Mitch's Blog

Atlas Data Privacy Corp, which helps its users remove personal information from consumer data brokers and people-search services online, is suing Babel Street, which allows customers to track individual mobile users using tracking data built into everyday Android and Apple phones.

Brian Krebs, KrebsOnSecurity:

Collectively, these stories expose how the broad availability of mobile advertising data has created a market in which virtually anyone can build a sophisticated spying apparatus capable of tracking the daily movements of hundreds of millions of people globally.

In the hands of domestic terrorists and US states that have enacted fanatical anti-abortion laws, the technology can be used to track suspected illegal immigrants, women seeking abortions, public servant targeted by baseless conspiracy theories, and more.

Atlas says the Babel Street trial period allowed its investigator to find information about visitors to high-risk targets such as mosques, synagogues, courtrooms and abortion clinics. In one video, an Atlas investigator showed how they isolated mobile devices seen in a New Jersey courtroom parking lot that was reserved for jurors, and then tracked one likely juror’s phone to their home address over several days.

The article goes into detail about how this service is already allegedly being used for harassment, as well as the possibility of far more. Journalist Brian Krebs recommends turning off tracking on Android phones and iPhones, and includes instructions on how to do so. Do it now, and do it for everybody who lives with you, because if attackers can find people you live with they can find you too.

I saw a guy at Orlando Airport dressed as Silent Bob. I was going to ask him why he was walking around in costume a week before Halloween, but I realized he’d either not answer or give me a 10-minute soliloquy, and I had a plane to catch.

I think my wife and me are the last two people without tattoos.

I saw a guy with an artificial leg with a NY Mets logo on the knee.

I feel bad for anybody sitting in my row on a flight. I fidget something terrible.

I listened to “Never Gonna Give You Up” end-to-end for the first time since rickrolling became a thing and you know what? It is a pleasant song.

Here’s something I saw while walking this dog at the park this morning.

2e2 whooping cough cases currently in my part of Washington state. There’s been a vaccine for that for 80 years.

There used to be a story about turkeys being so dumb that they would stand in the rain, looking up, until they actually drowned. Now I believe that the turkeys were taking a principled stand for their personal freedom.

— @grumble209@kolektiva.social

… just because you’re on their side, it doesn’t mean they’re on your side. They don’t want to prevent AI slop from reducing your wages, they just want to make sure it’s their AI slop puts you on the breadline.

— Penguin Random House, AI, and writers' rights., Cory Doctorow, @pluralistic@mamot.fr

Blue states should play “constitutional hardball."

Provide succor to “medical professionals, teachers, doctors and anyone with a trans kid,” says Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr.

All over America, families are despairing of their lives in red states. Whether you’re worried that you or someone you love might need to terminate a pregnancy, or you’re worried about gender-affirming care for you or a loved one, you can put your worries to rest in a blue state. Same goes for nurses and doctors who are worried they can’t do medicine unless it accords with the imaginary dictates of Bronze Age prophets as claimed by pencil-neck Hitler wannabe Bible-thumper with a private jet and a face from Walmart. Fill the blue states with great schools, libraries and hospitals, and invite everyone who wants to do their job in a free country to come and work at ‘em. Line every state border with abortion and mifepristone clinics, and set up billboards advertising the quality of life, the jobs, and the freedom in blue state America.

…

Dems have to get over their fear of “states’ rights” and start playing state-level hardball. This doesn’t mean escalating cruelty. Quite the contrary: every cruel measure enacted as red state red meat is a chance for blue states to extend a kindness, and capture even more of the best, brightest and kindest of the nation, creating a race to the top that Republicans can only win by abandoning their performative cruelty and corruption.

During our last time going out to lunch before the pandemic, my dad (who was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust and spent years living in the Polish forest and fighting the Nazis) expressed his dismay that Americans weren’t taking the threat to our country seriously enough. I suggested that while most Americans were concerned, they didn’t see the Trump era as being that ominous because they assumed the kinds of things that happened in his life could never happen here. My dad stopped walking, looked at me, and asked, “You think vhen I vas a kid any of us thought it could happen there?”

— Dave Pell

Surgeons are wearing Apple Vision Pro headsets into the operating room. $3,500 is wicked expensive for a consumer device, but it’s dirt cheap for medical equipment. Other vendors are making specialized devices.

