An Informant Exposes The Inner Workings Of The Ku Klux Klan [Fresh Air]
Joe Moore, a former Army sniper turned FBI informant, shares how he infiltrated the KKK and helped foil a plot to assassinate then Sen. Barack Obama. Moore explains how hate groups are growing. His new book is ‘White Robes and Broken Badges.’
Real-Estate Shopping for the Apocalypse
Patricia Marx writes for the New Yorker about her tour of bunkers in which people can survive the apocalypse in comfort.
After weeks of scrolling, I found a handful of dream hideaways on the market whose sellers were willing to let me take a tour. There were two bunkers in Montana, one of which sleeps at least ninety; a prepper bunker in Missouri that features an inconspicuous entrance and a conspicuous arsenal of guns (not included in sale, but makes you think twice before criticizing the kitchen-countertop choice); a defunct missile-silo site in North Dakota; and a twenty-thousand-square-foot cave in Arkansas used by its previous owner to raise earthworms. (Favorite bit of real-estate marketing copy: “The worm room speaks for itself.”)
I compare myself to other people too much. Other people are much better than me at not comparing themselves to other people.
Things I saw walking around Oceanside with a friend
This artful birdhouse
Retro-futuristic signage
Beach cabanas
This mural
Sophisticated political discourse
Another mural, in a nice courtyard
I went for a walk in Oceanside with a friend, and in the parking lot, there was a long line of tough-looking guys with leathery skin and tattoos waiting to pay. I gave them my lunch money out of force of habit.
Apple needs to stop trying to make HEIC a thing
jwz: “Happy Bell Riots day to all who celebrate.” According to a 1995 Deep Space Nine episode, “one of the most violent civil disturbances in American history” occurs in San Francisco the first week of September 2024.
But:
Even when imagining a dystopia, Star Trek somehow still manages to come up with something that is better than our actual lived reality.
📷 Here’s something I saw while walking the dog.
This car has seen some shit.
📷 This morning while walking the dog, we saw this shih tzu wearing shoes.
Love a dog wearing shoes.
Automattic is moving Tumblr to a WordPress back end — Interesting! There’s currently no mass-market platform for personal blogging. WordPress used to be that, but now it’s a hairy, often difficult-to-use publishing platform. Tumblr has the potential to fill that gap.
Moving to WordPress would be an opportunity to add ActivityPub support, which Automattic talked about doing years ago but hasn’t followed through on. I’d also like it if they fixed Tumblr’s broken RSS feeds.
Writing prompt: “A loving, married couple wake up one day to find that they have returned to their high school days, when they were the most popular student and the class geek." Enjoyable flash fiction.
Every time I pop open the self-view when I start a video meeting, I look like I just came off a Sterno and methamphetamine bender.
Meaty, thought-provoking post on how the act of reading genre fiction has fundamentally changed since he and I were young.
… the public understanding of fiction itself is changing, and with it, the types of fiction which are commercially (or even socially) viable going forward.
Three fictive seeds germinated during the 1970s, and we’re now living in the fifty year old forest they gave rise to. Forests coevolve with ecosystems, and now we’re seeing the consequences.
Those seeds were: Dungeons and Dragons (which sparked the whole field of Role Playing Games, which constitute a wholly new mode of fiction in which the story emerges through a collaboration between the GM and the players–the GM provides guidelines and mediates between the player characters and their environment, but doesn’t dictate their lines): computer games (which are similarly interactive, but the map or procedural generative content is established before the players arrive): and the first of the big superhero movie franchises (notably the original Christopher Reeve Superman movies, which, starting from 1979, dragged Superman–and then the rest of the DC universe, with Marvel in its wake, out of the comic books and onto cinema and TV screens).
I was an English major in college in the early 1980s, and then it was breathtaking, revolutionary and controversial to suppose that the author was not the ultimate authority on their own work — that readers and authors were coequal creators. Only the greatest minds of literary analysis were capable of comprehending that rarified thought, and many considered it blasphemy.
Now, the idea is commonplace, and every 14-year-old fan is just as great an authority on the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Kevin Feige.
The transitions in the art of genre reading might go a long way to explaining why 99% of the sci-fi and fantasy being published today just bounces off me. Even the award-winning stories. Maybe even especially those. I fail to connect with them. And yet, when I was a teen, I consumed science fiction voraciously.
(Does anybody under 60 even remember Theodore Sturgeon anymore? Poul Anderson?)
