Cory Doctorow: Denazification, truth and reconciliation, and the story of Germany’s story

Germany’s denazification was compromised and accommodated powerful, wealthy former Nazis, leading to resurgence of the far right and anti-semitism in Europe today. But it’s still better than the “least said, soonest mended” school of getting past atrocities, as practiced by the US with regard to slavery and genocide of indigenous peoples. These themes are a focus of Cory’s upcoming novel, “The Lost Cause.” pluralistic.net/2023/07/1…

ME: “Get out of the way so I can get an artsy photo of those rocks.” DOG: (gets out of the way … eventually)

While walking the dog this morning, we saw this excruciatingly artistically arranged bicycle and other objects.

Mandela Goes From Hero to Scapegoat as South Africa Struggles. “Nelson Mandela is revered worldwide…. But at home, a younger generation is disillusioned with the country, his party and the anti-apartheid leader, too.” nytimes.com

On covid, California’s supreme court just said the quiet part out loud ko-fi.com/post/On-c…

Robert Kuciemba, a woodworker in San Francisco, was infected by covid in 2020 after his company, Victory Woodworks, based in Nevada, transferred sick workers to the San Francisco site for a few months.

Nate Bear writes:

Through the proceedings of the case it turns out that the employer knew some employees might be sick but they transferred them anyway and ignored a San Francisco ordinance in place at the time to quarantine suspected covid cases.

Kuciemba was subsequently infected and he then infected his wife, who ended up in ICU on a ventilator.

The California Supreme Court just ruled against Kuciemba on the basis that a victory, while, in the court’s words, “morally” the right thing to do, would create “dire financial consequences for employers” and cause a “dramatic expansion of liability” to stop the spread of covid.

… the court agreed that there is no doubt the company had ignored the San Francisco health ordinance. In other words, they accepted the company had broken the law. And then concluded “yeah, but, capitalism.”

…

This ruling essentially helps codify workplace mass infection and justifies it as necessary for the smooth functioning of capitalism.

Privatized profit, socialized loss. Companies get to reap the financial benefit of spreading infection, and the cost of that infection is borne by employees and taxpayers.

Via www.ianwelsh.net

ChatGPT makes bad writers good and good writers better, according to a study. www.technologyreview.com/2023/07/1…

I make very little use of ChatGPT in my own work. However, I rely on two other AI products: Otter.ai for transcription and Grammarly for grammar, punctuation and tightening up verbiage.

Texas ranks dead last in livability, and Florida is in the bottom 10 of the 50 states, due to poor healthcare, education standards and culture wars. Texas has the highest percentage of people living without health insurance, the state has the 13th highest violent crime rate, and is in the bottom third of US states for licensed childcare facilities per capita.

And Texas is targeting LGBTQ residents for persecution and restricting voting and reproductive rights.

boingboing.net/2023/07/1…

Chick Tracts (99% Invisible). Jack Chick was the Leni Riefenstahl of comics. Chick devoted his life to using comics to witness to non-Christians. His gorgeous, kitschy art, combined with messaging that was often homophobic and Islamophobic, makes the tiny comics simultaneously masterpieces of pop culture and terrible hate speech.

Do kids in New York still play stickball, skelly, and hopscotch? Or has that gone the way of rolling a hoop with a stick?

Vulcans really are jerks.

The shuttle was huge. It was big enough to serve as a Starfleet Academy party bus. Just hang a disco ball from the ceiling.

Was Spock human long enough to try California burritos and pizza? Because if he thought bacon was great….

I saw these steps while walking Minnie a few days ago. They’re beautiful and my knees hurt just looking at them.

Even the old guys at the park were wearing ankle socks with their shorts, rather than full-length socks as I was. I need to level up my exercise fashion game.

Walking the dog this morning, I wore baggy checked cargo shorts, black calf-length socks, white New Balance sneakers, and my sweat-stained white Tilley bucket hat.

In other words, I was a thirst trap.