A son writes a hilarious and loving obituary for his father. “He is God’s problem now." Here’s the obituary

A delightful series of life lessons from people just turned 30, 40, 50 and 60, along with a 74-year-old. A selection:

30:

— don’t work for startups, they’re always one ‘innovative idea’ away adding ‘sell your kidneys on the black market’ to your job description.

…

— those little single-use glasses cleaning wipes are 1000% worth the money
— overly self-depreciating jokes just make people uncomfortable, wean yourself off of them

40:

— never get down on the floor without an exit strategy for getting back up

50:

• “loving yourself” is less of a feeling and more of an action. you can start doing it any time and it will make your life better and better as you go on
• this will happen incrementally - be patient
• along those lines, if you haven’t started making an active effort to quit shit-talking yourself, suck it up and do it
• no, shut up. do it. “but it’s haaaaard!” don’t care. do it.

…

• at some point you will encounter people much younger than you arguing passionately and incorrectly about history you personally remember and experienced
• this will be infuriating and annoying
• otoh, most other things just… will not matter to you as much
• at some point you will shift from wanting to go out to being like “eh” and deciding to stay in. this is okay.
• you will have absolutely no idea what The Youth are talking about and you will not care
• but if you keep your mind open to new ideas you’ll never be irrelevant

…

• get a fucking hobby, especially a hobby that involves physically creating/handling something and/or moving your body in physical space. it will do you more good than you can imagine

Trump plans to rule as a dictator, unchecked by Congress, courts, the law or the Constitution. He intends to put millions of American citizens, residents and visitors in prison camps. None of this is secret. He has promised to do it publicly.

Jamelle Bouie: There is no precedent for something like this in American history.

Trump’s campaign rests on an explicit promise to govern as an autocrat. He has announced, repeatedly, his intent to abuse the authority granted him as president to essentially terrorize millions of Americans, immigrants and native-born citizens alike.

If many Americans, from ordinary voters to political elites and the press, seem paralyzed with inaction, unable to accept what is plainly in front of us, it might just be because the stress of the situation has taken its toll on all of us. Faced with the truly unimaginable, many Americans have defaulted to the notion that this is an ordinary election with ordinary stakes.

If only that were the truth.

A school disciplined a student for using AI, and his parents sued.

The parents say there was no policy forbidding the use of AI, but the school points to several policies — and those policies seem reasonable. You can use AI if your teacher says you can, but you must show all your work, including chatlogs and prompts.

The school also says the kid basically just got a slap on the wrist, and he and his parents should stop being crybabies.

In the 20th Century, you could stroll up to a newsstand, see a newspaper with an interesting headline on the front page or a magazine with an interesting article on the cover, and just buy that one issue for pocket change. No subscription, easy transaction.

We need the equivalent on the internet. As we’re all learning the hard way, quality news needs to be paid for, but fake news is free; a decent micropayment system could help mitigate that terrible problem.

Is it possible to globally disable Cmd-P to print in the Mac?

It seems like an artifact from the 20th Century to have a valuable keyboard shortcut like Cmd-P set to “print.” Are there still people who print things out so frequently that they need that keyboard shortcut? Do they stand around the printer waiting for the printout to extrude while smoking unfiltered Lucky Strike cigarettes and doing other 20th-century things?

Employees describe an environment of paranoia and fear inside Automattic over Wordpress chaos. Mullenweg’s supporters are comparing him to Musk and Trump, which is not the flex they think it is.

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"

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.

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.”

Sam Kahn captures the zeitgeist of every decade from the 1880s to today, one paragraph at a time.

1940s — Dapper, cool under pressure, dedicated to duty. Gregory Peck’s Frank Savage in Twelve O’Clock High, chatting amiably with his driver, having one last cigarette, and then tossing it aside, switching to the backseat and becoming all of a sudden a hard-driving, no-nonsense Air Force General.

The FBI created its own cryptocurrency to catch scammers in pump-and-dump schemes. It would be much easier to simply identify the crypto companies that are not scammers. Are there any?

Apple MacOS 15 Sequoia is officially UNIX. Of personal interest to me; my first tech journalism job was at UNIX Today! (the exclamation was part of the name — my fellow UNIX nerds will recognize the punctuation symbol as a “bang.")

When I first heard “every accusation is a confession,” I thought it was just political joke. I’ve been shocked the extent to which it’s the literal truth.

New NRA CEO Doug Hamlin pleaded no contest to brutally murdering a pet cat with his fraternity brothers as a student.

