When you think you have a full cup of coffee left in the carafe, but it’s only this much.

A hand holds a clear glass coffee cup in front of a window. The cup has barely any coffee in it.

Idea for a Star Trek spinoff series: “These are the voyages of the starship Dunning-Krueger…. "

Governor Newsom Desperately Begs NetChoice To Drop Its Lawsuit Over Unconstitutional AADC Bill.

Mike Masnick on Techdirt:

… nothing in this law actually protects children. Instead, it puts them at much greater risk of having information exposed, as we’ve noted. It will also make it next to impossible for children to research important information regarding mental health, or to find out the information they need to help them deal with things like eating disorders, since it will drive basically all of that content offline

…

… we have Newsom lying about the law, lying about the filings from NetChoice, and now lying about the Surgeon General’s report. I know it’s a post-truth political world we live in, but I expect better from California’s governor.

For social media and other Internet companies, the IPO announcement is when the enshittification process accelerates. The IPO announcement is the moment when the service reaches the peak of the enshittification rollercoaster and begins plunging downward. We’re seeing this play out now with Reddit.

Today I learned that it is perfectly fine to say to someone, “I’m sorry, could you speak a little slower–I’m having difficulty understanding your accent.”

Previously I thought it was rude and maybe xenophobic to point out to someone that they spoke with an accent.

I do not want to admit how long I have struggled with this delusion and failed to arrive at the simple solution.

Furries Now Have Serious Beef With Ron DeSantis: A furry fandom con in Florida just announced it would ban minors based on the governor’s ridiculous laws

Many parents whose children are involved with the subculture credit it with helping them overcome bullying, or gain self-esteem. At conventions, [a furry convention organizer] says, “there will be parents crying in a corner because they don’t see their kids so happy every day. We had a mom break down because she’s never seen her kid feel so comfortable just sitting at a table and interacting with other kids.” She says it is “heartbreaking” to think of young furries not having a space to connect.

The furry fandom has been a target of the far-right for years, with numerous politicians baselessly claiming that schools are placing litter boxes in bathrooms to appease students who identify as furries. A number of school boards across the country have attempted to prohibit children from wearing animal ears to school, with Florida’s Brevard Public Schools most recently attempting to adopt a dress code banning clothing “which emulates non-human characteristics.” (A spokesperson for Brevard Public Schools denied that children dressing up as furries was a “widespread issue.”)

Glad to hear that poverty, violence, Covid, cancer, climate change, and rising healthcare costs are now solved problems, so we can go after furries.

The threat of human extinction by AI is only scary for billionaires and centimillionaires

I see now that tech executives are once again warning about risk of human extinction caused by AI.

I think it’s adorable when the plutes worry about that kind of thing, while the rest of us worry about paying for healthcare, food, and housing.

More than 30 million Americans are living below the poverty line. And 40% of Americans were having difficulty paying for normal household expenses.. That’s scary.

AI is only scary to the extent that it will be an excuse to put more people out of work.

Today I learned: A canary trap is a technique to identify an information leak by giving different versions of a sensitive document to several suspects and observing which version gets leaked.

I was familiar with the technique, but I’d never heard the name before, and I was ignorant of the technique’s history.

This Wikipedia article gives 40 years of history. I expect the canary trap is much older than that–thousands and thousands of years.

Researchers are using Shoggoth, a monster out of HP Lovecraft, as a mascot for AI.

Kevin Roose at The New York Times:

@TetraspaceWest, the meme’s creator, told me in a Twitter message that the Shoggoth “represents something that thinks in a way that humans don’t understand and that’s totally different from the way that humans think.”

Attempts to train AI to be more human-like are like putting a smiley face or human mask on Shoggoth. It’s still inscrutable, but it creates the appearance of understandability.

That some A.I. insiders refer to their creations as Lovecraftian horrors, even as a joke, is unusual by historical standards. (Put it this way: Fifteen years ago, Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t going around comparing Facebook to Cthulhu.)

And it reinforces the notion that what’s happening in A.I. today feels, to some of its participants, more like an act of summoning than a software development process. They are creating the blobby, alien Shoggoths, making them bigger and more powerful, and hoping that there are enough smiley faces to cover the scary parts.