Steven Vaughan-Nichols: I’ve used social networks since the 80s. Threads is the most annoying one I’ve tried. (ZDNET)

Threads’s egregious privacy policy (which SJVN provides more information about here) and its current lack of a web interface are the reasons why I’m sitting Threads out. For now at least; I may change my mind at any moment.

I expect I’ll wait until micro.blog supports Threads cross-posting. Either that, or wait until Threads supports ActivityPub, and then I’ll merge my Mastodon, Micro.blog and Threads activity, as I do now with Mastodon and Micro.blog.

It was at this moment that I decided to switch off Apple News notifications on my phone.

Jews, Christians and Satanists are taking legal action to protect reproductive freedom, claiming—rightly—that abortion bans are an imposition of religious beliefs by the state.

Cory Doctorow: “Jewish religious texts clearly state that life begins at the first breath, and that the life of a pregnant person takes precedence over the life of the fetus in their uterus.”

The “religious liberty” angle for overturning the overturning of Dobbs

Everyone Has ‘Car Brain’. “Online communities dedicated to criticizing cars and the people who love them have developed an insult that … kind of makes sense.“ (The Atlantic / Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Los Angeles’s Bradbury Building is a gorgeous edifice built in 1893. You’ve seen the Bradbury if you’ve seen “Blade Runner;” the Bradbury was the setting for the Toymaker’s workshop. And the building has been featured in a million other movies and TV shows.

99% Invisible:

From the outside, the Bradbury just looks like a brick office building at the corner of 3rd and Broadway, downtown. It seems unremarkable, but the magic happens when you step inside.

The Bradbury is basically a tall, narrow courtyard, walled in with terra cotta, covered with a glass ceiling, and flanked with two iron, clanking hydraulic-powered elevators. Human conductors still operate them.

There’s a reason the Bradbury is in so many films. Aside from being beautiful, it’s also practical. The balconies allow the crew to shoot from many different angles and create a whole range of different moods for various genres. The Bradbury’s ceiling height can accommodate all the lights and the camera equipment. Also, the Bradbury is located near a parking lot (for all the vans and trailers), as well as places downtown where a film crew can go get lunch.

Lewis Bradbury, a gold-mining millionaire, commissioned the buillding in 1892, from notable architect Sumner Hunt.

As the story goes, Bradbury didn’t like any of the plans that Hunt showed him, and so, disappointed, was on his way out when, for some reason, one of Hunt’s young draftsmen caught his eye. George Wyman, the draftsman, had no professional training as an architect.

Bradbury pulled Wyman aside and asked him to build his very important half-million dollar office building.

Wyman consulted the spirit of his dead brother before deciding to take the offer.

The design of the Bradbury was directly inspired by a novel called Looking Backwards by Edward Bellamy. Written in 1887, the book takes place in the year 2000.

In other words, the design is a 19th Century vision of what a 21st Century skyscraper would look like. And the vision was fulfilled, because the Bradbury is still standing today.

As of the time this article was published, 2015, the Bradbury was being used as office space for the Los Angeles Police Department internal affairs division. And that’s why I called up this article to re-read it: I’m currently reading “Angel’s Flight,” a police procedural murder mystery by Michael Connelly, and some of the action takes place in the Bradbury. The novel was made into a season of the TV series “Bosch”—another place you can see the Bradbury on-screen

… movies don’t shoot in the Bradbury as frequently as they once did. Generally, filming is not as welcome downtown now that people live and work there. These days, film crews can’t blow up cars in the street or have 300 zombies stampede down Broadway in the middle of the workday.

Update: I emailed Slate to cancel my sub, and they replied promptly and said they had done so. So, points to them for that. But there really needs to be a button on the site.

At the park this weekend I saw a bulldog wearing a pearl necklace. Big chunky pearls, like Barbara Bush used to wear.

The pearls probably weren’t real, but the dog probably was.

Slate Plus is raising its subscription rate from $59 to $119 annually. That’s a nope. I searched the website for 15 minutes to find out how to cancel my subscription and was unable to find a link. That’s sleazy, Slate.

