AT&T’s grounded AI strategy defies bubble warnings. My latest on Fierce Network. With executive backing, cross-team collaboration, and a relentless ROI focus, AT&T is proving you don’t need to ride a hype wave to generate value.

“Reflecting on their partnership, Weissmuller later said, ‘He was a natural on set, fearless in the water, and always ready to jump into a scene.'”

After Tarzan, Sheffield took the lead in “Bomba the Jungle Boy,” starring in 12 adventure films from 1949-55.

By his mid-twenties, Sheffield retired from acting. He earned a business degree from UCLA, married Patricia Berg in 1959, and raised three children: Patrick, Stuart, and Regina. He worked in real estate, construction, and even lobster importing, quietly shaping a life in Chula Vista far removed from Hollywood’s spotlight.

Son Stuart, his wife, Elaine Lancaster, and their son Draygon Wylde Sheffield-Cassan still live on the family property. “Draygon shares a striking resemblance to his grandfather, including the iconic curly, golden hair.”

Debbie L. Sklar, Times of San Diego

Which Star Trek bed would you want to sleep on?

People long associated the instrument with polkas, elephants, clowns, and players at the back of the band, imprisoned by conductors' preconceived notions of what the horn, and those who play it, were capable of. But today, tuba players have found freedom and, through hard work and focus, they dazzle, unconstrained by others' views.

— Sam Quinones at Times of San Diego

“‘Never gonna crack it with a detective who wears an actual fedora unironically,’ Melissa Chen, a tech executive based in London, wrote in an X post that has been viewed more than five million times. ‘To solve it, we need an unshaven, overweight, washed-out detective who’s in the middle of divorce. A functioning alcoholic who the rest of the department hates.'”

Alisha Haridasani Gupta at The New York Times

(This article ran on Thursday. This morning, French authorities arrested
suspects charged with being the Louvre thieves, according to headlines.)

“Since 1982, [Charlotte] Chopin, now 102 years old, has taught yoga in Léré, a French village in the Loire region."

Happiness is not achieved by pursuing happiness. Happiness is a byproduct of finding life purpose and pursuing that purpose.

Dana Milbank reports at The Washington Post:: The best way to achieve happiness is focus on others and how you can contribute to them and their well-being. We need to find meaningful ways to contribute, “and often that will lead to the happiness that you’re seeking,” says psychologist Kendall Cotton Bronk of Claremont Graduate University.

Ask yourself what “the world is missing” and how you uniquely “fill that gap a little bit,” says psychology professor Todd Kashdan, who runs the Well-Being Lab at George Mason University. “The specific purpose doesn’t matter; it’s just a question of ‘what lights you up. Then commit to make a specific regular contribution – particularly time – toward that purpose.”

The contribution doesn’t need to be “a major life-changing allocation of time or energy” but rather “things we can fit into our everyday routines,” says Cornell psychologist Anthony Burrow, who runs the university’s Purpose and Identity Processes Lab.

Milbank writes:

There’s no right or wrong purpose. It could be related to family or work or anything else that gives you meaning and helps you order your goals. It’s not necessarily altruistic (evil people can have purpose) but often is. Your purpose can change over time.

Man Alarmed to Discover His Smart Vacuum Was Broadcasting a Secret Map of His House. “Our homes are filled with cameras, microphones, and mobile sensors connected to companies we barely know, all capable of being weaponized with a single line of code.”

Anteaters evolved independently at least 12 times in the 66 million years since nonavian dinosaurs went extinct.

Ants and termites are good eating and there are plenty of them. They outweigh all other insects, mammals, amphibians and birds combined in the rainforests of South and Central America. And globally, termites alone outweigh all wild mammals by a factor of 10.

Jake Buehler at Science

Cory Doctorow:

Remember when we were all worried that Huawei had filled our telecoms infrastructure with listening devices and killswitches? It sure would be dangerous if a corporation beholden to a brutal autocrat became structurally essential to your country’s continued operations, huh?

In other, unrelated news, earlier this month, Trump’s DoJ ordered Apple and Google to remove apps that allowed users to report ICE’s roving gangs of masked thugs, who have kidnapped thousands of our neighbors and sent them to black sites.

There’s more: Decades of protectionist tech regulation gives the Trump government control of the world’s cloud applications, networks, tractors, phones, game consoles, medical implants, ventilators and more. “It’s well past time for a post-American internet.”

One of the benefits of using Amazon frequently is that we have a gallery of great photos of the front gate of our house.

ICE vs. NYC. Hamilton Nolan: “As dark as these times are, we can all take a tiny bit of comfort in the knowledge that ICE agents are going to have a terrible fucking time in New York City.”

Brilliant advice for any aspiring creative person, from an art teacher critiquing a student’s work:

My biggest critique is, I only merely dislike this piece. I want you to make me HATE it. Go crazy with the things that you like. Don’t hold back trying to make it palatable to people like me. Because I am NEVER going to like it. And if the audience does not like it, it should drive them crazy seeing how much YOU love it.

