Mitch's Blog

Clive Thompson: How I Use RSS To “Rewild” My Attention

I use RSS for an hour or so every day to follow specific sites, most of them very popular. Here, Thompson advocates using RSS to find great, weird content. I’m going to try that.

Emily Baker-White at Forbes:

The relationship between ByteDance and Oracle has become deeply untrusting and adversarial, according to five sources. One source with knowledge of the companies’ actions characterized Oracle’s stance toward ByteDance as a “counterintelligence operation,” rather than a normal customer relationship. Meanwhile, some ByteDance employees wonder if Oracle just wants to run up their bill. The TikTok contract, known internally at Oracle as Project Telesis, has made ByteDance one of Oracle’s most lucrative customers.

A look at Smallville, a virtual village populated by AI chatbots, built by Stanford and Google researchers to create a society with “believable human behavior”

When was the first time a waiter asked someone whether they saved room for dessert? Is that guy getting royalties?

Want to read—nonfiction: Empires of the Steppes by Kenneth W. Harl 📚

From landlines to Zoom, a brief 30+ year history of business phone technology and etiquette. By Clive Thompson.

In the 90s, background noise was unprofessional. Today, if somebody’s cat zoombombs the meeting, business stops while everybody meets the cat.

Wanted: A combined RSS/Mastodon client. Yes, Masto generates RSS feeds but that doesn’t give you everything a Mastodon client does.

Cory Doctorow: How the kleptocrats and oligarchs hunt civil society groups to the ends of the Earth:

It’s a great time to be an oligarch! If you have accumulated a great fortune and wish to put whatever great crime lies behind it behind you, there is an army of fixers, lickspittles, thugs, reputation-launderers, procurers, henchmen, and other enablers who have turnkey solutions for laundering your reputation and keeping the unwashed from building a guillotine outside the gates of your compound.

One Weird Trick for Writing a First Draft. By Clive Thompson

Clive Thompson: How I Take Notes When I’m Doing Research

Clive Thompson: Writing Tools I Use All The Time. My go-tos for reporting, research, and writing

On the You Are Good podcast with hosts Sarah Marshall and Alex Steed and guest Rain DeGrey.

The only movie I’ve ever watched more than once in a single day. I watched it three times.

Though it is a great movie, I don’t know if I would call it one of my favorites. But something about it hit me hard on that particular day.

WSJ: Tech Leaders Emerge Behind Plan to Build New City Near California Air Base

Venture capitalists want to build a new city on currently rural land in California. This will go as well as crypto, Web3, and the metaverse.

An ode to “Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast.

I loved this podcast. “… one of the great love letters to twentieth-century Hollywood.”

Some of the best guests were D-list stars even in their prime, who might only be remembered by the narrow age demographic that Gottfried and I shared.

From Brooklyn to Astoria (Oregon): Journalist Clive Thompson cycled 4,150 miles coast-to-coast reporting for his next book on “micromobility.”

What’s the biology behind why we find some people attractive?. On Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman

The spider was about an inch wide, and furiously busy tending its web, scurrying back and forth and moving its legs rapidly.

I took a step back and watched it for a while.

I tried to get a video but it didn’t come out great, and I know spiders give people the fantods so I won’t share the video here.

Casey Newton at Platformer: Why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter.

I’m surprised to learn Casey is a note-taking apps nerd, like me.

And like me he’s a compulsive hoarder of clips and links.

And like me he wants a chatbot to be able to ask the hoard questions and get good answers.

Decluttering continues. Two observations:

• A surprisingly significant amount of the clutter in my office was empty boxes for me to put the clutter in. • Some days I think I’m smart and other days I try to flatten empty cardboard cartons without tearing them.

What Happened to Wirecutter?. By Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic.

I rely on Wirecutter for any unusual purchase under $200. If I need something I’ve never bought one of before, and it’s priced under $200, I just buy whatever Wirecutter recommends.

The police came by to do a wellness check. They said Amazon had requested it because I hadn’t had anything delivered in nearly a month, and they were worried that we were OK.

Things that are annoying me today:

• Password management
• The acronym PTO. I don’t care whether you’re getting paid for taking time off.
• Companies that sign you up for their email list without your permission, just because you did business with them one time.
• Pretty much everything. I’m irritable.

Currently reading: Somebody’s Fool by Richard Russo 📚 A pleasant surprise—I did not know Russo planned another sequel to “Nobody’s Fool.”

Finished reading: This Bird Has Flown by Susanna Hoffs 📚Excellent!

