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.

A history of disco in America–not so much the music as the cultural movement. I lived through it and learned some things while listening to this podcast. [The Rest Is History]

It’s Still Alive — “Frankenstein” is often presented as a warning against new technology run amok, but historian Jill Lepore argues there’s a lot more going on in that book.

Now I think I need to re-read “Frankenstein.” And Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr might find that interesting too.

Something I saw while walking the dog: This house has a lot going on–a model train set in the front yard, and signage on the driveway gate. Note random cactus

Sign on a driveway gate reads 'No Soliciting: Charity, food/menus, estimates, petitions, politics, religion, salesman, magazines—NO EXCEPTIONS' House with a model train layout in the front yard Another view of the front-yard model train layout

I’ve been abstaining from posting political content, news headlines, and speculation about the current global crisis

I don’t feel like I have anything to contribute to the discussion. My contribution might, in fact, be harmful; I’d basically be like one of those guys on Twitter who suddenly became epidemiology experts in 2020 on the basis of watching a bunch of YouTube videos and knowing how to use Excel. Also, I have other things I want to do with my time. And I mostly don’t like reading that kind of thing on social media, so why should I push it on other people?

I do keep up and have strong opinions, and I have been known to rant about them at length face-to-face or on the phone. I used to be more opinionated on social media, but I don’t do that here anymore—not much, at least.

I do have one or two social media friends who have no training in foreign policy or politics, but who post knowledgeably about those subjects. I do enjoy reading their posts, and find them insightful. And I enjoy discussions with them—on their timelines. Not so much here.

📷 The scrap of cloth in Minnie’s mouth was once a toy duck. It was one of the first toys we got for her when we brought her home as a pup 11 years ago.

Close-up face photo of the most adorable big-brown-eyed dog in the world. She is holding a tattered scrap of yellow cloth in her mouth.

What signal do I send when I’m walking the dog and I wave to a neighbor with a full poop bag in my hand?

“A tendency to the lurid.” Reading the November, 1932 Astounding Stories

I am reading the November, 1932 issue of Astounding Stories, starting with “The Cavern of the Shining Ones,” by Hal K. Wells. The magazine is on archive.org.

Archive.org has a library of pulps and other popular magazines, going back more than 100 years. At a glance, the most recent pulps seem to date to the 1990s.

Months ago, I chatted with a gentleman at a local community association meeting who makes a hobby out of browsing the pulp archive. He likes dark fantasy magazines from the 1920s and 1930s. He said he occasionally finds a gem from someone who only ever wrote one to three stories, and who is completely forgotten.

“The Cavern of the Shining Ones” isn’t a gem, but it’s not bad. It has a Lovecraft vibe. A party of men, recruited from Los Angeles’s homeless population by a mysterious scientist who wears goggles day and night, is searching for something in the desert. I’m only partway through the story, but I believe they will find the thing, and it will not go well for them.

Here’s the author’s biography, just one paragraph on the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

He was born in 1899 in Little Hocking, Ohio, and died in 1979 in Torrance, California. He saw active service in World War I and published “The Brass Key” in Weird Tales in 1929. Another title: “Zehru of Xollar” (1932). His work had “a tendency to the lurid.” I’ll just bet it did.

Archive.org offers downloadable PDFs of old magazines. (Other formats too.) I downloaded the PDF, loaded it onto my iPhone and can easily read it there. Even after being on the Internet for more than 30 years, sometimes it strikes me with awe.

I used a 😊 when I should’ve used a 🙁 in a business email, so my making a good first impression in the first week of my new job is ruined.

I've been hired!

The eclipse isn’t the only cosmic event happening today. I’m pleased to say that I’ve joined the new website Fierce Network full-time as executive editor for reports, helping to launch its new research arm, contributing regularly to the site and authoring our new line of industry research focused on AI, cloud, open RAN, broadband and more.

Fierce Network launched Friday. Editor-in-chief Liz Miller has more about the new site here—tl;dr it’s a roll-up of Silverlinings, Fierce Telecom and Fierce Wireless.

Credit to Liz for the bit about the eclipse. It’s my first day on the new job and I figure it’s a great idea to get things going by ripping off the boss.