This is just the latest conservative/Republican leader whose history of animal abuse caught up with them. Trump and Vance are right that people are killing and abusing animals, but it’s their own faction doing it.

Normal people hearing about a robot that makes burgers: “Wow! So futuristic!”

People who have worked in restaurants: “Who’s gonna clean it”

— @sidereal@kolektiva.social

I just ordered business cards. What next? Will I send a fax? Will I receive a memo in a pneumatic tube?

Arizona Democrats close a field office after three shooting incidents

Armed militia are hunting federal rescue workers in North Carolina

Right-wing terrorists, led by Trump, are making death threats against local government officials, FEMA workers and even TV weather people in Florida and North Carolina. It’s part of a rising idiocracy.

Misinformation is too technical, too freighted, and, after almost a decade of Trump, too political. Nor does it explain what is really happening, which is nothing less than a cultural assault on any person or institution that operates in reality. If you are a weatherperson, you’re a target. The same goes for journalists, election workers, scientists, doctors, and first responders. These jobs are different, but the thing they share is that they all must attend to and describe the world as it is. This makes them dangerous to people who cannot abide by the agonizing constraints of reality, as well as those who have financial and political interests in keeping up the charade.

— I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is, by Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic

I went door to door to get out the vote for the Democratic Party this afternoon. I did 15 out of 47 houses in the neighborhood. I would have done more but I got into conversations with the neighbors. We have many Harris/Walz signs in front yards.

Antitrust is having a moment.

People understand that corporate looters – not “the economy” or “the forces of history” – are the reason that the businesses where they worked and shopped were destroyed by private equity goons who amassed intergenerational, dynastic fortunes by strip-mining the real economy and leaving behind rubble.

— Lina Khan’s future is the future of the Democratic Party – and America, Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

Don’t ever hand your phone to the cops. “Digital IDs make it tempting to leave your driver’s license at home – but that’s a dangerous risk.”

No matter what, teaching people they can add their IDs to their phones means some people will inevitably leave the house without physical ID, and that means creating the opportunity for cops to demand phones — which you should never, ever do. Technical details of your digital ID aside, handing your phone to a police officer grants law enforcement a lot of power over some of your most intimate personal data.

EFF: The Salt Typhoon hack shows there’s no security backdoor that’s only for the “good guys”

Jamie Zawinski: Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was released 30 years ago today:

According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. At some point late that night I wandered off and wrote the first version of the page that loaded when you pressed the “What’s Cool” button in the toolbar. (A couple days later, Jim Clark would go ballistic in a company-wide email because I had included a link to Bianca’s Smut Shack.)

What’s the best news portal? Apple News, Google News, Yahoo News, MSN Start, something else?

Rereading replies on Bluesky I now see that I was wrong to compare Florida’s extremist religious government to the Taliban, because it implies that what Florida is doing is un-American, rather than an official action by the third most populous state in the nation.

I’m being called a fuckhead on BlueSky for comparing Florida’s forced-birth extremists to the Taliban.

Apparently, this is offensive to the Taliban.

I’m OK with that.

Harris faces new urgency to explain how her potential presidency would be different from Biden’s.

Bullshit. “Urgency” from whom?

This is an issue for the journalists in the Washington press corps who have been locked in a room smelling each other’s farts for 25 years.

For the rest of us, the choice is clear: One choice is someone who we can hope will be a transformative President — a Roosevelt or Lincoln — someone who can lead the rebirth of a declining nation.

Probably not.

She’ll probably govern as a conventional politician and avoid burning down the house for another four to eight years, at which time we get to do it again.

The other choice is a violent psychopath who smears poop in his hair, along with his couch-fucking sidekick.

So yeah nobody gives a shit if Harris is different from Biden.

Florida’s Taliban government is threatening to criminally prosecute TV stations that air an ad advocating repeal of the state’s fanatical abortion ban. Republican claims to support free speech and Constitutional originalism are cynical lies and always have been.

“The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It’s almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.

Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.

— Dave Barnhart

The book is about a group of long-lived people who have been living secretly pretending to be just like everyone else.

They reveal themselves, are persecuted, flee in a spaceship with a newly invented FTL drive, and have adventures out in the galaxy with aliens. The book is dedicated to E.E. “Doc” Smith, it’s the most pulpy thing Heinlein ever wrote, and it’s really surprising what outright fun it is to read. I never think of it as being one of my favourite Heinleins, but I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of reading it.