I uncovered this book while decluttering my home office. I loved it when I was a kid, and bought a copy from Powells bookstore on a trip to Portland with Julie in 2008. 📚

In the course of major decluttering, I just found a ring of keys. It doesn’t fit any of our current locks but I have to keep them rather than throw them out. When we’re dead, our heirs can keep the keys and pass them on to THEIR heirs. Because that’s how keys work.

While walking the dog, I saw this SUV 📷

My latest article: Ancient programming language gets new life in the cloud thanks to IBM, watsonx and AI. An IBM watsonx AI tool helps refactor COBOL mainframe code into Java, to make it easier to maintain and extend for folks who entered the workforce after the disco era.

Why Calvin and Hobbes author Bill Watterson vanished from the public eye.

My friend Marc Gorelick shares lessons from more than 40 years playing the tuba. Can confirm that Marc played the tuba as a teenager. We gave him grief for it at the time, but Marc made the tuba cool.

Watching a security awareness training video as required by a client. Holy mackerel, Doug, stop being such a baby.

I saw this sign. Poor Sadie. 😭😢😭📷

TidBITS is doing a poll on whether Apple users use Apple Weather or some other app for weather forecasts. During yesterday’s weather emergency, I checked Apple Weather several times an hour.

All is well here following the storm. Reviewing the news today I see a dozen people had to be rescued from flooding in the San Diego River. Most likely they were homeless. Many people did not get to sit in their warm, dry houses and watch Netflix yesterday. So I am a little humbled and grateful.

Meanwhile, here in San Diego and nearby Southern California

Unimpressed by Hurricane Hilary. Demoted to a tropical storm. So far, we’ve gotten some heavy rain, but very little wind. Note to Hilary: This is not a challenge.

I love all 17 guidelines in Tracy Durnell’s reading philosophy.

Two highlights jump out at me.

• “Read according to whim.” Just read whatever the heck you want to read. Classics, trash, whatever.
• Quit reading a book whenever it stops working for for you. Tracy’s rule is “Quit nearly as many books as I finish.” I finish 90-95% of the books that I start and you know what? I think I should be quitting more books. Because I think quitting more books would mean that I’m trying to read a greater diversity of books.

Gradually over time in my adulthood, I found I was reading fewer and fewer books. I got back in the habit a few months ago, and I’m happy about that.

Many adults don’t read books, and if you’re one of those and would like to start, you could do worse than follow these rules.

Small changes in daily activity levels, like doing a little more walking, stair-climbing, chores around the house, and gardening, can burn a lot of calories and have major health benefits. It’s called NEAT—non-exercise activity thermogenesis.

I was kicking myself because I only thought to stock up on water this afternoon, and was sure the stores would be sold out. But I decided to try a couple of stores anyway (being mindful that we also need to conserve gas in the car, in case we need to evacuate). First supermarket I went to had stacks and stacks of water bottles in front. I bought five gallons.

We have plenty of people and animal food, meds, flashlights, external power supplies for electronics, and we’ve moved large but blowable items into shelter or tied them down. The backyard actually looks better than it has in years. It previously looked like some kind of ghastly graveyard for lawn furniture.

A couple of the neighbors across the street have small piles of sandbags strategically placed at the corners of their driveways. That’s not a problem for us; the slope of the street directs water away from the front of the house. Julie says the slope of the backyard directs water into the crawlspace under the house in heavy rain, but it’s too late to do anything about that now.

My prediction is much of this preparation will be unnecessary. We’ll get minor damage. I expect we won’t lose power, water, cable or TV. On the other hand, moving and securing blowables was definitely necessary, because we could well get record heavy rain and wind, and stuff tends to blow around even in normal winter storms.

But it’s good to be prepared for worse than you expect.

Rain predicted to maybe start at 2 am, with winds picking up Sunday early afternoon and continuing through mid-evening.

I’m hoping to do my normal morning walk tomorrow, but may give the dog a break.

Finished reading: The Gutenberg Parenthesis by Jeff Jarvis 📚A thoughtful history of five centuries of print as dominant form of information dissemination, culture and conversation, now closing (hence the parenthesis metaphor) and the internet era now dawning.

We got the front and back of the house as clear as we could of items that might blow around. Julie did most of the work on that. We have enough food in the house to last a few days. Later today, I’ll check to be sure we have plenty of potable water and that the electronics are charged. I have been thinking for some time of getting a solar-powered battery for electronics, maybe I’ll order something today and it will arrive in time for next time. Longer term, we should put in batteries that can power the whole house.

The fun starts at 2 am, according to the weather forecast. Today is actually a beautiful day, cool and calm and overcast.

