana Azeez and Ayesha Harris
We missed the San Diego Carnivorous Plant Society Sale and Show. It was last weekend. Darnit!
In other news: San Diego has a carnivorous plant society. Is it a society of carnivorous plants?
If there’s a movie based on a book, and you plan to both see the movie and read the book, what order should you do it in?
I think most readers would say you should read the book first, but a friend makes a compelling, brief argument for seeing the movie first: the book will have so much more to it than the movie. You watch the movie to get the broad strokes and read the book the appreciate the details.
With “Project Hail Mary,” I did something I don’t think I’ve ever done before: I read about half of the book, then watched the movie, then read the rest of the book. I loved the movie, thought parts of the book were great but much of it was “meh.”
The friendship worked, the physics didn't — a review of the novel "Project Hail Mary," by Andy Weir
Parts the novel “Project Hail Mary,” by Andy Weir, were compelling and even moving. Those were the parts that involve interactions with the characters and advancing the plot, particularly the warm friendship that grows between the human hero and alien Rocky.
I found the speculative technology and science less compelling. I know that it was meticulously and scientifically worked out, but it all read like Star Trek or Doctor Who technobabble to me and I found my eyes skating over pages and pages and pages without taking in anything I’d read.
Overall, I found the book enjoyable and even gripping in parts, but I don’t know whether I will read another Andy Weir book. I am not the audience.
There was one hugely implausible element to the book: The premise that all the nations of the world might come together to save the world against an invisible threat. Given how many people still believe Covid was a hoax, I fear that’s not how it would work out.
I had the same problem with the otherwise brilliant Last Policeman trilogy by Ben Winters, which is a series of police murder procedurals set in a small Massachusetts city during the final six months before an asteroid is due to strike the Earth and wipe out all life. Everybody in the world knows the asteroid is going to hit and the novel is about what you’re going to do when you know the world will come to an end in two years. I don’t remember any of the characters in the novel saying the asteroid is a hoax — astronomers go on TV to announce the news and everybody just believes it to be true.