Heather Cox Richardson: “The president is establishing the principle that he can order the murder of anyone he deems a threat. And Congress is letting it happen.”

David Pierce, a writer and podcaster for The Verge, talks about his work process and tools on the Cortex podcast with Myke Hurley.

Pierce is one of my favorite tech journalists and podcasters, and it’s not just because he does great work and because of his winning, upbeat personality. It’s also because his mental processes and work style are similar enough to mine that I find it useful and enjoyable when he nerds out about his tools and work style.

He talks about the style of podcast where the hosts are friends and talk about a subject they love. The Vergecast, which he co-hosts is a great example. He and Mike Hurley praise two podcasts in that style: The Rest is History and Rewatchables. Those two podcasts and The Vergecast are three of my favorite podcasts. Locally, here in San Diego, the Voice of San Diego podcast is yet another great example I love of that type of podcast.

David says the friendships the audience feels for podcast hosts are real, that we spend more time with our favorite podcast hosts than we do with nearly all of our real-life family, friends and co-workers.

I definitely feel those feelings, but I am skeptical whether those friendships are real. I sometimes refer to my favorite podcast hosts as “imaginary friends.” I don’t know whether those feelings are mentally healthy.

I do occasionally write to my favorite podcast hosts (I just sent a quick note to Pierce), and I always keep in mind when I do that these people don’t actually know me. The relationship is 99.95% in one direction.

Further complicating things: I currently have two favorite podcast hosts and writers who are also real-life friends. I have met up with them many times in person, and they have been to my house. However, I only see one of them every few years, and the other one is someone I have not seen in more than 40 years. These two people occupy very oddly-shaped emotional spaces in my head.

David and Myke also nerd out about productivity tools. They both agree that they would love to be the kinds of people who sit down and do a weekly review of their plans every Sunday, and that they never do it. Same here.

“WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg called the company’s Tumblr acquisition his biggest failure — but one he hasn’t given up on yet." I continue to love Tumblr, and I am so very far from its target demographic. I’m basically the Tumblr creepy old guy.

Hey, I’m going to add that to my Tumblr profile.

“Even Oedipus is like, ‘whoa, that sounds overly incestuous.'" Newsletter editor Dave Pell on “circular financing” in AI, where a company — like, recently, AMD — pays another company — like, recently, OpenAI, to buy the first company’s products.

British supermarket chain Aldi created a puffer coat that looks like a giant baked potato, with a removable silver rain cover that looks like tinfoil.

We finished watching The Diplomat Season 3, a fantasy series where the United States is run by competent, intelligent adults who have the best interests of the country and world at heart. It stars Keri Russell, Rufus Sewell and a whole lot of fabulous wallpaper. 🍿

I’m still reading “Lord of the Rings.” Blorbo is getting ready to peace-out from Bag End. He’s got this souvenir ring that he means to leave behind for his nephew, whose name is Froyo I think. But Blorbo can’t stand to give up the ring and he’s being super-weird about it. I’m sure this will not be a problem for the rest of the book.

Currently reading: The Lord of the Rings by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien 📚

I read Lord of the Rings when I was in my 20s and did not like it, but I’ve become a fan of The Rest Is History podcast and the hosts there love it. I’m intrigued by their comments that the book is, weirdly, a realistic portrait of medieval European history.

The podcast covered the life of JRR Tolkien, and how it likely influenced the Lord of the Rings, in particular his experience growing up in rural England, threatened by industrialization, and his later experience in World War I. Although, if I recall correctly, Tolkien himself denied the influences.

The podcast has talked a good deal about medieval European history, and British history in particular, and it is fascinating.

So I figured I’d give Lord of the Rings another go and see if I like it better.

I’ve barely started.

The books start with a long introduction or foreword about Hobbit history and major works of Hobbit scholarship, which is excruciatingly dry and is an odd creative choice by Tolkien. If I were picking up the book when it was first published in 1954, and knew nothing about it, I would have read no further.

Oddly, I’m reminded of the opening chapter of Snow Crash, which deals with the adventures of a cyberpunk pizza delivery driver. I found that childish when I first read the book. A couple of years later, I mentioned this opinion to a friend, and he said, yeah, the first chapter is dumb, but push through. You’ll be glad you did. And I did, and my friend was right — Snow Crash is brilliant. But the first chapter is dumb.

I pushed through with Lord of the Rings, and am now reading the first chapter, about Bilbo Baggins’s birthday party. When I first read the book, I found that section unbearably twee, but I took myself a lot more seriously then, and I’m enjoying this chapter now.

Overheard: “No, Chip Roy. Jesus is not my king. There is only one king in America and that’s Elvis.”

