Steven Spainhouer’s son was working at Allen Premium Outlets when he received the phone call no father ever wants to hear.

“He said, ‘Dad, we have a shooting … I’m pulling people into the break room, and we’re going to lock the door,’” Spainhouer told CNN on Sunday.

The former Army and police officer raced to the scene, called 911 and “started counting the bodies on the ground … one, two, three, five, six, seven bodies.”

Spainhouer said he saw devastation unlike anything he had seen in the Army.

“I never imagined in 100 years I would be thrust into the position of being the first responder on the site to take care of people,” Spainhouer told CNN affiliate KTVT.

“The first girl I walked up to … I felt for a pulse, pulled her head to the side, and she had no face.”

He said one child survived after his mother shielded him from the bullets. But the mother was struck and killed.

“When I rolled the mother over, he came out,” Spainhouer told KTVT. “He was covered from head to toe, like somebody had poured blood on him.”

Texas mall massacre gunman identified as witnesses describe horror of the shooting spree that killed 8 people

AI text generators are writing more of the internet. More AI-generated books and personalized articles mean fewer clients buying human-written content. By Will Oremus at The Washington Post.

This seems to affect content mills paying pennies. I’m not worried—and I’m learning to use AI to make myself a more effective writer.

Republicans have the answer to food insecurity in America: More guns, ban abortion, and stamp out drag shows.

Lines stretch down the block at food banks as costs go up and pandemic aid expires.

The line outside Boston’s American Red Cross Food Pantry on a recent Saturday morning stretched the length of two football fields. The number of people filing into the red-brick industrial-zone warehouse on some days now exceeds the worst periods of the pandemic economic crisis and in April it had the second highest monthly traffic since it opened in 1982, according to David Andre, the director.

His organization, like food banks across the country, has been flooded with requests for help since food-stamp recipients were hit with a double blow: the expiration of a temporary boost in benefits put in place during the pandemic and onerous grocery prices, which are running 24% above pre-COVID levels.”

Parents are depriving their children of food to make the food budget last longer.

By Michael Dorning at Bloomberg News.

The oats only need to soak two hours and I have an excellent battery case for the phone. Me vs. Monday is a tie so far.

I’ve been awake less than a half hour and already found I forgot to make overnight oats last night and my phone is only 7% charge. Does Monday have a reset button?

Corporate greed, not workers, is the cause of inflation. We know this because CEOs tell us:

Call me a conspiratorialist if you must. But when CEOs get on earnings calls and brag about how covid, war, and scare-stories about inflation let them hike their prices and rake in never-before-seen profit margins, I think it’s reasonable to blame inflation on greed, not on workers getting a couple of relief checks during the lockdown.

Amazingly, this is a controversial position!

Cory Doctorow: “Look at all the great stuff we lost because of inflation scare-talk: We swapped pandemic aid, new spending and minimum wage hikes for wage suppression and mass layoffs.”

“Insufficiently Caffeinated” would be a good name for a band.

“… when you refuse to learn why something weird is happening online and just stop and gawk at it, you miss what is always a more interesting story.” — Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day

A good rule, online and in the world.

Ostromizing democracy: Cory Doctorow discusses a proposed new subdiscipline of political science, Analytic Democracy Theory, that studies collective decision-making—a/k/a “democracy”—and particularly how it goes wrong.

Also: Libertarians are claiming democracy never works because it doesn’t always work. And the myth of the Tragedy of the Commons and other anti-democratic misconceptions.

I used ChatGPT to do background research for an article

I’ve got an interview with a VP at a major vendor that I followed closely while at Light Reading but haven’t paid much attention to since. It’s for an article I’m doing on that company’s overall strategy.

I’m diving into some background to prepare for the interview, and I decided to start my research with ChatGPT. I asked: “What are some questions I can ask COMPANY-NAME about its overall strategy.” (I used the company name, which I’m redacting here.) ChatGPT had the following suggestions:

Can you tell me more about COMPANY’s current strategic priorities?

Who do you see as your competitors?

How does COMPANY differentiate itself from competitors in the industry?

Can you speak to any recent acquisitions or partnerships COMPANY has made, and how they fit into the company’s overall strategy?

How does COMPANY approach innovation and staying ahead of emerging technologies?

Can you discuss any challenges or opportunities you see on the horizon for COMPANY?

How does COMPANY prioritize and approach sustainability and corporate social responsibility?

Can you speak to COMPANY’s approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion within the company and in the broader industry?

How does COMPANY work with customers to understand and meet their needs?

Can you discuss any recent or upcoming product releases that you’re particularly excited about?

How does COMPANY approach talent acquisition and development, and what opportunities are there for employees to grow and advance within the company?

These are damn good questions. They’re generic—not specific to the company or even the tech industry—but helpful. This is a list of questions to get me started, and I’ll continue to work on them and polish them before the interview begins. A few questions are missing, but there are also a few I would not have thought to ask.

I’ve been using chat AI for a week now, and this is what I’m finding: It doesn’t do creative work, but it’s great as an assistant. Kevin Kelly said it’s like having an intelligent intern helping you out, and I think that’s a good metaphor.

Everything ChatGPT says is unreliable. Everything. It will all need to be verified.

I treat it like a source that’s plugged in to gossip. I’m used to dealing with those. They’re great, but you have to use the information right.

I ran this post through Grammarly after writing it, and Grammarly suggested corrections to phrasing in ChatGPT’s questions. One AI is now correcting another AI!

A new study by researchers at Duke University looks at the bumpy rollout of AI in healthcare systems, and describes what it’ll take to make AI into a useful tool for healthcare providers.

Meanwhile, a study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that ChatGPT “decisively bested doctors at providing high-quality, empathic answers to medical questions people posed on the subreddit r/AskDocs.” The responses were judged by a panel of three physicians with relevant medical expertise.

(Ars Technica / Beth Mole)

Nature red of tooth and claw came to the backyard: I was hanging here at my desk doing my thing and I looked out the window and saw a big bird of prey on the ground. I think it was an osprey, perhaps one of the ones I’ve seen at the park. It was 18 inches to 2 feet high, with something brown and lumpy at its feet, which I took to be dinner.

I got out the Nikon, which lives at my desk because we occasionally do get wildlife in the backyard. But the battery was dead! Curses!

I watched for a while, as the bird attempted to get off the ground with the carcass in its clutches. A couple of big crows were making a fuss too.


Finally, I went out on the deck and the bird skedaddled.

The brown lump turned out to be an ex-rabbit.

Julie tried to scoop up the rabbit with a couple of rakes, and into a trash bag, but that didn’t work, So she finally just picked up the rabbit with her hands covered in a plastic trash bag, the way a person does when picking up dog poop. After giving the rabbit a proper ceremony (“Bye-bye, bunny,” we said) he or she went into the trash bin.

And that was the excitement this afternoon.

Things I post that people seem to enjoy:

  • Original stuff I write or photograph
  • Memes, vintage ads, and other found media from the Internet.

On the other hand, very few people seem to care about links to articles, and I’m starting to get a strong “what’s the point?” feeling about my doing that kind of thing. I started linkblogging 15 or so years ago, when social media was very different and my boosting the signal–even in a small way–seemed to matter.

I will continue to post links to my own articles, but what’s the point of my posting a link to an article on The Washington Post, The Atlantic, or even to articles by people like Cory Doctorow and John Gruber who are a hundred times more widely read than I am?

I have been using Grammarly for a few weeks, and I am extremely impressed.

Today’s insight: I can toggle checking for the Oxford comma. I can switch it on for clients that like the Oxford comma, and off for clients that don’t.

Self-appointed virtue police at the National Center for Sexual Exploitation (NCSE) are putting the heat on Reddit to ban porn.

“If they cause enough fuss in the media, over and over, eventually Reddit will decide it’s not financially worthwhile to stand up for sanity, and they’ll just nuke porn out of convenience,” a moderator for … a 3-million subscriber community for adult content, told Motherboard. Like many adult subreddits, posts focused on a specific fetish come from both adult performers promoting their work, and other users who are reposting adult content they lifted from other sites without permission. “Eventually groups like NCOSE will get porn outlawed from the web in general. It’s just a matter of time, and reintroducing the laws several times under different acronyms until people get tired of fighting. I’m very pessimistic about this. Unfortunately, mindlessly shrieking ‘Won’t somebody please think of the children?’ over and over is a dangerously over-effective tactic.”

The moderator pointed out that bills like FOSTA/SESTA—which NCOSE supported and which is largely considered a failure—drive sex workers further underground to one effect: causing more precarity to workers.

“If they win, everyone loses, including themselves,” the mod said. “Likewise, in getting all the big, well-moderated porn sites taken down, these demented religious perverts will inevitably drive all porn underground into closed communities where there is no moderation or control whatsoever. It’s completely backwards. Big sites like Reddit are significantly safer and better moderated than the internet in general. Driving all porn underground is profoundly dangerous and stupid. These anti-sex religious groups are all alike: they’re all depraved, repressed perverts. Absolutely demented, brain-damaged imbeciles, absolutely self-defeating, too stupid to think two seconds in front of their faces.”

Emphasis added by me because I so, so love that quote.

Another porn moderator said:

“Do I particularly care about the fate of my subreddit should such a ban be applied? No. I don’t make money here, and moderation takes a time out of my day. I’ll start collecting post stamps, like my father before me.”

— Samantha Cole and Emmanuel Maiberg at Vox.com

I saw these baby geese and momma goose at the park this morning. Gosling photos will continue until morale improves. 📷

Using the word “risible” makes you a pompous weenie.

Optimism Optimized & Pessimism Prodded

“An interview about THE FUTURE with Hugo Winning author CHARLES STROSS! Fumblingly carried out by John Shirley:”

  • The Singularity “uncritically subsumes patterns of belief that originated in Christianity…. “

  • The Singularity’s origin in “the writings of the Russian Orthodox theologian Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov in the late 19th century…. “

  • “… it looks from where I’m standing as if many self-avowed atheists and rationalists are actually replacing the religion they rejected with an elaborate framework of beliefs that are structurally indistinguishable from it.”

  • Also: The slowing rate of IT progress, “information pollution,” and how hackers could create armies of assassins using smart light bulbs. “We’ve created a hideous grifters paradise, where everybody needs to know stuff that only network security administrators needed to be aware of a couple of decades ago, and made it a terrible time to be a paranoid schizophrenic.

Mastodon needs to be more user-friendly, or people will just continue going to the platforms supported by billionaires, despite evidence from Twitter and Facebook that those platforms aren’t great.

I want to like Mastodon, but it seems like work.

Donald G. McNeil Jr. cites many reasons why US pandemic response was disgracefully incompetent, and why it’s wrong to pin all the blame on Fauci, or make a saint out of him either.

Fauci is a courageous scientist and was a dutiful civil servant doing the best he could with little actual authority, trying to mitigate an ongoing disaster.

He was also the only powerful medical official with the stones to contradict Trump.

New York Times Magazine Interview With Dr. Fauci: Science Fiction

Gadgets I am tempted by:

This Ultimate Hacking Keyboard. I like the way it separates in two parts, with a trackball in the center. But it’s not worth $385 to me, so I’ll pass.

Also, this 4K 15.6-inch portable monitor would tempt me if I was still living the frequent business travel life.

And I’m STILL tempted, because I’ve been using laptop+external display for my desktop setup for most of the past 25+ years. But I never actually use the laptop display because it’s so much smaller than whatever external display I’m using. maybe a laptop + a smaller display, side-by-side.

But I’m not spending that money today.

Private equity finally delivered Sarah Palin’s death panels: Hospices are unregulated, heavily subsidized charnel houses.

Cory Doctorow:

The private healthcare sector is designed to deny care. Its first duty is to its shareholders, not its patients, and every dollar spent on care is a dollar not available for dividends.

…

Medicare pays private hospices $203-$1,462 per day to take care of dying old people – seniors that a doctor has certified to have less than six months left. That comes to $22.4b/year in public transfers to private hospices. If hospices [take] that $1,462 day-rate, they have lots of duties, like providing eight hours' worth of home care. But if the hospice is content to take the $203/day rate, they are not required to do anything. Literally. It’s just free money for whatever the operator feels like doing for a dying elderly person, including doing nothing at all.

…

This is absolute catnip for private equity – free government money, no obligations, no enforcement, and the people you harm are literally dying and can’t complain. What’s not to like?

One technique favored by corrupt hospices: Give the patients unlimited access to opioids, and when the cash fountain from the government runs dry, let the patients die of overdose. No autopsy when the victim dies in hospice care. Everybody wins!

This immature osprey was standing on the footpath at Lake Murray for a long time this morning; passers-by said he’d been there for hours. There’s an osprey nest on a utility pole high above the footpath. Probably the immature osprey fell out and could not fly up. Another osprey was standing just outside the nest, high above, watching. In the video, you can hear the immature bird call out plaintively.

I’ve been putting energy into Mastodon, but Bluesky looks interesting and may just lap Masto. I’ve been dismissive of Bluesky until now, but I just signed up for the private beta.

I keep wanting to read Nostr as “Nostril.”

Today I learned that Oxiclean does an amazing job cleaning years of coffee crust from the inside of my Hario insulated metal coffee server. It’s like new. Sadly, my coffee loses some flavor served from a clean container.

Today I am just saying nope to empty news calories.

Two articles about Tucker Carlson’s last broadcast? Another day I might have read one or both but today I just say nope.

A profile of a powerful Democratic political consultant who is apparently an awful person? Another day I would gobble that up, but today? Nope.

I hope I can keep this up.

This blog is a LGBTQ- and trans-friendly place.

I’m posting less about politics nowadays, and that’s a conscious decision by me.

But given all the hate coming out of the red states nowadays, it seems to me to be necessary to take a stand on this issue.

Anti-trans bigotry taps into the darkest impulses in human societies. It’s a step on a dark road that ends in genocide.

You should always start the day with gratitude. This morning I’m grateful that the cat vomit on my blanket was quick and easy to clean up.

Cory Doctorow’s “Red Team Blues” is the most exciting technothriller about a 67-year-old accountant you’ll read this year 📚

“Red Team Blues,” the latest novel by the prolific Cory Doctorow, is a gripping technothriller about billion-dollar cryptocurrency crime. I don’t often encounter fiction that pulls me in as hard as “Red Team Blues” anymore—I’m a jaded reader. But “Red Team Blues” kept me up well past my bedtime on more than one night, and I staggered around bleary-eyed at work the next day. I should send Cory a bill.

Continue Reading →

Cats are always disappointed in you, whereas dogs always think you’re amazing and you’re disappointed in yourself for failing to live up to their high regard.

Just a reminder that ALL the sticks in the forest are free. Go out and get yourself a cool stick. You earned it!

I’ll just switch notetaking apps and/or task managers and then my life will be perfect, right?

Tonight I wiki’d and googled about the Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon stories 📚and their author, Spider Robinson. The bar travels through time and space1 but its home base is Route 25A, in Suffolk County on Long Island, which is just a few miles from where I grew up. Robinson went to the same college I did, State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Then I wiki’d my home town, Huntington Township on Long Island, and was surprised to learn about many notable people who came from there, all of which I immediately forgot, because it is late and I am tired.

  1. Like the TARDIS on Doctor Who, if the TARDIS was a bar. ↩︎

Noncompete clauses and related employment agreements are indentured servitude.

Noncompetes epitomize MLK’s “socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.” They’re a way for employers to operate in a command economy where the power of the state can be mobilized against uppity workers who dare to seek a better deal…. “

— Cory Doctorow, How workers get trapped by “bondage fees”

📚I reread “Snow Crash, recently and recommend it. It gets better with age.

When people talk about “Snow Crash” today, all they talk about is the Metaverse. But there is a lot going on in that novel, and the Metaverse is only part of it.

I was pleasantly surprised to be reminded that the novel is satire. It’s funny. People talk so seriously about the book that I had forgotten. I laughed out loud at the payoff to the joke about the dog.

📷 Minnie and I hiked the Father Junipero Serra trail yesterday.

In his memo announcing the cuts Peretti took full responsibility, writing “I also want to be clear: I could have managed these changes better as the CEO of this company and our leadership team could have performed better…” which is why 180 other people will be getting fired instead of him. He’s learned so much, and going forward he’ll bring a new spirit of collaboration and humility to the AI garbage he replaces them with.

— Rusty Foster on the BuzzFeed News shutdown

California Isn’t Special: California’s housing problem isn’t what you think it is

Jerusalem Demsas at The Atlantic:

California’s housing policies are the same as everywhere in the US, but population pressure has made the housing situation here far worse.

In blue and red localities across the country, researchers find a “California-style” preference for single-family homes, hostility to density and renters, a tendency to segregate types of development (industrial, commercial, and residential), and a default toward delaying or blocking the construction of new homes, whether affordable or market-rate.

…

What has made California the worst in the country for housing is not uniquely bad policy but population growth running up against generically bad policy. If both San Francisco and a small, economically disadvantaged town in Mississippi enact a home-building moratorium, that’s going to hurt a lot more in the former, where millions of people want to live, than in the latter, where just a handful of people do.

Jobs and state population growth in California outstripped housing development. From 2010-20, the state permitted—not built, just permitted—one home for every 2.54 jobs it added. That leads the country; Utah permitted one home for every 1.57 jobs.

Legislation to legalize high-density housing is proving politically impossible in California, and elsewhere around the US too.

Terrible housing policy isn’t California’s legacy; it’s America’s.

I’d love to see a Star Trek miniseries focused on young James Kirk, in his first posting to a bridge crew.

I always preferred the TV series Kirk to the movie Kirk. In the series Kirk, follows the chain of command and obeys orders, even when he thinks the orders are stupid. Movie Kirk is a cowboy.

So let’s call the series “Ensign Kirk.” We know that Kirk in Starfleet Academy was a grind, so how does he transform from that to the swashbuckling youngest Captain of a Constitution-class starship in Starfleet history?

Cox shut down Internet service for scheduled maintenance this morning, because apparently it’s 1983 and people don’t need Internet to work from home.

I am not feeling a lot of love for Cox right now.

I had no blue checkmark before having no blue checkmark was cool.

Instagram is letting users put up to five links in their profile and I guess that’s what counts for innovation at Meta. Also, Linktree had $1B+ valuation as of a year ago, and now that’s gone. I thought NFTs were a ridiculous investment but Linktree’s business seems even more ridiculous.

Ever since the dog snatched half of Julie’s Reuben sandwich from the kitchen counter on Sunday, I have been making jokes about the subject.

Like: The dog doesn’t want treats anymore; she wants more corned beef. Or: The dog asked us if we could swing by the deli and bring her back another sandwich.

Julie says she’s sick of these jokes, but I know she doesn’t mean it, so I will keep them coming.

I wonder whether the 12.9” iPad has a future.

Seems like almost anybody thinking about buying one of the big iPads would be better off with a MacBook Air.

For most people, the 12.9” iPad is an ungainly platypus, neither mammal nor bird.

The only people who seem like they’d want the 12.9” iPad would be graphic artists and other people who really, really need that big display and touchscreen and Pencil support.

The 12.9” iPad is too big and heavy to be as portable as the smaller iPads. You can’t hold that 12.9” iPad in your hands for long, unless you’re Andre the Giant. And iPad OS isn’t as versatile as MacOS.

I have an 11-inch iPad Air with a Folio keyboard that I use as a mini-laptop when I want something like that, and I have an iPad mini that I use every day for reading and social media.

Honestly, I’d probably be happier with a MacBook Air than with the iPad Air, but I can’t justify the expense of buying a new MacBook right now.

Truthfully, the iPad mini was a foolish purchase, as I already had the iPad Air. But, still, I’m glad I bought the mini, because it’s my primary iPad now.

Cory Doctorow has got me thinking about doing a better job structuring threads on Mastodon and Twitter.

Damn you, Cory, I don’t have time for this.

*shakes fist*

Ever since I was a little kid, I have thought men’s suits from the 1930s-50s looked great.

When I was a little kid, I watched old black-and-white reruns of Superman, Abbott & Costello, and particularly John Astin in The Addams Family, and thought to myself, damn, those guys looked sharp. Particularly the double-breasted suits.

Well, Lou Costello didn’t look sharp. But Bud Abbot? Sure. A good suit made even Abbott look good.

That feeling continues to this day.

We’ve been watching a few 1930s-50s movies, including the first couple of Thin Man movies (1930s), “My Man Godfrey” (1936), and just this weekend, “Executive Suite” (1954). And I think: Why don’t men dress like that anymore?

Why do we all go around dressed like hobos and toddlers?

And then a couple of days ago, I thought, you know, I could just buy a vintage suit.

I don’t know where I would wear it.

The dog would like me to go to the deli again today and pick up another sandwich. Less lean this time. Not too fatty, but a little more fatty than yesterday.

Julie put a lean corned beef Reuben sandwich on the kitchen counter and left the room for a minute. While she was out, the dog snatched the sandwich off the counter and ate half of it.

The dog has a death wish.

I did 14,000 steps yesterday, about 4,000 more than usual. Climbed Cowles Mountain, about 3.4 miles distance and 890 feet elevation. Then got home and walked the dog for a mile. My knees would like to discuss my choices.

Amazon Web Services sales and support teams are currently “spending much of their time helping customers optimize their AWS spend so they can better weather this uncertain economy,” says CEO Andy Jassy in an annual letter to shareholders.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/17/amazon_annual_shareholder_letter_aws/

AWS customers are “not cost-cutting as much as cost-optimizing so they can take their resources and apply them to emerging and inventive new customer experiences they’re planning,” Jassy said.

(This is pretty much what we’d expect Amazon to say. It may also be true.)

Amazon invested heavily in AWS during the 2007-8 economic downturn and saw that investment pay off. Jassy sees its “Kuiper” satellite broadband program as being at a similar stage today.

And AWS is putting greater focus on custom silicon.

Cats have no idea how arms work. They’ll park behind you or six feet away, and demand scritches. