Mitch's Blog

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr: How America’s oligarchs lull us with the be-your-own-boss fairy tale. The gig economy, DEI and ESG are the latest iterations of a 70-year-old PR campaign to convince Americans that Big Business is their friend.

Bose introduced pricy open-air earbuds that sit on your ears, rather than in them. Bose is touting the devices as being comfortable enough to wear all day.

I already find my AirPods to be comfortable enough to wear all day. But I don’t because it would be weird, battery life isn’t up to all-day use and I can’t think of a reason why I would want to do that.

After much practice, I am now expert at photographing my own left ear. I do not expect this skill to be useful.

Antisemitic callers overwhelmed a La Mesa City Council meeting with hate speech. timesofsandiego.com. I am a Jewish person who has lived more than 25 years in La Mesa, a suburb of San Diego, California. This is terrorism.

UPDATE: I edited this post to remove criticism of the City Council. I have no reason to believe they behaved inappropriately.

‘A Black Thing.’ Fani Willis’s father explains why his daughter keeps cash: John Clifford Floyd III, attorney and former Black Panther, says that when he was younger, Black Americans couldn’t count on white-owned businesses accepting credit cards from them. And so he taught his daughter to always keep six months' cash on hand. crooksandliars.com

“Stinge watching” is the opposite of binge watching, says Jason Kottke—when you love a show so much that you stingily portion it out, postponing watching episodes to extend the pleasure.

We sometimes binge-watch, but not often. Generally, we watch 45 minutes to an hour of episodic TV every night. Sometimes a movie on weekends—and I like it better when movies are under 1 hour and 45 minutes. I feel like that’s the amount of time I want to spend watching TV. And yes that does have the beneficial side-effect of extending the pleasure of a good show.

We recently raced through the show “Funny Woman,” because it was so engaging. We watched three 45-minute episodes one night and two another. Does that count as binge-watching?

I went out to walk the dog the other day and discovered I’d forgotten to charge my AirPods. I found wired earbuds in a box near my desk, where they’d been unused and unopened for five years since I got them as a free giveaway. They worked fine. This is why nothing ever gets thrown out in our house.

I’ve been hearing about the Perplexity search engine, a competitor to Google. www.perplexity.ai I tried it yesterday and it’s really quite good. It’s like ChatGPT with links to sources. Those links are important because the inaccuracy problem with Perplexity is bad, like any other generative AI.

When I’m using Wikipedia for serious research, I fact-check by looking for the blue footnote links and following those to the source articles. Perplexity seems to work the same way, although Perplexity—like all conversational AI—is significantly less accurate than Wikipedia.

Play this video when you want to pretend to be busy so people will leave you alone. Say “yeah” at the three-minute mark.

Enterprise leaders swing between confidence and sleepless terror over AI.

Fear of missing out (FOMO) vies with fear of messing up (FOMU).

Enterprise leaders say they’re well along in their AI implementations and ready for more, but they’re also afraid of falling behind competitors, according to a study by Juniper Networks and Wakefield Research. These leaders are also concerned that employees within their organizations are out of control in their AI use.

My latest on Silverlinings.

Clark Gable is a veteran returning home from World War II eager to resume his pre-war lifestyle as a playboy ad-man, but ultimately finding the life empty and unsatisfying. He takes a high-paying job at an ad agency, in the course of which he meets beautiful war widow Deborah Kerr, which causes him to change his values.

Are there not-too-expensive alternatives to Grammarly? I’m starting to get fed up with it.

I began using Grammarly a year ago and loved it for most of that time, but it generates so many false positives that grinding through them can be a chore. I accept only about 30% of the suggestions it makes.

Also, the little helper chiclet that it puts on-screen gets in the way far too often. It is a horrible, horrible user interface and it drives me crazy.

I saw this extremely handsome pig in the front yard of a house in the neighborhood.

Young people may find this hard to believe, but I remember back in the old days we spent hardly any time making sure our devices were charged.