President Trump posted an AI video of himself spraying explosive diarrhea on peaceful protesters. I’ll point this out next time a Trump supporter tut-tuts and says the left loses elections because we’re not civil.

Help pass California Proposition 50, the Election Rigging Response Act (ERRA). You just need to walk around your neighborhood and talk to your neighbors. Sign up at mobilize.us

It’s easy to feel hopeless as the Trump government sends masked agents to invade our communities, uses government as a personal revenge apparatus, executes extrajudicial killings and creates economic chaos with tariffs. Even billionaires and the CEOs of the biggest companies in the world are bending the knee. It seems that surely the rest of us can’t do anything to stop the U.S.’s downward spiral.

But you can make a difference if you stop obsessing about national decline and turn your attention to local change. Join a community association, become active in your church, synagogue or mosque, and reach out to your neighbors. Change doesn’t just come from the top down; it also spreads from the bottom up. Down here at the bottom is where regular people like you and me can help bring about positive change, or at least slow the decay.

One such opportunity for positive change is available now: You can help pass California Proposition 50, which redraws state Congressional maps to create five additional Democratic Party-leaning seats in Congress. Prop 50 is a reaction to a naked power grab by Republicans in Texas who gerrymandered five Democratic-leaning districts to Republican.

What the Republicans did in Texas is corrupt and against the principles that our Founders held dear. To be clear, Prop. 50 is also gerrymandering. But it’s necessary to counter Republican cheating. The California measure will help Democrats retain a voice in national decision-making. As California State Assembly Member Chris Ward explains, Democrats need a five-point majority in the popular vote to gain majority control of the U.S. House of Representatives, because of decades of prior Republican gerrymandering. Texas’s gerrymandering will make that situation worse.

Terrible, but necessary

In Texas, the legislature decided the measure, after Republicans threatened to arrest Democrats, required Democratic representatives to submit to state police escorts and confined one representative to the state capitol overnight. But California’s Prop 50 won’t be decided by the governor or the legislature; it will be decided by the people, in a special election Nov. 4. Moreover, the California redistricting is temporary; California will revert to the independent redistricting commission, of which we are justifiably proud, after 2030.

Republicans are using their control of Congress and the White House to cheat California, threatening to withhold funding to fight wildfires, opening floodgates in the California Central Valley to waste water, driving ICE into our communities with no accountability, and threatening to withhold housing, education and healthcare funding, Ward notes.

Proposition 50 is a terrible measure — but it’s necessary. Republicans have stopped playing by the rules. Democrats need to stop bringing pencils to the knife fight.

You can help pass Proposition 50. You don’t need to donate money. You just need to canvass — walk around your neighborhood and talk to your neighbors. To sign up, go to San Diego Mobilize and look for the Prop 50 activities. Or sign up for any of the other great causes at San Diego Mobilize. If you can’t walk, you can make phone calls or text.

Even today, in the era of TikTok and AI, door-to-door canvassing is a highly effective means of getting out the vote. That’s been true for more than a century, and it’s still true.

Getting ahead

I’ve been active in the local Democratic Party and walking door-to-door to get out the vote since 2017. At first, I hated the idea — it seemed like an unnatural act. I hate being on the receiving end of door-to-door solicitation, and I did not relish the idea of doing that to my neighbors.

But I soon learned canvassing is different. We’re not asking for money or trying to get you to change your religion. We just want you to vote and suggest which candidates and issues to vote for.

Every time I canvass, I’m pleasantly surprised by how friendly and grateful people are to hear from me. Sometimes I get into lovely conversations. Though, to be honest, any kind of interaction is rare — mostly, when we ring a doorbell, nobody’s home, and we leave a door-hanger and move on. Still, it’s nice to get out and walk — and to feel like we’re doing something. Because we are.

After you’ve canvassed a few times in your neighborhood, people know who you are. One time, a neighbor chased me down — I wasn’t canvassing that day, I was just walking the dog — because she knew I canvassed, and she was upset because she thought she missed the deadline to vote in a previous special election. I reassured her that no, she had not; the ballot just needed to be postmarked by Election Day. I got out my phone and showed her where she could drop the ballot off in a dropbox if she didn’t want to mail it in. Another time, while canvassing, I rang the doorbell of a woman in her 90s who lived alone, and her caregiver let me in. The woman was unable to walk more than a couple of steps and breathed with an oxygen tank, but we sat a while and had a lovely conversation. She had been an activist herself when she was younger and more mobile.

A few weeks ago, a neighbor in his 80s greeted me with a big grin — and a fake severed head. He had been decorating for Halloween and thought that answering the door with a fake severed head was a splendid idea. He was 100% right about that, and we had an excellent conversation.

Two separate goats

That’s another great thing about canvassing: You’re a volunteer. You’re not on a clock. If you want to stop and have a nice conversation with someone, do it. That’s what we’re out there for.