Notwithstanding the preparations, I’m optimistic the storm will fizzle. But best to plan for worse.

The pizza delivery guy says the weather outlook is changing rapidly and he is optimistic that when the storm hits it will be weak so that’s good.

Want to read—nonfiction: Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World by Maryanne Wolf 📚

Want to read—nonfiction: Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf 📚

This weekend we’re supposed to get a hurricane and an invading army of lustful tarantulas. How does your weekend look to be shaping up?

Yesterday morning, I was typing happily on my Mac when I noticed the cursor disappeared. I was typing but no text was appearing. I determined that another app was stealing focus. The problem app was the Finder. I figured this out through the simple expedient of watching the menu bar to see which app jumped to the foreground when the problem came up.

This was going on every minute or so. Very annoying! I continued working like that all day, just Cmd-Tabbing back after the Finder stole focus. Around 4 pm I decided enough was enough.

After trying several possible solutions, I resolved the problem by rebooting in safe mode.

A couple of other things I tried before that:

• Of course I tried Googling, and got the usual mishmash of confusing forum responses and just plain wrong search results. Completely unhelpful.
• I asked ChatGPT.

Interestingly, ChatGPT’s answer was wrong but led me in the right direction.

ChatGPT’s first suggestion was a complete hallucination—it suggested disabling a feature in Finder through a menu setting that simply does not exist.

It suggested resetting Finder preferences. I followed the instructions (this time they were accurate) and that did not solve the problem.

It suggested incompatible hardware might be to blame. I gradually disconnected stuff from my MacBook until I was running it in pure MacBook mode—no external keyboard, no external storage devices, no external display, and so on. That didn’t solve the problem either.

ChatGPT mentioned third-party software twice, which led me to restart the Mac in safe mode. Safe mode accomplishes two things: Restarts the Mac without starting third-party software, and also performing some system maintenance. I suspect the system maintenance is what worked.

This is a five-year-old MacBook and I expect I’ll have to replace it soon enough. But it will survive another day!

This post is primarily for the benefit of anybody coming after me Googling “Finder stealing focus on Mac.” Good luck, my friend! I hope my advice helps you fix your problem.

A brief history of an American gift to world cuisine: the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. This article at the Saturday Evening Post by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie takes a few paragraphs to get going, but then it delivers.

Peanut butter was reportedly invented in 1894. Early recipes featured “a banana and apple salad served over lettuce with a peanut butter dressing” and “a peanut butter ‘loaf’ recipe involving two cups of chopped olives and a teaspoon of onion juice”

“Animal House” is where the 1960s finally and decisively turned into the 1980s — the 1970s being understood as a transition period highlighted by double-knit and “Kung Fu Fighting.” With “Animal House,” we crossed the line from hippies to yuppies, from “all you need is love” to “greed is good.” It seems crazy to say it, but the film’s Deltas — a fraternity of proud, self-defined losers — became role models for a generation obsessed with winning. You could argue we’re still living with the fallout.

— Ty Burr at The Washington Post: I was on campus when ‘Animal House’ debuted. It changed everything.

I love this movie and can quote from it endlessly. And Burr is right.

Donald Trump is Bluto.

“The Warriors” keeps popping up in my Internet wandering. Time to watch it again?

We’re watching “Hijack,” a miniseries about an airline hijacking, focusing on Idris Elba as Sam, a passenger working to outwit the team that’s taken over the plane. Highly recommended—very suspenseful!

The British Home Secretary is a supporting character. I’ve heard of that position but realized I had no idea what the home secretary does.

My half-assed Internet research tells me the Home Secretary is responsible for British internal security, so they are basically Britain’s top cop. They’re also responsible for immigration and emergency services, such as the fire departments.

The equivalent position in the US seems to be the Secretary of Homeland Security. However, the Home Secretary position was created in the late 18th Century, while Homeland Security was created in the aftermath of 9/11.

We Jews are left out of progressive discussion of diversity. Jews don’t count.

A significant part of the progressive movement is outright anti-Semitic.

And conservatives have a weird variety of anti-Semitism that fetishizes Israel and supports some prominent American Jews.

But I just can’t bring myself to care about Jewface in movies and TV.

Bradley Cooper is getting criticized by Jewish activists who are accusing him of “Jewface” for wearing a prosthetic nose in an upcoming biographical movie about Leonard Bernstein.

To be fair to Cooper, early versions of the movie had him wearing a clown nose, so the current version is better.

Want to read: Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient World by Mary Beard 📚A new book of Roman history by the author of “SPQR”? Yes, please.