Overheard: A chain of grocery stores that specialize in donuts, bagels, Swiss cheese, Cheerios and Lifesavers. It would be called Hole Foods.

I don’t know why the new generation of productivity apps hates folders, but I’m sure enshittification has something to do with it.

I have rediscovered the “hide” command in Apple Photos. It’s great if you want to get photos out of sight but do not want to commit to deleting them. I’d forgotten about that command for years.

A mob set a Waymo self-driving car on fire over the weekend. arstechnica.com

Videos of the incident are all over social media. … In one video, a crowd of people surround the car, preventing it from moving. The vehicle is already covered in graffiti and has several smashed windows. One person then throws a lit firework into the cabin; the firework explodes and a fire starts inside the car. The Waymo car then burns to a crisp while it helplessly flashes its hazard lights.

“so there’s a special drug that makes you hallucinate so hard you can fold space… its made out of worm shit and it will turn you into a salamander”

I had a blood draw this morning, and I had a skilled phlebotomist. “Skilled Phlebotomist” would be a good name for a podcast.

The dog and I walked part of Junipero Serra Trail yesterday at the Old Mission Dam.

Meanwhile, in a holosuite on Deep Space Nine, Ben Sisko is a 20th Century Earth Boston legbreaker and hitman named Hawk.

I hear Taylor Swift‘s boyfriend is participating in something today.

It’s 1947, and Holmes is long retired to a country house, where he tends his bees and his failing memory. He’s struggling to remember a case 35 years earlier that set the course of the final decades of his life.

Sad Clown Paradox: Why You Should Check In On Your Funny Friends

Humor has long been used as a tool against stress and uncertainty, perhaps best captured in The Wipers Times: a satirical newspaper that went to print in the decimated city of Ypres, Belgium, during World War I. So named because most of the soldiers reading it couldn’t pronounce Ypres (they said why-pers instead of ee-pruh), the trench newspaper included sporting notes in which gas attacks were reported as a horse race, regular serials (one of the earliest: a detective series “Herlock Shomes”) and a Things We Want To Know section, including “whether the pop’lar Poplar tree’s as pop’lar as it used to be?”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, humans across the globe took to their windows, bathrooms, and balconies to showcase a similarly resilient sense of humor in the face of life-threatening disease, all while grappling with the stress and isolation of lockdown. And later, amidst the devastation unfolding in Ukraine, hackers found the time to make Russian charging stations display the message: “Putin is a dickhead”.

Do you read books on your phone?

Seems like smart glasses wouldn’t be usable by people who wear glasses only part of the time.

How do you survive fame? Podcaster P.J. Vogt talks with his friend, the actor and writer Molly Ringwald, “formerly the most famous teenager in America.” She starred in movies including “The Breakfast Club” and “Pretty in Pink.”

Ringwald has a head on her shoulders and didn’t let fame get into it. And she got out of the country and moved to Paris, where she wasn’t famous.

She says the only thing she misses about being famous is getting tables at restaurants.

The Freakonomics podcast is doing a series of episodes on the physicist Richard Feynman. The first episode is terrific, and I’m looking forward to listening to the rest.

Feynman liked to figure things out from first principles. He didn’t accept received wisdom. This led him to extraordinary breakthroughs in physics and a rich and unusual life. He followed his own path, in science and in life.

But Feynman was a super-genius. You and I are not super-geniuses. If you and I try to apply this principle broadly, that leads to Qanon, anti-vax and other bad outcomes.

Sometimes you have to listen to what the experts say.

However, here in the 21st Century, with institutions breaking down and displaying incompetence, it’s difficult to figure out which self-proclaimed experts to listen to.

NYTimes: Could a Giant Parasol in Outer Space Help Solve the Climate Crisis?

Researchers are investigating whether a solar shield in space that blocks some sunlight could help mitigate climate change.