— Pulp adventure and nothing wrong with that: Robert Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children. Jo Walton at Reactor.

Like Walton says, I don’t think of this as one of my favorite Heinleins, but it’s a great read. I haven’t read much super-science from the 1930s, but “Methuselah’s Children,” published in 1941, is a throwback to the era when sci-fi writers were tossing stars around like snowballs.

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain.

Bill Wells, the Republican running to unseat my Congressional Rep, Sara Jacabs, is going hard for the deranged MAGA vote. Wells has a powerful Florida man vibe.

Instagram and Threads moderation is out of control . I was curious what “crackergate” is. Now I know.

I am baffled by journalists and influencers who were burned by Musk and who ran for shelter to another service run by an amoral billionaire.

This has nothing to do with my politics or ethics. I use Google and Apple products, shop at a chain supermarket, buy from Amazon, and so on. But I don’t stand on a rug when somebody at the edge is waiting to give it a good hard pull.

I’ve reactivated my Mastodon account after a brief experiment suspending that account and using Micro.blog as my primary Fediverse outpost. While Micro.blog is great, Mastodon is better at being Mastodon, and it turns out I like both.

Also, I’ve suspended my Micro.blog ActivityPub support. I continue to use and like Micro.blog, but not for that.

If you’re reading this from Mastodon, this has been nearly invisible to you. Mastodon and Micro.blog let me easily move followers between accounts.

In my earlier review of two favorite 1940s science fiction stories¹, I avoided using the phrase “hard-boiled” to describe the heroes, even though they have many of the characteristics of hard-boiled heroes: Tough-minded, street-smart, fast-talking, and working the streets of early-20th-Century New York.

I didn’t say “hard-boiled” out of a vague conception that the phrase connoted a propensity toward brutal violence, which was not characteristic of those characters.

After posting, I wondered where the phrase “hard-boiled” came from and came upon this excellent Quora post from Paul Vargas, who states his credentials this way: “I researched 20th Century journalism as part of my doctoral studies.”

Vargas explains that the “hard-boiled school”

… was coined in the early 1930s to describe a group of writers of whom Dashiell Hammett was regarded as luminary (see The New York Times Aug 11 1935.) This ‘hard-boiled school’ depicted emotionally hardened characters in an uncaring world driven by money, power and sexual desire. The Encyclopaedia Britannica cites Hammett as the inventor of the genre and calls ‘Fly Paper’ (1929) the ‘first truly hard-boiled story.’ Other critics have disputed this. Ian Ousby regards Carroll John Daly (1889-1958) as the author in whose writing the hard-boiled elements first combine. The question is still open as ‘hard-boiled characters’ and crime-ridden urban landscapes prefigure ‘the hard-boiled school’ by some 30 or 40 years.

The phrase as a descriptor of human character goes back to thelast quarter of the 19th Century, Vargas says

Journalistic usage of ‘hard-boiled’ in the early 1900s connoted brutality and usually designated hoodlums. The phrase grew in usage after WW1 with the high-profile prosecution of ‘Hard-Boiled Smith,’ a US drill instructor accused of treating recruits with brutality. The case opened a widespread journalistic discourse on the use of brutality by the US army and police and the term ‘hard-boiled’ was one of its keynotes. ‘Hard-boiled’ really took off and almost everything was being evaluated for its potential. There were hard-boiled criminals, and hard-boiled towns, and there was hard-boiled talk and even hard-boiled items of clothing. Movie man Pat Dowling was remarked upon as wearing a hard-boiled hat (Moving Picture World vol 43 Mar 13 1920 p1779.)

In the 1920s, we start to see the phrase used to describe “tough and unsentimental characters without brutality.”

Read the whole post, which goes into more detail and includes scans of historical newspaper and magazine pages. Interesting and fun to read!

Roger Zelazny was a demented genius who could squeeze words until they sang.

— “Beautiful, poetic, and experimental: Roger Zelazny’s Doorways in the Sand,” Jo Walton on Reactor.

“Doorways” and “Roadmarks” are two of my favorite Zelazny books. His major works — “Lord of Light” and the “Amber” series — are great, but “Doorways” and “Roadmarks” are special to me, I think in part because the stakes and scope are relatively low.

Some friends and I have taken to calling Threads “the gas-leak social network” because that is the basic experience of using it: Everyone on the platform, including you, seems to be suffering some kind of minor brain damage.