The same lawmakers who want to rob their constituents of the right to bodily autonomy have also begun to treat democracy as an obstacle to avoid, not a process to respect. If the people stand in the way of ending abortion, then it’s the people who have to go.

— Republicans Won’t Stop at Banning Abortion, by Jamelle Bouie at the New York Times.

Me, watching @manton ’s video demo of the Epilogue app for micro.blog: “Hey, I just added that book to my want-to-read-list! And that one too! And I’m currently reading that one! OMG, Manton is looking at my blog! I’m Internet-famous now!”

When I was a kid, we rode bicycles for miles every day, unsupervised. Also unsupervised: We played in schoolyards and playgrounds, went into stores, and went to the movies. Even when we were playing in another kid’s backyard, often the adults weren’t outside with us. I can’t even remember if the adults were home.

And I was, by the standards of my childhood, a sheltered, sedentary, bookish kid. Other kids were having even MORE adventures than I was.

And of course Generation X, the generation younger than mine, were famously latchkey kids.

I don’t see any of that anymore. Kids seem to be always, always supervised by adults.

I saw this while walking with the dog this morning. I was disappointed that I did not see the pig, but it’s probably just as well because I totally would’ve put my fingers through the fence.

I never see pre-teens outdoors unsupervised by adults. Not playing in their front yard, not walking, not in a park, not at a playground, not riding bikes. Are pre-teens supervised all the time nowadays?

The Case of the Internet Archive vs. Book Publishers

David Streitfeld at the NY Times:

In the pandemic emergency, Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive freely lent out digital scans of its library. Publishers sued. Owning a book means something different now.

“Sweet sesame chicken!” sounds like something a person would say instead of swearing.

Lunch yesterday with friends at Shakespeare’s, a British pub here in San Diego. One of the restrooms had two walls covered with dozens of “cheeky postcards.” Here’s one example. 📷

A quick look back at the first IBM PC that launched 42 years (and two days) ago My Dad had one of these. I was living at home and going to college at the time, and I spent a lot of time using it to write papers and noodle around.

I’ve been listening to the Age of Napoleon podcast for months now, which covers Napoleon’s life, career and world in exhaustive detail. I am coming away a great admirer of Napoleon, while also acknowledging that Napoleon did terrible things. (Haiti.) That is one thing I have in common with Musk.

I also love Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast.

So that’s two things I have in common with Elon.

Also, like Musk, I have not and never will fight in a cage match with Mark Zuckerberg.

Trump tells Georgia witness not to testify

The Marion County Record was investigating sexual misconduct charges against police chief Gideon Cody before police raided the newspaper, according to publisher Eric Meyer. Meyer says the allegations, and the names of the people making the charges, are on computers the police seized.

Police in the small town of Marion, Kansas, raided the local newspaper office, leading to worldwide protest by free speech organizations. The newspaper publisher’s 98-year-old mother died the following day; the publisher says the raid triggered her death.

Gary Marcus:

… we are building our entire global and national policy on the premise that generative AI will be world-changing in ways that may in hindsight turn out to have been unrealistic.

I have found generative AI uses to be limited at best.

I use it to generate illustrations for articles. In the past, I used public domain and Creative Commons images, and those were just as good as AI imagery.

AI produces mediocre writing that’s filled with errors. In the time it would take me to bring AI writing up to standard, I can just do the writing myself. And that’s what I do.

So yeah maybe generative AI will be the biggest thing since the invention of electricity or fire, but I don’t see evidence that will happen.

The most promising application for generative AI is to deliver voice-activated Star Trek like computers. That would be a big deal—but we’re not there, and may never get there.

Want to read: Sh*tshow by Richard Russo 📚

Want to read: Chances Are . . . by Richard Russo 📚

Want to read: Triage by Richard Russo 📚

Want to read: Elsewhere by Richard Russo 📚

Want to read: Somebody’s Fool by Richard Russo 📚

Want to read: My Life as a White Trash Zombie by Diana Rowland 📚

Currently reading: This Bird Has Flown by Susanna Hoffs 📚

San Diego attorneys fought to prosecute an unhoused woman for blocking a sidewalk. Now they’re backing off. The solution to homelessness is not criminalizing homelessness.

The History of Command Palettes: How Typing Commands Became The Norm Again

Cory Doctorow: Paying consumer debts is basically optional in the United States. The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act protects the people who need it least. How the debt collection industry sets the poor to prey on the poor.

A short collection of delightful and/or appalling confessions, rendered in an excruciatingly painful format. Some of these are extremely raunchy, so don’t read them to the kiddos.