Negative interactions are extremely rare; I’ve knocked on hundreds of doors and can only think of two or three times when people were rude. And sometimes even the negative interactions can be entertaining; goats chased State Sen. Akilah Weber Pierson. Twice. In one day. Two separate goats, at two separate houses.

Local action is your best bet for breaking the MAGA wave sweeping the country. Canvassing to support Prop 50 is a great way to make a difference; sign up at mobilize.us, or sign up for any of the other great causes there. Or just get active in your community — your church, synagogue, mosque, school or any other club or activity. If you choose to canvass, you’ll almost certainly find it a rewarding experience, and you’re highly unlikely to be chased by goats.

Mitch Wagner is a board member at large for the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club, serving La Mesa and surrounding communities — but all are welcome. We meet the first Wednesday of the month at 6:30 pm for a social half-hour, with programming starting 7 pm, at the La Mesa Community Center, 4975 Community Drive, La Mesa.

I’m concentrating my social media and blogging time to where I get the most enjoyment and interaction.

I’ve stopped posting memes, vintage photos and other Internet found-media here. You can find them on my other social accounts:

• Tumblr
• Mastodon
• BlueSky
• Facebook

Shift Change at the Wheel Reinvention Factory. Even David Brooks is welcome in our movement.. By Hamilton Nolan.

Microsoft, Tear Down That Wall! What the Eurostack is missing.. By Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

Photos: From Ranches to Small Mountain Towns, How Prop. 50 Would Change San Diego’s 48th Congressional District:

More often than meeting people who were strongly in favor or against redistricting, I met people who either had not heard of Proposition 50 or didn’t understand it. Others simply felt disillusioned by politics. They didn’t believe that politicians, no matter from what party, would have a positive impact on their lives, and they didn’t expect help from them.

Chris Arnade:: “…. Hong Kong is not walkable, [but] that doesn’t mean it’s not a singular and fascinating city, a humid gem in an ocean of global uniformity, and one that is ultimately rewarding as a pedestrian.” As always, I love his travel writing and street photography.

Spit On, Sworn At, and Undeterred: What It’s Like to Own a Cybertruck

Photos from yesterday’s No Kings rally and march in downtown San Diego, in Waterford Park. There were three rallies in the city, and more than a dozen around the county. I was one of thousands of people who turned out.

Eight years ago today I attended my first meeting of the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club. It has been quite a ride since.

I marched at the San Diego No Kings event this morning. I’ll have photos later. It was intense. My phone needs recharging and so do I.

Do The Same Sorts Of People Lead All Societies?

Loni Anderson, Star of ‘WKRP in Cincinnati,’ Dies at 79 — “In 1980, she starred in the biographical drama and made-for-TV movie ‘The Jayne Mansfield Story,’ opposite a young Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Hungarian actor and bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay.”

We once loved pigeons. We might not remember that, but they do

I’m going to the No Kings event Saturday. I didn’t want to shlep a sign but then I thought — T-shirt! Ordered one, but it arrives Sunday. Oh, well — there will be other protests. Sadly, we’re not going to get rid of the 🤡and his 🍩enablers in one day.

My hotel room has no desk. It has an ironing board and iron but no closets, so once you’ve ironed your clothes, there is nowhere to hang them up.

I haven’t ironed anything since I ironed my shirt on our wedding day in 1993, but don’t you need to hang things up immediately after you iron them, if you’re not going to wear them right away?

Here’s something I saw today — this restaurant next door to my hotel. Colombian. It wasn’t great, but I’m glad I tried it anyway.

President Donald Trump is desperate for an enemy to justify the extreme force he wants to deploy on blue states and is trying his hardest to convince people that antifa is so dangerous that, as Attorney General Pam Bondi said at the roundtable this week, they need to be exterminated like ISIS or Hamas. The Trump administration also has a nearly pathological habit of accusing their enemies of being exactly like them. Which is why they think the left is a dark money-funded domestic terror cell full of pedophiles and spree shooters that wants to destroy America.

…

[Jack] Posobiec, an influencer who never ascended to Kirk’s level because he just can’t stop going full Nazi, said at the roundtable, “Antifa has been around in various iterations for almost 100 years in some instances, going back to the Weimar Republic in Germany.” What happened to antifa after that, Jack?

— Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day, The war against giant frog costumes

The Romantic: How Diane Keaton’s quest for beauty left an imprint on American culture — A beautiful appreciation of a beautiful spirit and woman.

The Oatmeal’s comic/essay about AI art starts as yet another AI rant, but then goes in an interesting direction that more or less aligns with how I think about using AI for writing. I use it for what the Oatmeal calls administrative drudgery — dragging cans of paint up the stairs to paint the Sistine Chapel. But I do not use it to write.