Cory Doctorow: The FDA literally granted pharma company Ferring a monopoly on shit. More precisely, the FDA rescinded its “discretionary enforcement” guidance relating to fecal microbiota transplants (FMTs), where doctors implant a small quantity of processed poop from one person to another, which turns out to be a powerful, safe treatment for serious and potentially fatal intestinal infection. The FDA ruling makes it illegal for doctors to source their poop from Openbiome, a nonprofit that coordinates between doctors, patients, and donors to provide safe FMTs. Ferring conducted clinical trials on FMTs and received approval for an FMT product called Rebyota, which charges $20,000 per treatment, compared to Openbiome’s $1-2k per treatment. So sick Americans will have to pay 10x higher for shit.

We recently learned about “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,” a 2017 movie directed and written by Luc Besson of “The Fifth Element,” which Julie and I both love. The previews have the same look and feel as the other movie. It stars Dane DeHaan (never heard of him), and Cara DeLevingne, who appeared in “Carnival Row”—we enjoyed the first season of that—along with a hell of a supporting cast: Clive Owen, Rihanna, Ethan Hawke, Herbie Hancock, Rutger Hauer and John Goodman.

Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design:

The term brutalism is derived from the French béton brut, meaning “raw concrete”. Although most brutalist buildings are made from concrete, we’re more interested in the term raw. Concrete brutalist buildings often reflect back the forms used to make them, and their overall design tends to adhere to the concept of truth to materials.

…

A website that embraces Brutalist Web Design is raw in its focus on content, and prioritization of the website visitor.

Panpsychism is the view that the mind “or a mindlike aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality.”

Possibilianism is a religious philosophy that’s open to exploring possibilities. Neuroscientist David Eagleman described it this way:

Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I’m hoping to define a new position — one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story.

The iPhone will auto-reply to text messages—but only when you’re in Driving Focus. I want auto-reply in all Focus modes. I hope that’s coming in the next version of iOS.

What novel should I read next? 📚

I woke up this morning and decided to break up with the novel I’m currently reading. This is a new thing for me; I recently decided to start more books and quit reading more books when they’re not working for me.

I’m not finding that resolution easy. A part of me feels compelled to finish a book once I start, as if failure to complete was wasteful, like not eating all the food on my plate. But of course, that’s ridiculous, and quitting reading a book that isn’t working opens up time to read something I might enjoy more.

The book I’m quitting is “Cetaganda,” by Lois McMaster Bujold. It’s part of her Vorkosigan series of novels. These are far-future science fiction about a hero named Miles Vorkosigan. Miles is the son of one of the most powerful men on the planet Barrayar, scion of a warrior caste. Miles’s father was one of the greatest warriors and statesmen of Barrayan history, who saved the planet after a revolution and coup against the rightful Emperor, and then ruled as regent.

But Miles is not his father; he’s disabled, short and frail, with a rare medical condition that makes his bones fragile and easily breakable. He’s also brilliant, hyperactive, a wise-ass, and prone to getting himself into trouble and thinking himself out of it. The books have an enthusiastic fandom and won a lot of awards.

But I always find myself having to push through the middle of the Vorkosigan books, and in the case of “Cetaganda,” it’s too much pushing.

The Vorkosigan stories are mysteries of one kind or another: murders to be solved, spy plots to be uncovered, military capers to be executed. The plots are intricate. I think the books are meant to be read quickly, over two or three days at most. I read books slowly, over weeks or months, and I get confused about what’s going on in the Vorkosigan novels and who’s who.

The books were written in the 90s, and they already seem a little dated.

Julie went to school with Bujold, though they were not close. And here’s an interesting Wikipedia bit: Bujold’s inspirations for Miles include T.E. Lawrence, a young Winston Churchill, a disabled hospital pharmacist she once worked with, “and even herself (the ‘great man’s son syndrome’).” I’ll have to ask Julie what, if anything, she knows about Bujold’s father.

I may come back to Miles Vorkosigan. But not today.