Are they really calling it a “space parasol?” It should be pink with yellow daisies all over, and tassels at the edges.

It has stopped raining and the sun is out at last, but it is so, so wet and chilly and unpleasant out there.

This is not why we are paying San Diego cost-of-living to live here. I demand to speak to a manager.

TV show idea: Just Chrisjen Avasarala from The Expanse and Susy from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel swearing. I would watch 13 seasons of that.

Currently reading: Nobody’s Fool by Richard Russo 📚My third or fourth time reading this wonderful book.

What are your favorite and second-favorite social media services? Where do you spend the most time?

Cisco and NVIDIA did a technology integration deal this week—here’s why it matters: Cisco and NVIDIA want to take the hassle out of AI infrastructure. My latest article for Silverlinings.

Thanks to the indomitable Seth, who had me as a guest to talk about one of my favorite novels, “Alas, Babylon,” by Pat Frank. Hugos There.

Clarkesworld: “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole,” by Isabel J. Kim.

Via Pluralistic — thanks!

I had a meeting at 11 am at a local coffee shop. It’s been raining hard nonstop since Monday morning. This is not unusual back east, but it is unusual here, and because the drainage infrastructure isn’t built for it, it’s a cause for concern. We’ve had a lot of flooding. Not in my neighborhood—we’re fine—but elsewhere in San Diego, during another round of storms last week, cars were swept away and people had to be rescued.

I put on my rain jacket and hat and drove to the coffee shop. I got there about 20 minutes early. Every seat was full but that’s fine—I’m comfortable standing—so I stood there and drank my coffee.

A man wearing an Apple Vision Pro walked by me to approach the counter. When he walked by me the other way, I stopped him and I said, with no preamble or introduction, “Do you like it?” He knew what I was talking about, of course. He said he did like it. He said he edits video and he had two screens open and also his email. I said, “Now? While we’re talking? While you were at the counter?” He said yes. He was wearing the Vision Pro the whole time.

My meeting arrived a little early. A little more than half-hour in, every phone in the still-crowded coffee shop went off. We all looked at our phones. Tornado alert. Take shelter in a basement or somewhere away from windows. I happened to have gotten a table very far from the window, so I figured we were good.

I messaged Julie to check on her. She said she was going to get the dog and sit on the floor in the back hall, and try to get the cats too.

After a few minutes of no tornado, I thought about driving home. Could I beat the tornado? That seemed like maybe a bad idea, but on the other hand, I’m on a deadline today.

By now, it was after noon, and I decided to check and see what the place served for lunch. They had shakshuka. I love shakshuka. I thought about the options: Drive home during a tornado warning and not have shakshuka and maybe get killed and win a Darwin Award? Or stay in the coffee shop, have shakshuka, not get killed and not win a Darwin award? I went for the shaksuka option.

There was no tornado. It stopped raining. The shakshuka was delicious. The meeting was excellent. I left for home and arrived at about 1:15 pm. The sun was out, even though the forecast called for a solid wall of rain Monday through Thursday.

And that’s pretty much my day so far.

I saw this dog at the park yesterday. He hopes your week is off to a good start.

He’s 16 years old, which is pretty old even for a small dog. (Small dogs live much longer than big dogs.) He’s losing his fur in spots and it was chilly yesterday—hence the stylish couture.

Friends came down from Los Angeles yesterday and we visited the San Diego Zoo

Yes, that is my finger in the preceding photo. I like it anyway.

I picked up annual passes for me and Julie. I want to make a point of going to the zoo and adjacent Balboa Park more often, without needing a goal or making a big deal out of it. They are great places to go and just be and walk around.

A tumblr thread on the edginess of classic Fleischer cartoons and the awesomeness of Cab Calloway.

A toddler got stuck after climbing into a claw machine looking for a toy in an Australian shopping mall.

It’s me. I am the toddler.

Watch an elephant family working together to save a baby elephant that got stuck in the mud.

