2023s
My latest: Surviving the AI job apocalypse. AI won’t kill the human race or take everybody’s job. But the workplace will be transformed, and some jobs are at risk. Workers are already starting to adapt.
I recently came across the IndieWeb concept of POSSE. Not the first time I’ve seen it, but this time I read it more closely and said, “Holy cow, there’s a name for the way I’ve always preferred to use social media?”
It should be called “POSCE”—“Publish on your Own Site, Copy Elsewhere.” It’s a more understandable explanation of the concept. Though understandability isn’t a great strength for the IndieWeb movement.
Suddenly, It Looks Like We’re in a Golden Age for Medicine. David Wallace-Wells / NYTimes.
Hard to reconcile with our disastrous Covid response. We did better with the 1918 flu.
I’m fiddling with my RSS/read-it-later setup—again!
This is an area I’m never satisfied with, and I seem to fiddle with it every few months. I find Inoreader is a mixed bag as a reading environment, though I’m continuing to use it because it’s unparalleled for filtering massive numbers of RSS feeds to find a few details that I need for my work.
So I’m experimenting with moving more over to newsletters, and then comes the question of what’s the ideal tool for reading newsletters. Inoreader? Matter?? Readwise Reader
I’m finding, to my surprise, that the ideal tool for reading newsletters may be … wait for it … email.
I do not share the general Mac power-user enthusiasm for tools that parse articles to strip out ads and make everything look the same. I find they introduce enough problems that they’re not hugely superior to the originals.
There will never be another Harrison Ford
The guy’s 80, and instead of sliding into the traditional role of lifetime achievement award winner, memoir writer and maker of occasional cameo appearances, he’s back on billboards and the sides of buses for “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.”
Meanwhile his roles in “1923” and “Shrinking” could very well deliver not only his first Emmy nomination but his second as well.
Oh, and he just finished shooting his first Marvel movie, “Captain America: Brave New World,” in which he plays American President Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (a role formerly filled by the late, great William Hurt), who may or may not turn out to be the Red Hulk.
— Mary McNamara / LA Times
As AI becomes more prevalent, a vast underclass of people training the machines is emerging worldwide. Josh Dzieza reports in depth for The Verge.
There are people classifying the emotional content of TikTok videos, new variants of email spam, and the precise sexual provocativeness of online ads. Others are looking at credit-card transactions and figuring out what sort of purchase they relate to or checking e-commerce recommendations and deciding whether that shirt is really something you might like after buying that other shirt. Humans are correcting customer-service chatbots, listening to Alexa requests, and categorizing the emotions of people on video calls. They are labeling food so that smart refrigerators don’t get confused by new packaging, checking automated security cameras before sounding alarms, and identifying corn for baffled autonomous tractors.
Casey Newton at Platformer: How the Kids Online Safety Act puts us all at risk
Happy Independence Day to all of my American friends, and may you finish the day with the same number of fingers with which you began it.
RIP Frank Field, a local New York TV weatherman who was a fixture of the television landscape when I was a kid in the 70s. He was 100 years old.
Field, who died Saturday, was an evangelist for the Heimlich maneuver, which saved his life in 1985.
He was dining at a Manhattan restaurant with the CBS sportscaster Warner Wolf when a piece of roast beef became lodged in Dr. Field’s throat. “There was no pain,” he later told The New York Times. “I tried to swallow and could not. I tried to cough. I was perfectly calm, until I realized I couldn’t breathe.” He was also unable to speak to Mr. Wolf to convey his distress.
“So I pointed to my throat and stood up, to give him access,” Dr. Field said. “He did it the first time, and it didn’t work. I thought: ‘My God! It doesn’t work. If I fell unconscious, I wouldn’t make the 11 o’clock news.'”
When Mr. Wolf tried again, he expelled the meat.
“Warner had never done it,” Dr. Field said, “but he had seen me demonstrate it on television.”
Frank Field, Who Brought Expertise to TV Weathercasting, Dies at 100 (NYTimes / Richard Goldstein)
President Eisenhower signed the National Highway Act, “the largest infrastructure project in American history,” July 3, 1956—68 years ago today. The hosts of the This Day in Esoteric Political History podcast “are joined by Eddie Alterman, longtime editor of Car & Driver magazine, to discuss how the highway network reshaped the country and changed car culture.”
This Day in Esoteric Political History: “The Great American Road Trip”
I had thought the end of “Endeavour” might take place immediately prior to the first season of “Inspector Morse.” But then I thought that was wrong of me, because Shaun Evans is so much younger than John Thaw was.
Or not. Today I learned Thaw was 45 at the beginning of “Morse,” and Evans is 43.
We have watched four episodes of “Silo,” and so far, I would absolutely live there. Friendly people, everyone dresses comfortably, earth tones and sweaters. Plenty of stairs for aerobic exercise. No computers more complicated than MS-DOS 5. Don’t have to worry about sunscreen. No mosquitoes.
Currently reading: Angels Flight by Michael Connelly 📚
Finished reading: Blood Work by Michael Connelly. Not his best, but very good nonetheless. This is the sixth Connelly novel I’ve read since January; I read his first several years ago. I think I’ll start the next one right now. 📚
That moment when you're finishing up a big project that's the last thing you need to do before a four-day weekend and your mouse decides it's angry at the Mac and they're not talking anymore.