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The Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez You Don’t Know [nytimes.com] — “… the coalition Democratic leaders could once rely on to defeat Mr. Trump is already falling apart, and their current strategy — to hammer the former president — may not be enough to win in November.”

Bill Gates, ousted for misconduct, is still pulling the strings at Microsoft

Business Insider:

Publicly, Gates has been almost entirely out of the picture at Microsoft since 2021, following allegations that he had behaved inappropriately toward female employees. In fact, Business Insider has learned, Gates has been quietly orchestrating much of Microsoft’s AI revolution from behind the scenes. Current and former executives say Gates remains intimately involved in the company’s operations – advising on strategy, reviewing products, recruiting high-level executives, and nurturing Microsoft’s crucial relationship with Sam Altman, the cofounder and CEO of OpenAI. In early 2023, when Microsoft debuted a version of its search engine Bing turbocharged by the same technology as ChatGPT, throwing down the gauntlet against competitors like Google, Gates, executives said, was pivotal in setting the plan in motion. While Nadella might be the public face of the company’s AI success – the Oz who built the yellow-brick road to a $3 trillion juggernaut – Gates has been the man behind the curtain.

A black and white photo of a building with a large vertical silo next to it that reads “Dairy Barn Stores.” There’s a vintage car parked in front of the building. Trees with no leaves in background.

Dairy Barn was a drive-through convenience store popular on Long Island when I was growing up.

Archie Goodwin on the joy of voting

From “A Family Affair,” a Nero Wolfe novel by Rex Stout:

I have never understood why anybody passes up that bargain. It doesn’t cost a cent, and for that couple of minutes, you’re the star of the show, with top billing. It’s the only way that really counts for you to say I’m it, I’m the one that decides what’s going to happen and who’s going to make it happen. It’s the only time I really feel important and know I have a right to. Wonderful. Sometimes the feeling lasts all the way home if somebody doesn’t bump me.

Jarrod Blundy loves his Meta smart glasses for rock climbing and running

I’ve been using the Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses for about a month now, and I’m finding even more reasons to wear them all the time.

[heydingus.net]

If Apple came out with something like this that took prescription lenses and cost under, say, $1,500, I’d be tempted. If those glasses were equipped with a Siri version that had GPT-4’s excellent language recognition, I’d be even MORE tempted. If those glasses included facial recognition, I’d be in love—I am moderately faceblind and I hate that I go around not remembering people’s names.

The Sci-Fi Writer Who Invented Conspiracy Theory

Analee Newitz: Paul Linebarger was a US Army intelligence officer who pioneered psyops and wrote science fiction under the pseudonym “Cordwainer Smith.” His stories read today like Qanon conspiracy theories. [theatlantic.com]

Linebarger, who died of a heart attack in 1966 at age 53, could not have predicted that tropes from his sci-fi stories about mind control and techno-authoritarianism would shape 21st-century American political rhetoric. But the persistence of his ideas is far from accidental, because Linebarger wasn’t just a writer and soldier. He was an anti-communist intelligence operative who helped define U.S. psychological operations, or psyops, during World War II and the Cold War. His essential insight was that the most effective psychological warfare is storytelling. Linebarger saw psyops as an emotionally intense, persuasive form of fiction–and, to him, no genre engaged people’s imagination better than science fiction.

Newitz’s latest book is Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.

📷Something I saw while I was walking the dog A quirky mailbox mounted on a wooden post, designed to resemble the front of a car with a cream-colored body, a wooden bumper, and toy wheels.

Inner Cosmos with Stanford University neuroscientist David Eagleman: Is AI truly intelligent? How would we know if it got there? [eagleman.com]

Alt Text Hall of Fame [alttexthalloffame.org] — Honoring the excellent use of descriptive text on images for the benefit of the blind and vision impaired.

I’ve been trying to do more of that. AI is a big help.

The Comfortable Problem of Mid TV [nytimes.com] — We are entering a golden age for mediocre television, says critic James Poniewozik.

Mid is … what you get when you raise TV’s production values and lower its ambitions. It reminds you a little of something you once liked a lot…. It is prestige TV that you can fold laundry to.

