Here’s something else I saw walking the dog today: This tiny dog wearing a coat and shoes.
I love a dog wearing shoes.
We watched the first episode of the new Dexter prequel series: “Dexter: Original Sin.” Dexter’s back and he’s got lots of plastic wrap.
Quit more books to read more books
Many readers feel compelled to finish any book they started. I am one of those readers. But that’s a bad compulsion. It makes you cautious about trying new things. You read more books, and greater variety, if you quit reading any book you’re not enjoying.
I’ve been reading an acclaimed science fiction trilogy that totals 1,100 pages. I liked the first book, but did not love it. I liked the second book less. Tonight I got within 100 pages of the end of the third book and said, “I’m done.”
I went to the Wikipedia page for the book and read the plot summary, which is something I do when I’m considering abandoning a book, and confirmed I was not interested in finishing.
The trilogy could have been a single good novel. Say, 250 pages.
Though the series is hard science fiction, the structure is fantasy. A band of characters, led by a hero, travel through a series of lands populated by strange aliens to defeat an antagonist that’s essentially a powerful evil wizard. This is not a genre I enjoy.
I’m intentionally not saying the name of the series or author. The author is aging, and I hear they’re having a hard time. I don’t want the karma of saying anything bad.
“My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Conjure by it at your own risk. I’m a wizard. I work out of an office in midtown Chicago. As far as I know, I’m the only openly practicing professional wizard in the country. You can find me in the yellow pages, under ‘Wizards.’”
Currently reading: Storm Front by Jim Butcher 📚
Flipboard’s Surf joins several existing apps designed to view Mastodon and other ActivityPub platforms, as well as BlueSky and ActivityPub.1 I love Flipboard CEO Mike MkCue’s vision of the “social web,” as described by David Pierce at The Verge with feeds superseding websites.
“You won’t put in, like, theverge.com and go to the website for The Verge, but you can put in ‘the verge’ and go to the ActivityPub feed for The Verge.” Your Threads timeline is a feed; every Bluesky Starter Pack is a feed; every creator you follow is just producing a feed of content.
Surf’s job, in that world, is to help you discover and explore all those feeds.
I have tried Tapestry and Reeder, which have a similar philosophy of combining feeds from multiple sources and platforms into a single place. I found those apps not quite ready for me to use regularly, but I love the promise of that direction.
It’s what Dave Winer calls Textcasting and I’m eager to see it mature.
-
Surf also joins several apps named “Surf” or “Surfed.” ↩︎
The Take It Down Act, written to combat non-consensual intimate imagery posted to the Internet, has the best intentions, but the implementation is a disaster, says Mike Masnick at Techdirt. After receiving a complaint of such imagery, the law would require platforms to act to take down images and duplicates quickly. But the proposed law does nothing to combat false complaints.
The only current law in the US that has a similar notice and takedown scheme is the DMCA, and, as we’ve been describing for years, the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown provision is widely and repeatedly abused by people who want to takedown perfectly legitimate content.
There have been organized attempts to flood systems with tens of thousands of bogus DMCA notices. A huge 2016 study found that the system is so frequently abused to remove non-infringing works as to question the validity of the entire notice-and-takedown procedure. And that’s the DMCA which in theory has a clause that is supposed to punish fraudulent takedown notices (even if that’s rarely effective).
Here, the law doesn’t even contemplate such a system. Instead, it just assumes all notices will be valid.
On top of that, by requiring covered platforms to “identify and remove any known identical copies” suggests that basically every website will have to purchase potentially expensive proactive scanning software that can match images, whether through hashes or otherwise.
Yet another proposal to regulate the Internet that would see to it that only billion-dollar-companies can afford to run platforms.
Ageism and ableism are the stupidest prejudices. Most of us will become old and disabled. Ageism and ableism are delayed self-hatred.
I see a lot of ageism on the political left. Ageism, like all other prejudice, is wrong.
It’s OK if you want to argue that Gerry Connolly is a hack, incapable of inspiring Democrats, and his health makes him physically incapable of doing the work as party leader on the Oversight Committee. I love AOC and was extremely disappointed to see her passed over.
But age has nothing to do with it. If Connolly is unfit, it’s not because of his age. The MAGA leadership, except Trump himself, is young. The leaders of the MAGA-manosphere are even younger.
Bernie Sanders was 75 in 2016, a year older than Connolly is today
Calling out party leadership for their age sends a message to progressives over 60 that we are not welcome. We are merely tolerated.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency in California over bird flu.
