A delightful series of life lessons from people just turned 30, 40, 50 and 60, along with a 74-year-old. A selection:
30:
— don’t work for startups, they’re always one ‘innovative idea’ away adding ‘sell your kidneys on the black market’ to your job description.
…
— those little single-use glasses cleaning wipes are 1000% worth the money
— overly self-depreciating jokes just make people uncomfortable, wean yourself off of them
40:
— never get down on the floor without an exit strategy for getting back up
50:
- “loving yourself” is less of a feeling and more of an action. you can start doing it any time and it will make your life better and better as you go on
- this will happen incrementally - be patient
- along those lines, if you haven’t started making an active effort to quit shit-talking yourself, suck it up and do it
- no, shut up. do it. “but it’s haaaaard!” don’t care. do it.
…
- at some point you will encounter people much younger than you arguing passionately and incorrectly about history you personally remember and experienced
- this will be infuriating and annoying
- otoh, most other things just… will not matter to you as much
- at some point you will shift from wanting to go out to being like “eh” and deciding to stay in. this is okay.
- you will have absolutely no idea what The Youth are talking about and you will not care
- but if you keep your mind open to new ideas you’ll never be irrelevant
…
- get a fucking hobby, especially a hobby that involves physically creating/handling something and/or moving your body in physical space. it will do you more good than you can imagine
Trump plans to rule as a dictator, unchecked by Congress, courts, the law or the Constitution. He intends to put millions of American citizens, residents and visitors in prison camps. None of this is secret. He has promised to do it publicly.
Jamelle Bouie: There is no precedent for something like this in American history.
Trump’s campaign rests on an explicit promise to govern as an autocrat. He has announced, repeatedly, his intent to abuse the authority granted him as president to essentially terrorize millions of Americans, immigrants and native-born citizens alike.
If many Americans, from ordinary voters to political elites and the press, seem paralyzed with inaction, unable to accept what is plainly in front of us, it might just be because the stress of the situation has taken its toll on all of us. Faced with the truly unimaginable, many Americans have defaulted to the notion that this is an ordinary election with ordinary stakes.
If only that were the truth.
A school disciplined a student for using AI, and his parents sued.
The parents say there was no policy forbidding the use of AI, but the school points to several policies — and those policies seem reasonable. You can use AI if your teacher says you can, but you must show all your work, including chatlogs and prompts.
The school also says the kid basically just got a slap on the wrist, and he and his parents should stop being crybabies.
In the 20th Century, you could stroll up to a newsstand, see a newspaper with an interesting headline on the front page or a magazine with an interesting article on the cover, and just buy that one issue for pocket change. No subscription, easy transaction.
We need the equivalent on the internet. As we’re all learning the hard way, quality news needs to be paid for, but fake news is free; a decent micropayment system could help mitigate that terrible problem.
Is it possible to globally disable Cmd-P to print in the Mac?
It seems like an artifact from the 20th Century to have a valuable keyboard shortcut like Cmd-P set to “print.” Are there still people who print things out so frequently that they need that keyboard shortcut? Do they stand around the printer waiting for the printout to extrude while smoking unfiltered Lucky Strike cigarettes and doing other 20th-century things?
Employees describe an environment of paranoia and fear inside Automattic over Wordpress chaos. Mullenweg’s supporters are comparing him to Musk and Trump, which is not the flex they think it is.
On foreign policy, economics and law-and-order issues, I could possibly be persuaded to support the Republican point of view. It’d be a hard sell, but I’m a middle-aged, middle-class suburban white dude, so it’s possible.
But I have at least one trans friend, several gay and lesbian friends, and I support bodily autonomy.
So the harder the GOP pushes on those issues, the harder they push me to the Democratic side.
I expect I am far from alone.
I was blocked on Threads for most of the day. Whenever I tried to log in, I got a notification that one of my posts was deleted for praising or supporting an organization Meta deems as dangerous. This is the post.
I often see front yards covered in artificial turf around here. Is that common elsewhere, or is it particular to southern California?
I dislike it. Just put down indigenous plants, or (if that’s too much bother) gravel is fine, too. Artificial turf makes me wonder why you thought it was a good idea to carpet your yard?
I didn’t even notice how common this is here until I shared a photo online, and people who live elsewhere in the US commented on how weird it is. They’re right — it is.
[@MitchW](https://micro.blog/MitchW) The most true and accurate and wise words on the internet:
don't Google “Goatse"
My 20-year love of RSS
I’ve been using RSS virtually every day for more than 20 years. My current favorite is Readwise Reader, which is a little pricy, but it combines RSS, newsletters, read-it-later, reading PDFs and ebooks, highlighting, note-taking and building a document library into a single, powerful application.
I’ve recently been struggling to find a decent news portal—something I can glance at and see if there’s any major breaking news, such as when hurricanes threatened Florida. I decided to add feeds for the NYTimes, Washington Post, Guardian, etc., to my reader, on the theory that if news is major and breaking, it’ll show up in the feeds when I glance at them.
I divide my feeds into folders: one for high-priority items, where I want to see every headline, and another for work-related news.
But mostly, I treat the RSS feed as a “river of news” and don’t even try to read every item. I read headlines every few hours. Often, I just mark an item to read later (tap the “L” key in Readwise Reader) and move on.
I’ve been using Vivaldi as my primary browser on the Mac for about six months, and I quite like it. My two favorite features:
- You can switch between vertical and horizontal tabs. I use vertical tabs with page thumbnails on my ultrawide display, and normal, horizontal display when the MacBook is detached.
- Command palette for commands and opening bookmarks and bookmark folders.
A jury denied damages to the family of a San Diego Black man who was buried in the wrong grave for 22 years. The deeper you read into this article, the less legitimate the family’s case seems.
Elon Musk’s promise of free Starlink terminals for hurrican victims in western North Carolina was a cruel lie. The service is not free, and Musk is spreading lies about FEMA responders and jeapordizing the lives of people on the ground.
If Musk really wants to help, he can just donate money.
This is an article by my friend and tech journalist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, who lives in Asheville and is one of the people displaced by the hurricane; his house is without power, water, internet and cell service.
“Following initial contact with victims on social media platforms, they first sent artificially generated photos using AI technology to create attractive individuals in terms of appearance, personality, occupation, education and other aspects,” said Fang Chi-kin, the head of the New Territories South regional crime unit.
According to the unit’s superintendent, Iu Wing-kan, deepfake technology was then used when victims requested video calls.
“This technology transformed the scammers' appearances and voices into highly attractive females in terms of looks, attire and speech, making the victims trust them unquestioningly,” SCMP quoted him as saying.
Scammers are also using deepfakes of corporate executives to phish employees on video calls to execute fraudulent transactions.
The FTC finalized a new regulation making it easier to cancel unwanted subscriptions. Republicans oppose it, of course.
The FTC said it’s “modernizing” the 1973 Negative Option Rule in order to carry out its mission of combating unfair and deceptive business practices. (“Negative option marketing” is a term that the regulator uses to mean any business practice where customers need to take affirmative steps to reject or cancel service lest they are billed anyway.)
The only acceptable jobs for Spider-Man.
i dont want any of this “hes a genius tech ceo making millions” SHIT. Spider-man is BROKE and he missed rent this month and he has a tiny apartment and thats how its MEANT TO BE. he doesnt make money because he is our Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-man and not fucking Tony Stark.
Brilliant. Just a few paragraphs. Read the whole thing.