Federico Viticci talks about his homemade MacBook-iPad hybrid with John Gruber on The Talk Show

Viticci sawed the display off a Macbook Air, attached an iPad in its place, and has been using that hideous chimera as his primary computer for a couple of months. The iPad functions as a display for the MacBook using Universal Control, or it can be used as just an iPad. [daringfireball.net]

They also talk about the importance of blogging, microblogging in the post-Twitter era, Viticci’s Macstories turning 15 and Gruber’s Daring Fireball turning 22, X’s resurgence as a place worth visiting, the European alternate app store, alternative browsers and more.

Doctor Who: “The Man in the Box"

On the Last Archive podcast, Harvard journalist and historian Jill Lepore reads and discusses her respectful and affectionate 2013 New Yorker essay on Doctor Who. [open.spotify.com]

When I was growing up, science fiction was still fighting for respectability, so I’m still amazed whenever I learn a respected intellectual is a fan. Lepore is more of a mystery fan, but still.

Read the essay here: [newyorker.com]

Meeting Alaska’s broadband infrastructure challenge [fierce-network.com] — MTA’s Jessica Gilbert talks with my colleague Diana Goovaerts about connecting rural communities in the sprawling Alaska back-country.

1968 is making a comeback

Rusty Foster [todayintabs.com]:

Now we have a historically unpopular Democratic President stubbornly maintaining American involvement in a historically unpopular foreign war, for idiosyncratic ideological reasons. We have an anti-war protest movement blazing up among young people across University campuses nationwide and being met with panicked repression from sclerotic college administrations wielding a post-BLM police force that recognizes no need for restraint and the right wing gangs who work alongside them to create the conditions of violence required for police to justify the use of force on protesters, in the unlikely event they ever need to justify it.

Extremist militias are prepping for the ascension of a vindictive authoritarian monster, bent on revenge against the political and cultural elites who are paradoxically delighted at the prospect of having him to kick around again.

Also, “pro-Palestinian protesters and pro-Israel counter-protesters at the University of Alabama took turns earnestly screaming ‘Fuck Joe Biden’ at each other.”

Would you rather be alone in the woods with a man or a bear?

I brought five Lightning cables and one USB-C cable. My brain thinks it’s 2014 I guess.

I'm packed and ready for my first business trip since December 2019

I was a frequent business traveler from the 90s through the 2010s, but I’ve only done one plane trip in the past four-plus years. Funny the things you remember (stuff underwear inside shoes to keep the shoes in shape and save space) and forget (do hotels give you free toothpaste? I know they give you free soap and shampoo but toothpaste? Google says no).

Also, the bits and parts of my previously neatly consolidated travel pack of wallwarts and cords were spread allllllllllll over the house.

We started watching Wonka but we wonkad out of it after 45 minutes. OTOH, we got nice naps when the movie put us to sleep, so I’ll count that as a win.

I embark on the dangerous mission of changing task management software

For to-do-list software, I’ve been using Things 3 by Cultured Code for most of the past 14 years, but when I started the new job, at first I thought I wouldn’t be able to continue to use Things, so i switched to Todoist, because it’s a pretty good app and it integrates well with Microsoft Outlook.

Two weeks into the new job, I learned I could use Things after all, and I was getting a little frustrated with Todoist in the Mac. It’s not a native Mac app, and it shows. Working with Todoist seems to require more taps and keystrokes than it should, and sometimes menus scroll off the top or bottom of the screen, requiring scrolling to see everything. And Todoist doesn’t support start dates for tasks, which I find important to my workflow.

This gave me an opportunity to start fresh and reevaluate task management software. Going back to Things would be about the same amount of work as just starting with something new. And Things is rigid—it works great if your brain works like Things wants it to, but I was finding it a bit difficult to work with.

Switching to-do apps is dangerous for me! I have wasted a lot of time fiddling with productivity apps. While I usually come back to Things, I’ve also tried OmniFocus, Todoist, the Tasks plugin for Obsidian, TickTick, Workflowy, Remember the Milk, Microsoft To Do, Taskpaper, todo.txt, bullet journaling and probably others I’m forgetting about.