New Paper Finds That When You Reward AI for Success on Social Media, It Becomes Increasingly Sociopathic. “… when [AIs] were rewarded for success at tasks like boosting likes and other online engagement metrics, the bots increasingly engaged in unethical behavior like lying and spreading hateful messages or misinformation.” Fortunately, this is not a problem when people use social media.

Scott Alexander reviews Julian Jaynes’s alternative-science masterpiece, “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” and argues Jaynes is half-right:

Julian Jaynes' The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciousness. And second, that it posits a breakdown of the bicameral mind. I think it’s possible to route around these flaws while keeping the thesis otherwise intact. So I’m going to start by reviewing a slightly different book, the one Jaynes should have written. Then I’ll talk about the more dubious one he actually wrote.

Alexander argues that what Jaynes discovered is not the breakdown of the bicameral mind — left-brain and right-brain merging into an integrated whole. Jaynes discovered the origin of theory of mind.

Until the Bronze Age, people operated without theory of mind, and they hallucinated gods to compensate. When theory of mind emerged, it spread like a virus.

Turn on what Terry Pratchett called “first sight and second thoughts” and try to look at the Bronze Age with fresh eyes. It was really weird. People would center their city around a giant ziggurat, the “House of God”, with a giant idol within. They would treat this idol exactly like a living human – feeding it daily, washing it daily, sometimes even marching it through the streets on sedan chairs carried by teams of slaves so it could go on a “connubial visit” to the temple of an idol of the opposite sex! When the king died, hundreds of thousands of men would labor to build him a giant tomb, and then they would kill a bunch of people to serve him in the afterlife. Then every so often it would all fall apart and everyone would slink away into the hills, trying to pretend they didn’t spend the last twenty years buliding a jeweled obelisk so some guy named Ningal-Iddida could boast about how many slaves he had.

If the Bronze Age seems kind of hive-mind-y, Julian Jaynes argues this is because its inhabitants weren’t quite individuals, at least not the way we think of individuality.

The Trump government is like those episodes of MASH where Henry Blake leaves the camp and Frank Burns is in charge.

Bobby Brainworms says babies live inside women’s placentas, which is not how women’s bodies work, and that he’s going to assign someone to prove that acetaminophen causes autism, which is not how science works.

… when people say, “How come you were never mad at the last guy?” I say, “Because I wasn’t paying attention.” … I thought the last guy was pretty smart, and he seemed good at his job, and I’m lazy by nature. … So I don’t check up on people when they seem okay at their job. You may think that’s an ignorant answer, but it’s not, it’s a great answer. If you left your baby with your mother tonight, you’re not going to race home and check the nanny cam. But if you leave your baby with Gary Busey…

— John Mulaney, “There’s a horse in the hospital."

I was today years old when I heard John Mulaney’s “Horse in the Hospital” routine, and it’s brilliant. “If you left your baby with your mother tonight, you’re not going to race home and check the nanny cam. But if you leave your baby with Gary Busey… "

I am a heavy user of dictation on the iPhone — I probably dictate as much or more than I type — but don’t use it on the Mac or iPad. If I have a full-size keyboard available, it’s easier for me to type.

The online conversation community seems to gravitate toward corporate-owned silos rather than commons, and seems to like its arbitrary 300-character limits. These two trends are frustrating to me.

When I turned 50, I decided to get a tattoo, but I did not follow through because it seemed like too much of a commitment.

When I get dressed in the morning, I don’t like putting on T-shirts with messages on them because I may not agree with the message in the afternoon.

I used “harrumph” in a work chat this morning. I’m at an age now where I can “harrumph,” and I plan to take full advantage of this privilege.

The Best Apples to Eat Right Now, According to an Apple Reviewer

I love apples. I literally eat an apple a day. My go-to apple is now Cosmic Crisp.

For a few years, I loved Honeycrisps, but I now find them barely edible. I think Honeycrisps are different now.

Reviewer Brian Frange ranks SweeTango as number one. I’ve never had one but I’ll watch for it.

Trump says Illinois governor, Chicago mayor should be jailed

Stephen Miller Cited ‘Plenary Authority,’ Then Paused. Conspiracies Started Flying.

I work on a core team of eight people, five of them women, including the manager. We use ❤️ to acknowledge messages on Teams. But lately, I have been uncomfortable with the ❤️ and I am using a 👍 instead. On the other hand, I don’t want to send a message to my colleagues that I don’t like them — I’m just not comfortable with the ❤️.

Unrelated: I’ve been told I overthink things.

For me, the answers are:

1. Facebook. Sigh.
2. Reddit, but 90% of my activity is reading and the occasional comment
3. Tumblr
4. Mastodon
5. Bluesky is a distant fifth

I don’t like Discord, so I decided to drop all the Discords I participate in. If those communities go to a proper community platform, I’ll gladly rejoin.

I do LinkedIn for professional reasons.

I don’t do Instagram and Threads now, but I might go back.

Here’s where you can follow me elsewhere.