“This reminds me of something that once happened to me in the dressing room in the husky section at Macy’s.”

I saw this spectacular rainbow while walking the dog this afternoon.

Shorter version of my earlier post about Tapestry: Yes, today I can consume Mastodon, Threads, Reddit, YouTube, newsletters etc. in most RSS readers—but the experience is nowhere near as good as in the native apps. What if there were an aggregator where the experience is just as good as in a native app, but it’s all in one place, on one screen? That seems to be what Iconfactory is doing with Tapestry.

I think I now get the point of what Iconfactory wants to build with the Tapestry project.

Cory Doctorow: Companies like Tesla, Amazon and Cruise that claim to have replaced human workers with AI are often outright lying. Often, they’re instead replacing local employees with remote workers paid peanuts in India and other developing countries.

So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: “AI stands for ‘absent Indian.’”

Sometimes the remote workers aren’t low-paid—they’re engineers making a lot of money and replacing low-wage workers. That works too; the scam allows technology companies to boost their stock prices while failing to deliver on their promises, Cory says.

Journalists and other critics who attack tech companies for stealing jobs aren’t doing the companies any harm. They’re supporting the companies’ inflated claims and elevating stock prices.

I’m upgrading from a five-year-old iPhone XS to an iPhone Pro Max. Any advice? What should I expect to be different?

I wasn’t planning to upgrade. I was planning to not upgrade. I was proud of using an old phone. No conspicuous consumption for me!

But Julie found us a sweet deal—far too good to pass up.

I had a tough decision whether to go for the 15 Pro or Pro Max. I don’t love the idea of the bigger screen. But I want the better camera, and the additional battery life will be nice too.

Kevin Drum: Congress got to yell at social media CEOs today.

… research really doesn’t support the notion that social media is harmful to teenagers. It seems to have both negative and positive effects, but they’re small and the positive effects overwhelm the negative ones.

Also: As Congress Grandstands Nonsense ‘Kid Safety’ Bills, Senator Wyden Reintroduces Legislation That Would Actually Help Deal With Kid Exploitation Online (Techdirt)

Meanwhile, Sen. Tom Cotton doesn’t know Singaporeans and Chinese are different people. Or he pretends to be unaware of that fact to pander to his ignorant racist base. CrooksAndLiars

Boing Boing: “There is no plan beyond blaming Biden.” Trump’s border plan “consists of moats filled with alligators, fences with spikes on top, bombing northern Mexico, and shooting asylum seekers. Trump only speaks about creating misery at the border, there is no plan to improve anyone’s situation there.”

Taylor Swift vs. the manosphere

Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day ties together far-right movements among young men in multiple nations and relates them to MAGA losing its shit over Taylor Swift:

Much of the digital playbook fueling this recruitment for our new(ish) international masculinist movement was created by ISIS, the true early adopters for this sort of thing. Though it took about a decade for the West to really embrace it. But nowadays, it is not uncommon to see trad accounts sharing memes about “motherhood,” that are pretty much identical to the Disney Princess photoshops ISIS brides would post on Tumblr to advertise their new life in Syria. And, even more darkly, just this week, a Trump supporter in Pennsylvania beheaded his father and uploaded it to YouTube, in a video where he ranted about the woke left and President Biden. Online extremism is a flat circle.

The biggest similarity, though, is in what I call cultural encoding. For ISIS, this was about constantly labeling everything that threatened their influence as a symptom of the decadent, secular West.

For our new International League Of Unfuckable Conservative Men, it is, increasingly, about labeling everything that threatens them as feminine and, thus, bad. This is why you only ever see them rant about women journalists — well, usually it’s just The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz tbh. This is also why they’re always angry about whatever wild shit random teenage girls are posting TikTok. And this why they invented the concept of “simping,” the minute sites like OnlyFans began giving direct financial power to sex workers. Because they see masculinity as unquestionable strength and anything that threatens that must be eliminated. And this why they’re all losing their minds over Taylor Swift right now.