I realized that what I want is something like Todoist but with a nicer Mac app, and with support for start dates.

So I went to Omnifocus. Here are some first impressions:

Pluses:

  • It’s a nice-looking app on the Mac and iPhone.
  • Has start dates, just like I want it
  • Seems surprisingly flexible. In the early days of the app, 15+ years ago, Omnifocus rigidly conformed to David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology, but now It seems pretty loose.

Also added to the plus column: Omnifocus is, as far as I can determine, unique among task managers in that it’s very easy to import and export task lists in human-readable format. So if I want to do housecleaning on the task manager—get rid of projects I’m not going to get to anytime soon—without outright deleting the projects, Omnifocus will let me easily do that.

Minuses:

  • Expensive. Mitigated by my already having paid for earlier versions so being eligible for a discount.

Could go either way—maybe a plus, maybe a minus, maybe no big deal:

  • Really wants everything to be a Project. I like using single-actions. Yes, “write article” is technically a dozen or so steps, from thinking about how to start research to proofreading and submitting. But I don’t need to list those steps—at least, not in my to-do app. (Though maybe I should—and there certainly are things I do need to write down for every article, like lists of people I want to email for interviews).
  • Extremely flexible and customizable, leading to a moral hazard to fiddle with Omnifocus when I should be doing other things.

Jon Udell: Best Practices for Working with Large Language Models

[thenewstack.io]:

… you don’t need a low-level understanding of the neural networks at the core of large language models in order to align with the grain of that architecture. Although I can’t explain how LLMs work – arguably nobody can – I’m able to use them effectively, and I’ve begun to codify a set of guiding principles.

Here’s my list:

  1. Think out loud
  2. Never trust, always verify
  3. Use a team of assistants
  4. Ask for choral explanations
  5. Outsource pattern recognition
  6. Automate transformations
  7. Learn by doing

Good rules here. I’ll add a couple of guidelines:

  • Don’t pretend the AI is intelligent or conscious. It’s fancy autocomplete. When you talk to the AI, you’re talking to a version of yourself.

  • Also: The AI doesn’t have feelings. Take advantage of that. The AI is never going to get bored or discouraged. (But don’t be cruel to the AI—it’s a bad idea to be cruel, even to an inanimate object that cannot suffer.)

Californians voters will be asked to vote on two opposite initiatives: One will enshrine same-sex marriage into law, formally repealing Proposition 8 in case the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Obergefell. The second would enshrine transphobia. [voiceofsandiego.org]

A Catholic advocacy group created an AI chatbot to answer religious questions. The bot claimed to be a priest, said masturbation is a “grave moral disorder” and that it’s OK to baptize babies in Gatorade. [businessinsider.com]

I went down a YouTube rabbit hole of 60s kitsch pop music

One Tin Soldier youtu.be/o8JtNHGSO…

Written by Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter, first recorded by Canadian folk group The Original Caste. A 1971 cover by Jinx Dawson, lead vocalist of Coven, became a hit in the US after being featured in the movie “Billy Jack.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Tin_Soldier

I’m pretty sure we had this 45 when I was a kid.

I never saw Billy Jack, although my 8th Grade social studies class did a table reading from the paperback version of the script over the course of several days. Our teacher, Mr. Geig, was a hippie. I also read the Mad Magazine parody.

Here’s a trailer of the movie.

youtu.be/bc9ef9RhD…

It looks … earnest.

“Coven” was a pioneering metal band that used occult themes, and introduced the “sign of horns” to metal.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cove…

“One Tin Soldier” is an example of a “strophic ballad,” where all the verses are sung to the same music.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stro…

It is also an example of the pop genre, “This song isn’t long enough so just repeat a couple of bits of it so it fills out the 45.”