So what should I read next? I think I’m going to stick with series novels. I like series. Once you find a series you like, they’re reliable, familiar, and comfortable. Here’s what I’m thinking:

Blood Work, Michael Connelly’s seventh novel. Connelly primarily writes about Harry Bosch, an LAPD detective, but he also writes novels about other characters, and this character is new to me, Terry McCaleb, an ex-FBI agent retired on medical disability.

Robert B. Parker’s Little White Lies is not, despite the title, by Parker, but instead by Ace Atkins. It’s a novel about Boston private detective Spenser (first name never revealed), who Parker invented and wrote about in dozens of books until Parker died in 2010. Then Atkins was hired by Parker’s estate to continue the series.

The Parker novels meant a lot to me. I read them in my 20s, and they were the last books I read in a period of my life where I drew role models from fiction, which started in childhood. I looked to fictional characters as I tried to figure out how to live life, and Spenser was the last of those for me.

Also, I fell in love with Boston by reading the Spenser books and taking frequent business trips to that city. I moved there in 1992 and decided I wouldn’t say I liked it after all, but I met Julie there, and we moved together to California and got married.

So the Spenser books are a big deal for me.

Ace Atkins has done a surprisingly good job continuing the Spenser series. His first four books are good but could be better, but he gets going with the fifth, Slow Burn. I’ve read other series where a living author tried to pick things up from an original author who died, and they don’t quite work out; Atkins shows that it can succeed.

Slow Burn isn’t Parker’s Spenser; it’s a collaboration between the two writers (one of whom happens to be not living anymore).

Those are the leading contenders for what I’ll read next. Others on the candidate list:

  • A Sandman Slim novel by Richard Kadrey. I quit that series several books in, but maybe I just needed a break.
  • Something by Stephen King. I’ve been re-reading some old favorites and picking up newer books I haven’t yet read.
  • A Harry Dresden novel. Like the Vorkosigan books, they have an enthusiastic fandom. I read the first one, and it didn’t grab me. A fan told me this weekend that they get better after the first few. Maybe I’ll start again in the middle with those. I did that with the Spenser books, and it worked well.
  • After seeing the Jon Hamm Fletch movie, I re-read the first book in that series, by Gregory Mcdonald, and liked it so much I might keep going.
  • The next Stainless Steel Rat book, by Harry Harrison, about a master thief turned elite secret agent in the distant future. I loved those books when I was a kid, and I re-read two last year and thought they held up great.
  • John Scalzi has a book coming up. I could check to see if it’s out already or if I can winkle an advance copy.
  • The second Travis McGee novel. I read the first one last year, and I can definitely see the appeal.
  • Something by Elizabeth Gilbert. This entry doesn’t fit on the list; the rest of the books on this list are sf or fantasy or detective novels, but that’s not Gilbert. She’s an author I’d previously dismissed and compartmentalized, but I heard an interview with her in 2020 about her then-new novel, “City of Girls,” I read the book, and by God, it’s brilliant. And I now seek out interviews with Gilbert because she’s brilliant. So maybe I should read more by her?

I’ll probably go with the Connelly, but it’ll be hours and hours and hours until I decide, and who knows where the world will take me in that distant future of later today?

What great books have you read recently?

Mr. Davies Giddy rose and said, that while he was willing to allow the hon. gent. who brought forward this every degree of credit for the goodness,of his intentions, as well as for his ability and assiduity; still, upon the best consideration he was able to give the bill, he must totally object to its principle, as conceiving it to be more pregnant with mischief than advantage to those for Whose advantage it was intended, and for the country in general. For, however specious in theory the project might be, of giving education to the labouring classes of the poor, it would, in effect, be found to be prejudicial to their morals and happiness; it would teach them to despise their lot in life, instead of making them good servants in agriculture, and other laborious employments to which their rank in society had destined them; instead of teaching then subordination, it would render them factious and refractory, as was evident the in the manufacturing counties it would enable them to read seditious pamphlets, vicious books, and publications against Christianity; it would render them insolent to their superiors and, in a few years, the result would be, that the legislature would find it necessary to direct the strong arm of power towards them, and to furnish the executive magistrates with much more vigorous laws than were now in force. Besides, if the bill were to pass into a law, it would go to bur-then the country with a most enormous and incalculable expence, and to load the industrious orders of society with still heavier imposts. It might be asked of him, would he abolish the Poor-Laws altogether? He had no hesitation to declare he would; for, although they relieved many persons, who were certainly objects of compassion, they were also abused by contributing to the support of idleness and profligacy; and he never could admit it to be just or reasonable that the labour of the industrious man should be taxed to support the idle vagrant. This was taxing virtue for the maintenance of vice.

