An in-depth explainer why the New York Times might win its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, which the AI community says would be catastrophic. arstechnica.com

We watched the first episode of “Resident Alien,” about an extraterrestrial who assumes the identity of a doctor in a Colorado small town where people are colorful. “Northern Exposure” meets “Starman.” The show stars Alan Tudyk, who played Wash in “Firefly.” Pretty good. I’ll give it another try.

Before the IBM PC, There Was the TRS-80

Radio Shack, known for its DIY kits and gear, unveiled this low-cost computer in 1977 in a bid to capture the fledgling PC market.

I had forgotten that the consumer PC revolution started in the mid-late 1970s, even though I was a teen-ager then and aware of what was going on. I think of it as a mid-80s phenomenon.

Trust Between Southeastern San Diego Flood Survivors and Local Government Is Dead

Flooded residents of the Southcrest, Shelltown and Mountain View neighborhoods of San Diego say they’ve been abandoned by the city and county and some say politicians are trying to drive them out to inflate real estate prices.

Will Huntsberry at the Voice of San Diego:

The flood waters have receded, but in these southeastern San Diego neighborhoods a crisis of trust is now ripping through the streets. From block to block the narrative is the same: City officials knew for years the flood canals were clogged and did nothing to clean them. After the floods, city leaders didn’t jump into action to provide relief; it was neighbors and homegrown nonprofits.

The residents of these historically Black and Latino neighborhoods can draw but two conclusions. At best, city leaders don’t care if they are forced from their homes. At worst, city leaders want them gone.

…

In other words, city leaders purposefully allowed Shelltown, Southcrest and Mountain View to flood, so that other people could take the land.

City officials, of course, have offered many explanations for why they never cleaned Chollas Creek. The amount of money for stormwater improvement is dangerously low. Certain environmental regulations were hard to get around. They have also said the amount of rain was so severe that cleaning the canals would not have stopped the floods. But none of this has resonated with the flood survivors. Would so many calls for a channel to be cleaned have gone unanswered in La Jolla they wonder?

Now, they are all forced to watch as the fabric of their community is torn apart.

Jessica Calix adored her neighbors in Southcrest. She rented a two-bedroom for $1,650 per month — unheard of in today’s rental market. Now, she’s stuck in a motel, searching for a new place. She can barely find a studio apartment in the same price range.

That’s bad for her and other renters, Calix said. But it’s good for landlords.

“Landlords will clean their places up and rent them for an extra thousand dollars or more now,” Calix said.

Roughly 70 percent of people in Shelltown, Southcrest and Mountain View are renters, according to US Census data.

And it’s not just renters being pushed out, according to the rumors going around. Stories of cheap cash offers for waterlogged houses are also making the rounds.

Rain and possible flooding is forecast to start again in a few hours and continue two days.

The season finale of “All Creatures Great and Small” was satisfactory. Drunk Carmody is my role model.

Ezra Klein: Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden. Biden is a great President, but he’s running a lousy re-election campaign. Polling shows him losing to Trump. The solution, says Klein, is for Biden’s closest advisors—people like Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer—to convince Biden to stand aside and not seek re-election, and then to choose a new candidate at the convention.

The New York Times explains the controversy around the 2023 Hugo Awards, hosted by China

Alexandra Alter:

The Hugo Awards, a major literary prize for science fiction, have been engulfed in controversy over revelations that some writers may have been excluded based on their perceived criticism of China or the Chinese government.

Suspicions in the science fiction community have been building for weeks that something was amiss with last year’s awards, which rotate to a different city each year, and in 2023 were hosted in Chengdu, China. Now, newly released emails show that the awards were likely manipulated because of political concerns.

Also:

“The Hugo Awards tried so hard to appease the Chinese government they circled back to being racist by preemptively disqualifying Chinese diaspora,” Xiran Jay Zhao wrote on X.

Chuck Mawhinney, a Camp Pendleton Marine who became the deadliest sniper in corps history, dies at 75.

The Marine Corps credited Mawhinney with 103 kills as well as 216 ‘probable’ kills that could not be confirmed because of the dangerous conditions in which the shootings happened…. The Oregon native recorded all of the kills before he turned 20….. Serving as a sniper “was the ultimate hunting trip: a man hunting another man who was hunting me,” Mawhinney told the Los Angeles Times in 2000. “Don’t talk to me about hunting lions or elephants; they don’t fight back with rifles and scopes. I just loved it.”

Today’s memes: This is love

Superman II (1980) featured some ground breaking special effects, in particular the battle between Superman and the supervillains General Zod, Ursa and Non and here is special effects designer Derek Meddings (1931-1995) on the model “battle” set of Superman II. For his work on Superman (1978), he was awarded a shared Special Achievement Award for special effects by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and shared the Michael Balcon Award of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA). He was also nominated for the 1980 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for his work on Moonraker (1979), for the 1990 BAFTA Award for Best Special Visual Effects for Batman (1989), and posthumously for a 1996 BAFTA Award for Best Achievement (in special effects) for GoldenEye (1995). via

Facebook just sent me notices that it removed two of my posts for violating its rules. It won’t show me what those posts are so I don’t know how I violated the rules, therefore I can’t modify my behavior to be more in line with Facebook terms of service.

Joey deVilla:

If you’ve been laid off – and especially if you’ve been laid off for the first time – you will blame yourself for being laid off. This post is just for you, and it can be summed up as this: you’re probably facing the consequences of someone else’s mistakes.

Upper management makes bad decisions, and employees face the consequences:

The decision-makers at companies making these layoffs sound like Lord Farquaad from Shrek: “Some of you may die, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”

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" vs. binge-watching

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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

Shakshuka is better than winning the Darwin Award

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 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.

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.

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

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?

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!.

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.