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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.

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.

How Cory Doctorow uses browser tabs for productivity superpowers

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.

Continue Reading →

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.

On the futility of blocking spammers on social media

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!

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”

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.

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

The Price of Netanyahu’s Ambition.

Amid war with Hamas, a hostage crisis, the devastation of Gaza, and Israel’s splintering identity, the Prime Minister seems unable to distinguish between his own interests and his country’s.

For liberal, secular Israelis, Netanyahu has always been an object of scorn on a range of social and political issues, but now, across the ideological landscape, he stands accused of failing utterly on his promise of vigilance and security.

A deep and thoroughly researched article on the current state of Israel, by David Remmick at The New Yorker.

… for more than 200 years, the American people have elected a buffoon’s gallery of rogues, incompetents, empty suits, abysmal spellers, degenerate golfers and corrupt Marylanders to the Vice Presidency with barely a passing consideration that they might one day have to assume the highest office in the land.

From the book “Veeps: Profiles in Insignificance,” by Bill Kelter and Wayne Shellabarger, which is definitely going on my to-be-read list. Reviewed by Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr. Thanks, Cory!

Forget 10,000 steps: 7 tips for step counters.

The notion to take 10,000 daily steps stems from a marketing ploy: As the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics approached, a Japanese researcher decided to nudge his nation to be more active by offering pedometers with a name that loosely translated as “10,000-step meter.” (The Japanese character for the number 10,000 looks a little like a person walking.)

For “men and women younger than age 60, the greatest relative reductions in the risk of dying prematurely came with step counts of between about 8,000 and 10,000 per day,” according to a 2022 study pooling results from 47,457 adults of all ages.

For people older than 60, the threshold was a little lower. For them, the sweet spot for reduced mortality risk was 6,000 to 8,000 steps per day.

The New Yorker: How Ten Middle East Conflicts Are Converging Into One Big War

Robin Wright:

Ten conflicts among diverse rivals or in different arenas over disparate flash points and divergent goals are now converging. For all the recent punditry warning about a widening war, the trajectory has long been obvious. And for all the American warships, troops, and diplomats deployed in the Middle East over the past hundred days, the U.S. has produced little, if anything, beyond greater vulnerabilities. “The U.S. appears pretty disconnected from regional realities, which may have been an intentional approach to enable withdrawal,” Julien Barnes-Dacey, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “But now that Washington has been sucked back in by the Israel war, it’s looking pretty lost.”

Also:

U.S. intelligence has warned of growing Arab and Muslim support for Hamas, which is designated a terrorist group by the U.S. and Europe. At the Doha Forum last month, I heard from dozens of Arabs who condemned Hamas tactics and disagreed with its ideology, even as they admired or envied its determined resistance to Israel and defiance of U.S influence. “In this kind of a fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin acknowledged in December. “And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat.” He noted, “It would compound this tragedy if all that awaited Israelis and Palestinians at the end of this awful war was more insecurity, more rage, and more despair.”

And:

In 2002, the Houthis' founding slogan was “God is the greatest, death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, victory to Islam.”

A company backed by Silicon Valley billionaires is seeking local voter approval to build a walkable city from scratch for 50,000 people on farmland in Solano County, located in northern California between Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Backers include LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. “Eventually, the city could grow to 400,000 people, the group says, but only if it can create at least 15,000 jobs that pay above-average wages.”

I love the spirit behind this idea. California is in a housing crisis. It’s a disaster, like an earthquake or wildfire, and we need bold solutions.

This has been bugging me for more than a year. Now I have the answer and can relax and move on.

The three-decade saga that led to the Crown Heights Tunnels: A group of anti-establishment yeshiva students from Israel took control of the Chabad-Lubavitch synagogue in Brooklyn and started digging.

Underground tunnels were discovered last week near the synagogue, and the rowdy yeshiva students rioted to block repairs.

The students, who come from the Israeli city Tzfat and are called Tzfatim, are “extreme Meshichists.”

Meshichists – or Messianists – are Chabad Hasidim who believe that their late leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, is the Messiah, and despite his death in 1994, is still meant to reappear. Tzfatim are perceived to be, even by Meshichist standards, unusually fervent in their beliefs and have been involved in numerous incidents of violence and mayhem for nearly three decades.