C Spire overcomes AI ‘stigma’ — C Spire accelerated trustworthy AI adoption via a CEO-backed Center of Excellence, a customer-first strategy, and early tooling wins that saved time and blocked threats. My latest on Fierce Network.

Congratulations to Cory Doctorow on the publication of his new book, “Enshittification: Why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it,” and his blockbuster profile in The New York Times.

Times writer Joseph Bernstein met with Cory over “an avocado malted and poached eggs at a Lower Manhattan diner:”

Doctorow had arrived to the diner with custom-printed poop emoji stickers, a design that appears on the cover of the new book. He’d won favor with the owners on an earlier visit by explaining that their seltzer maker could be modified to fit a large carbon dioxide tank, rather than frequently replacing smaller, proprietary canisters.

Across Doctorow’s fiction and nonfiction is a central theme: That technology can be used either as a tool of human empowerment and creativity, or repression and control by the state or big corporations. In this vision, tinkering, customization, and individuality are good. Conformity, consolidation, and passive consumption are bad – even if it’s about something as seemingly small as seltzer.

“I am simultaneously extremely excited and hopeful and energized about the possibilities of what technology can do for us as people trying to thrive,” Doctorow said, “and terrified of how bad technology will be for that project if we get it wrong.”

Cory’s theory of enshittification in a nutshell:

First, a platform is good to its users. That may look like Facebook connecting you to all of your friends, or Amazon providing a giant, reliable marketplace for goods.

Then, when enough people have joined a platform that there aren’t any alternatives, the platforms start exploiting their own users to entice businesses. That may look like Facebook providing personal data about its customers to advertisers, or Google prioritizing paid ads over organic search.

Then, when those business customers are also stuck on one dominant platform, the platform puts the screws to them, too: Ad rates skyrocketing on Facebook amid reports of ad fraud, or Amazon sellers having to pay Amazon to be featured on Prime, just to appear high up in search results.

In the end, according to Doctorow, no one is happy except the shareholders of the big platforms.

“All our tech businesses are turning awful,” Doctorow writes in the book. “And they’re not dying. We remain trapped in their carcasses, unable to escape.”

Minnie does zoomies.

This is Tina and Ray’s dog Walter. Tina had about a dozen people over to her house this morning, and Walter greeted every one of them at the front door with a rope-toy in his mouth. Walter excels at tug-of-war.

What’s Wrong With Las Vegas? Prices are rising, international tourism is falling, and visits are down 11% year-over-year.

Work is evaporating, businesses are closing, longtime residents are leaving, and the city’s creative middle class is hanging on by a thread.

By Ben Fritz at the Wall Street Journal:

Los Angeles is full of transplants who moved here to pursue dreams of working in movies and TV. Few earned millions as stars or A-list directors. They build the sets, operate the cameras, manage the schedules and make sure everything looks and sounds perfect. The work isn’t steady, because film shoots end and TV shows get canceled. But established professionals had rarely gone more than a few months between gigs—until now.

The entertainment industry is in a downward spiral that began when the dual strikes by actors and writers ended in 2023. Work is evaporating, businesses are closing, longtime residents are leaving, and the heart of L.A.’s creative middle class is hanging on by a thread.

“This is the first year since 1989 that I haven’t had a show to work on,” said Pixie Wespiser, a 62-year-old production manager and producer who has worked on 36 TV series, including the original “Night Court” and its recent revival. “I look around and I see so many people who are seriously suffering.”

At the end of 2024, some 100,000 people were employed in the motion picture industry in Los Angeles County, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Two years earlier, there were 142,000.

The primary reason is that Hollywood is making less stuff.

…

Thomas Curley won an Oscar recording the sound on 2014’s “Whiplash” and had more job offers than he knew what to do with as recently as 2022. The 49-year-old hasn’t worked since April of last year, save for one week on a movie that was made in Europe but needed to shoot exteriors in San Francisco.

The hardest part isn’t watching his savings wither while he does home improvement projects and hunts for jobs, Curley said. It’s missing the creative camaraderie he has enjoyed for most of his adult life on movie and TV sets.

“Feeling like you’re part of a team that’s making something that can provide joy for millions of people around the world is what drew me here in the first place,” said the native of upstate New York. “That level of purpose is a really hard thing to let go of.”

The mafia hitman who dreamt of being a pop star: The scarcely believable true story of convicted Israeli assassin Avner Harari

Drew Scanlon, the face of the three-panel Blinking White Guy meme, is using his Internet fame to raise money for multiple sclerosis.

Many Germans look back with bafflement at how the country that produced Bach and Goethe succumbed to rule by Hitler and his enabling thugs. Americans may someday look back with bafflement at how the country that produced Washington and Lincoln surrendered to Trump and his enabling thugs.