Silicon Valley billionaires and millionaires support racist Richard Hanania, who advocated eugenics, forced sterilization, and opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing,” Bouie writes.

Hanania wrote, “These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people on subways or walking around in suits.”

Racists are the natural ally of plutocrats, Bouie says. By supporting an argument that some people are naturally inferior, the plutocrats support the argument that other people are natural elites.

I could watch a 2-1/2 hour movie of Peter Quill and his grandpa eating breakfast and gossiping about the neighbors.

We just watched Guardians of the Galaxy 3. I hope they make about ten more of those movies. So good.

Kottke: Glamor photos of vintage calculators, 1968-83.

In the 1970s, calculators weren’t just for calculating. They were luxury items. In a world before iPods and iPhones, calculators were the first aspirational personal electronics.”

My Dad was an accountant and started using calculators very early. I remember visiting his office as a boy around 1970 and seeing a desktop calculator. All it did was add, subtract, multiply and divide, and it was the size of a cash register.

Kottke: The accidental secret ingredient that made Chicago Vienna Sausages delicious.

Occasionally I like to not dress like a person who works from home and dribbles food down the front of their shirt. When I’d Google for fashion advice, I’d end often up on r/malefashionadvice. Morgan Sung reports on TechCrunch that Reddit’s menswear hub is the latest casualty of its battle with moderators.

If you follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, or Mastodon, you know that I like to share memes and vintage ads and photos, and I used to often find them on Reddit. I’m just not finding those images and videos there as much anymore, and I’m starting to check Reddit less often.

I saw this leaflet on a utility pole when walking with Minnie.

Currently reading: The Gutenberg Parenthesis by Jeff Jarvis 📚

“The long bezzle: Verizon can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” Verizon shutters BlueJeans, three years after buying it for $400M, the latest in a long series of failures for the company.

Techdirt: Verizon Fails Again, Shutters Attempted Zoom Alternative BlueJeans After Paying $400 Million For It:

These repeated failures by Verizon would be less of an issue if the company didn’t have such a long history of skimping on essential broadband network upgrades. Whether it’s New York, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania, the telco has a long history of taking tax breaks, subsidies, or regulatory favors in exchange for promised DSL to fiber network upgrades that somehow never fully materialize.

How Will Artificial Intelligence Change Journalism?

EFF: Congress Amended KOSA, But It’s Still A Censorship Bill. Despite small changes, the Kids Online Safety Act “is a censorship bill that will harm the rights of both adult and minor users. We oppose it, and urge you to contact your congressperson about it today.”

To demonstrate representational bias, the London Interdiscipinary School asked the AI tool Midjourney to generate images of a typical prisoner, lawyer, nurse, drug dealer, etc. The results showed striking racial and ethnic stereotyping.

My latest: Snowflake wants to help telcos ditch silos with a blizzard of data. With its telco ambitions, is Snowflake getting over its skis? The company launched its Telco Data Cloud this year to help providers make better decisions for network planning, customer service, and growing revenue.

“This question has two parts, neither of which have anything to do with the other or the subject at hand. Also, this question has four parts.” Every Question In Every Q&A Session Ever.

Daring Fireball: “Colonel Harland Sanders, who founded Kentucky Fried Chicken, sold the company to a conglomerate in 1964, and then remained their paid spokesman for the remainder of his life, despite the fact that he despised their food and professed deep regret that he sold the chain.”

Jason Kottke writes about the joys of being a regular at your neighborhood restaurant.

Despite’s Zoom’s attempts to walk back its changed terms, the service is still a privacy mess, according to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols' research.

I’ve been using Zoom several times per week for three years. It’s been my go-to videoconferencing service. I need to think about whether to stay with it.

Oracle expands its hybrid cloud footprint to the enterprise. My latest: Big Red introduces Compute Cloud@Customer, a microcosm of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure that runs in the customer data center.

Investigating the provenance of archive.today, useful for circumventing paywalls to read articles on sites such as Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, etc.

The dirty little secret that could bring down Big Tech. New research reveals that Silicon Valley uses predatory pricing to crush competitors and scam investors — evidence the government can use to bust up tech monopolies.

Cory Doctorow: “Private equity plunderers want to buy Simon & Schuster: From the same parasites that infected your hospital’s emergency room and sucked Toys R Us dry.”

Caleb Sasser writes about “Turn-On,” a legendary hyperactive sketch comedy show from “Laugh-In”’s creators, canceled in 1969 midway through its first episode, reportedly because it was too far ahead of its time. The show disappeared for 54 years but surfaced (possibly illegally) on YouTube. Via Waxy