— Max Read, writing several months ago. Threads is not different today and yet I enjoy it. Other people’s pointless low-stakes drama is often entertaining.

Fat Bear Week, the annual competition held by Katmai National Park in Alaska, had to take a brief delay last week after one of the fat bears, 469, ate another one of the fat bears, 402. I guess, I did not know that bears eat other? But apparently, it’s a thing.

— Ryan Broderick

Meta simply does not give a shit anymore. Facebook spent most of the 2010s absorbing, and destroying, not just local journalism in the US, but the very infrastructure of how information is transmitted across the country. And they have clearly lost interest in maintaining that. Users, of course, have no where else to go, so they’re still relying on it to coordinate things like hurricane disaster relief. But the feeds are now — and seemingly forever will be — clogged with AI junk. Because you cannot be a useful civic resource and also give your users a near-unlimited ability to generate things that are not real. And I don’t think Meta are stupid enough to not know this. But like their own users, they have decided that it doesn’t matter what’s real, only what feels real enough to share.

— Ryan Broderick

mitchellaneous.net, aka Mitch’s Other Blog, is where I’m posting memes, vintage ads and photos, and other found media. I don’t imagine many people will bookmark mitchellaneous.net and return to it. It exists primarily as a publishing platform to share posts to a newsletter and several social media services, powered by Micro.blog, the great service that hosts both this blog and that one.

I’m thinking of changing the domain of this blog as well, to mitchipedia.org. It’s now mitchw.blog, of course, but I soured on that domain a while ago. One reason is because “MitchW” isn’t one of the names I use in life. I use “Mitch” or “Mitch Wagner.” People who knew me when I was a child call me “Mitchell.”

Also, I love blogging but I don’t like the word “blog.”

On the other hand, is “mitchipedia” too cute?

I own mitchwagner.com, and formerly blogged there, but I decided a few years ago to put a slight distance between my professional identity, which is tied to that name (my real name) and the stuff I post here. Now mitchwagner.com is just a placeholder site.

Another option would be to give this blog a domain tied to a catchy name, like Daring Fireball or Scripting News or Pluralistic. But all the names I could think of seemed to be either too bombastic or too cute. And so many of the good domains are taken now.

Here’s a profile of Dave, by John Naughton at The Guardian: The blogosphere is in full bloom. The rest of the internet has wilted.

Dave’s blog, Scripting News, is one of my favorite blogs, and it’s the blog I’ve been reading daily for longest.

Naughton:

“Some people were born to play country music,” [Winer] wrote at one stage. “I was born to blog. At the beginning of blogging I thought everyone would be a blogger. I was wrong. Most people don’t have the impulse to say what they think.” Dave was the exact opposite. He was (and remains) articulate and forthright. His formidable record as a tech innovator meant that he couldn’t be written off as a crank. The fact that he was financially secure meant that he didn’t have to suck up to anyone: he could speak his mind. And he did. So from the moment he launched Scripting News in October 1994 he was a distinctive presence on the web.

Matt Stoller: “Apolitical basketball legend Michael Jordan filed an antitrust suit last week against NASCAR. Whatever happens in this next election, the antitrust revolution is unstoppable."

Hamilton Nolan: “Run a Left Wing Democratic Primary Candidate in 2028. No Matter What. Stopping the party’s rightward drift means having a real primary.”

The scariest possible outcome of the 2024 presidential contest is a Trump victory. The second scariest outcome, however, is a scenario in which center-right, anti-Trump voters pour into the Democratic Party and elect Kamala Harris and then proceed to pull the Democratic Party to the right.

Nolan makes these points:

#NeverTrump Republicans like the Cheneys are supporting Harris and may stick around in the Democratic party after 2024, pulling the party to the right.

Joe Biden’s leftward swing was due to pressure from Sanders, his allies, and their supporters. The Democratic Party became afraid of the Left.

But now Harris is afraid of Trump, his supporters and conservatives.

Primaries are the right time to challenge party leadership and force change in direction.

Regarding Dave Winer’s @davew@mastodon.social assertion that journalists should view people writing on the Internet as sources, rather than their competitors: I had this ongoing argument with a friend and colleague who was a very traditional journalist — he later went on to work for the New York Times and then Bloomberg. This was in the 2000s, when blogging was hot, and I was pro-blogging while he was a blogging skeptic.

