2023
Life for the Lowest Class in Ancient Pompeii? It Was Awful. Excavations in the ancient ruins have unearthed a cramped space where enslaved workers and donkeys performed their grueling tasks.
Jim Geraghty at National Review: “Hunter Biden’s entire life, so far, has been a bold, defiant, shameless declaration that laws are for the little people, not for the Bidens.”
I will gladly support Joe Biden against any plausible Republican candidate. I think he’s done a pretty good job as President. Not great, but pretty good.
However, let’s not kid ourselves: If Hunter Biden came from a different family, he’d be doing prison time by now. And it remains to be seen how much Joe Biden knew.
The first record of donuts appears in a 1400s German cookbook.
I think this is the first year I’m hearing about jelly donuts and Hanukkah. We always had latkes when I was a kid.
Fantasy disguised as science fiction disguised as fantasy: Roger Zelazny’s “Lord of Light.” Jo Walton: “I have never liked Lord of Light. If I’ve ever been in a conversation with you and you’ve mentioned how great it is and I’ve nodded and smiled, I apologise.”
Making DevSecOps more than just lipstick on a pig. If your answer to implementing DevSecOps is dumping more responsibility on overworked developer teams, you’re doing it wrong. My latest.
The presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania said calls for genocide against Jewish people don’t violate their school policies. When I covered crime in New Jersey in the 1980s, making death threats was a crime. I assume that’s true today in most US jurisdictions—but not at Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania if you’re threatening Jews.
Back to Reddit
After a recent discussion with friendly fellow journalists, I started using Reddit again. I’d dumped Reddit after the whole dustup this summer between the Reddit CEO and the developer of the Apollo client. It left me feeling like the CEO was a petty jerk, and I didn’t want to support him.
But after Friday I decided to give Reddit another try, and I find I like the discussion there. And call me a sucker but I like watching the karma points rack up.
And it’s a good opportunity to promote articles.
But I miss Apollo. Reddit is barely usable on the iPhone and iPad without Apollo.
On a private discussion group, a friend asked what we use to clean our computer screens. I said I cover mine with peanut butter and let the dog lick them clean. I enjoy opportunities like that to share my deep technical knowledge with the less-informed.
Lucid dream startup says you can work in your sleep.
Despite the linkbait headline, the article itself is very interesting and goes into claims by the startup that they’ve created technology to induce lucid dreaming at will.
What would be the ramifications of something like that, where most people were able to lucid dream at will? Would it be like the movie “Inception?”
The most popular articles on Wikipedia in 2023: ChatGPT is #1. The list also includes Taylor Swift, the Barbie movie and Matthew Perry. I’m interested to see how many listings are international, particularly Indian.
Jewish women’s advocates share graphic descriptions of Hamas’s brutal rape, mutilation and torture of Israeli women and girls. In the US and West, progressives march to support Palestinian victims—and rightly so—but are quiet when the victims are Jews.
Also: The World’s Feminists Need to Show Up for Israeli Victims: Solidarity for victims of sexual assault should trump other politics.
Facebook and Instagram’s recommendation systems are finding and promoting blatant pedophilia
WSJ: Meta Is Struggling to Boot Pedophiles Off Facebook and Instagram
The headline and deck on this article are too kind to Meta. The companies do not seem to be “struggling” to get rid of this content. They don’t seem to be trying very hard at all.
More from Casey Newton (paid sub required I think) who points out the difference between “Internet problems” and “platform problems.” “Internet problems” arise from the fact that we live in a world where evil exists, and will inevitably find its way onto the Internet. “Platform problems” are unique to a particular platform.
Pedophilia content on Meta platforms isn’t an Internet problem. Facebook and Instagram are actively promoting that content to pedophiles.
I’m not feeling good about being on Facebook right now.
“Bertie Sheldrake was a South London pickle manufacturer who converted to Islam and became king of a far-flung Islamic republic before returning to London and settling back into obscurity.”
The number of supercentenarians in an area tends to fall dramatically about 100 years after accurate birth records are introduced.
Ukrainian defenders print out giant 1:1 life-size aerial photographs of damaged airfields. Once the site is repaired, they hang the images over the sites so they look damaged and not worth attacking again.
I’m going back to cross-posting from mitchw.blog to @mitchw@mastodon.social. Mastodon is part of the Fediverse (of course), but it’s not one with the fediverse.
This system may need further adjusting later today or this week, and almost certainly need adjusting in the near term as the fediverse evolves.
“I reversed my type 2 diabetes. Here’s how I did it”
Neil Barsky at The Guardian:
One gray Sunday in the middle of the Covid lockdown, I received an unwelcome call from my family doctor. Until then, for virtually my entire life, I had managed to stay out of a doctor’s office, except for routine checkups. My luck had run out.
“I am sorry to disturb you on a weekend,” she said. “But your tests just came back and your blood sugar levels are alarming. I am pretty sure you have diabetes.”
Barsky controls his diabetes with lifestyle changes.
I did the same more than 10 years ago—diet, exercise, and losing 100 pounds of weight.
My diet is different than Barsky’s. I do eat carbs—pizza on Fridays, plenty of fruit every day, and 4-6 cookies as a bedtime snack.
But I eat a lot less carbs than I did in my pre-diabetes life.
I rarely eat sandwiches anymore, or potatoes, nachos and other chips, or rice.
I almost never have a burrito anymore, even though I live in a Mexican-food capital of America,
I do miss that Mexican food.
I question the advice that the author initially got from his doctor. When I was diagnosed with diabetes, 20 years ago, my doctor told me that both lifestyle changes and medication were the answer to managing the disease. Barsky’s doctor seemed to brush off lifestyle changes and focus just on meds.
A new theory of “wobbly spacetime” potentially reconciles quantum mechanics and relativity—one of the greatest scientific mysteries of the past century.
The macroscopic world of relativity and the subatomic world of quantum physics are fundamentally different. And both those worlds are different—and mostly incomprehensible—to humans and the other complex life forms that inhabit Earth.