Parakeet Panic. “When invasive parakeets began to spread in New York City in the 1970s, the government decided it needed to kill them all. Today: The offbeat panic about wild parrots, and a history of anxieties about population growth.” (The Last Archive)

An odd ChatGPT conversation

I was trying to remember a quote about writing, but I couldn’t remember the exact words. Something like, “If you can do anything else but be a writer, you should do it." But not quite that—punchier.

I tried Googling the phrase but that didn’t turn up anything.

So I asked ChatGPT, which said the exact phrase is, “If you can do anything else but write, do it,” and attributed it to Elie Wiesel.

I googled the correct phrase with his name attached, but didn’t find results or that either.

So I asked ChatGPT for the source, and ChatGPT responded:

I apologize for any confusion caused. After conducting further research, it seems that the quote I provided earlier attributed to Elie Wiesel may not be accurate. There are variations of this saying that are often attributed to different authors, but there is no concrete evidence that links this particular quote to Elie Wiesel. I apologize for any misinformation. It’s always important to verify the authenticity of quotes and their sources.

In her new book “Nuts and Bolts Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way),” structural engineer Roma Agrawal identifies and examines the seven of most basic building blocks of engineering that have shaped the modern world: the nail, the wheel, the spring, the lens, the magnet, the string, and the pump.

— Nuts and Bolts [99% Invisible]

Born into extreme poverty, [Cary] Grant was told as a child his mother had died. She had actually been placed in a psychiatric institution. It was the start of a life of repression and extraordinary reinvention.

— The Trauma of Cary Grant: How He Thrived After a Terrible Childhood - As Told by His Daughter. (The Guardian / Emma Brooks)

Grant was determined to give his only child, a daughter, born when he was 62, the good upbringing he never had. So he walked away from his film career to devote the rest of his life to raising her. That daughter, Emily Grant, is now an executive producer on a four-part TV series about her father’s life.

Want to read: This Bird Has Flown by Susanna Hoffs 📚Good interview with Hoffs, formerly of The Bangles, on Debbie Millman’s podcast. Hoffs is surprisingly smart. She’s written a novel and it sounds good.

Finished reading: Persian Fire by Tom Holland 📚 Fascinating story, a non-fiction history of the Persian-Greek war 2500 years ago. But a challenging read. The author uses ornate sentences that I had to read two or three times to get the gist of. I’ve read other Holland history books and enjoyed them, and did not find them quite so difficult.

Yesterday at the supermarket, I saw a man with a dog. The dog wasn’t wearing a service dog vest. It was just a dog, but inside the supermarket. It looked like a chocolate lab, but with a wiry tail.

I happened to be buying treats for Minnie at the dog treats shelf at the moment I saw the dog. The supermarket dog sniffed the shelves with great interest, then turned away.

Later, I saw a teen-age girl with an e-bike in the supermarket. She wasn’t riding it in the supermarket. She was just pushing it. Still, it was odd.

After that, I decided we were just bringing any dang thing we wanted into the supermarket, so I brought in the car and drove it up and down the aisles rather than walking, throwing my purchases from the shelves over my shoulder onto the back seat. I knocked a lot of things over, but it was otherwise very convenient.

I deleted Meta Threads from my phone. I may come back to the service, but I’m not feeling urgency, and I don’t like app’s privacy policies.

Threads grabs a great deal of user information, including text messages.

Text messages?! Are you kidding?!

I’ve got Facebook on my phone. That’s bad enough.

Has anybody found a news alerts service for the phone that only alerts you for world-changing news? All the news alert services I’ve tried are too noisy.

I want an alert if Biden or Trump drops dead, or if Ukraine boils over into World War III. I don’t need an alert to let me know somebody got murdered 15 miles away, or the Walmart killer got sentenced or—true alert I got from CNN yesterday—how to not get bedbugs from hotel beds.

Basically, I only want to get a news alert once every few months. All the news alerts I’ve subscribed to send alerts every few hours.