I eventually stopped arguing with him when I realized that good-faith bloggers criticizing journalists were angry at journalists for not acting like journalists should. It’s fine for random people on the Internet to say random things, but journalists should be reporting what’s actually happening, not just repeating the random things that random people say on the Internet.

Dave also discusses WordPress’s potential as an infrastructure for the social web: “… underneath the cluttered user interface is a strong foundation that you could build any kind of writing software on.” The cluttered interface eventually drove me away from WordPress, and I now describe it as an Internet publishing and commerce platform that incidentally does a mediocre job of supporting blogging.

On this morning’s walk, I saw my first Trump signs of the season. There were many campaign signs for both parties, including one house with many Harris/Walz signs, topped by a Harris/Walz flag on a flagpole, which I have not seen before.

Directly across the street was a house with a lot of Trump/Vance signs. That’s gotta be awkward.

I found myself this weekend thinking of a friend, sadly deceased for a few years, who frequently told fantastic stories, usually about his sexual exploits. After a time, I began to wonder if my friend was fabulating. After more time, I decided I didn’t care — his stories were great.

I started thinking about my friend yesterday after reading this obituary of Jay J. Armes, a flamboyant private investigator with hooks for hands, accused of lying about many aspects of his colorful life history.

Margaret Atwood was advised to just find a good man. Her response: ‘You’re an idiot.’ An enjoyable, fast Q&A with Atwood on bad advice, good advice, envy, sorrow and a premonition that came true.

This is one hell of a lead sentence:

Jay J. Armes, a flamboyant private investigator who lived on an estate with miniature Tibetan horses, traveled in a bulletproof Cadillac limousine with rotating license plates and had steel hooks for hands, including one fitted to fire a .22 caliber revolver, died on Sept. 18 in El Paso.

— Jay J. Armes, Private Eye With a Superhero Story, Dies at 92, by Michael S. Rosenwald at the New York Times

Franz Lidz at the New York Times: “Scientists recently found the planet’s longest continuously occupied termite colony in an arid region of South Africa. It dates to the time of the Neanderthals.”

Termites are masterful soil engineers capable of erecting cathedral-like edifices out of dirt, saliva and feces. To create and maintain their homes, they become miners, masons, scaffolders, plasterers and roofers. Working together, they don’t just build simple nests; they install air-conditioning, central heating and even security devices.

…

Termites eat, process and excrete organic matter, enriching the quality of the surrounding soil. “Their mounds increase the depth, nutrient and moisture status of the soils, which results in the mounds often supporting more vegetation than the soils surrounding the mounds,” said Catherine Clarke, a soil scientist at Stellenbosch University who collaborated on the new study. “So they increase the productivity of semiarid landscapes and likely make these landscapes more resilient to climate change.”

A New Jersey couple sued Uber after a crash left them severely injured. An appeals court ruled that they had agreed to settle disputes out of court when their 12-year-old daughter used the Uber Eats app to order a pizza.

Lola Fadulu at the New York Times:

A New Jersey couple was heading home from dinner in an Uber in March 2022 when their driver T-boned another car, leaving them with serious injuries, including spine and rib fractures.

The couple, Georgia and John McGinty, of Princeton, N.J., sued Uber nearly a year later. Now, their effort to bring the case to court could be hampered by a terms-of-service agreement that they say their 12-year-old daughter signed while ordering pizza using Ms. McGinty’s Uber Eats account.

A New Jersey appeals court found last month that the agreement’s arbitration provision – which says that most disputes between Uber and its customers must be litigated privately – was “valid and enforceable,” reversing a lower court’s decision that would have allowed the couple’s personal-injury lawsuit to be heard by a jury.

The Harris father and daughter live just two miles apart, but rarely speak. NYTimes:

Interviews with more than a dozen friends and former colleagues of Dr. Harris reveal two notable themes. First, Ms. Harris’s father, a Jamaican-born emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University, has been a critic of mainstream economic theory from the left but is hardly a Marxist.

Second, Dr. Harris has been a mostly absent figure from his daughter’s life but not an irrelevant one. Well before she set out on her political trajectory, her father was racking up achievements and, like her mother, setting a high standard that in retrospect helps explain Ms. Harris’s own ascent.

Trump accuses the elder Harris of being a Marxist, which is bullshit, like everything Trump says. But his policies are most definitely leftist and helped shape a decade-long economic boom in his native Jamaica. So if Harris did learn economics at his knee, that’s a plus for her.