— Saying the quiet part aloud.

When I read this I thought it was from a Dickens novel but nope it’s from UK Parliamentary debate over the Parochial Schools Bill of 1807.

via

Last night I got up for the reason one usually gets up in the middle of the night and walked into a wall forehead-first. Someone had moved the wall in the night.

Then, today, I accidentally kicked the sunroom heater and said, “Sorry,” my phone woke up, and Siri said, “Hmm?”

How is your weekend going?

We are five episodes behind on Succession, and I am wondering if I have the willpower to avoid news and social media Sunday and Monday, to avoid series finale spoilers.

“I tried the AI novel-writing tool everyone hates, and it's better than I expected”

Adi Robertson at The Verge:

Last week, generative fiction tool Sudowrite launched a system for writing whole novels. Called Story Engine, it’s another shot in the ongoing culture war between artists and AI developers — one side infuriated by what feels like a devaluation of their craft, the other insisting that it’s a tool for unlocking creativity and breaking writer’s block. Neither answered the question I was really curious about: does it work?

Well, I didn’t take on Sudowrite’s pitch of a full novel in a few days. But over the weekend, I generated a novella written entirely inside Story Engine — it’s called The Electric Sea at the AI’s suggestion, and you can read the whole thing on Tumblr.

I’m not sure how I feel about it.

I’m an enthusiastic, if strictly amateur, fiction writer. I wrote somewhere north of 150,000 words of unpublished fiction last year, so Sudowrite’s “break writer’s block” pitch isn’t that compelling to me. Writing, however, is not a task I hold inherently sacred. The field has a long and proud tradition of hastily written profit-driven trash, from Ed Wood’s churned-out erotica to the infamous pulp publisher Badger Books, known for handing authors a cover and asking them to write a book around it. I enjoy seeing where large language models’ strengths and weaknesses lie, and I’ve long been fascinated by challenges like NaNoGenMo, which asked writers to create an AI-generated novel in the days before modern generative AI. So on Saturday morning I paid for 90,000 words of Sudowrite text, booted it up, and “wrote” a roughly 22,500-word cyberpunk novella by Sunday afternoon.

One of my favorite novels deals with the world of “hastily written profit-driven trash:” “Derby Dugan’s Depression Funnies,” by Tom DeHaven, about a hack writer in the 1930s who churns out pulp stories and comic strip text. I wrote about it here. (“‘Derby Dugan’ is a wonderful novel,” I said. “I like to re-read it every few years to revisit a time and place where a kid in a yellow derby with a talking dog can make a writer a star of an enchanted New York.” Which reminds me that I haven’t re-read the Derby Dugan trilogy in some time.)

Robertson:

Writing is a pastime I enjoy, and it’s led me to a lot of fascinating places, even when the end result won’t be sold or even read by anybody else. I’ve taken up entire hobbies and vacations for research purposes. I like devising a good turn of phrase or exploring a character’s motivations. I enjoy feeling like I’ve done something a little unexpected or, conversely, like I’ve written a spot-on pastiche of a style. I don’t care about an AI “replacing” me the way I don’t worry about an industrial knitting machine replacing my handmade shawls — the process is the point.

I need to think about that. I started my journalism career on daily newspapers, where I loved doing weird things that I would not do on my own initiative: playing paintball, flying in an ultralight aircraft, or—in college—going out with the campus police on an all-night ridealong. I talked with a lot of strange characters too. Tech journalism and marketing is a great career, but I miss that other thing.

Spoiler: Robertson finds the software writes a barely passable, mediocre, cliched cyberpunk novella. I think she’s being charitable. I think it stinks—but I’m not a cyberpunk fan. Still, it’s a functional novella, she says.

I find the same thing with ChatGPT, when I’ve tried it on articles. It’s bad, like SEO spam. But there’s demand for SEO spam.