Also, from the comments:

I do feel like the mystery of why are women trend so more liberal than men is akin to wondering why didn’t more Jews join the Nazi party. Conservative rhetoric is ever becoming more anti woman.

A Pennsylvania man decapitated his father and posted a video in which the son displayed the older man’s severed head and “claimed that his father was a longtime federal employee who ‘is now in hell for eternity as a traitor to his country,’ and ranted about President Joe Biden, ‘far-left woke mobs’ and the LGBTQ+ community.” huffpost.com

Meanwhile, in Soviet MAGAstan: Transgender People in Florida Face Having Their Driver’s Licenses Revoked

Lawyers Guns Money: “It turns out the whole Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce romance is just another Democrat conspiracy to defraud White America of its birthright, which for those of you scoring at home is complete dominion over the United States.”

NYTimes: MAGA nincompoops are losing their shit over Taylor Swift dating Travis Kelce—Vivek Ramaswamy says its a conspiracy and a Fox News commentator says its a four-year-old Pentagon/NATO psy-op.

Reading about Yusef Salaam’s traffic stop in both the New York Times and NY Post I can’t see how Salaam (or the police officer) did anything substantially wrong or how Salaam disparaged police. More MAGA bullshit.

Tuesdays, the Savage Love podcast drops and I always enjoy that. But I’m going to listen to the AppStories podcast first today because this week’s topics look interesting.

I guess that means the AppStories podcast is better than sex.

I’m intrigued by Project Tapestry, an app in development from Iconfactory that creates a single feed for social networks, blogs, weather alerts, RSS feeds and more. But it sounds like a feed reader, similar to Newsblur (my current favorite), Feedly, Feedbin, Inoreader, etc. Am I missing something?

Forbes: Google’s AI will read all your private messages—and Apple might do the same.

This is a flagrant violation of privacy.

Via Violet Blue’s Cybersecurity Roundup—thanks!

Ars Technica:

The National Security Agency (NSA) has admitted to buying records from data brokers detailing which websites and apps Americans use, US Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) revealed….

… the senator is calling on all intelligence agencies to “stop buying personal data from Americans that has been obtained illegally by data brokers.”

”The US government should not be funding and legitimizing a shady industry whose flagrant violations of Americans' privacy are not just unethical but illegal”….

Via Violet Blue’s Cybersecurity Roundup–thanks!.

An 18-year-old British man was acquitted of charges of public disorder after he joked with friends in a private Snapchat conversation about blowing up a flight he was a passenger on. (Via Violet Blue’s Cybersecurity Roundup—thanks!).

Currently reading: The Life of the World to Come by Kage Baker 📚

Finished reading: A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers 📚

Coronado residents are protesting the Hotel Del agreeing to host a service by the Awaken Church, a toxic MAGA organization whose leaders espouse vile LGBTQ-phobic beliefs. The head pastor “shares violent messaging and images, argues for the ‘public hanging’ and ‘torture’ of people he disagrees with and encourages the violent overthrow of the government.”

What’s behind the tech industry’s mass layoffs in 2024?.

There is a herding effect in tech…. The layoffs seem to be helping their stock prices, so these companies see no reason to stop.

Layoffs “are contagious…. when one major tech company downsizes staff, the board of a competing company may start to question why their executives are not doing the same.”

Israeli officials presented details to back up their claims that UN relief workers helped Hamas in the October raid. “One is accused of kidnapping a woman. Another is said to have handed out ammunition. A third was described as taking part in the massacre at a kibbutz where 97 people died.”

German-born photographer Evelyn Hofer captured beautiful photos of Dublin in 1965-66. “Hofer took her time composing each shot, whether it captured a pair of housekeepers in brief repose or James Joyce’s death mask.”

I had a Zoom meeting yesterday and I put it on my calendar but instead of “Zoom” I mistakenly wrote “Zoomies” and so instead of my meeting I went out in the backyard and ran around in circles as hard as I could for a while and then I collapsed and had a nap.