…

When Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson assumed the leadership of the Chabad-Lubavitch community in 1951, he delivered a seminal public address, which set the movement’s guiding principle for the next seven decades: “We are the last generation. It is our job to bring Moshiach” – the Hebrew term for the Messiah.

…

His followers heard something else too: their leader, in their view, was declaring himself the Messiah. What exactly he said and what he meant and how he meant it would be hotly debated over the years, but in a broad sense, Chabad Messianism became established Chabad doctrine.

David French: Disqualify Trump (or else).

There’s no doubt that knocking Trump off the ballot would send shock waves through the American body politic, but why would anyone believe that it’s inherently less destabilizing if Trump runs?

We already know what he does when he loses. For him, counting the votes is only the beginning of the battle. If he loses, he’ll challenge the results, conspire to overturn the election and incite political violence.

And if he wins? Then you have an insurrectionist in command of the most powerful military in the world, who is hellbent on seeking vengeance on his political enemies. Does anything at all sound stabilizing about that?

The secret history of Napoleon Bonaparte: Watching “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (2002) starring Ian Holm

We saw “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” an idiosyncratic and charming historical romantic-comedy that starred Ian Holm and came out in 2002.

I liked the movie a lot. It exceeded my expectations. I thought it would be more broad and farcical than it actually was. It had a big heart, which I did not expect.

The premise: Napoleon, in exile on the island of St. Helena after his defeat at Waterloo, executes a scheme to escape and be replaced on the island by a double, a common seaman who looks exactly like Napoleon, whose name is Eugene Lenormand. Napoleon will settle in Paris incognito, and the false Napoleon will reveal his true identity, as will the true Napoleon. France will rally and the empire will be restored.

But the plan goes wrong, and Napoleon needs to survive in Paris as Lenormand.

Fortunately for Napoleon, he’s taken in by a pretty widow.

But Napoleon never loses hope, and never stops planning to resume his rightful place as emperor.

Meawhile, he and the widow fall in love. She thinks he’s just Lenormand, a commoner like her, maybe someone who once did prison time.

Holm plays both Napoleon and the sailor Lenormand. He gives two great performances. As Napoleon, Holm is commanding, striding about erect with his hands clasped behind him. And he’s also sad and brave as he adjusts to life without the trappings and luxury of power.

In an early scene, Napoleon, disguised as Lenornmand, commands his ship’s captain to change course immediately and head for France. Holm’s performance is appropriately imperious, and you can easily imagine that underlings would be terrified to receive a command like that from the emperor. But now Napoleon is living the life of a common deckhand, and the ship’s captain just laughs at him.

Later, Napoleon marshals the same charisma to inspire rather than intimidate, and succeeds in rallying a band of struggling street vendors to sell fresh fruit.

Meanwhile, on St. Helena, the false Napoleon is enjoying his captivity. It’s a prison, but it’s posh and luxurious, with fine food, beautiful art and clothing, and servants to tend to Lenormand’s needs. In character as Lenormand, Holm is boorish, gluttonous, drunk and loud. His scenes are played for low comedy.

Iben Hjejle plays the widow, whom everybody calls “Pumpkin.” She’s a Danish actor, probably best known to American audiences for appearing as John Cusack’s girlfriend in “High Fidelity.” Pumpkin is your basic romantic-comedy woman’s role; she’s an auxiliary to the man. Her job is to look beautiful and adore Napoleon (whom she knows as Lenormand). Hjeile does the job. I’d like to see her in a real role sometime.

The magic of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is that it commits to the bit. It takes its premise seriously.

As Roger Ebert noted in a 2002 review, you can easily imagine the movie going in a broad, Monty Python direction, but instead, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is “a surprisingly sweet and gentle comedy.”

The dialogue and acting are first-rate, and the costumes and settings are up to the standards of any historical drama.

I was intrigued by “The Emperor’s New Clothes” because of a mention the movie got on the Age of Napoleon podcast, an extremely detailed history of the life and world of Napoleon, which has been running for seven years and isn’t anywhere near done. I’ve been listening to the podcast for several years.