The Harris-Walz tech policy platform is still bad
Mike Masnick at Techdirt:
It’s not batshit crazy, like the GOP plan, but it’s still generally bad. It’s the kind of thing that is going to lead to a lot of wasted time and effort as moral panic know-nothing “we must do something” types push out bad idea after bad idea, while people who actually understand how this stuff works have to do our best to educate against the nonsense.
The Arkansas Supreme Court upholds rejection of abortion rights petitions. Just keep digging, Republicans.
To infinity — and beyond! Nokia to extend 4G wireless to the Moon. My colleague Dan Jones reports.
After deciding he is the arbiter on who is truly Black, Trump now gets to decide who’s truly Jewish.
… history does not offer positive stories about political leaders who decide that they can evaluate the legitimacy of Jewish people and their families, suggesting that those who fail the evaluation should be cast out.
Trump is hosting a fundraiser for domestic terrorists who assaulted cops on Jan. 6
Michael Fanone, a former Washington, D.C., police officer who suffered a heart attack after being repeatedly tasered by one of Trump’s followers on Jan. 6, said Americans cannot afford to forget what happened that day. “Wake the fuck up, America,” he told HuffPost. “This is who Donald Trump is, a sick motherfucker who fetishizes violence committed on his behalf.”
I’d like to read Robert E. Howard. I sneered at those books and their fans during my prime teen science fiction and fantasy reading years. But I was so much older then — I’m younger than that now.
Also, today I learned that the Cimmerians were real.
… the business world has a well-worn playbook that they roll out whenever anything that might cause industry to behave even slightly less destructively is proposed. What’s more, we keep falling for it. Every time we try to have nice things, our bosses – and their well-paid Renfields – dust off their talking points from the last go-round, do a little madlibs-style search and replace, and bust it out again.
— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr, Corporate Bullshit
Court to cop: Someone observing all the laws is not “probable cause” for a search.. By Tim Cushing at Techdirt.
Tim Cushing at Techdirt: Age verification laws are just a path towards a full-on ban on porn, a proponent admits.
I’ve been masking consistently in public since 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic began, because I have a kidney transplant and will take immunosuppressant medication for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, my lifesaving medication also makes me more susceptible to infectious diseases like measles, the flu, and Covid-19. Even when people like me are vaccinated against the virus, we are at higher risk of being infected and are more likely to experience adverse health outcomes, including hospitalization and death.
The legislation in Nassau County and elsewhere primarily targets people who wear masks to hide their identity while committing crimes or during public protests, specifically against the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Masks are defined as any facial covering that disguises the face, and facial coverings worn for religious or health reasons are exempt. But people like me, who wear masks for health reasons, are disproportionally affected by these bans even when they include medical exemptions.
That’s because although the Nassau mask ban contains provisions for people who mask for medical reasons, it is up to the police to determine whether someone has a medical reason for masking if they are out in public. This means that enforcing the ban is subjective and will disproportionally impact Black people and people of color, who are more likely to be stopped by police and are also more likely to wear masks to prevent Covid. This is in part because Black and Latinx Americans are more cautious in their approach to the pandemic, reflecting the higher hospitalization and death rates in these communities. The Nassau mask ban as it is written is reminiscent of a “Stop and Frisk” law, which allows police to temporarily detain, question, and search people without a warrant.
This isn’t just localized to Nassau County; mask bans have been proposed or passed in multiple states, including North Carolina, Ohio, and California.
Mike Masnick at Techdirt: Ad revenue at Twitter is still in free fall two years into Musk’s reign.
Karl Bode at Techdirt: Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, streamers are “falling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV.”
Disney’s CFO says the company has “earned” the right to relentless price hikes.
Do you want piracy? Because that’s how you get piracy.
I just saw the GOP referred to as “period-tracking panty-sniffing ghouls” and that is perfect. No notes.
Where are you watching the Democratic National Convention? I’m looking for a TV station or streaming channel where the pundits don’t talk over the speakers.
“Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses’ insatiable horniness for enshittification.” — Cory Doctorow at Pluralistic
What Happened to Getting a Doctor’s Finger in Your Butt?
It’s a rite of passage for men. You’re in your 40s, you’re at your annual checkup, and suddenly you hear the snap of a rubber glove.
Why doctors are no longer doing the digital rectal exam (DRE).