I wrote this: Red Hat brings AI to IT operations. Red Hat is putting artificial intelligence (AI) to work in IT operations and event remediation, showing the technology is good for more than designing novelty socks or creating an endless Seinfeld parody.

Jealous of other people's excellent videoconferencing backgrounds

Midjourney image. The prompt: Cartoon middle aged man sitting at a desk. There’s a computer on the desk. The desk has papers and office supplies on it. Shelves are behind the desk. The shelves have knickknacks on them.

I have an expanse of blank white wall behind my desk, which always bugs me when I see myself on Zoom calls. This has been a stone in my shoe for three years since videoconferencing became commonplace. I’m jealous when I see other people have excellent backgrounds for their Zoom calls.

A friend suggested I just get a couple of guitars and put them behind me. “But I don’t play guitar,” I said. “Doesn’t matter,” my friend said. “Anybody asks, you just make a sad face and say, ‘Oh, I just don’t have time to play anymore.’”

I found a local shop that sells movie posters, with a focus on midcentury grindhouse horror movies. Having a poster for “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” hanging behind me for business meetings would definitely send a message.

I wrote: Red Hat secures the software supply chain. Red Hat unveils Trusted Software Supply Chain, which tracks where open-source components come from and whether they are trustworthy to “provide customers with the added assurance that the bits they are deploying are safe and secure.”

I can proofread my article or generate a cool Midjourney image to accompany said article. Gee, tough decision. Do I want kale or chocolate cake?

If the Apple VR/AR headset debuts, and it’s as described in leaks, it’s going to be the biggest flop in Apple’s history and one of the greatest tech flops ever.

Nobody’s interested in wearing a Batman mask all day.

Mimestream is a Mac Gmail client that’s worth paying for

A goofy cartoon mailbox, generated by MidjourneyMimestream is a native Mac app for accessing Gmail. It gives you Gmail’s advanced capabilities, including Priority Inbox, categories, and labels, in an app that looks and works like a native Mac app. 

The alternatives to Mimestream are Gmail’s web interface, which I find cluttered, or native Mac mail apps, which look and work like Mac apps should but don’t give you all of Gmail’s capabilities. 

Mimestream has been in beta and free to use for years. I’ve been using Mimestream for most of that time. Now, Mimestream exits beta and gets a few juicy new features for organizing multiple accounts, muting some accounts at scheduled times (for example, if you’d like to mute your work account during personal time), configuring filters and more. Templates with variables will be useful for people who repeatedly send versions of the same email, such as customer support. And a menu bar extra lets you check to see what’s new without opening the app.

Other features of Mimestream: Support for Markdown formatting, Google calendar responses, Google Contacts integration, mentioning colleagues to bring them into the conversation, and syncing with Gmail signatures. More here.

Mimestream is a fast app. With it, I can fly through my email quickly, with minimal hassle. I’ve been using Gmail for more than 15 years, and there are still aspects of that interface I find confusing. That’s not a problem with Mimestream.

I’ve liked using Mimestream and will gladly pay for it. Pricing is US$49.99/year or $4.99/mo. Beta users, like me get 50% off for the first year. $25 is a reasonable price for a year of an app I use all day, every workday.

People who are only occasional Gmail users looking for an alternative to the Gmail Web interface might be happy just sticking with built-in Apple Mail, which is free with your (expensive) Mac. In the past, Apple Mail was unreliable with Gmail, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem lately.

Mimestream was founded by Neil Jhaveri, a software engineer who worked at Apple 7½ years, leading and managing engineering teams working on Mail and Notes. According to the product roadmap, the company is working on expanding Mimestream beyond Gmail to support other mail services, including Microsoft Outlook. They're also working on iPad and iPhone versions of Mimestream.

Daring Fireball notes that the first version of many Apple products is historically overpriced and underfeatured. That’s how Apple works. They grab the affluent early adopters first, and then over the years the price goes down and capabilities improve. Example: The Apple Watch.

So if the Apple headset is overpriced and underfeatured, that’s no reason to declare it dead on arrival.