NYC’s AI chatbot was caught telling businesses to break the law. The city isn’t taking it down [apnews.com] — “Asked if a restaurant could serve cheese nibbled on by a rodent, [the bot] responded: ‘Yes, you can still serve the cheese to customers if it has rat bites,’ before adding that it was important to assess the ‘the extent of the damage caused by the rat’ and to ‘inform customers about the situation.’”

Crying Myself to Sleep on the Icon of the Seas [theatlantic.com] — Curmudgeonly travel writer Gary Shteyngart takes a luxury cruise on the world’s largest cruise ship:

The maiden voyage of the Titanic (the Icon of the Seas is five times as large as that doomed vessel) at least offered its passengers an exciting ending to their cruise….

📷 Something I saw while walking the dog: This osprey, on a platform on a pole about 50 feet above a footpath around Lake Murray. I shot the photo on the 5x setting on the iPhone and then cropped it heavily, which is why it’s pixelated.

Hawk-like bird standing with wings folded on a pole sticking out from a platform, with the bird's next on the platform. Plumage is dark gray from this distance, with a white head and chest.

Anyone who fears that we may be wiped out by artificial intelligence should just buy a robot vacuum cleaner and watch the unshakable determination with which it returns, over and over again, to the one corner of the room where it gets stuck every time.

A realistic “Terminator" movie would consist of two hours of well-meaning humans patiently disentangling the T-800 from the rug or dragging it out from under the bookshelf while it beeps pathetically for assistance.

Star Trek: Future Astronauts Having Feelings

I want to like “Star Trek: Discovery” more than I do. The characters all seem to be having big emotions and I’m supposed to share those big emotions, but I do not. The show is about Future Astronauts Having Feelings. The show seems to be popular among Millennial and Gen Z LGBTQ+ people, and that’s fine.

In general, the entire Trek franchise seems to be a warm nostalgia bath. And I don’t mean that in a good way. They’ve got a whole Galaxy to play with and they keep coming back to the same characters, races, species and tropes. It’s 1,000 years in the future and hey look there’s a shout-out to Jean-Luc Picard.

Also, why doesn’t the franchise bring back Shatner and Takei? They barely used Walter Koenig and Wil Wheaton. What’s up with that?

I thought yesterday was Thursday and I thought today was Thursday. Eventually, I will be right.

The best Stephen King novels chosen by you: NPR readers share their favorites. [npr.org] — I have read all but one of these and can confirm they’re terrific.

We watched the pilot episode of “Law and Order,” which first aired in 1990. Only 495 episodes remaining.

If ActivityPub support remains off by default for Threads, fewer than 1% of Threads users will activate it. They have more important and interesting things to do than to understand the fediverse.

Suicide Mission: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

John “Swampy” Barnett, a 26-year quality manager at Boeing, tried unsuccessfully to stop management from destroying the company for the benefit of vulture investors. He died of apparent suicide recently, but his former colleagues don’t believe his death was self-inflicted. By Maureen Tkacik. [prospect.org]

Cory Doctorow notes that whether or not Boeing assassinated Barnett, company CEO Jim McNerny and its leadership killed hundreds of people on crashed 737s through willful incompetence. McNerney was proudly contemptuous of competence, publicy calling senior engineers “phenomenally talented assholes" and rewarding managers who forced them out of the company. [pluralistic.net]

How the Atlantic Went From Broke to Profitable in Three Years. Rather than chasing clicks and breaking news, the 167-year-old magazine, co-founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson, raised subscription prices and hired top talent; “we make something worth buying.” [wsj.com]

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog.

Orange vintage Volkswagen Beetle, viewed side-on, nicely centered in the photo, parked in front of and between two suburban houses.

I can envision myself starting to learn Photoshop soon. I look at this photo and think how much it could be improved if we just removed that darn green trash bin.

Lately, it feels like I have to tie myself up in a pretzel to make Obsidian do what I need and want it to do. Today, I’m experimenting with going back to DevonThink. If I get unhappy with that, maybe I’ll just use documents in the Finder.

I rarely use Venmo, and when I do I’m always startled by its news feed. It seems like such a bad idea to broadcast records of payments. I’m not particularly concerned about privacy here—it just seems like a lot of noise. Why on Earth did someone think this was interesting information?