You’ve got to hide your myopia away: John Lennon’s contact lenses
John Lennon’s eyeglasses became iconic, but before 1966 he was seldom seen in public wearing glasses. Instead, he wore rigid contact lenses that frequently fell out.
This is a wild article from the professional/scientific “Journal of the College of Optometrists.” It goes deep on medical terminology, attempting to diagnose Lennon’s prescription and explaining why he had such problems wearing contacts.
Nigel Walley, John’s childhood friend and manager of John’s first band ‘The Quarrymen’ (which evolved into The Beatles) recalled: ‘The thing with John though was that he was as blind as a bat—he had glasses but he would never wear them. He was very vain about that’ ‘He didn’t want to be seen out in them, and kept them in an inside pocket along with his mouth organ. He might slip them on to see something, but he’d whip them off again very quickly’.
In 1980, John himself explained that ‘I was just a suburban kid, imitating the rockers. But it was a big part of one’s life to look tough. I spent the whole of my childhood with shoulders up around the top of me head and me glasses off because glasses were sissy…’.
Paul McCartney recounted a story of John’s spectacle wearing habits from their teenage years in Liverpool. ‘He was pretty short-sighted, and it led to some funny occasions… Normally if there were girls around, he’d whip them off. He was a little bit shy with them, so if he was out and about, he’d just take them off… But he came down to my house, he lived about a mile or so away… We were writing some stuff and we got finished about midnight.
And so… he took off his glasses and walked home. The next day he said “…do you know those people on the corner of Booker Avenue?” I said ‘Yeah’. He said, ‘They’re crazy… at midnight when I left you, they were out on the porch of their house playing cards’. I said, ‘You’re kidding me’. So, I had to investigate. I went around and had a look… it was a nativity scene’.”
Chicago officials have been terrified that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott would inundate the DNC with migrant buses. But the people of Chicago may have already called Abbott’s bluff.
This is not the optimistic article suggested by the headline and description. Today’s broken immigration policies are creating a crisis and misery that will roll on for many, many years.
Quixotic attempts to seal the border, combined with prison camps to hold tens of millions of people, won’t solve the problem. They’ll just accelerate the crisis and make it a million times worse.
“I killed him for money – and for a woman. I didn’t get the money. And I didn’t get the woman.” Roger Ebert reviews “Double Indemnity.”
The “Memindex Method” was a 1906 precursor to the Bullet Journal, Hipster PDA, GTD and related productivity systems. It preceded Vannevar Bush’s seminal “memex” essay by nearly a half-century.
Here’s something I saw immediately after walking the dog.
11 years old. Still gets zoomies.
Last night, Julie went into the pantry to get a snack. She found a pound and a half of sliced deli turkey breast that had gotten lost on the path from the supermarket to the car to the refrigerator.
This explains the unpleasant smell and flies that had been lingering inexplicably in the kitchen for weeks.
Many “ews” were said that night, and the turkey found its way out of the house and into the trash bin. Fortunately, trash pick-up was this morning.
As a pleasant surprise, the smell and flies were gone almost immediately.
Scott Dworkin: The press must cover Trump’s cognitive decline.. Tom Nichols at The Atlantic: “Trump’s “obvious emotional instability is frightening, not funny.”
A friend said one of my earlier posts about Trump was fat-shaming. Not sure he’s right, but I amend the word “obese” to “with an unhealthy lifestyle.”
Brightspeed gets a whopping $3.7 billion to build fiber networks. Linda Hardesty breaks the news.
The US and Sweden are teaming up to develop 6G technology. By Dan Jones
Natural gas companies want to power artificial intelligence. Nuclear power won’t arrive fast enough. By Diana Goovaerts.
Investors are pouring money into hardware to secure sufficient compute power for AI. By Diana Goovaerts
Huawei is developing a new chip to challenge Nvidia and surmount US sanctions
Alert readers will note that last article is not from Fierce Network.
ChatGPT updated to new model based on user feedback — Release notes? OpenAI has heard of them.
Donald Trump is a 77-year-old obese man who is clearly losing his mental faculties. He can’t even remember who he’s running against half the time or remember her name even when he does. What happens when his decline is obvious even to his supporters? Or if he drops dead? What if that happens before Election Day?
An enjoyable, informative but unsatisfying read. Bouie concludes that the party will still be Trump’s as long as he wants it.
Andy Borowitz: Trump and Musk Share Tips on Running Companies into Ground
Trump is starting to give off “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up” vibes. via
Ina Fried at Axios AI+: AI’s biggest danger isn’t that it can be used to make up lies — human beings are already great at lying. It’s that bad people can claim that inconvenient facts are AI-generated deepfakes.