I fear the service I’m looking for may not exist.

Jo Walton writes about Heinlein’s Worst Novel. I 98% agree.

My favorite Heinleins are his early books, particularly “Citizen of the Galaxy.”

I loved “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” and “Starship Troopers,” but I’d love them even more without the lectures.

I loved “Stranger in a Strange Land” when I was 13 years old, but it ages badly.

And “The Cat Who Walks Through Walls” and “To Sail Beyond the Sunset” are just plain bad.

I often think about the failed US Heinlein describes in “I Will Fear No Evil” and “Friday.”

In a sign of what’s to come for many white-collar workers, artificial intelligence is eating the software industry, as companies turn to generative AI tools to save money on programmers.

Some 70% of coders are already using or plan to use AI in their work, with one-third saying the primary reason they do so is because it makes them more productive, according to survey by Stack Overflow.

What Will AI Do to Your Job? Take a Look at What It’s Already Doing to Coders. By Christopher Mims at the Wall Street Journal.

How Tom Brady’s Crypto Ambitions Collided With Reality. “The superstar quarterback is among the celebrities dealing with the fallout from the crypto crash. Others, like Taylor Swift, escaped.” (The New York Times / Erin Griffith and David Yaffe-Bellany).

Seems like Brady and other celebrities were both victimizers and victims, as is so often the case with people in pyramid schemes at any level. They’re not entirely guilty but they’re not innocent victims either.

And they’re all still rich. Maybe they lost a few millions or tens of millions, but they can afford it.

I was and am disappointed to see celebrities I liked and respected, like Matt Damon and Larry David, get caught up in this grift. I thought they had more integrity.

I remember when I did not have to spend quite so much of my life charging things and making sure that the things are charged

Threads: A mall inside the store inside the mall

I signed up for Threads. Unenthusiastically. I want to use fewer social media platforms, and concentrate my focus, rather than doing more.

Hopefully, Threads will follow through and become a full citizen of ActivityPub, and also connect to the blue Facebook platform. That will make my social media activity simpler.

Even better: Everybody needs to wake up and realize that we don’t need a platform to serve as the internet town square. The internet already is the town square.

About 7-10 years ago, JC Penny announced a bold new initiative to start opening independent shops within its stores. At first I thought that was brilliant, and then I said, “Wait a second—you want to open a mall inside the store inside the mall? How’s that going to work?”

I’m @mitchwagner on Threads. So far, my entire Threads activity consists of a single photo of the dog.

Every so often I am tempted by an Ember coffee mug and then I look at the price and I fall over unconscious.

Historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook “delve into the mysteries surrounding the Ark of the Covenant.”

The most important object in the universe, but also a somewhat invisible presence in the Bible, the Ark of the Covenant has fuelled stories for millennia… as a weapon of mass destruction, an elaborate filling cabinet for sacred laws, or as the very location where God and man meet.

The Rest is History: Raiders of the Lost Ark

Also:

The Mystery of the Holy Grail

“Who drinks the water I shall give him, will have a spring inside him welling up for eternal life.” A deeply mysterious object which doesn’t appear in the Bible, was the Holy Grail really the chalice used by Jesus during the Last Supper, and the very cup that caught his blood at the crucifixion? Or is it merely a symbol representing Christ’s bloodline? Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the Holy Grail, the origin of the tradition, and the role it played within medieval Christendom.

“Why do we have so little access to what’s happening under the hood?" Neuroscientist David Eagleman discusses how almost everything we do is controlled unconsciously. Our consciousness and free will are just illusions, thinking we’re in control but really just along for the ride.

I’ve seen the metaphor elsewhere comparing consciousness and free will to a toddler riding in a car with one of those child-safety seats that has a toy dashboard and steering wheel built in. The kid thinks they’re driving, but they’re not.

I made heavy use of Google Reader, checking it several times daily every day. But I never used the social features—I barely knew about them.