I love the idea of the Surfed app, which records and organizes your entire browsing history and bookmarks. I haven’t found a use for it. And according to this review, it’s buggy as heck.

Dave Winer: WordPress has a greater destiny. I loved Radio Userland. One of those great old history-making apps like WordStar, Lotus 1-2-3, or the Mosaic Web browser.

Headline of the week: Kamala Harris campaign motorcade halted by confused robotaxi

Stephen King’s Under the Dome nails how Trumpism functions at the most elemental of levels — Rick Perlstein at The American Prospect

The 2010 novel, which foresaw Trump by five years, is the story of a small town in Maine that gets cut off from the rest of the world when a supernatural dome is dropped on top of it. In the tradition of political fiction, the town is a microcosm of America. The primary action of the novel isn’t supernatural; it’s about the town’s most successful businessman, a car dealer, who “does what strongmen always do when crisis strikes” and uses the crisis to become a bloodthirsty, brutal dictator.

I love how Grammarly improves my writing, but I hate how intrusive the desktop app is. It gets in my face, overlaying my writing and app controls. It’s worse than Clippy. Is there an alternative?

There are strong moral and ideological reasons for everyone to join a union. But I would be satisfied if everyone joined a union for a much more pragmatic reason: Your money, that you made with your work, is right there on the table in front of you. Do you want to pick it up? You need a union. Or the rich people get it. That’s it. The people telling you that you don’t need a union are the same ones who will take that money off the table, and put it into their own pockets.

– Hamilton Nolan, “Your money is on the table. If you don’t have a union, you can’t have it”

This is wild: The ancient Egyptians may have used hydraulics to lift the massive stones needed to build the Pyramid of Djoser, constructed 2,680 BCE.

Yesterday, I went to the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club meeting and wrote postcards for Democrats in swing states. If Harris loses, blame my lousy handwriting. I also picked up a few lawn signs to add to our curbside display and received instructions and door hangers for door-to-door canvassing.

“The Push of a Finger (free Gutenberg download) by Alfred Bester, was my second go at reading a story that I loved when I was 12 years old. I re-read it this past weekend, and very much enjoyed it. (Previously: Revisiting a childhood favorite story: ‘Dreams are Sacred’ still delights.)

As with “Dreams Are Sacred,” the Bester story is still entertaining. Like “Dreams Are Sacred,” the hero is a street-smart, wisecracking New York newspaperman with a brain in his head and abundant common sense. Published in 1942 in Astounding Science Fiction, “The Push of a Finger” is set a thousand years in the future, but the situations and language are straight out of a screwball comedy or noir movie from the 40s.

The hero is Carmichael, one of a dozen reporters for as many different newspapers assigned to the mysterious Prog Building in New York, where the technocrats who run the world issue pronouncements to preserve the Stability that has been the rule of civilization for centuries. The reporters are a brawling, fast-talking bunch, but they keep to their roles. By the rule of the Stability, every newspaper must have a balancing newspaper on the other side, and every decision by the ruling technocrats must be met by full-throated agreement by one newspaper and equal denunciation by its opposite number.

Carmichael finds a way to sneak into the mysterious Prog Building and discovers an event that will destroy the universe in a thousand years. “The Push of a Finger” has a similar gimmick to the far more famous “The Sound of Thunder," by Ray Bradbury, which ran in the far more upscale Collier’s magazine in 1952: The cataclysmic change in the future can be prevented by a trivial change in the present. Carmichael leads a team of technocrats in finding out what that minor, precipitating event is and stopping it.

I’m making the story sound more bombastic than it is. Bester was always a playful writer, fond of wordplay, absurdism and doggerel. In “The Push of a Finger,” a crowd of students at a demonstration chants

Neon
Krypton
Ammoniated
FitzJohn

and that bit of verse has been stuck in my head for days. (And now it’s stuck in yours. Um sorry I guess.)

Later, one of the characters exclaims, “I’ll be a pie-eyed emu!” which proves to be important.

Bester seemed to be drinking from the same creative well as the Beats (Kerouac, Ginsberg, etc.), but a decade or two earlier, and pinning his writing to a scaffolding of pulp science fiction.

Bester’s best-known novels were “The Demolished Man” (1953), a murder mystery in a society of telepaths, and “The Stars My Destination” (1956), a retelling of the Count of Monte Cristo in a society where people have the power to teleport from one location to another by sheer force of mind.