For the past two nights, I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to induce lucid dreaming

This started with my listening to a podcast episode about lucid dreaming on Inner Cosmos, hosted by Stanford University neuroscientist David Eagleman, with guest Jonathan Berent. I can’t find out much about Berent’s background; according to this website, he’s an “entrepreneur” and “lucid dream expert,” and he’s selling an app. Which, tbh, all sounds kind of sketchy. But he seemed reasonable in the interview, and I respect Eagleman so onward.

The podcast advises three techniques to induce lucid dreaming:

Keep a dream journal. Look for common factors in your dreams that can indicate you are dreaming. Berent says he grew up in Indiana, and though he now lives elsewhere, most of his dreams occur in Indiana. So when he finds himself doing something in Indiana, he assumes he’s dreaming. (Must be awkward on family visits.)

I forgot the second thing. Maybe review the dream journal?

Test yourself throughout the day to determine whether you are dreaming. Tap your teeth. Flick a lightswitch on and off. Push one finger against the palm of your other hand. Look at a clock or some text, then look away, and instantly look back.

We know what happens with those things in wakefulness; the behavior will be unexpected and weird in a dream. For example, your finger might push through your palm. The clock or text might change drastically when you look back at it. Your teeth might float away. If any of these things happen, you’ll know you’re dreaming.

I’ve been doing the reality testing several times a day; I set an alarm on my phone to remind me.

I haven’t done well at dream journaling. Ideally, you should wake yourself up after 5-6 hours and journal at that moment. But I have chronic insomnia—difficulty returning to sleep after waking up in the middle of the night, sometimes three or four nights a week—and so I do not want to mess around if I’m getting a good night’s sleep. I did wake up once last night and got out of bed (for the normal reason one awakens and leaves bed—more common in middle-aged prostate-havers and pregnant people) and brought my phone with me and dictated a recap of my most recent dream. I haven’t listened to that recording; it may just be a minute of mumbling, a stream of water hitting water, followed by a toilet flushing.

I woke up many times in the night and was aware of having many dreams, but I could not tell you details of any of them—other than the one I journaled. I remember that one with a fair amount of detail.

From my listening to Eagleman’s podcasts and other reading about sleep, my failure to remember dreams is unsurprising. When we sleep, the part of our brains that records working memories—short-term memory—is switched off. Without recording short-term memory, nothing can get saved to long-term memory. Dreams are forgotten within seconds of awakening.

I said earlier that Berent sounded reasonable on the podcast, and that’s only 99% true. When Eagleman talked about “reality” and “dreaming,” Berent talked about “consensus reality” and “dream reality”—that they’re both equal somehow. This is bullshit. There is only one reality. Anybody who’s ever kicked a coffee table while barefoot knows that.

No, I will not take your customer satisfaction survey. Not now, not ever.

I’m doing more writing for Silverlinings and the upcoming Fierce Network site and looking for news, feature and trend ideas related to cloud infrastructure and platform, networking and AI for the enterprise. Hit me with your pitches and ideas at mitch@mitchwagner.com.

Do you do lucid dreaming? If so, do you find it beneficial? Harmful?

Whenever I talk with someone with a New York/Jewish accent, I start reflecting it back to them. One minute I’m just a regular middle American dude, and the next minute I’m Tevye from “Fiddler on the Roof.”

Here's why AI search engines really can't kill Google

AI search tools are improving but they don’t match how we use search. [David Pierce / theverge.com]

Search can be divided into three types, says Pierce: People primarily use search just to find websites.

… my favorite fact of all: … a vast number of people every year go to Google and type “google” into the search box.

People also use search for specific facts, such as who won last night’s big game.

And the third type is the “exploration query.”

These are questions that don’t have a single answer, that are instead the beginning of a learning process. On the most popular list, things like “how to tie a tie,” “why were chainsaws invented,” and “what is tiktok” count as explorational queries. If you ever Googled the name of a musician you just heard about, or have looked up things like “stuff to do in Helena Montana” or “NASA history,” you’re exploring.

I needed to get my glasses repaired, but I couldn’t remember what you call the person who does that. I came up with “optimist.”

📷 Good morning! Here’s something I see on my walk every day.

She says she has been a good dog and would like a treat now.