Learning about them now, I think I would have loved them. Most of what I do on social media is share things I find elsewhere on the Internet, sometimes commenting on them. I’ve never found a platform where that kind of behavior was a perfect fit. Reddit comes close, but there’s a lot of overhead on Reddit finding the right community to comment in, and figuring out those communities’ sometimes esoteric rules.

Raymond Scott was one of the most famous musical composers of the 20th Century, though his name is nearly forgotten today. He was also a brilliant electronics engineer, and his life’s work was the Electronium, an automated music-composing machine. Scott came up in in the Big Band era, and later worked with Berry Gordy, who founded the Motown record later. Scott’s music appears in Looney Tunes, Ren & Stimpy, and the SImpsons cartoons.

Player Piano, an episode of the Last Archive podcast featured on 99% Invisible.

The Last Archive: The Word for Man is Ishi: The amazing story of Ishi, only member of his Native American community to survive genocide, who was discovered in a small town in northern California in 1911.

Celebrated during his life as “the last wild Indian,” Ishi moved in to the new Anthropology Department at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became a living exhibit. But he also took control of his own life, moving around the community, attending vaudeville shows, and giving newspaper interviews.

Ishi’s life is a microcosm of American imperialism, and how white America celebrated, romanticized, and mourned Native American culture, after first subjugating that culture, committing genocide against it, and sidelining actual, living Native Americans who were—and are—still here.

Anthropologist Alfred Kroeber worked with Ishi and became Ishi’s friend, though Kroeber eventually betrayed Ishi. Ishi died in 1916.

Thirteen years later, Kroeber had a child, who grew up to become one of the most famous and well-respected science fiction writers of the century, writing again and again about imperialism and its victims.

Ishi - Wikipedia

Google bungled by killing Google Reader to build Google+, and then bungled again killing Google+ The company is like the proverbial donkey placed between a pile of hay and a bucket of water that ends up dying of hunger and thirst because it can’t decide between them.

How Google Reader died — and why the web misses it more than ever. By David Pierce at The Verge

Ten years after its untimely death, the team that built the much-beloved feed reader reflects on what went wrong and what could have been.

Google Reader was more than just an RSS reader. It was a general-purpose information hub and sharing platform. It achieved 30 million loyal users—a great success by real-world measures, but not Google scale.

Google’s bad reputation for killing and abandoning products started with Reader and has only gotten worse over time. But the real tragedy of Reader was that it had all the signs of being something big, and Google just couldn’t see it. Desperate to play catch-up to Facebook and Twitter, the company shut down one of its most prescient projects; you can see in Reader shades of everything from Twitter to the newsletter boom to the rising social web. To executives, Google Reader may have seemed like a humble feed aggregator built on boring technology. But for users, it was a way of organizing the internet, for making sense of the web, for collecting all the things you care about no matter its location or type, and helping you make the most of it.

Instead of building on Google Reader, Google wanted to build Google+, and look how that turned out.

I used Reader daily, but never got into the social features. I was barely aware they existed. I thought Google+ was great.

I also talked with ChatGPT. I asked it whether AI is a threat to people’s jobs, and how people can maximize their success in their careers as AI becomes more prevalent. I didn’t include ChatGPT’s responses in the article. Read them here.

I recently came across the IndieWeb concept of POSSE. Not the first time I’ve seen it, but this time I read it more closely and said, “Holy cow, there’s a name for the way I’ve always preferred to use social media?”

It should be called “POSCE”—“Publish on your Own Site, Copy Elsewhere.” It’s a more understandable explanation of the concept. Though understandability isn’t a great strength for the IndieWeb movement.

I’m fiddling with my RSS/read-it-later setup—again!

This is an area I’m never satisfied with, and I seem to fiddle with it every few months. I find Inoreader is a mixed bag as a reading environment, though I’m continuing to use it because it’s unparalleled for filtering massive numbers of RSS feeds to find a few details that I need for my work.

So I’m experimenting with moving more over to newsletters, and then comes the question of what’s the ideal tool for reading newsletters. Inoreader? Matter?? Readwise Reader

I’m finding, to my surprise, that the ideal tool for reading newsletters may be … wait for it … email.