“This proclamation is a targeted action to ensure government agencies have the resources and flexibility they need to respond quickly to this outbreak,” Newsom said in a statement. “While the risk to the public remains low, we will continue to take all necessary steps to prevent the spread of this virus.”
With the federal government about to be taken over by bumbling criminals, Newsom reminds me why I’m relieved to live in California, which has a functioning government.
Since I upgraded to Apple Intelligence a couple of days ago, it has twice started talking to me while I’m wearing my AirPods and conversing with an actual person. I was on a videoconference with my boss’s boss this afternoon, and the AirPods started talking and would not shut up. This is highly annoying at best and it potentially made me look like an idiot in front of someone who signs my paycheck. Utter failure on the part of Apple product design; I am highly dissatisfied.
A quick impromptu comparison test of ChatGPT vs. Kagi vs Google vs. Perplexity
Following up on my friend Steven J. Vaughan-Nicols' article praising the Perplexity search engine, I decided to do a fast, spontaneous test.
Reading the news over lunch, I saw that an actress named Jill Jacobson had died. The obit said she was in Star Trek.
I said to myself, “I wonder who she played on Star Trek?”
The article said she appeared on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “Deep Space Nine.”
First I asked ChatGPT what characters she played. ChatGPT replied that she only ever appeared on TNG. I asked about DS9, and it said she had not appeared on that show.
I searched Kagi. Interestingly, Kagi turned up several articles titled “Who did Jill Jacobson play on Star Trek”—the exact words of my query.
I know that’s a common SEO trick (“What time is the Super Bowl?”) but would not think that would be implemented for such a specific question.
Google’s AI summary says “Vanessa” on TNG, with no mention of DS9.
And here is Perplexity’s answer — complete, concise, and impressive.
What’s the real answer? I can’t say for sure; I’m not a superfan of those particular iterations of Trek. However, I consider the Memory Alpha wiki definitive on issues of Trek lore, and it agrees with the IMDB.
Looking around for places to have Christmas dinner. I asked ChatGPT what restaurants are open. First two on the list: Denny’s and IHOP. lol no
Daring Fireball: On the Accountability of Unnamed Public Relations Spokespeople.
Unnamed public relations spokespeople are unaccountable for errors and lies.
I go along with the journalism custom of using unnamed PR people. Perhaps I should not.
You can't rebrand a class war. Move left, just to stay standing
If billionaires are destroying our country in order to serve their own self-interest, the reasonable thing to do is not to try to quibble over a 15% or a 21% corporate tax rate. The reasonable thing to do is to eradicate the existence of billionaires. If everyone knows our health care system is a broken monstrosity, the reasonable thing to do is not to tinker around the edges. The reasonable thing to do is to advocate Medicare for All. If there is a class war–and there is–and one party is being run completely by the upper class, the reasonable thing is for the other party to operate in the interests of the other, much larger, much needier class. That is quite rational and ethical and obvious in addition to being politically wise. The failure of the Democratic Party, institutionally, to grasp the reality that it needs to be running left as hard as possible is a pathetic thing to watch. When the current situation is broken and one party is determined to break it further, the answer is not to be the party of “We Want Things to Be Broken Somewhat Less.” The answer is to be the party that wants to fucking fix it. Radicalism is only sensible, because lesser measures are not going to fix the underlying state of affairs.
And if the decline of labor unions is robbing the working class of its most powerful tool and undermining the general health of society, the reasonable thing for the labor movement to do is not to play footsie with a political party that has shown repeatedly through words and deeds that it stands against the existence of organized labor. The answer is spend every last dollar we have to organize and organize and strike and strike. Women are workers. Immigrants are workers. The poor are workers. A party that is banning abortion and violently deporting immigrants and economically assaulting the poor is not a friend to the labor movement, ever. (An opposition party that cannot rouse itself to participate on the correct side of the ongoing class war is not our friend, either–the difference is that the fascists will always try to actively destroy unions, while the Democrats will just not do enough to help us, a distinction that is important to understand.)
…
When political pundits and strategists and party operatives anchor their sense of reality in a bygone era that no longer exists, they are bound to misjudge what is happening now. They are bound to fail to recognize the reorientation of the national landscape, the tilting of the ground that requires a lean left in order to keep things stable. There is a class war, it is being won by the rich, and they are about to stage an enormous offensive for the next four years. Position yourselves accordingly. It is one thing to fight against great power and lose. That is part of fighting. That is forgivable. What is not forgivable is to see all this coming, and to choose to continue to stand in the same place and say the same things and advocate for the status quo and pretend that America just needs to “get back to normal.” “Normal” has been broken for the lifetimes of most of the people alive today. Radicalism is only getting more and more correct. Recognize it or get run over.