RIP Trent Zelazny. A moving tribute by his friend George. R.R. Martin georgerrmartin.com/notablog/…
Trump fans are suffering from Tony Soprano syndrome. They don’t see that characters like Tony, Walter White and Judge Dredd are villains. They think Trump is an anti-hero who will fight for them, whereas Trump fights only for himself.
I’m skeptical of this kind of analysis; it’s lacking original research and too on-the-nose to make Trump opponents feel superior.
John Gruber on using generative AI for Internet research: “I direct (and trust) ChatGPT as I would a college intern working as a research assistant. I expect accuracy, but assume that I need to double-check everything.”
Same. I also use ChatGPT to help me write descriptions, summaries, headlines and introductory and concluding sections for reports and articles. Keyword is “help” — I’m in charge and doing the work.
The Rage and Glee That Followed a C.E.O.’s Killing Should Ring All Alarms. By Zeynep Tufekci. We’re in the Gilded Age 2.0, with yawning wealth inequality and political violence. Only now the guns are bigger and more dangerous.
How Trump Targeted Undecided Voters Without Breaking the Bank. The Trump campaign was outspent by Harris, but made up for it with microtargeting.
A delightful review of the McDonalds McRib):
I had a McRib yesterday, which for the uninitiated is a sandwich from McDonald’s that was introduced in 1981 and discontinued in 1985 due to poor sales. This should have been the end of the McRib story, but some people — people who live among us!! — desperately wanted the sandwich to return, and McDonald’s then began rolling it out semi-annually in certain markets as a limited time menu item to satiate the most deranged people alive.
h/t Club MacStories
Brendan Carr Makes It Clear That He’s Eager To Be America’s Top Censor. By Mike Masnick at Techdirt.
New technology from World Labs, a startup founded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, can generate interactive 3D scenes from a single photo. The tech “lets you step into any image and explore it in 3D.” Wild! I’d love to play with this with old family photos.
The Great Grocery Store Squeeze.
Food deserts are not an inevitable consequence of poverty or low population density, and they didn’t materialize around the country for no reason. Something happened. That something was a specific federal policy change in the 1980s.
Easing restrictions on “discriminatory pricing” allowed major supermarket chains to drive local groceries out of business, and forced residents of low-status city neighborhoods and rural towns to travel long distances to buy food.
“The Biden administration has begun to connect the dots.” But Trump’s re-election puts that work in doubt.
By Stacy Mitchell at The Atlantic.
h/t Garbage Day
Currently reading: Demon by John Varley 📚Book 3 in the Gaea trilogy.
Finished reading: The Closers by Michael Connelly 📚. Another good Harry Bosch yarn. Spoiler alert: Bosch catches the murderer, but only after near catastrophic failure.
… giving more rights to a creative worker who has no bargaining power is like giving your bullied schoolkid more lunch money. No matter how much lunch money you give that kid, the bullies will take it and your kid will remain hungry. To get your kid lunch, you have to clear the bullies away from the gate.
— Harpercollins wants authors to sign away AI training rights, by Cory Doctorow
Alex Williams at the New York Times:
Earl Holliman, an iron-jawed actor who earned a star on Hollywood Boulevard for a prolific career that included a corral full of Westerns, an appearance on the first episode of “The Twilight Zone” and a turn as Angie Dickinson’s boss on the 1970s television drama “Police Woman,” died on Monday at his home in Studio City, Calif. He was 96.
…
Despite a promising trajectory, Mr. Holliman was open about not burning for stardom the way many in Hollywood did.
“Money is getting important to me,” he said in a 1967 interview with The Los Angeles Times, for an article headlined “He’d Rather Be an Actor Than a Star.” “The trouble is, I can’t handle success.”
After starring in the Western series “Hotel de Paree,” which ran for a season starting in 1959, he told the newspaper he received four movie offers and a recording contract from Capitol Records.
“So what did I do?” he said. “I went to Europe instead, bummed around for a whole year.”
A Bird Flu Pandemic Would Be One of the Most Foreseeable Catastrophes in History.
Zeynep Tufekci at the New York Times:
The H5N1 avian flu, having mutated its way across species, is raging out of control among the nation’s cattle, infecting roughly a third of the dairy herds in California alone. Farmworkers have so far avoided tragedy, as the virus has not yet acquired the genetic tools to spread among humans. But seasonal flu will vastly increase the chances of that outcome. As the colder weather drives us all indoors to our poorly ventilated houses and workplaces, we will be undertaking an extraordinary gamble that the nation is in no way prepared for.
Biden has failed to take action to defend against H5N1, and Trump wants an anti-vaxxer and advocate of dubious herd immunity pandemic prevention in charge of public health. This is not OK.