Pizza

Pizza is my favorite food. We have pizza once a week. There have been times in my life when I have had it more often than that. I have had great pizza and I have had good pizza. I love the pizza they served on Fridays in the school cafeteria when I was a little kid. I loved riding my bike up Larkfield Road with my friends, and getting a slice of pizza at the place on that road. I love going back to New York and getting pizza from places with formica counters that serve you slices on paper plates. I love Chicago deep dish pizza, but I’m told it is not the pizza that Chicagoans eat. I love the pizza that we have when we go back to Ohio to visit Julie‘s family. Ohio pizza is covered edge to edge with pepperoni, cut into strips, and baked with a coating of cornmeal on the bottom to keep it from burning in the oven. Even frozen pizza, bar pizza and cafeteria pizza is delicious. Of all the thousands and thousands of pizza meals I have eaten in my life, only one was bad.

Walking with the dog the other day, I saw a big snake on the path. 5-7 feet long and fat. This was a couple of days after seeing a coyote walking down the street. I guess we live in Jumanji now.

What if we had a political party that represented working people? All working people. Everybody. All races, ethnicities, genders, sexes, and religions. White, Christian, Black, Jewish, Muslim, agnostics, atheists, men, women, trans, and nonbinary.

There’s been a lot of ink spilled on the Trump transformation of the GOP, but Dems’ transformation from a party representing labor to a party representing McKinsey consultants is less well understood.

— Cory

Banger link roundup today: Medieval people didn’t drown cats; they LOVED cats. AI hype is a scam to allow bosses to “fire all our asses and replace us with shell-scripts.” And more.

The Four Freedoms, According to Republicans

Jamelle Bouie at the New York Times:

There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.

There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.

There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.

And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.

It amazes me when I see someone has worked at the same company for 20+ years. I respect that stability.

De-nerding on coffee

A few years ago, I nerded out on coffee-making methods and eventually settled on using an Aeropress for my daily work-juice. Then I went down a rabbit-hole of looking up Aeropress coffee formulas.

There’s an entire nerd subculture of Aeropress enthusiasts, who measure their beans and water to the gram, use a thermometer to measure the weater temperature, and time their brew to the second. They even count the number of strokes they use to stir the coffee before serving.

While I was going through all this, and posting about it on social media, a couple of friends staged an intervention. They are themselves coffee enthusiasts, but they told me I needed to relax.

And I learned that the Aeropress is indeed a very forgiving method of making coffee. Use good beans, grind them at home, measure using a scoop without worrying about the precise weight, use water at about the right temperature, and you’ll be fine. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the last few years.

In the last few days I let go of the last remnant of my coffee obsessive-compulsiveness. Until a few days ago, I measured the amount of water I used to make coffee. But now I’m just doing it by eye. I have a little Hario insulated coffee server, and I just fill that up with hot water until it looks like it’s pretty close to the top. And it’s fine.

Don’t tell the gang at reddit.com/r/coffee; they’ll ban me for sure.

Today I learned Alexander Skarsgård and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau are not the same person.

On YouTube: Unboxing Shakespeare’s First Folio..

Amazing. The books look so new.

I’ve always known Shakespeare was a popular writer in his time, but it’s striking to see this reminder.

Today I learned what a “folio” and “quarto” are.

This is Catfishing on an Industrial Scale

Laura Cole writes at Wired about fake dating sites that employ hundreds of freelancers around the world “to animate fake profiles and chat with people who have signed up for dating and hookup sites…. Often recruited into ‘customer support’ or content moderation roles, they found themselves playing roles in sophisticated operations set up to tease subscription money from lonely hearts looking for connections online.”

These reps, who often work for pennies from developing countries, roleplay as women with incredibly detailed—and fictional—biographies and profiles, messaging men on online dating sites. The reps rapidly toggle through many characters in each work shift, and each operator might roleplay as hundreds of women, all while sitting at laptops in their homes.

As with many sophisticated criminal operations, I am both appalled and amazed at the sophistication.

Quite a lot of nature this morning

This morning, a little after 8, I was on my way home from walking the dog, one street over from the house, and I saw a coyote loping down the street. One of the neighbors, still in her red pajamas and slippers, stood in the street and watched. We chatted about the coyote and where it might live. That coyote has been around lately; I recognize it.