The host, Everett Rummage, said he thought “The Emperor’s New Clothes” was the only movie that he ever saw that truly captured Napoleon’s character. This was before the current Ridley Scott movie came out.

Having now seen “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” I can absolutely see Rummage’s point. Granted, pretty much everything I know about Napoleon comes from Rummage’s podcast. But we know that Napoleon started as a minor nobleman in Corsica, went to French military school and quickly soared through the ranks during the Revolution. Napoleon was arrogant, but he also had a common touch. He was a democrat with a small “d,” unimpressed by aristocracy and valuing talent, character, and loyalty over inherited titles. He slept on the ground with his men in battle, gave them personal attention, and they loved him. We see all these qualities in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” When the fictional Napoleon is required to scrub decks, sleep in a barn and rub elbows with street vendors, well, we can imagine that Napoleon had experience with that kind of thing.

In reality, Napoleon was a genius. He was an enlightened ruler who swept aside the old order and instituted more egalitarian forms of government that are influential to this day. He nurtured science, scholarship and the arts.

And Napoleon was also a bloodthirsty murderer, tyrant and monster who bathed Europe in blood and re-instituted a regime of brutal slavery that Haiti still has not recovered from more than two centuries later.

We only see the good side of Napoleon in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” His evil is dealt with in a single line of dialogue. Which is as it should be in this particular movie.

The movie is loosely based on a novel by Simon Ley, “The Death of Napoleon.” Writer Peter Hicks compares the two. Hicks says the book is “a sustained elegy on the wisdom of recognising the important things in life, such as love, happiness, modest success,” which are far more important than the “chimaeras of power and military glory.” The movie has the same theme. As Ebert says, Napoleon gradually realizes that “the best of all worlds may involve selling melons and embracing Pumpkin.”

In an afterword to a 2006 edition of the book, Leys said the movie “was both sad and funny: sad, because Napoleon was interpreted to perfection by an actor (Ian Holm) whose performance made me dream of what could have been achieved had the producer and director bothered to read the book."

Based on Hicks’s description, I think I would prefer the movie and I am not tempted to read the book.

P.S. Hugh Bonneville, who stars “Downton Abbey” as Robert Crawley, plays a supporting role in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” I didn’t recognize him.

This morning I looked at a “this day in history” calendar and saw that Martin Luther King was born on this day.

What a coincidence! I said to myself.

Some days I think I’m pretty smart. And then there are other days.

On Reddit, somebody asked how non-Americans identify Americans visiting their country. The top answer: Men wearing jeans, T-shirts, sneakers and ball caps.

I went to the supermarket later that day and can confirm.

Also, hoodies. And, this being San Diego, many of the men were wearing board shorts and flip-flops, even in January.

Sympathy for the spammer. Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr posts a terrific essay about how scammers and spammers are often themselves victims of “passive income” and “rise and grind” hustlers, who prey on desperate people:

In any scam, any con, any hustle, the big winners are the people who supply the scammers – not the scammers themselves. The kids selling dope on the corner are making less than minimum wage, while the respectable crime-bosses who own the labs clean up. Desperate “retail investors” who buy shitcoins from Superbowl ads get skinned, while the MBA bros who issue the coins make millions (in real dollars, not crypto).

Also:

Con artists start by conning themselves, with the idea that “you can’t con an honest man.” But the factor that predicts whether someone is connable isn’t their honesty – it’s their desperation. The kid selling drugs on the corner, the mom desperately DMing her high-school friends to sell them leggings, the cousin who insists that you get in on their shitcoin – they’re all doing it because the system is rigged against them, and getting worse every day.

And:

… while we’re nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we’re certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job.”

While most big companies are only in the proof-of-concept stage with AI, Wells Fargo is moving fast. The bank’s assistant, powered by Google’s AI, has done 20 million transactions. The company put 4,000 employees through Stanford’s Human-centered AI program and has many generative AI projects in production, including projects to make back-office tasks more efficient.

AI models can be trained to deceive and the most commonly used AI safety techniques had little to no effect on the deceptive behaviors, according to researchers at Anthropic.