Only 90s Web Developers Remember This. The halfway point of this essay is where my Web development skills end.

Cory defends lifehacking, which “is in pretty bad odor these days, and with good reason: a once-useful catch-all for describing how to make things easier has become a pit of productivity porn, grifter hustling, and anodyne advice wreathed in superlatives and transformed into SEO-compliant listicles.” But at its core, lifehacking is just a collection of little tricks that help people be more productive.

Your Local Epidemiologist: How to (and not to) boost your immune system

Works: “A balanced, nutrient-dense diet,” sleep and hydration.

Doesn’t work: Getting re-infected; dietary supplements (for most people) including Vitamin C, Vitamin D and probiotics; cold plunges; nasal breathing; saunas.

How Cory Doctorow cured his writer’s block:

… the key turned out to be the realization that while there were days when (in retrospect) I wrote well and days when I wrote poorly, and days when I _felt _like I was writing well and days when I felt like I was writing poorly, they weren’t the same days. I could write great material even when I felt like I was writing shit. I could write shit when I felt like I was doing the best writing of my life.

Helpful for any kind of skilled work.

People who spend a lot of time posting to social media often spend time going through their follower list and getting rid of the spammers and bots. I’ve never seen the point of that. As long as the bots aren’t interacting with my account, or otherwise getting in my face, I say let ‘em be. I have other things to do with my time.

No doubt many or perhaps most of my social media followers are bots. Doesn’t bother me. As long as I know real people are following my posts and enjoying them, that’s sufficient to keep me going.

I also distribute these posts via a newsletter. One day I checked the stats there and saw the newsletter had thousands of subscribers, and was growing fast. I was quite pleased.

Then a while after that I looked at the subscriber list and saw that many of those subscribers were bots. So I figured out how to prune the bots, and found that the actual number of human subscribers I had was 24.

Twenty four. Not 24,000 or 2,400. Two dozen.

Sad-face emoji.

The newsletter is up to about 26 subscribers now. But at least a few of those 26 subscribers seem to enjoy the newsletter, and it’s set-and-forget for me—runs automatically—so I’m happy to keep it going.

By the way, if you want to subscribe to the newsletter, you can do that here. Just think—your action alone can increase the subscriber base by nearly 4% and that’s quite an accomplishment!

“Brand New Key” is actually a song about sex! Holy shit!

The word of the day is “pharmacovigilance.”

Penn Jillette Wants to Talk It All Out

I was going to move to France with my girlfriend and be a beatnik existential writer — she broke up with me, I was very upset, I said, “Fuck you,” and went to Clown College.

On the importance of agreeing on consensus reality:

We can argue forever about gun control — whether that’s a good idea or a bad idea, including what the framers thought — but if we can’t agree that the shootings happened, then we can’t talk.

Also:

As a good friend of mine said, “I don’t mind being called an asshole — I don’t want to be an asshole.”

He talks about renouncing libertarianism; Bob Dylan; the Smothers Brothers; the risk of monetizing hate, aggression and outrage; Jewish identity; why he doesn’t speak out about Israel and Hamas (pretty much the same reason I don’t); the Three Stooges; fame; ambition; Donald Trump; and why, despite numerous problems, the world is better off today than it has been.

Downworthy: A browser plugin to turn hyperbolic viral headlines into what they really mean:

• “Literally” becomes “Figuratively”
• “Will Blow Your Mind” becomes “Might Perhaps Mildly Entertain You For a Moment”
• “One Weird Trick” becomes “One Piece of Completely Anecdotal Horseshit”
• “Go Viral” becomes “Be Overused So Much That You’ll Silently Pray for the Sweet Release of Death to Make it Stop”
• “Can’t Even Handle” becomes “Can Totally Handle Without Any Significant Issue”
• “Incredible” becomes “Painfully Ordinary”
• “You Won’t Believe” becomes “In All Likelihood, You’ll Believe”

The lost ancient practice of communal sleep. “Until the mid-19th Century, it was completely normal to share a bed with friends, colleagues and even total strangers. How did people cope? And why did we stop?”