I’m pretty sure that a coyote won’t attack a full-sized adult person. And while coyotes will kill and eat small and even medium-sized dogs if the dog is unattended, I’m pretty sure a coyote won’t attack a dog on a leash accompanied by a full-sized adult person. I need to look into that.

Here are tips for keeping a dog safe from coyotes. I used to have a whistle on a keychain, but the keychain fastener broke a few months ago, and I stopped carrying it with me. I should replace that.

This was only the latest in a series of nature encounters this morning.

When policing the backyard for canine by-product at about 6:30, I heard ducks grumbling in a corner of the garden where we do not usually get ducks. It’s a little fenced-off triangle at the corner of the yard, up against the house, where there are a lot of potted plants. Later, Julie said that’s probably a good place for ducks to nest.

Two minutes later, back inside the house, I saw one of our garden squirrels scuttling around on a big palm tree immediately outside the window.

Two minutes after that, bringing the dog through the garden gate, I saw a skeletal-looking dragonfly hanging still next to the gatepost, about five feet off the ground. The dragonfly was dead and caught in a spiderweb. Somebody had a good breakfast this morning.

And twenty minutes after that, I was at the park and saw two adult Canada geese and about eight goslings, almost on the footpath, much closer than usual. The goslings are half-grown now, with their adult colors. The female and goslings were pecking at the ground. The gander stood by the path and ordered me and the dog to fuck off.

Kieran Culkin, who plays Roman on “Succession,” would be outstanding as Random in the miniseries of Roger Zelazny’s “Chronicles of Amber” that’s supposedly coming.

ME: I can drink three strong cups of coffee every day without any negative effects! ALSO ME: I wonder how I got this vicious insomnia, which is getting worse.

Cory Doctorow: Rent control works. It keeps housing costs down, doesn’t constrain supply, and sometimes increases that supply.

We need rent control, and we need to build plenty of more housing.

… regular housing for working people. Mr Market doesn’t want to build it, no matter how many “incentives” we dangle. Maybe it’s time we just did stuff instead of building elaborate Rube Goldberg machines in the hopes of luring the market’s animal sentiments into doing it for us.

The people who design public bathrooms like to change the faucet designs just to fuck with us. “Let’s see those fuckers try to wash their hands NOW,” they chortle.

BlueSky supports Markdown links when cross-posting from micro.blog (which is how I post to BlueSky. Let’s see if BlueSky also supports bold and italics.

Bluesky should be pronounced “blooski.”

Follow me for more branding tips.

Things I am grateful for this morning:

  • The dog does not smell as bad as she did this weekend. (She is very past due for a bath.)
  • The cats rarely throw up overnight on the path between my bed and the bathroom. (Sadly, Julie cannot say the same.)

Tens of millions Americans suffer from chronic, debilitating pain that often drives them to addiction, unemployment and homelessness. Nicholas Kristof reports in depth for The New York Times: Why Americans Feel More Pain

I meant to write “QR Codes” but instead wrote “QR Cods.” Microsoft Word tagged that spelling as fishy.

I’m doing some work in my home office this afternoon and I was literally distracted by a squirrel in the backyard.

Please enjoy this 11-second video of geese and goslings, which I saw at Lake Murray this morning.

Just as I got my mind un-blown about generative AI, I’m now learning about autonomous agents.

I tried doing a Midjourney cartoon to illustrate this point, on the general theme of my mind being blown, but all the drawings came out creepy when I was going for cute.

That time Heather Armstrong roasted me on her popular blog, dooce

I mentioned yesterday that I interviewed Heather Armstrong, who wrote the blog dooce and that she later wrote about how excruciating the experience was for her.

Armstrong took her own life this week. She was talented, funny, and insightful, and she helped invent professional blogging, which led to today’s social media influencers and indie journalists.

I was not offended by the piece Armstrong wrote after I interviewed her in 2006. I thought it was a fair rap. However, I was disappointed that I’d set out to interview someone I admired, and that person had found the experience horribly painful.