Exploring the life and mysterious death of Mary Haxby-Jones, whose body was found in a San Diego home freezer nine years after her disappearance.

Haxby-Jones, a longtime San Diego resident and nurse-anesthetist was found in December in the home she’d lived in for many years.

… someone visiting the home opened an unlocked, plugged-in freezer. There, folded inside, was her body…. The frozen corpse was discovered Dec. 22 by out-of-town family members related to the current resident – not Haxby-Jones, police said.

Your pacemaker and open source software. Using embedded medical technology, such as a pacemaker, defibrillator, or insulin pump? What’s running inside is a complete mystery.

Implanted medical devices running proprietary software present security vulnerabilities and lock up data where doctors can’t get to it when needed. That’s a problem open source advocate Karen Sandler knows about firsthand because she has an implanted pacemaker/defibrillator running proprietary software.

Here is what puzzles me about “Bears Discover Fire:” There are at least three storylines in this super-short story: The protagonist, a 61-year-old man, dealing with his family. The protagonist’s mother is dying. And, of course, the bears discovering fire.

Why did Bisson choose these characters and their stories, bringing them together with the bears discovering fire?

RIP Terry Bisson. Here is one of his most famous stories, the excellent “Bears Discover Fire."

I just re-read the story. It’s very short and simple on the surface, with a lot going on underneath that I don’t quite understand. At some point, I might Google until I find an analysis—or, even better, try to figure it out on my own. But for now, I’ll just appreciate the story.

He also wrote the short story “They’re Made Out of Meat.” He wrote novels too, but he was a master of short fiction.

A client asked for a synopsis of each of five articles, and I think it makes sense to do them all as a single document.

When I need to locate the document again, I will find it by searching for its filename.

Will future-me remember that the plural of “synopsis” is “synopses?”

Oxiclean gets an insulated coffee carafe or Thermos clean as a whistle, without scrubbing

First, put the Oxiclean in the carafe. I used a partial scoop of Oxiclean, just above the line on the plastic scoop that comes with the product.

Fill the carafe halfway with hot water from the tap. Cover and shake.

Open and fill the rest of the way with hot water. Let it sit for a while. I let it sit for two hours; you can probably do it for less time.

The carafe is like new.

I’m passing this on because it does not seem to be widely known. Every time I Googled for how to clean a stained Thermos, I saw a lot of tips about denture tablets and dishwasher soap, which don’t work well at all in my experience. And the shape of the carafe makes scrubbing impractical.

Are whistles particularly clean, by the way?

I read the Robert B. Paker Spenser novels voraciously in the 80s. Spenser often eats food with Syrian bread. What the hell is “Syrian bread?” I wondered.

I’m currently listening to the audiobook of “Early Autumn,” which is not one I have re-read in more than 30 years. Spenser is eating Syrian bread again.

Google did not exist when I first read the books, but it does now. And now I know:

“Syrian bread” is another name for pita bread.

Katelyn Jetelina, Your Local Epidemiologist: Real-world data shows fall 2023 vaccines are effective. Vaccines help prevent against long covid and are safe and effective for children. Also, transmission takes hours. “Quick passersby at a grocery store are far less risky than staying in a house with someone infected.”

… AI isn’t going to replace you at work. But it’s already augmenting your shitty boss’s ability to rip you off, torment you, maim you and even kill you in order to eke out a few more basis points for the next shareholder report.

Cory Doctorow: The REAL AI automation threat to workers

Today’s fun fact: Rachel Bloom, who plays Elaine, Julia Child’s new director on “Julia,” became famous in 2010 with a viral music video: “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury.”

The song is a banger, funny, clever, even dirtier than the title suggests, and — if Bloom is doing the singing and is not electronically augmented — she’s got a surprisingly good set of … pipes.

Things I can’t be arsed to care about: Hunter Biden’s crimes, Lloyd Austin’s prostate, Taylor Swift, Claudine Gay, anything else having to do with Harvard University, sports, the golden globes, the Republican primary, Oppenheimer, the Barbie movie, Jonathan Majors, Pete Davidson and Selena Gomez.