Many people saw big crowds at Harris rallies, but Trump claims the photos and videos were manufactured by AI.
Warnings about the danger of deepfakes have helped arm the public against an expected flood of fakery.
- But they’ve also unavoidably made it possible to question the trustworthiness of any evidence you don’t like.
- The next time a recording surfaces of some private event where a politician said something damaging, it will be that much easier to deny it.
Some Jan. 6 defendants tried to argue that photos showing them attacking the U.S. Capitol were AI-generated fakes, invoking what a recent American Bar Association article calls “the deepfake defense.”
- “The growing use of AI-generated false and misleading information is exacerbating the challenge of the so-called liar’s dividend, in which widespread wariness of falsehoods on a given topic can muddy the waters to the extent that people disbelieve true statements,” a Freedom House report last year argued.
…
- A world in which nobody trusts anything is one where autocratic leaders can easily mobilize hate and invent their own realities.
The bottom line: As Yale historian Timothy Snyder, author of “On Tyranny,” puts it, “What authoritarians do is they say, ‘Look, there’s no truth at all. Sure you don’t trust me – but don’t trust them, or them, or certainly not the media. Don’t trust anybody.'”
- “And so just stay on your couch, basically … just do nothing. Affect a pose of cynicism. Be equally skeptical about everything.”
Timothy Sandefur at Discourse Magazine:
It was 50 years ago this month that American science fiction writer John Varley – who celebrates his 77th birthday today–published his first short story. It sparked a rapid rise that brought him the praise of the genre’s most prominent figures, along with multiple Hugo and Nebula awards (the science fiction equivalent of the Pulitzer). Isaac Asimov was among the many who called him the natural successor to Robert A. Heinlein.
Yet despite the immense admiration Varley has enjoyed both within the science fiction community and without (Tom Clancy called him “the best writer in America”), he has never gained the following that Asimov or Heinlein enjoyed. That’s a shame because his unique blend of imagination and realism–and his underlying belief that freedom is essential to the human personality–make him one of the finest authors ever to set his fiction in the future….
Varley moved to San Francisco as a young man, and the “hippie element” plays an important role in his fiction, “not (or not usually) in the sense of ‘tune in, turn on, drop out,’ but of rebellion, self-reliance, hard work and creativity that remain underappreciated elements of the ’60s counterculture.”
Contrary to the popular stereotype of hippies as drugged-out, unemployed hitchhikers, many members of the Woodstock generation (Varley attended Woodstock, by accident, after getting stuck in the traffic jam while driving through New York) put a heavy emphasis on manual trades, intellectual innovation and self-improvement. Many members of the counterculture weren’t anti-capitalist per se, but were committed to what historian David Farber calls “right livelihood”: that is, a life of genuineness not offered by what they called “the Establishment.”
Disappointing: Confess, Fletch director Greg Mottola says the series “curse” got him and no sequel is currently planned. I very much enjoyed the Jon Hamm movie that came out two years ago and would gladly have watched a sequel every year for the rest of my life.
Ericsson is working with partners to supply private 4G and 5G networks to US rural electrical cooperatives “of all sizes and service terrains.” My colleague Dan Jones reports on Fierce Network.
“Peggy Sue Got Married” for 2024. I like it.
For a research report, I’m looking for companies outside the tech industry that are doing interesting work with artificial intelligence. If that’s you, or if you have any leads, email me at mwagner@questex.com.
Dash: Unlike physical machines, the institutions that make up society are never broken. They always do precisely what they were designed to do.
… when our carceral system causes innocent people to be held in torturous or even deadly conditions because they could not afford bail, we must understand that this is the system working correctly. It is doing the thing it is designed to do. When we shout about the effect that this system is having, we are not filing a bug report, we are giving a systems update, and in fact we are reporting back to those with agency over the system that it is working properly….
In my own life, I’ve found the greatest reluctance to embrace this idea, and strongest rejection of its obvious truth, comes from the politically moderate, centrist-leaning suburban folks…. “
Accepting the principle of POSIWID is “a prerequisite for optimism that actually has impact. Mindless optimism says, ‘this system is supposed to have a good output, therefore if we support it hard enough, it’ll do the right thing.’”
Kid Rock Threw the Party. MAGA Faithful Brought the Joy, Rage and Smirnoff Ice..