The politics of “The Push of a Finger” are typical of science fiction of the day and maybe of the U.S. at that time. The world of the future was going to be highly organized, centrally planned, and run by technocrats, just as the real world was at that time. It was 1942 – World War II was raging, the Depression was just a few years earlier, and the great nations of the world were highly centralized machines governed by technocrats. Surely that would continue forever. That’s the way Isaac Asimov wrote, and even Robert A. Heinlein, later an icon of libertarianism, featured centrally planned societies in his early stories, published at about this time.

I didn’t talk abut racism and sexism in “Dreams are Sacred” and I don’t have much to say about it here. Both stories are typical in that regard for pulp science fiction written and published in the 1940s. Race isn’t mentioned, women are nearly in the background, LGBTQ and disabled people don’t exist.

Something odd along those lines that I did notice: In the American pulps of the 40s and earlier, characters almost always had Anglo or European names: Carmichael, Pete Parnell, Steve Blakiston, etc. This was the norm back then, and I grew up in the 70s immersed in stories from that period and didn’t think twice about it. But re-reading those stories today, the high percentage of Anglo names (and the missing women and nonwhite people and disabled and LGBTQ people) stands out to me as weird. I’m not saying this to condemn the writers of that era; they were living in their world just as I live in ours. But it’s odd and unrealistic.

Bester was a giant of science fiction when I was a young fan in the 70s, and all science fiction fans then would have heard of him and most would have read him. Now I suspect he’s nearly forgotten by anybody under 50. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Fresh Air:

25 years ago, the TV series The West Wing premiered. It was a behind-the-scenes look at a fictional White House. We revisit our interviews with show creator/writer Aaron Sorkin, and actors Allison Janney, who played C.J., and John Spencer, who played Leo McGarry. They talk about the show’s signature walk-and-talk and the quippy, rapid-fire style of dialogue.

Allison Janney describes herself as “five feet 12 inches” tall and said she had difficulty landing roles until her late 30s. Now, she said, “I get cast as either the smartest person in the room or the drunkest person in the room.”

We’ve re-watched the first and second episodes recently, and I think we’ll stick with it.

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber in conversation with The Verge’s Nilay Patel about the iPhone, camera photography and more. It’s a wide-ranging interview – more than two and a half hours – but listening flew by, because Gruber and Patel are outstanding speakers.

One particular point jumped out at me: The camera has become a primary input device for iPhones. Cameraphones are now multipurpose machines used to record a wide range of video and photos: Hollywood movies, fine art photography and videos, family milestones such as a child’s first steps and weddings, casual photos (“Hey, look at this!"), and serial numbers on consumer purchases. And the phone is expected to excel at all those things.

“It’s not Jersey Boys!” A conversation on the Take Me To Your Reader podcast with Matthew Zrebski, director and adapter of a contemporary English-language update to the 1920 science fiction play “R.U.R.,” by Karel Čapek. The play was where the word “robot” was coined.

So many people I know hate retirement until they get a hobby that requires them to work. They join a board and do tons of work, or they start crafting and making tables. They do that work and then they relax and have their glass of wine and they have a really nice day because they actually were productive. I think we, as humans, are designed to be productive.

Make Identity Central Again, with Bluesky’s Jay Graber. Bluesky’s vision is that your identity is the same across social media services, and you would be able to move your following and follower list from one service to another, like phone number portability but for social media.

“Social is really starting to stagnate because we’re in this trap where users are locked in and developers are locked out. And we need to open that up again,” says the Bluesky CEO in an interview with Mike McCue on the Dot Social podcast.

Something I saw while out walking this morning.

No, I will not sniff random objects lying on the sidewalk.

Whatever happened to Kate Middleton? Garbage Day’s Ryan Broderick talks with British royals journalist Ellie Hall about the rumors that swirled earlier this year about Kate Middleton. “A lot of very, very unhinged people kind of got this right.”

Conspiracy theories aren’t just for lunatics like the Qanon Shaman and people who obsess about the royals — we all get our news from conspiracies nowadays.

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog. Google cannot explain this sign.

On the Core Intuition podcast, hosts Daniel @danielpunkass Jalkut and @Manton Reece have a more nuanced view than mine on the WordPress/WP Engine dustup.

A more generous interpretation of Matt Mullenweg actions: He sees Automattic contributing enormous resources to WordPress development and his competitors at WP Engine are coasting off that work and money.

I don’t think anybody’s covering themselves with glory here.