Also: “Billy Don’t Be a Hero,” by Paper Lace (1974) youtu.be/T2seUCc3o…

Paper Lace didn’t succeed with the song—Bo Donaldson & the Heywoods recorded the hit version.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Don%27t_Be_a_Hero

Here are Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods. They are 70s-tastic.

www.facebook.com/BoDonalds…

However, Paper Lace—“reportedly the most successful band Nottingham ever produced”—scored a hit with “The Night Chicago Died,” which is a fun song and this is a fun video.

youtu.be/w2OFubG0d…

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pape…

And here’s “Knock Three TImes” by Tony Orlando and Dawn.

youtu.be/uw2eitx9L…

I had a conversation with a new neighbor. His name is Oscar. He has a husband, whose name is not Felix. This seems like a lost opportunity.

I can’t understand why the dog continued with her behavior

One of our neighbors has a new dog, a big rambunctious golden retriever that repeatedly jumped up on me to say hello. Our neighbor would drag the dog away and the dog would race back and jump up on me again.

This was despite my attempts to discourage the dog by (1) skritching her behind her ears (2) rubbing the dog’s cheeks and (3) telling the dog she was a beautiful girl and very sweet.

I was awakened with a start in the middle of the night

I was abruptly jarred out of a sound sleep by terrible screaming. At first I thought Julie was in great distress next to me. Then I thought it might be a siren close by the house.

Then I figured out what it was. One of the cats was meowing. Loudly and directly into my ear. She wanted me to pay attention to her, so I reached out and gave her skritches, which I’m sure will not enforce this negative behavior.

I’m leveling the playing field, transforming and revolutionizing business models and delivering actionable insights. What are you up to today?

Elon Musk wants to turn Tesla’s fleet into AWS for AI — would it work?

Andrew J. Hawkins [theverge.com]:

During last night’s earnings call with investors, Elon Musk threw out an all-time late-night dorm room bong sesh of an idea: what if AWS, but for Tesla?

Musk, who loves to riff on earnings calls, compared the unused compute power of millions of idle Tesla vehicles to Amazon’s cloud service business. If they’re just sitting there, he mused, why not put them to good use to run AI models? (Also, have you ever really looked at your hands? No, I mean really looked?)

Something I wrote: Blue Planet OSS lets you BYO AI fierce-network.com — Telcos can beef up back-office operations by bringing their favorite AI to Blue Planet’s Cloud Native Platform for OSS.

📷 Things I saw walking the dog this morning

A small front porch of a house with a white door, white railings, and steps. There is an outdoor table with chairs and a folded green umbrella, decorative signs including one for Route 66, and some potted plants.

Home with a front porch displaying an American flag, a pride flag, and large blue planters. A Buddha statue sits by the steps, and various plants are visible.

Sweatshirts hung carefully on a chain-link fence.

I walked by Maryland Avenue Elementary School, La Mesa, just as kids were being dropped off, and saw these sweatshirts hung carefully from the fence. Why was that done?

I walked past a school this morning and saw a couple of dozen sweatshirts. neatly pinned spread-eagled on a chain link fence. What’s up with that?

“I’m a major hypochondriac. I won’t even masturbate anymore. I’m afraid I might give myself something.”—Richard Lewis

We watched the first episode of Shogun. I don’t understand a lot of what’s going on, but I think I like it.

How Meta is paving the way for synthetic social networks

Casey Newton [platformer.news]:

The first era of Facebook was for talking with friends and family. The second, TikTok-influenced era of the company is more focused on content from creators and other people you don’t know.

This week, we got a glimpse of the era yet to come: one where we interact regularly with both people and bots – perhaps not even always knowing, or caring, which one we are talking to.

I started on social media just to talk with other people. Some of these were actual friends and family; others came to be friends through long interactions online. We were all at the same level.

Then I started following celebrities. We occasionally interacted, but mostly I just consumed what they produced. And that’s cool. Like everybody reading this, I grew up having what’s come to be called “parasocial relationships” with fictional characters and the actors who played them.

Now I’m supposedly going to have parasocial relationships with AIs? I’m skeptical.