Yesterday, I said I was unable to locate Heather’s blog post, but a friend online found it and sent me the link this morning:

On being a total nutjob

A few weeks ago Jon and I gave an interview to an IT magazine for an article about accidental entrepreneurship. They wanted to know how this website now pays our mortgage when I originally started it so that I could make obnoxious fart jokes online. Short answer: I had to give a lot of head.

It was a phone interview, and they recorded it so that they could incorporate it into a podcast (when it’s posted I’ll link to it here), and I can honestly say that I have never been more uncomfortable giving an interview. One, it was only a couple days after I had discovered that someone I thought was a very cool person was making viciously mean comments about me in a public forum, and every time I answered a question into the phone I could hear in my head how this person would make fun of the way I said things. Two, in order to make sure that they had a clean edit for the podcast, the guy conducting the interview wouldn’t say anything for at least 10 seconds after I answered a question, and that disorienting pause made me think that my thrilling discourse had bored him into a coma.

Here’s the article that followed from that interview. It’s … fine. Not my best work, but not bad either.

Accidental Tech Entrepreneurs Turn Their Hobbies Into Livelihoods. InformationWeek interviewed five accidental entrepreneurs, including the founders of del.icio.us and Digg and the author of the blog Dooce, to find out how they freed themselves from the paycheck-to-paycheck grind.

The article I wrote is perhaps notable today as a time capsule of Internet history. I also interviewed Joshua Schachter, the co-founder of a bookmarking site called del.icio.us; Kevin Rose, who co-founded digg; Mena Trott, co-founder of Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type, LiveJournal, and TypePad; and Tom Davis, author of personal information manager software called Zoot, which is similar in mission to more recent applications like Evernote and Microsoft OneNote. (I’m pleased to see that Zoot Software is still around.)

I did a brief follow-up article a few years later, focusing on Armstrong alone: Maytag Crosses Popular Blogger, Gets Spun Dry. I talked at the end about how I felt about reading Armstrong’s article about our interview.

News of Armstrong’s death this week shook me in the same way Anthony Bourdain’s death shook me. Like Bourdain, she was struggling with demons, and the demons beat her.

I can’t help thinking that her living so much of her life in public, sharing her insecurities and self-loathing with millions of people, was not helpful to her mental state. And I need to think about how that relates to my own online habits.

I’m sad to learn about the death of pioneering blogger Heather Armstrong, author of dooce. She wrote candidly, movingly, and often hilariously about life and struggles with addiction and depression.

I interviewed her and her then-husband and business partner, Jon Armstrong, in the mid-2000s. The interview went badly and she wrote about the experience—hilariously—on her blog. I can’t currently find the article I wrote as a result of the interview or her blog post.

My deepest condolences to Armstrong’s family and friends.

I found IBM’s AI announcement yesterday confusing; this write-up by Tobias Mann on The Register helps clarify details.

IBM is pushing its deep enterprise expertise as a differentiator over AWS, Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI.

I think Watson is a brand liability at this point. It’s 2011’s hot technology—not 2023’s—and has the scent of overreach and failure on it.

The dog caught all three of her nutritional supplement treats in the air this morning, so that means it’s going to be a good day.

Mrs. Maisel spoiler speculation

In my head canon, the final episode is set today, in 2023. Midge and Susy are in their 90s and reconciled. And they’re on tour together, like George Burns. In the final scene, Susy goes into Midge’s bedroom in a hotel suite to find Midge died peacefully, in her sleep, fully made up and dressed, lying in bed with her will and funeral instructions under the pillow. Then cut to flashback to the Gaslight Club.

If you're looking to procrastinate, Midjourney is great for that. 

It's hard to have a nap when there is a cat standing on your pillow demanding attention. 

I’ve got a 1,500-word article due Thursday but I’m going to try to get it done today. Am writing. Don’t distract me.

Scientists have invented a technique for reading a person’s thoughts without the need for invasive surgery—in other words, they don’t have to crack open your skull to be able to tell what you’re thinking.

As I read the article, I thought this sounds like a software problem—which means if it’s cutting edge today, it’ll be in iPhones tomorrow. But then I read:

The participants in the study ran through all these tests while inside an fMRI machine, which is a clunky and immobile piece of laboratory equipment.

“Clunky and immobile” is one way to put it; that’s a five-ton machine and an entry level model costs $225,000.