I migrated from Mastodon to Micro.blog, again. Great thing about both platforms is you can just do that, easily and without inconveniencing anybody. I may switch back in a bit because why not?
How Tim Cook sold out Steve Jobs. By Anil Dash. “The son of an immigrant, a child of the counterculture, a man offering an unmistakable fuck-you to Big Brother, and a person who, above all, would never kiss the ass of someone who had absolutely awful taste. This was Steve Jobs.”
Hate the player AND the game: But above all, hate the crooked ump.. By Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr. “The wellspring of enshittification isn’t poor consumption choices, it’s poor policy choices. The reason monsters are able to destroy our online lives isn’t their personal moral failings, it’s the system that rewards predatory, deceptive and unfair commercial practices and elevates their foremost practitioners to positions of power within firms:”
A short history of business cards, from the 17th Century to today. “Today, the format is functionally dead, displaced by email signatures, LinkedIn profiles, and QR codes (see also: the slow decline of paper menus, postcards, and real concert tickets). Without a practical reason to make one, the business card has become something of a fetish object. If one bothers to make one at all, it’s often letterpressed within an inch of its life and on paper thick enough to fix a wobbly table.”
What’s the Difference Between a Sport Coat, a Blazer and a Suit Coat? A sport coat is meant to be worn with pants that don’t have the same fabric or pattern. A blazer is a solid jacket with contrasting buttons, often metal. A suit coat has pants made from the same pattern and fabric as the coat.
Getting Yelled at By Dumbasses. The defining experience of fascism. By Hamilton Nolan
The school shooting industry is worth billions — and it keeps growing. “Tom McDermott, with the metal detector manufacturer CEIA USA, says schools used to be a small fraction of their U.S. business. Now they’re the majority. ‘It’s not right. We need to solve this problem. It’s good for business, but we don’t need to be selling to schools,’ McDermott says. Sarah McNeeley, a sales manager with SAM Medical, is selling trauma kits, which include tourniquets, clotting agents and chest seals. She says their customers are traditionally EMTs, fire departments and military medics, but increasingly, school districts.”
AI psychosis and the warped mirror. Cory Doctorow: “While the internet makes it far easier to find a toxic community of similarly afflicted people struggling with your mental illness, an LLM eliminates the need to find that forum. The LLM can deliver all the reinforcement you demand, produced to order, at any hour, day or night. While posting about a new delusional belief to a forum won’t generate responses until other forum members see it and reply to it, an LLM can deliver a response in seconds.”
Netscape Navigator was released 30 years ago.. By Jamie Zawinski, one of the first Netscape employees.
UPDATED: My initial version of this post said 20 years, and I was sure that’s what the original said.