A music festival headlined by the pro-Trump musician offered a snapshot of a maturing American subculture, with a mash-up of hedonism, rebellion and beer-guzzling pursuit of happiness.
Frank Zappa was a musical genius and a difficult father. His four children, now in their 50s, are still grappling with his legacy; Dweezil doesn’t even talk with the others.
The app includes a DOS emulator so it can run on modern Windows, and Sawyer says it also supports Mac and Linux, according to Lia Proven at The Register.
WordStar users include Sawyer, who’s still using it, as well as Arthur C. Clarke, Anne Rice, George R. R. Martin (who still used it as of 2014), William F. Buckley Jr. and Ralph Ellison.
Sawyer’s project may be illegal — he declared WordStar to be abandonware but it may still technically be somebody’s intellectual property.
I was more of a XyWrite guy. I wonder whether there’s a version that runs on the Mac?
Facebook has decided I want to get notifications anytime somebody posts to any of the dozens and dozens of groups I’m a member of. Spoiler alert: I do not want to receive these notifications.
I have asked Facebook to change the name of the page I manage. Apparently, I have to ask for permission to change the page’s name? Because I’m five years old and Facebook is my auntie?
Facebook is such a shitty platform.
I think I may have figured out how to turn off Facebook notifications when someone reacts to one of my posts. If it works, this would make Facebook a million times friendlier.
TimWalzFixedYourBicycle.com. I’m just going to refresh that the rest of the day.
I just finished writing and submitted a major report for my editor’s review.
Proofreading it, I was amazed how many ways I could find to spell “Kubernetes.”
For the title of this morning’s blog post about “Battlestar Galactica,” I asked ChatGPT:
What are some playful plays on words for the title of “Battlestar Galactica” that would indicate we think it’s a bad show?
The response:
Here are a few playful and critical wordplays on “Battlestar Galactica”:
- “Battle-Snore Galactica”
- “Blunderstar Galactica”
- “Battlestar Lacklusterica”
- “Borestar Galactica”
- “Battlestar Catastrophica”
Not bad.
We never got into the 2004 “Battlestar Galactica.” We loved the mini-series, but the first episode of the full series didn’t appeal to us so, we bailed out.
For the next 20 years, I’ve heard people raving about how great the show is. It’s become a classic. I got FOMO.
We started watching the series recently. We rewatched the miniseries and 10 episodes of the series.
And I think we’re done. Every episode is the same. For a space opera, it’s awfully claustrophobic.
“Battlestar Galactica” today looks like a rough draft of “The Expanse” and “For All Mankind.” And, indeed, “For All Manknd” is executive-produced by Ronald Moore, who produced “Galactica.”
I buy audiobooks from Libro.fm rather than Audible, primarily so that I can listen to the audio using the Overcast podcast app. Overcast is more familiar to me than the Audible app, and Overcast has excellent audio quality.
As a side-benefit, I also get non-DRMed audiobooks, which means I’m not locked into the Audible ecosystem. Also, I get to support a competitor to the Amazon monopoly. I buy plenty of stuff from Amazon, but it’s nice to occasionally shop elsewhere.
Inspired by this post on Threads, I hit Wikipedia to read the synopsis of “Flowers in the Attic.”
I remember the book being hugely popular, but I have never read it. I thought: It’s about children who live in an attic, which I guess is kind of nice, right?
No, it’s not nice. Holy shit. Just when I think it’s hit maximum fucked-upness, it takes another turn.
The German Bertha was born into a wealthy family and married engineer Karl Benz, writes Sari Rosenberg at Lifetime.
Bertha used her family money to finance her husband’s creation of a horseless carriage. Under modern day law, Bertha would have actually owned the patent rights. However, German law in the 1880s prohibited married women from even applying for a patent.
Her husband, Karl Benz, gets the credit for the invention, but her money, marketing “and chutzpah” built the business.
Benz’s Motorwagen was made of wood, with two wheels in back, one in front and a “handle-like contraption” for steering, and could reach speeds up to 25 mph, Rosenberg writes.
People were reluctant to buy a machine that only traveled short distances, and “Bertha realized the only way to sell more cars was if they demystified the public’s fear of driving.”
With only a small amount of fuel in the carburetor, Bertha had to plan her route around where apothecaries were located so she could buy ligroin, a detergent that was used as fuel.