Some ways I find ChatGPT and generative AI useful today

  • Generating questions for interviews. ChatGPT is surprisingly great at that.
  • Generating images.
  • Occasionally writing draft introductions to articles, as well as conclusions, descriptions and summaries. I’ve always had trouble writing that kind of thing. I don’t use the version ChatGPT generates—I tear that up and write my own—but ChatGPT gets me started. I don’t do this often, but I’m grateful when I do.
  • Casual low-stakes queries, when I remember to use ChatGPT for that. “What was the name of the movie that was set in a boarding house for actresses that starred Katherine Hepburn?” “Stage Door.” “Was Lucille Ball in that one too?” “Yes.” “Was that Katherine Hepburn’s first movie?” “No.” And ChatGPT provided some additional information. I probably could have gotten that information from Google, but ChatGPT was faster.
  • I find otter.ai extremely useful for transcriptions, likewise Grammarly for proofreading. Those applications use AI, but do they use GenAI? I don’t know.

My big problem, and the reason I don’t us ChatGPT more, is that ChatGPT lies. Not only that, but it lies convincingly. A convincing liar is even worse than a liar. I don’t have much use for an information source that I can’t trust. I don’t see an obvious way to solve this problem.

Tempest in a teapot And by “teapot” I mean massage parlor

Lloyd Evans, theater critic for the British magazine The Spectator, writes about how he attended a lecture by a woman political philosopher and found her so attractive that he was distracted, so he went to a business that we in the US would call a “rub and tug” and had sexual relations with a prostitute.

“My (surprisingly) decent proposal” The Spectator

I’ve seen a few disparaging comments on social media about Evans’ article, so I found it and read it, and it was … fine. It was a certain type of humor that isn’t for everyone. I enjoyed it, though I would not say I enjoyed it a lot. The author makes himself look like a pathetic loser, but that is the point of that type of humor.

My only quibble with the article was that the author should not have named the lecturer. But the lecturer herself seems to be taking the incident in good humor so there was possibly no harm there either.

“Spectator Writer Faces Backlash Over ‘Grotesque’ Article As Named Lecturer Speaks Out” mediaite.com

The Spectator is apparently a conservative magazine, so this has become a minor football in the culture wars. Focus, people! Don’t get worked up about a slight, ephemeral article. There is far more important work to be done.

A member of Delta’s Diamond top-tier frequent flyer program is getting backlash for habitual snitching on flight attendants who violate company policy by using their personal smartphones during flights. Ironically, the snitch is herself violating company policy. [onemileatatime.com]

Meta’s battle with ChatGPT begins now [theverge.com] —  Meta is putting its AI assistant across Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook and the company’s next major AI model, Llama 3, is here.

Is Apple Universal Control unreliable?

I just set it up yesterday between two Macs located about three feet from each other, and find it’s flaky. I can move my mouse pointer and keyboard control between Macs about half the time. Other times, the mouse pointer stops at the screen edge.

The Macs are on Wi-Fi. Maybe it’d work better if I connected them with a USB-C cable?

They are a 2024 MacBook Air and 2024 MacBook Pro.

A San Diego state senator's bill would ban the plastic bags you buy when you forget yours

“The bill would tighten standards for reusable bags and require stores to provide 100% recycled paper bags or let consumers use reusable bags.” [nbcsandiego.com]

If I’m reading this right, the plastic bag ban actually increased plastic bag waste, as grocery stores started charging customers nominally for heavier so-called “reusable” bags.

We buy those bags and reuse them once or twice until they get too dirty. We haven’t gone in on cloth bags.

‘Intentional’ AT&T cable cut takes down Sacramento airport comms — The Sacramento Sheriff’s Office is reportedly investigating a cable cut that snarled check-ins at Sacramento International Airport. [fierce-network.com]. Something I wrote with Liz Coyne.

A rule I try to live by: Why do old men wear white athletic socks with sandals? Because they don’t care what other people think about how they look.

And another: People spend far less energy thinking about us than we think they do. People barely notice us at all. (Unless we are Taylor Swift.)

I just looked up “fuggedaboutit” in the dictionary to make sure I’m spelling it right.

Our new coffee machine makes 12 cups so I feel the need to make 12 cups even though I normally drink less. I’m sure this will not end up with my being awake at 3:30 in the morning scrubbing the bathroom grout with a toothbrush.