2022
The Los Angeles Police Department is here to serve and protect… the powerful. The rest of you are on your own.
After audio recordings leaked of Los Angeles city lawmakers making shockingly racist statements, police want to find and prosecute the leakers.
LAPD Thinks Best Response To Leaked Recording Of Councilmembers’ Racist Remarks Is Going After Reddit Users. By Tim Cushing at Techdirt.
This letter from Mickey Mantle, recalling his ‘outstanding experience’ at Yankee stadium, is delightfully obscene, as is this 1898 memo to all Major League Baseball teams to reduce cursing.
The 1898 memo was “so expletive-laden and obscene as to be ‘unmailable’ to its intended audience via the postal service, and so was delivered by hand to each of the League’s 12 clubs and their foul-mouthed players.”
(Thanks, Daring Fireball!)
Dyson’s Air Purifying Headphones Will Cost $949, Plus Your Pride. By Andrew Liszewski at Gizmodo.
McSweeney’s: Middle School Party Games, Revised for Thirty-Five-Year-Olds.
Truth or Dare
If a player chooses “truth,” they must reveal how much money they make. If they choose “dare,” they must hand someone their phone and let them look at every tab they have open on their browser.
By Nicole Beckley
The New Yorker: Cory Doctorow Wants You to Know What Computers Can and Can’t Do.
A conversation about the “mediocre monopolists” of Big Tech, the weirdness of crypto, and the real lessons of science fiction.
…
This will all be so great if we don’t screw it up.
By Christopher Byrd.
Cory also talks about the limitations of perfect productivity: Once you’ve pared away all the unimportant tasks in your life, everything left is important and there’s nothing left to pare.
Fortunately, this is not a problem for me. I waste plenty of time!
I’m very impressed that Cory was featured in the New Yorker.
The promise and the peril of ChatGPT. By Casey Newton.
Reading about the potential for abuse here, I found myself thinking about the classic science fiction story “A Logic Named Joe,” in which author Murray Leinster predicts the consumer internet in 1946. One of the computers on the network gets a little wonky and starts answering questions on how to commit murder.
People are already using ChatGPT to get answers to potentially lethal questions.
Less significantly, ChatGPT could potentially be the end of Google and industries that have grown around it—advertising and search engine optimization. Google gives search results, but ChatGPT provides answers.
Yes, It’s Censorship: Stop picking that nit, it’ll never heal. A few big companies, including Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Twitter, monopolize public discourse, setting the rules for what we’re allowed to talk about.
Cory Doctorow:
The decision to make our “digital public square,” into a privatized, monopoly-friendly corporate shopping mall whose owners can wield the power of the state against rivals who dare to compete with them may not violate the First Amendment, but it sure as hell isn’t good for free expression.
Ancient Rome did not fall. It was destroyed from within, by the same forces we see playing out in America today. By Barry Gander, a self-described “Canadian from Connecticut,” on Medium.
A new Indiana Jones movie, starring 80-year-old Harrison Ford? Sure, why not?
I’ve seen criticism of the trailer and of all the movies after “Raiders.” And much of that criticism is valid.
But the best reaction to the trailer was from Jason Kottke: “Ok fine I will watch one more Indy movie.”
I have enjoyed every Raiders movie, even “Temple of Doom” and “Crystal Skull.” I have no doubt we will watch this one and enjoy it.
The parts I enjoyed in “Temple of Doom” were the little kid and the girlfriend, who screamed very fetchingly.
Marion stole the movie in “Crystal Skull.” She had all the good scenes.
About that trailer: The bullwhip scene is classic Indiana Jones: “Look at me I am doing this swashbuckling thing… Oh shit that was a really bad idea.” All conveyed with his face and body language.
That scene is a visual response to the swordsman scene in the first movie, only this time it’s the other guys who have the guns.
Proud Boy terrorists threaten Columbus, Ohio, drag queen story hour, school asks for protection, police nope out.. On MetaFilter.
Far more children have been molested by youth pastors than by drag queens, as Dan Savage points out.
jwz: Like Zoinks
Seth Godin: Confidence doesn’t help win the lottery. There are lots of lotteries in our lives. Always have a Plan B.
One of the best blogs on the Internet. is back. I’m glad to see Jason Kottke has returned to blogging. But I’m sorry to learn he’s experiencing chronic pain. That’s hard.
Karl Bode at Techdirt:
… policymakers freaking out about the Chinese potentially getting access to TikTok user data are the exact same people who’ve fought tooth and nail against the U.S. having even a baseline privacy law for the Internet era. These are the exact same folks that created a data broker privacy hellscape completely free of accountability, and advocated for the dismantling of most, if not all, regulatory oversight of the sector. The result: just an endless parade of scandals, hacks, and breaches.
Now those exact same folks are breathlessly concerned when just one of countless bad actors (China) abuse a zero-accountability privacy hellscape they themselves helped to create.