Powerful and disturbing: My grandpa was a Nazi, by Bastian Allgeier.

I canceled my ChatGPT subscription. I’m just not using it enough to justify the $20/mo.

I had in mind creating my own GPT—my own individual AI assistant—but I haven’t prioritized doing so, and I don’t see that changing in the near future.

I thought that ChatGPT might make a good writing assistant. But ChatGPT’s first drafts are hopeless. It’s easier and faster for me to write from scratch.

This is not a forever decision. I expect I’ll give it another try soon enough.

Is anyone else having a problem with micro.blog posts propagating out over ActivityPub? Maybe “propagating” isn’t the right word here—I mean that when I go to mastodon.social/@mitchw@mitchw.blog, the newest post I see is from Saturday. @help

Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr):

The most amazing things about monopolies is how the contempt just oozes out of them. It’s like these guys can’t even pretend to give a shit. You want guillotines? Because that’s how you get guillotines.

Big Pharma jacks up the price on Ozempic and other powerful meds because these companies are monopolies, and they can do that. Apple pulls “a malicious compliance stunt that could shame the surly drunks my great-aunt Lisa used to boss in the Soviet electrical engineering firm she ran.” Ello, “the ‘indie’ social media startup that literally promised – on the sacred honor of its founders – that it would never sell out its users,” goes ahead and sells out its users. Also: The Trolley Problem—solved (in the same way that James Kirk solved the Kobayashi Maru).

For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything.

The program was a weird combination of email, databases, and workflow that allowed companies to stand up custom applications and deploy them to relevant groups of workers inside Notes.

Also:

… It provided not just your email, but an internal telephone directory, contact database, booking system for time off, company handbook, and more, all accessible via a single application and a single set of credentials, long before single sign-on became a thing.

Nowadays, it is common for most if not all of these functions to be delivered via separate web-based applications, each requiring a different login so you need to have dozens of different credentials, and each one sporting a different user interface. So I guess you could regard the web browser as an app runtime that is the ultimate successor to Notes?

Also:

Eventually, IBM, which had acquired Lotus in 1995, announced in 2012 that it would be discontinuing the Lotus brand altogether, before offloading Notes to Indian software outfit HCL Technologies in 2018.

The platform still survives, with HCL releasing Domino 14.0 last year, which, as The Register commented at the time, speaks to the “stickiness” of the custom workflows built on the platform.

Also:

But Notes is nowhere near holding the record for the oldest piece of software still being used. The US Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA), which takes care of contracts for the Department of Defense (DoD), is said to have a program called Mechanization of Contract Administration Services (MOCAS), which was introduced in 1958, making it nearly twice as old.

A tale of two cities: one real, one virtual.

Digital city-building has become a legitimate part of urban planning, helping to mirror the present — and map the future.

“Digital twins” are transforming urban planning in Barcelona, Ukraine(!), Helsinki, and Singapore and advancing archeology in Pompeii.

A digital twin is a digital model of a real-world object, using sensors to measure changes in real time. Used in urban planning, a digital twin of the city can predict how changes will affect the city over time: For example, how adding a traffic signal would affect traffic patterns.

The goal is “‘to build an oracle,’ says Jordi Cirera Gonzalez, director of the Knowledge Society at Barcelona City Council, and a man not short on ambition. ‘Like the ancient Greeks’: a place where you can ask anything you can imagine and it’s possible to find some answer.’”

Barcelona’s digital twin project “lives within the deconsecrated Torre Girona chapel, on the campus of the Barcelona Polytechnic. Where once one might have prayed to God for an answer, now one goes to a computer.”

I wrote about digital twins for cities for Oracle in 2021: The smart city gets even smarter