…
When a fuel line got clogged, she used a long hat pin to fix it. She used a garter to repair a broken ignition. At one point, she had to employ the help of a blacksmith to help fix a broken chain. When the brakes on the car began to fail, Bertha visited a cobbler who installed leather on them, hence creating the first brake pads. Meanwhile, at a time before roadmaps even existed, she literally forged her own path on the trip via automobile to her mom’s house.
“We used to be better than they are, we used to be good.… Now we are the same.” Journalist Aviya Kushner writes at The Forward about her encounter at an Israeli light rail station with a woman older than the state of Israel itself.
Israelis opposing Netanyahu use the word “hamadena” to describe what Netanyahu is destroying. “For Israelis, that word, hamedina, or ‘the state’ is not just the State of Israel, but the dream of the State of Israel.”
I think the elderly woman is oversimplifying. I, too, used to believe Israel was good. Since the reaction to the Oct. 7 attack, I have come to see that Israel is founded on injustice.
Israel is not unique or fundamentally evil. As Ezra Klein said, nearly every state is founded in blood.
However, Israel can’t just go back to locking the Palestinians in the basement and nailing the door shut. Israel has to do better.
This is a thoughtful article, and I agree with the overall thrust. But I disagree with key premises. Many people don’t use social media or just use it occasionally. This is true even in the tech industry, marketing and journalism.
The ‘Trans Boxer’ story isn’t what you think: Gender wars, Russian influence ops, and our addiction to rage bait — Unusual circumstances are great for inciting Internet rage wars, and Russia is happy to fan the flames.
We had stopped for a minute for me to pick up the dog’s by-product. I heard the chickens before I saw them. and thought, “WTF is that?” The sound was simultaneously very familiar and utterly strange.
We live in an ordinary Southern California suburb, not farm country by any means. By SoCal standards, we live in the city. I have heard people keep chickens around here, but have not encountered it in person for 15 years or so.
When you see an El Camino, you are required to photograph it and share the photo. Those are the rules.
“Why I was gone.” Andrea Lopez-Villafaña, managing editor, daily news, for the Voice of San Diego, is a DREAMer. Brought to the United States as a small child by her parents, she qualified for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, in 2013. DACA requires her to re-apply for the right to work in the US every two years. But the federal government was slow to process applications and in June she was forced to take an unpaid leave of absence from work, returning recently.
I missed her voice on the Voice of San Diego weekly podcast, and was glad when she came back.
People who’ve lived their whole lives in the US should have an easy path to citizenship and not have to suffer this ridiculous bureaucracy
Dave linked to this series of posts on Threads and said it’s “a tutorial on why the social web is so useless.” Yep.
Whether it’s Kamala Harris helping to raise other people’s children or Donald Trump going to Epstein Island to have sex with other people’s children, both candidates have made a lifelong impact on other people’s children.
Microsoft is reportedly merging the chat and text channels bits of Teams into a single interface, which would remove a pebble from my shoe.
This time, however, I’m using Stage Manager on my new 34" Dell Ultrawide display, which I received last week, rather than my ancient 14-year-old 27" Apple Cinema Display.
I like to have one app open on my desktop at a time, not a clutter of windows. With the Apple Cinema Display, that was simple: maximize the app. But that result is far too wide on the Dell.
Stage Manager lets me have one app centered on half-width and everything else tucked off to the side, for easy access. Plus I can have two or more apps sharing a screen (Apple calls them “spaces”), which suits me when I have a document in one app and I’m taking notes on that document in another app.
Spaces, which is older technology, is very similar. I’ve hated it in the past, but maybe I should give it a try again. Maybe I would like it, too.
Just thinking about how different the scene between Marty McFly and his mom would be if George RR Martin had written Back to the Future.
I laid my phone down on a window ledge barely wider than the phone and instantly thought, “Bad idea. If there’s an earthquake, the phone will get knocked to the floor and might be damaged.”
I have gone native.
Welcome to the shitpost election, by Casey Newton:
… sharing weaponized misinformation in the form of lazy jokes has quickly come to define the developing presidential campaign between Harris and Donald Trump. Across social networks, Democrats and Republicans are flooding the feed with obviously untrue statements about one another and calling it a joke.
I normally eschew both-siderism but Casey Newton may be right on this one. Certainly, Democrats jumped gleefully on couch jokes.
I am using a Microsoft Teams recording and transcription to take interview notes. It’s the first time I’ve used Teams for that, and it requires me to stare at my own ugly face while reviewing the recording much slower than in real time.
