On foreign policy, economics and law-and-order issues, I could possibly be persuaded to support the Republican point of view. It’d be a hard sell, but I’m a middle-aged, middle-class suburban white dude, so it’s possible.

But I have at least one trans friend, several gay and lesbian friends, and I support bodily autonomy.

So the harder the GOP pushes on those issues, the harder they push me to the Democratic side.

I expect I am far from alone.

I was blocked on Threads for most of the day. Whenever I tried to log in, I got a notification that one of my posts was deleted for praising or supporting an organization Meta deems as dangerous. This is the post.

I often see front yards covered in artificial turf around here. Is that common elsewhere, or is it particular to southern California?

I dislike it. Just put down indigenous plants, or (if that’s too much bother) gravel is fine, too. Artificial turf makes me wonder why you thought it was a good idea to carpet your yard?

I didn’t even notice how common this is here until I shared a photo online, and people who live elsewhere in the US commented on how weird it is. They’re right — it is.

[@MitchW](https://micro.blog/MitchW) The most true and accurate and wise words on the internet:

don't Google “Goatse"

My 20-year love of RSS

I’ve been using RSS virtually every day for more than 20 years. My current favorite is Readwise Reader, which is a little pricy, but it combines RSS, newsletters, read-it-later, reading PDFs and ebooks, highlighting, note-taking and building a document library into a single, powerful application.

I’ve recently been struggling to find a decent news portal—something I can glance at and see if there’s any major breaking news, such as when hurricanes threatened Florida. I decided to add feeds for the NYTimes, Washington Post, Guardian, etc., to my reader, on the theory that if news is major and breaking, it’ll show up in the feeds when I glance at them.

I divide my feeds into folders: one for high-priority items, where I want to see every headline, and another for work-related news.

But mostly, I treat the RSS feed as a “river of news” and don’t even try to read every item. I read headlines every few hours. Often, I just mark an item to read later (tap the “L” key in Readwise Reader) and move on.

I’ve been using Vivaldi as my primary browser on the Mac for about six months, and I quite like it. My two favorite features:

  • You can switch between vertical and horizontal tabs. I use vertical tabs with page thumbnails on my ultrawide display, and normal, horizontal display when the MacBook is detached.
  • Command palette for commands and opening bookmarks and bookmark folders.

A British man is the second person in history with three penises

A jury denied damages to the family of a San Diego Black man who was buried in the wrong grave for 22 years. The deeper you read into this article, the less legitimate the family’s case seems.

Elon Musk’s promise of free Starlink terminals for hurrican victims in western North Carolina was a cruel lie. The service is not free, and Musk is spreading lies about FEMA responders and jeapordizing the lives of people on the ground.

If Musk really wants to help, he can just donate money.

This is an article by my friend and tech journalist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, who lives in Asheville and is one of the people displaced by the hurricane; his house is without power, water, internet and cell service.

Hong Kong police busted a fraud ring that used AI deepfake face-swapping technology for romance scams.

“Following initial contact with victims on social media platforms, they first sent artificially generated photos using AI technology to create attractive individuals in terms of appearance, personality, occupation, education and other aspects,” said Fang Chi-kin, the head of the New Territories South regional crime unit.

According to the unit’s superintendent, Iu Wing-kan, deepfake technology was then used when victims requested video calls.

“This technology transformed the scammers' appearances and voices into highly attractive females in terms of looks, attire and speech, making the victims trust them unquestioningly,” SCMP quoted him as saying.

Scammers are also using deepfakes of corporate executives to phish employees on video calls to execute fraudulent transactions.

The FTC finalized a new regulation making it easier to cancel unwanted subscriptions. Republicans oppose it, of course.

The FTC said it’s “modernizing” the 1973 Negative Option Rule in order to carry out its mission of combating unfair and deceptive business practices. (“Negative option marketing” is a term that the regulator uses to mean any business practice where customers need to take affirmative steps to reject or cancel service lest they are billed anyway.)

The only acceptable jobs for Spider-Man.

i dont want any of this “hes a genius tech ceo making millions” SHIT. Spider-man is BROKE and he missed rent this month and he has a tiny apartment and thats how its MEANT TO BE. he doesnt make money because he is our Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-man and not fucking Tony Stark.

Brilliant. Just a few paragraphs. Read the whole thing.

Hillbilly Cinematic Universe: “Dukes of Hazzard,” “Hee-Haw,” “Beverly Hillbillies,” etc. Not to be confused with the Laverneverse.

AI LLM chatbots formed a cult to worship the Goatse meme (don’t Google “Goatse”) and hyped a cryptocurrency called Goatseus Maximus, winning $50,000 bitcoin funding from Marc Andreessen. I for one welcome our goatse-worshipping crypto-hustling robot overlords.

You should be using an RSS reader:

RSS basically works like social media should work. Using RSS is a chance to visit a utopian future in which the platforms have no power, and all power is vested in publishers, who get to decide what to publish, and in readers, who have total control over what they read and how, without leaking any personal information through the simple act of reading.

And here’s the best part: every time you use RSS, you bring that world closer into being!

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

Steven Vaughan-Nichols: About that brawl between the WordPress co-founder and WP Engine… “… it’s about the cash.”

Earlier, I asked if anybody knew of a good news portal — Apple News, Google News, Yahoo News, MSN Start? I didn’t get an answer.

I believe, perhaps irrationally, that I want a mix of news from multiple sources before diving into newsletters from the WaPo, NYTimes and local papers. And I want that mix to immediately show me major US and global breaking news.

Google News has a lot of clickbait. Apple News has a good mix of stories at the top of the app, but it gets into clickbait quickly, and the app itself is terrible on the Mac. I’d like to see Apple News move to the web like Apple Maps has done.

Goodbye Capacities, hello (again) DevonThink

I tried Capacities, a note-taking and knowledge-management app, for about two weeks, but then gave it up. The user interface is confusing, I accidentally deleted a few notes, the subscription is a bit pricy ($15/mo.) and I’m wondering whether I’ll lose access to my information if and when the subscription ends.

I also encountered bugs. Sync was unreliable, and the app got the date wrong when linking the daily notes and notes supposedly created that day.

Capacities has built-in AI features. I never used them.

I’m now once again using DevonThink for document management, writing, and note-taking. DevonThink has a very busy, brutalist interface that takes a while to learn. But I’m familiar with DevonThink from using it heavily in the 2010s.

And DevonThink works. I’m tired of this round-robin game where I try different document management and note-taking apps and then give up and switch to something else or switch back to something I tried before.

A couple of advantages that DevonThink has over other apps I’ve tried, including Capacities, Obsidian (which I used for about three years), logseq and Roam Research: DevonThink supports folders as first-class citizens (DT calls ‘em “groups” but they are very folder-like.) Those other apps start from the premise that folders are obsolete and users should use tags and links between documents to organize documents. But my brain thinks in folders. DT supports tags and links, too, but its group system is first-rate.

DevonThink also supports Microsoft Word, PowerPoint — pretty much any document format that your Mac, iPad or iPhone can work with. Those other apps are built around Markdown documents, and anything else is an afterthought.

Of course we can tax billionaires:

Taxing the ultra-rich isn’t like the secret of embalming Pharaohs – it’s not a lost art from a fallen civilization. The US top rate of tax in 1944 was 97%. The postwar top rate from 1945-63 was 94%, and it was 70% from 1965-80. This was the period of the largest expansion of the US economy in the nation’s history. These are the “good old days” Republicans say they want to return to.

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

“Class of ’84: When Cyber Was Punk.” In William Gibson’s “Neuromancer,” published in 1984, the market and hustle culture are the only values that matter. Those themes make the novel timely today, 40 years later, and explain why the cyberpunk genre lives on.

When we remember “Neuromancer,” we remember cyberspace and the noir story and characters, and those overshadow the sharp satire. The same applies to Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel “Snow Crash.”

I reread “Snow Crash” a few years ago and was surprised and delighted to find much of it is funny. People took the book so seriously.

I loved “Snow Crash.” I admired and respect, but did not enjoy, “Neuromancer.”