I do not share the general Mac power-user enthusiasm for tools that parse articles to strip out ads and make everything look the same. I find they introduce enough problems that they’re not hugely superior to the originals.

There will never be another Harrison Ford

The guy’s 80, and instead of sliding into the traditional role of lifetime achievement award winner, memoir writer and maker of occasional cameo appearances, he’s back on billboards and the sides of buses for “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.”

Meanwhile his roles in “1923” and “Shrinking” could very well deliver not only his first Emmy nomination but his second as well.

Oh, and he just finished shooting his first Marvel movie, “Captain America: Brave New World,” in which he plays American President Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (a role formerly filled by the late, great William Hurt), who may or may not turn out to be the Red Hulk.

— Mary McNamara / LA Times

As AI becomes more prevalent, a vast underclass of people training the machines is emerging worldwide. Josh Dzieza reports in depth for The Verge.

There are people classifying the emotional content of TikTok videos, new variants of email spam, and the precise sexual provocativeness of online ads. Others are looking at credit-card transactions and figuring out what sort of purchase they relate to or checking e-commerce recommendations and deciding whether that shirt is really something you might like after buying that other shirt. Humans are correcting customer-service chatbots, listening to Alexa requests, and categorizing the emotions of people on video calls. They are labeling food so that smart refrigerators don’t get confused by new packaging, checking automated security cameras before sounding alarms, and identifying corn for baffled autonomous tractors.

AI Is a Lot of Work

Not to brag but I just selected the perfect size container for Julie’s leftover chili.

I saw this sign 10 years ago today in a barbershop window in Coronado.

Happy Independence Day to all of my American friends, and may you finish the day with the same number of fingers with which you began it.

RIP Frank Field, a local New York TV weatherman who was a fixture of the television landscape when I was a kid in the 70s. He was 100 years old.

Field, who died Saturday, was an evangelist for the Heimlich maneuver, which saved his life in 1985.

He was dining at a Manhattan restaurant with the CBS sportscaster Warner Wolf when a piece of roast beef became lodged in Dr. Field’s throat. “There was no pain,” he later told The New York Times. “I tried to swallow and could not. I tried to cough. I was perfectly calm, until I realized I couldn’t breathe.” He was also unable to speak to Mr. Wolf to convey his distress.

“So I pointed to my throat and stood up, to give him access,” Dr. Field said. “He did it the first time, and it didn’t work. I thought: ‘My God! It doesn’t work. If I fell unconscious, I wouldn’t make the 11 o’clock news.'”

When Mr. Wolf tried again, he expelled the meat.

“Warner had never done it,” Dr. Field said, “but he had seen me demonstrate it on television.”

Frank Field, Who Brought Expertise to TV Weathercasting, Dies at 100 (NYTimes / Richard Goldstein)

President Eisenhower signed the National Highway Act, “the largest infrastructure project in American history,” July 3, 1956—68 years ago today. The hosts of the This Day in Esoteric Political History podcast “are joined by Eddie Alterman, longtime editor of Car & Driver magazine, to discuss how the highway network reshaped the country and changed car culture.”

This Day in Esoteric Political History: “The Great American Road Trip”

I had thought the end of “Endeavour” might take place immediately prior to the first season of “Inspector Morse.” But then I thought that was wrong of me, because Shaun Evans is so much younger than John Thaw was.

Or not. Today I learned Thaw was 45 at the beginning of “Morse,” and Evans is 43.

We have watched four episodes of “Silo,” and so far, I would absolutely live there. Friendly people, everyone dresses comfortably, earth tones and sweaters. Plenty of stairs for aerobic exercise. No computers more complicated than MS-DOS 5. Don’t have to worry about sunscreen. No mosquitoes.

Finished reading: Blood Work by Michael Connelly. Not his best, but very good nonetheless. This is the sixth Connelly novel I’ve read since January; I read his first several years ago. I think I’ll start the next one right now. 📚