NASA radar reveals an abandoned Cold War military base buried under the ice in Greenland. Camp Century was built by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1959.
Vaccines Will Have to Prove Themselves Again. The Hard Way. By Donald G. McNeil Jr.: Vaccines will prove themselves tragically after disproportionate numbers of unvaccinated children die unnecessarily. “When children begin dying, moms will figure out who was lying.”
On the Mac Power Users forum, I’m following a discussion about the search for perfect headphones for different use cases.
I mainly use my headphones to listen to podcasts and make calls, both videoconferencing, for work, and the occasional phone call. Over the years, I’ve gone from AirPods to AirPods Pro and now I use AirPods Pro 2, which I like very much. The noise canceling is great.
I am blessed because, apparently, I have perfectly average earholes; AirPods have always fit great for me.1
I used SoundCore sleep earbuds for a while but they stopped working after a few months.
Now I use foam earplugs.
I tried using the AirPods Pro as sleep earpods but they jammed deep into my ears when I slept on my side and started beeping a warning, completely defeating the purpose. However, those were first-gen AirPods Pro; I now have the second-gen so maybe I’ll give those a try.
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Once I figured out how to wear the blasted things. For a couple of years I jammed them in my ears with the stems facing outward because I did not trust that they would just rest effortlessly on the ear bottom-part. ↩︎
Tim Chambers: A Quick Snapshot of the Microblogging Landscape
I like Chambers' vision: Mastodon should evolve to be easier to use, like Linux evolved into Chromebooks. BlueSky and Mastodon should become more interoperable. Threads should fully adopt ActivityPub. Ultimately, microblogging — and blogging! — should become one big thing, like email, where the underlying platform and protocols are unimportant.
Tumblr can continue to be Tumblr, and that’s OK. Matt Mullenweg said the platform would embrace ActivityPub two years ago, but that’s the last we heard of it. I don’t think he meant it; he just blurted it out without considering it.
h/t @manton
Daring Fireball: ‘Building LLMs Is Probably Not Going Be a Brilliant Business’.
The business with a moat is making the cutting-edge computer hardware that trains LLMs, and that belongs to Nvidia.
David Pierce at The Verge: Craft 3 is shockingly close to my ideal productivity app — I expect I will give Craft 3 a try, but I’m really, really trying to stop switching apps.
Musk accuses Trump whistleblower Vindman of ‘treason,’ says ‘he will pay’ – An oligarch with the ear of the incoming President is publicly threatening a political opponent with criminal prosecution.
A Great Idea for People With a Terrible Disease: Let’s Find a Cure Ourselves — Zeynep Tufekci praises the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, a group of people with Long Covid who are funding research into the condition. She asks people to donate.
Republicans are the predators stalking American bathrooms. Republicans are sex-obsessed deviants who want to strip-search everybody to make sure their genitals are correct.
The far right grows through disaster fantasies
Cory Doctorow:: The right thrives on fantasies about urban collapse, “FEMA death camps, ‘great replacement theory,’ the ‘Great Reset,’ fifteen-minute cities, 5G towers being beacons of mind control, and microchips installed in people through vaccines,” while denying the existence of real-world catastrophes like climate change.
Think of conservatives' obsession with imaginary and hypothetical children, from Qanon’s child trafficking conspiracies to the forced birth movement’s fixation on “the unborn.”
It’s not just that these kids don’t exist – it’s that the right is either indifferent or actively hostile to real children. Qanon peaked at the same time as Trump’s “kids in cages” family separation policy, which saw thousands of kids separated from their parents, many forever, as a deliberate policy.
The forced birth movement spent decades fighting to overturn Roe in the name of saving “the unborn” – even as its leaders were also overturning the Child Tax Credit, the most successful child poverty alleviation measure in American history. Actual children were left to sink into food insecurity and precarity, to be enlisted to work overnight shifts in meat-packing plants, to fall into homelessness – even as the movement celebrated the “culture of life” that would rescue hypothetical children.
Lifting kids out of poverty and building a world where parents can afford to raise as many children as they care to have is a collective endeavor. Firebombing abortion clinics or storming into a pizza parlor with an assault rifle is an individual rescue fantasy that escapes into the world.
Ian Welsh: The causes of the Ukraine war and What Ukraine looks like post-war if Russia imposes the peace. Welsh has an idiosyncratic view of the Ukraine war; I think he sees both sides as bad, but Ukraine is worse, and Russian victory is nearly inevitable. He makes a credible case, and I have to remember that everything I know about that war comes from Big Journalism.
Let’s All Take a Breath and Get Off the Plane Like Grown-Ups
I got in a shouting match with a guy last month over this issue — which, to be clear, means I was a jerk. I’m not proud of that moment.
Then, when I got home, I did some Internet research and determined I had been wrong about this for 35 years. But no more! I have learned! I am a new de-boarder! Or I will be the next time I fly.
Currently reading: The Closers by Michael Connelly 📚 Harry Bosch never disappoints.
Simplifying! I decided to stop posting to Threads, check in there only occasionally and consolidated my two personal newsletters into one. Also, I’m going to quit checking Reddit daily. I feel lighter already!