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"… how is it that some AI's users describe their experience as a hellish ordeal, while others delight in the ways that AI is changing their lives for the better?"

Cory Doctorow:

The answer is contained in the concept of “centaurs” and “reverse centaurs,” found in automation theory:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/rancid-vibe-coding/#class-war

A “centaur” is a human being who is assisted by a machine (a human head on a strong and tireless body). A reverse centaur is a machine that uses a human being as its assistant (a frail and vulnerable person being puppeteered by an uncaring, relentless machine).

Also: AI is a bubble. When it bursts it will leave behind a wealth of useful tools and skilled workers, but at terrible cost.

"I'm not a spy! I read books!" Watching "Three Days of the Condor"

“Three Days of the Condor” is a 1975 thriller starring Robert Redford as a bookish CIA analyst who stumbles on a lethal conspiracy and has to run for his life while unraveling the mystery as he goes. I admired the movie and enjoyed watching it, but I was not engaged.

Redford is cool and handsome. I loved the clothes and cars. The CIA gadgetry is delightfully retro high-tech (transistorpunk). Faye Dunaway is beautiful and warm as Redford’s love interest; she effortlessly steals a scene at a New York deli. Max Von Sydow is delicious as a weirdly friendly assassin. The movie also features Cliff Robertson and John Houseman.

The plot is complicated and confusing. Redford does thriller-movie shtick, using Dunaway as a go-between to deliver a menacing message, getting into brawls and gunfights, racing across town and hacking a phone switching office. He is infinitely resourceful and confounds experienced field agents, explaining that he learned everything from books. In the end, of course, Redford figures everything out, but I don’t know how, and I’m not 100% sure what he figured out.

Although I enjoyed the movie, it didn’t pull me in, partly because it’s been overtaken by headlines. The movie premise is that a hypercompetent conspiracy of government agents drives U.S. affairs. In reality today, the government is run by clowns. I wish “Three Days of the Condor” were an accurate depiction; instead, we’re living in “Idiocracy.”

Redford’s character’s relationship with Dunaway’s character is disturbing. She is a stranger whom he kidnaps at random so he can use her as cover to get out of Manhattan and hide out in her apartment. He holds her at gunpoint and ties her up in her own bathroom for hours while he goes out and does spy things. Nonetheless, she decides he’s a nice guy and has sex with him. Sometimes I’m shocked by how rapey pop culture was in the 20th Century.

It’s a good example of a 1970s New York movie, like “The French Connection” and “Annie Hall,” showing off the grittiness of the city.

The movie takes place just before Christmas, but it’s not a Christmas movie. It’s like “Die Hard” that way. There’s no snow on the ground. There’s almost no discussion of Christmas. You hear some Christmas carols in ambient music and see some Christmas decorations in stores, and that’s it for the Christmas angle.

Sloppy Internet research:

  • Redford wears an excellent, preppy wardrobe. He wears a herringbone tweed jacket or a pea-jacket at different times in the movie, over a navy crew-neck sweater, chambray shirt and tie (the crew-neck sweater and tie are not, to be honest, a good look), flared jeans, and hiking boots. Men’s fashionistas have struggled for decades to find that exact tweed jacket.. The look is iconic, like Steve McQueen’s tweed jacket and roll-neck sweater in “Bullitt,” which set off a fashion trend for men when that movie was released.
  • The film has been interpreted as a political statement or propaganda, but director Sidney Pollack says it’s just a thriller — nothing more. It was released at about the same time as a scandal broke in the news about illegal CIA activities; Pollack says the movie was already well underway when the scandal hit, and he is frustrated by people who think he was sending a message.
  • At the beginning of the movie, Redford’s character orders lunch for his office from a luncheonette, the Lexington Candy Shop. It was founded in 1925, is still in business, and still looks the same.
  • Faye Dunaway is still alive and seems to be still working. I’m happy to see it.

Cheap shots from Letterboxd:

I need to explore the new OpenGraph support in Micro.blog. I saw a truncated post show up as a screenshot of the text when viewed from Mastodon, which I quite like. Presumably, the same thing happens for BlueSky? Thanks, @manton.

Approximately 70% of all people who get cancer have eaten pickles.
Most people who have recently died in car accidents ate a pickle in the past year.
All Americans who ate pickles in 1901 have died.
Therefore, pickles obviously kill people.
(This is a post about Tylenol and autism. )

I just got a notification that my Tumblr blog turned 17 years old today. Tumblr has rarely been my primary social media platform, but it has always been easy to syndicate posts from whatever my favorite is to there, and I’ve come to be quite fond of Tumblr.

The Verge staff lists books that changed their lives. My friend Barbara Krasnoff adds class to the list by naming “Little Women,” by Louisa May Alcott. Nobody names “Lord of the Rings” or the Harry Potter books, which I would have expected to see on such a list. However, Harry Potter is now, as they say, problematic. Same for Neil Gaiman, another writer whose work I might have expected to see on a most-influential-books list not long ago.

If I were contributing to a list like this, and being honest, I would name “Red Planet” by Robert A. Heinlein. It was the first chapter book I read, at age 8, and awakened in me a lifelong love of reading, science fiction and Heinlein. It’s no longer one of my favorite Heinleins; I think that would be “Citizen of the Galaxy.”

If I wanted to impress people, I’d pick Mark Twain’s Autobiography, “Life on the Mississippi,” or “Roughing It.” I do love Mark Twain; I am currently reading Ron Chernow’s biography of the writer. Twain’s work has been influential in my life, but honestly, not as influential as the science fiction I read as a boy.