Black buff-colored dog with a long nose, looking at the camera from the end of a leash. The dog is wearing a safety-yellow harness. Black buff-colored dog with a long nose, looking away from the camera and making a squinty face. The dog is wearing a safety-yellow harness. Black buff-colored dog with a long nose, coming in to boop the camera.

Overheard: “My teacher told me years ago not to worry about spelling because in the future there will be autocorrect. And for that I am eternally grapefruit.”

Death and typos: Writer/musician David Safran describes his six strange years screening online obituary comments. His job was overwhelming and rich in errors. And it drove home one message: we’re always on the clock. [theguardian.com]

Elon Musk has fully bought into the ‘great replacement.’ Musk thinks Democrats are using immigration to bolster a favorable voting demographic. But that’s not how immigration works. [theverge.com] — It is, at most, a short step from “great replacement” to “The Jews will not replace us.”

Margaret Atwood on Stephen King’s “Carrie,” which turns 50 and is still relevant today. Like much of King, it’s about the white underlcass in America. [nytimes.com]

First impressions of my new MacBook Air, after using it just a few minutes

  • Holy cow, this thing is fast compared with my 2018 MacBook Pro. I did a thing where I open 30+ tabs simultaneously. Took a couple of minutes on the MBP, but is virtually instantaneous on the MBA.
  • Migration Assistant seems to have worked flawlessly. I had to authenticate and give permission for a few things, but that only took about a minute.
  • Unexpected benefit: With a 15" built-in display, I now have a usable second display for my desk. My previous 13" display wasn’t usable when the MBP was on my desktop attached to the external Cinema Display, keyboard and trackball, except under limited circumstances. I hadn’t considered that when I decided on 15".
  • Hmmm… I hope this thing fits into my favorite computer bag. If not—MOAR shopping!
  • I can switch back to Safari from Vivaldi now, but I don’t know if I will. I’ve come to like Vivaldi.

Before upgrading to my new MacBook Air, I am being responsible, updating the operating systems and making sure my backups are all up-to-date. But really I just want to hold-my-beer this bitch and let Migration Assistant rip.

My new MacBook Air is here!

My current machine is a 2018 MacBook Pro. It works fine,although of course it’s slow. But I have to reboot several times a week—twice in one morning last week—and this suggests to me that it’s going to die on me at any moment and leave me possibly unable to meet deadlines. Better to arrange the transition on a schedule more under my control. So I pulled the trigger on an upgrade last week.

The old Mac has just 8 GB of memory and a 13" screen. The new machine is 15"/24GB/2TB. I’m looking forward to having that bigger screen to spread out on when I take the MB off my desk and use it elsewhere.

But now I’m on deadline and don’t even have time to open the box!

Excellent post from Cory about how widespread corruption in public institutions leads to anti-vax, MAGA and other conspiracy theories.

“Conspiratorialism and the epistemological crisis: We may not know what’s in the box, but we can tell if it’s been damaged in transit.” pluralistic.net/2024/03/2…

The revolving door of senior personnel between regulatory agencies and the companies they’re supposed to regulate means that the agencies don’t do their jobs.

The FAA has been overlooking problems with Boeing planes for years and we’re seeing the damage in headlines now.

Likewise, while vaccines are safe and powerful enablers of public health, Big Pharma lied for decades about the safety and efficacy of opiods, so it’s reasonable for people to disbelieve everything Big Pharma says.

Few of us are qualified to judge the safety of vaccines, medications, buildings and airplanes, but we can look at the regulatory process and see if it’s sound. And that process is broken. Corrupt.

Facebook and TikTok aren’t to blame here, the fault lies in the failure of government.

If the Biden Administration has been tackling this problem, I’m not aware of it. That doesn’t mean I support Biden’s re-election less, because Biden’s done a lot of good and in areas where Biden has failed, Trump would be a thousand times worse.

Photos of the original McDonald’s in in Illinois, which opened in 1955, and has been preserved as a museum, showing what it was like to dine there back then. [businessinsider.com]

The “Reitoff principle”: Why you should add “nothing” to your work-life schedule. [bigthink.com] — Taking time to do nothing, and letting your mind wander, is important to productivity and living a good life.

The Reitoff principle is the idea that we should grant ourselves permission to write off a day and intentionally step away from achieving anything.