This is excruciatingly painful. I am a slack-jawed baboon.
Sonya Massey’s mother called 911 and asked police not to hurt daughter before shooting death. “Donna Massey told a dispatcher: ‘Please don’t send no combative policemen that are prejudiced.’” Heartbreaking.
Rachel Treisman at KPBS.org: While other Olympic shooters showed up wearing “cyberpunk-looking gear … large ear protectors, visors and sci fi-esque shooting glasses, [Turkey’s Yusuf Didek] played it a different kind of cool with regular eyeglasses and barely visible ear plugs.” He wore “a jersey that looked like an ordinary T-shirt, and [shot] with his free hand tucked in his pants pocket,” giving off “a noticeably casual vibe. So casual, in fact, that scores of social media users jokingly wondered whether Turkey had sent a hitman to the Olympics.”
I’ve seen this place, with its vintage space-age Googie architecture, from the highway near Old Town often. I’ve never been inside, though I’ve always meant to. Inside, it’s a classic diner of a type that seems to be a dying breed — my favorite kind of restaurant. RIP.
According to Roxana Popescu at the San Diego Union-Tribune, Perry’s will be replaced by a 223-unit residential complex, preserving some of the original building.
Former San Diego Democratic Party chair Will Rodriguez-Kennedy announced his exoneration from a sexual assault accusation. He stepped down when the accusation surfaced two years ago. His successor was killed in a motor vehicle accident recently.
Trying to move folders around in bookmarks on Safari is a dreadful experience. I have sometimes wondered why The Youngs today don’t use browser bookmarks — it’s because browser bookmarks are stuck in the 90s, so people don’t use them, and therefore browser developers don’t pay them any attention, and it’s a vicious cycle.
Derek Thompson at The Atlantic, What Is America’s Gender War Actually About?
The left has become more adept at shaming toxic masculinity than at showcasing a positive masculinity that is distinct from femininity. Progressive readers of the previous sentence might roll their eyes at the notion that it is the job of any left-wing political movement to coddle men’s feelings. But if a large shift rightward among young male voters helps Trump eke out a victory in November, Democrats will have little choice but to think up a new message to stop the young-male exodus.
Much truth here I think. I have never been bothered by this because I do not feel at all targeted by progressive denunciations of toxic masculinity, and I don’t look to politicians and political pundits to tell me how a man ought to act.
Then again, I am not young.
The Republican vision of masculinity is not only toxic, but it is also false. Donald Trump is a draft dodger and a coward who hides behind his inherited money, and his lickspittle lackeys are no better. I’m not seeing a lot of astronauts, athletes, military combat veterans or other true adherents of machismo in that crowd. Republican President Theodore Roosevelt would have been disgusted with what his party has become.
My latest on Fierce Network: We need a new internet The internet as we know it is old and worn out, as are the ways that we think about it.
Training AI using synthetic data seems like a lot of bullshit to me. It’s like learning to cook by reading cookbooks, watching YouTube videos and talking to other people who are doing the same thing, but never actually cooking. All of those things are useful, but the only way to learn to cook is to cook.
Am I missing something?
I’m pleased to see the Goodlinks read-later app has added support for highlights and notes. My Readwise Reader annual subscription runs out in a few days, and I’ve been looking for alternatives. Readwise Reader is a great product, but it is overpowered and overpriced for my purposes.
Meta’s idiot moderation AI strikes again, this time deleting a meme I posted to Threads weeks ago for allegedly violating Meta’s terms of service prohibiting drug sales. Of course, I was not selling drugs — it was stoner humor. I used to run into this kind of thing several times a month on Facebook before I stopped posting there about two weeks ago.
This incident was particularly annoying because I was unable to dismiss the warning notification to click through to the timeline.
A 70-year-old hiker was found alive and well after spending five days alone and lost in the wilderness. Warren Elliott “ate berries and drank from the river to sustain himself. He was found ‘in good spirits’ and uninjured.” Score one for the geezers.
Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day: Conservatives are struggling to get ahead of this whole “weird” thing. (My two cents: That’s cuz they’re weird.)
I’m not thrilled with the ageism in the Democrats' new slogan: “Donald Trump is old and weird.” But I’m happy to see it seems to be working. I’ll deal with my issues after President Harris is sworn in.
Also from Broderick: Musk Is Violating His Own Terms Of Service (And Likely Election Law) If You Even Care.