— Edward Packard

Nine Things I Learned in Ninety Years. By Edward Packard, writer, whose work includes the prototype Choose Your Own Adventure book and many other books in that series, and native son of Huntington, NY, where I grew up.

Rebekah Riess and Bill Kirkos at CNN:

Adults and children alike were pulled from their Chicago apartments, crying and screaming, during a large overnight raid that has left tenants and neighbors shaken.

“I’ve been on military bases for a good portion of my life,” said Darrell Ballard, who lives in the building next door. “And the activity I saw – it was an invasion.”

Ballard recalled seeing residents detained outside the building for hours, after seeing a Black Hawk helicopter flying over the five-story building in the city’s South Shore neighborhood and military-sized vehicles and agents filling the parking lot early Tuesday morning.

…

…. Eboni Watson, said she and others ducked for cover when hearing several flash bangs go off.

“They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other,” Watson told WLS, recalling trucks and military-style vans were used to separate adults from their children.

If ICE doesn’t want to be compared to the Gestapo, they could maybe try not acting like terrorists.

One of my neighbor kids is doing trumpet practice. This is a sentence one hopes never to utter.

We had a great meeting of the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club yesterday. It was wonderful to get together with people doing the work of preserving democracy against fascism.

Microsoft confirms it found a way to make Crocs even uglier – with Windows XP and Clippy

I discovered Crocs a few weeks ago and I love them and want to wear them 24x7 and be buried in them when I die. They are very fashionable and I look great in them.

Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark:

If you were expecting Triumph of the Will, you were disappointed because what you got instead was fat, disoriented Elvis stumbling through his set. Except that it wasn’t funny. It was dangerous.

I promise you that the flag officers in attendance were more alarmed than amused. And you should be, too.

1. “The Enemy from Within”

President Trump did not have many bad things to say about America’s foreign adversaries. He spoke about Vladimir Putin in largely neutral terms (only saying he was “disappointed” in him) and barely mentioned China.

He did, however, speak with great moral clarity about certain classes of Americans whom he views as a grave threat:

• The American left: “They’re really bad. They’re bad people.” Again, he’s talking about Americans here.

• His own domestic political opponents: “They’re vicious people that we have to fight, just like you have to fight vicious people. Mine are a different kind of vicious.”

• American journalists: “sleazebags.”

• Residents of American inner cities: “animals.”

I fit three out of four of those categories. I also support LGBTQ rights and DEI, which Trump and his supporters have declared war on.

“I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.”
— General William Tecumseh Sherman

They have declared war on 1/3 to 1/2 of the American population: Three of our largest cities plus San Francisco, the residents of America’s inner cities in particular, LGBTQ people, women, nonwhite people, the American Left and all Trump’s political opponents.

He’s 100% hero, lives by the Scout oath (trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent¹), loves his fellow humans and is never even tempted by evil.

I’ve never liked Batman, because he seems to me to be on the edge of being a supervillain himself. On the other hand, a friend who is a deep comics fan once said I was doing Batman a disservice. Batman, he said, has all those qualities I love in Superman, but Batman is in a bad mood about it. Superman loves humanity because of our capacity for good, while Batman sees the capacity for good and is angry that so many of us choose evil.

Looking at online reviews of this year’s “Superman” movie, I’m surprised that many people say they’d never seen a good Superman movie before, or that this was the first good Superman movie they’d seen. I guess the Christopher Reeve Superman is lost to the mists of prehistory.

Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day:

The MAGA movement needs violence and intimidation to function, both online and off. Without its central bundle of grievances and universe of enemies — LGBT people, people of color, leftists, Democrats — Trump’s supporters might notice that he’s ransacking the country’s institutions and making their lives worse. So they can’t acknowledge that a decade inside the pressure cooker of political violence has turned Trump supporters in spree shooters in waiting.

And the U.S. will have to weather that storm under the most inept and corrupt national government we’ve known.

How should I prepare for that? I have no answers, and have been continuing along as we always have been.

I hope that living in California will provide protection.

This is something that keeps me awake staring wide-eyed at the ceiling at 4 am in the dark.

Previously

Here’s something I saw walking the dog, giving a Lincoln Lawyer vibe. I have not seen this car or license plate before. It was parked about a half-dozen houses away from us on our street.

Lately when I think of going to the movies I think of driving across town, parking and paying money to sit in a dark room and watch things on a screen. I have screens at home.

Hamilton Nolan: “The ‘imperial boomerang’ is the concept that all of the methods of oppression that a mighty nation visits upon its far-flung imperial subjects will one day be turned back upon its own population. And here we are.”

“Workslop: Bad study but an excellent word”, by David Gerard at Pivot To AI:

The word of the day is: “workslop.” There’s a new article in Harvard Business Review: “AI-Generated ‘Workslop’ Is Destroying Productivity.” [HBR]

Workslop is when a coworker sends you some obvious AI-generated trash and you have to spend your time redoing the whole thing. They save time by wasting your time:

Workslop is a result of top-down AI mandates, Gerard says. However, the report identifying the trend is an “unlabeled advertising feature” for enterprise AI, not a real study. The report blames workers, but bad management is the real culprit.