William Shatner is 93

Kevin Mims makes the case that Shatner is a superb actor, and his much-parodied over-the-top style was due to a couple of factors: TVs at the time had small screens and often lousy picture and audio quality; performances had to be big because the medium was small. Also, Kirk and Spock were a duo; Kirk had to be loud to offset Spock’s stillness.

[quillette.com]:

While a lot of TV actors were trying to mimic the mush-mouthed vocal delivery of big-screen movie stars like Marlon Brando or James Dean, Shatner went in the opposite direction. He enunciated his words carefully and broke his sentences into bite-sized pieces, making each clause a separate unit of delivery. He would speed up his cadence at times, and then bring it to a near halt. Shatner’s unique speaking style has been parodied countless times. Among living actors, probably only Christopher Walken’s line delivery has generated more parodies.

Also:

It isn’t just a coincidence that names like Richard Matheson, Harlan Ellison, and Rod Serling crop up frequently in discussions of Shatner’s career. Academics frequently celebrate the work of various American literary schools–the American ex-pats of the so-called Lost Generation, the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, the Beats–but few literary salons have influenced American popular culture as profoundly as the Southern California fantasists who were all brought together by Rod Serling for his Twilight Zone series and later worked on other fantasy and sci-fi shows, including Star Trek.

Go read some Vernor Vinge

Noah Smith [noahpinion.blog]:

Vinge was perhaps the most technologically visionary sci-fi writer of the past 50 years — a worthy successor to H.G. Wells and Isaac Asimov. And yet in some ways he excelled even those august predecessors. Vinge imbues his characters with an emotional depth that very few sci-fi authors can match, and his plots are consistently complex and engaging. He’s the rare writer who really could do it all.

In the early part of his career, Vinge was a staunch libertarian, but over time he came to see that government is essential to keeping society functioning and preserving freedom.

My encounters with Vernor Vinge

I used to enjoy doing panels at science fiction conventions. Fear of public speaking is supposedly the most common fear, but not for me. I’m the opposite. I love public speaking, though I rarely get opportunities. So, for a few years, I leveraged my meager cred as a tech reporter to get myself put on panels at science fiction conventions. Those panels often focused on AI, and Vernor Vinge was often a speaker at those, too.

One panel turned out to be just me and him. It was the last panel of the day on the last day of the con, and yet the room was packed. “All these people here to see me, I said. “Poor Vernor. Gosh, I hope he doesn’t feel bad.” jkjkjk They were there to see him. We sensibly turned it into a Q&A with Vernor, with me asking a lot of questions and trying to minimize my contributing my own opinions. Which is hard for me, because I have so many opinions and would feel selfish if I did not share them promiscuously.

I did another panel with about a half-dozen people, including Vernor, David Brin, a renowned physicist who has done groundbreaking research into AI, and me. Again, I realized that the people in the room were not there to see me. How can I contribute? I said to myself. And I answered myself: A panel is a show. Every show needs a villain. So when it was my turn to present, I took my iPhone out of my pocket, held it up for the audience to see, and said, “This is my iPhone. It doesn’t know who I am when my finger is wet. You’re telling me this thing is going to achieve superintelligence in a few years? Pfui. The Singularity is bullshit.”

Vernor, who was sitting next to me, turned to me and his face lit up. He was delighted.

In the 2000s and early 2010s, I attended one or two SF conventions per year and encountered Vernor walking the floors of the dealer room, checking out what was for sale while I did the same. We’d stop and chat for 15-30 minutes. I always enjoyed our conversations, and I think he did, too—it would have been easy enough to escape if he did not. I wish I’d taken the opportunity to get to know him better.

Researchers analyzed digital archives of an obscure document thought to have been written by Shakespeare’s father and learned that it was actually written by the Bard’s sister. [phys.org]

Shakespeare had a sister?

Overheard: “As you age, it’s ridiculous how fast bird-watching creeps up on you. You spend your whole life being 100% indifferent to birds, and then one day you’re like “’is that a yellow-rumped warbler’”

California regulators want to protect indoor workers from oppressive heat. Politicians are blocking the protections. This is part of a nationwide trend. [kpbs.org]

For seniors, medical care can be a slog, but there are ways to rein it in. [washingtonpost.com] — Scheduling appointments, going to and from and managing treatments takes a lot of time.