Let’s Call a Murder a Murder. By John Gruber at Daring Fireball.
Arista’s Ullal: Ethernet is the ‘eventual winner’ for AI networking. Ethernet is overtaking InfiniBand in AI data centers as inference and automation reshape infrastructure, says Jayshree Ullal, Arista CEO and chairperson. My latest on Fierce Network.
Video shows ICE agent in Minneapolis fired at driver as vehicle veered past him. The video shows that the ICE agent was next to the vehicle, not in its path. He was in no danger.
‘I’ll Hear About It Eventually.’ So-called news avoiders aren’t really skipping out on the news
The news is depressing and stressful and many people avoid it. But these news avoiders get their news secondhand, writes Mary Retta at Columbia Journalism Review:
This can involve hearing about the news from friends or family, or “seeing discussions of things that happened in the news on Facebook describing ‘that thing that Trump said’”—that is, indirect exposure, [says Benjamin Toff—an associate professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota and the author of Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism.] “After all, you need to be exposed to news often to be able to actively avoid it.” …. So-called news avoiders are, he argued, for the most part still regularly consuming information: “What makes them news avoiders is having this experience of regularly avoiding it, but that isn’t the same thing as screening out news altogether from their lives.
Mitchellaneous CXLVI. Thirteen things I saw on the Internet
Life under a clicktatorship
One of the strangest moments to emerge from the U.S. kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro was the flurry of images posted by President Trump on Truth Social. It felt a bit like a student who can’t decide which spring break photos look cutest, so they just upload them all…. It felt as if a group of twelve-year-old boys in a basement had been handed control of the most lethal military in history—and were using it to boost their online brands.
A primary motive of this administration is boosting their clout on social media. It’s simultaneously pathetic and terrifying. “… standing out online often demands being awful—channeling negative emotions like anger and outrage, usually based on misinformation or conspiracy theories.”
What I’m arguing is that the Trump administration isn’t just using social media to shape a narrative. Many of its members are deeply addicted to it. We would be concerned if a senior government official was an alcoholic or drug addict, knowing it could impair judgment and decisionmaking. But we should be equally concerned about Pete Hegseth and Elon Musk’s social media compulsions—just as much as their alcohol or ketamine use, respectively.
Overexposure to online engagement has cooked the brains of some of the most powerful people in the world. This is not exclusively an American phenomenon…. But in the US government, poster brain feels endemic. The Trump administration is made up of a cabinet of posters. For many, that’s how they won Trump’s attention. The head of the FBI, for example, is a podcaster—that’s his main qualifier for the job.