Cory Doctorow: " … a third of the stock market is tied up in seven AI companies that have no way to become profitable and … this is a bubble that’s going to burst and take the whole economy with it…. "

I firmly believe the (economic) AI apocalypse is coming. These companies are not profitable. They can’t be profitable. They keep the lights on by soaking up hundreds of billions of dollars in other people’s money and then lighting it on fire. Eventually those other people are going to want to see a return on their investment, and when they don’t get it, they will halt the flow of billions of dollars. Anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops.

Cory’s advice to Cornell University, during a visit to lecture there:

I told them that they should be planning to absorb the productive residue that will be left behind after the bubble bursts:

https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Plan for a future where you can buy GPUs for ten cents on the dollar, where there’s a buyer’s market for hiring skilled applied statisticians, and where there’s a ton of extremely promising open source models that have barely been optimized and have vast potential for improvement.

There’s plenty of useful things you can do with AI. But AI is (as Princeton’s Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, authors of AI Snake Oil put it), a normal technology:

https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology

That doesn’t mean “nothing to see here, move on.” It means that AI isn’t the bow-wave of “impending superintelligence.” Nor is it going to deliver “humanlike intelligence.”

It’s a grab-bag of useful (sometimes very useful) tools that can sometimes make workers' lives better, when workers get to decide how and when they’re used.

That’s what a big business should do. But what about individuals? That’s something I’ve been thinking about, and getting nowhere.

People today aren’t more productive than they were in 1975, despite advances in computers and the Internet.

I spent a couple of hours this weekend processing and closing browser tabs.

I’m sure these two things are completely unrelated.

‘We’re insanely hubristic’: how The Rest Is History became the world’s biggest history podcast. “If you found history boring at school, this podcast will have you intently listening to 20 hours on the French Revolution – and that’s before even getting to the Terror.” Can confirm. I love this podcast.

Small Acts of Good, US as Third World Country, and How Culture Changes. By Chris Arnade. American decline is much on my mind lately. I take it very personally – I am not built to do well in a failed nation. Arnade, like me, is cautiously optimistic, seeing our current rapid decline as reversible.

What Happens When a Bad-Tempered, Distractible Doofus Runs an Empire?. “One of the few things that Kaiser Wilhelm II, who ruled Germany from 1888 to 1918, had a talent for was causing outrage.” (Via @sjvn@mastodon.social. Thanks!)

White Lotus season one: I don’t know if it would be right to say we liked it. This is a show about essentially likable characters who chronically self-sabotage due to their acute cranial-rectal inversion. The show featured brilliant, subtle performances by Steve Zahn, Jennifer Coolidge and Murray Bartlett as Armond, the put-upon resort manager. Just kidding: They weren’t subtle — they were outrageous and ridiculous and delicious. We will watch season two.

We liked Superman. But it was too long and it made me miss Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman, Ned Beatty and Valerie Perrine.

Krypto stole the movie.

The supporting characters were better than the main action: Nathan Fillion as the Green Lantern, Hawk Girl, Mr. Terrific, Drunk Party Supergirl.

Wendell Pierce was terribly underutilized. I’m going to start walking around with a big cigar in my mouth.

If this is the start of a DC Cinematic Universe, I’m there for it.

I was planning to see this in the theater — our first theater movie in at least five years. But I changed my mind. And I’m glad I did. It’s more comfortable to see it at home, where we can take breaks and enjoy our own snacks.

I have only a half-dozen phone numbers in my iPhone tagged as favorites. I actually looked at all of them for the first time in a long time this week. How long? One of the numbers was for voicemail for a job I left more than five years ago.

The next items on my to-do list are filling out expense reports and dropping stool samples at the vet. Gosh — hard to choose what to do next!

What Nvidia and OpenAI’s $100B agreement means for telcos. OpenAI just inked a $100B “memorandum of understanding” with NVIDIA, which could lead to a tectonic industry shift for telcos. Or it could all be vaporware — a “memorandum of understanding” is not a signed contract. By me on Fierce Network, earlier this week.

My latest on Fierce Network: Telcos tackle AI’s impact at Fierce Network Research event. At the Dallas Cowboys headquarters, a bunch of telco execs got together to figure out what the heck to do about AI.

Here’s Minnie one evening this week, letting me know it’s time to quit fooling around and put out her food. Priorities, man!

The Advocate: “The man Meta has appointed to help address ‘ideological and political bias’ in artificial intelligence is a conservative influencer who believes that pesticide turns children LGBTQ+ and that the COVID-19 vaccine caused Matthew Perry’s death.” Crazy as a hatful of snakes.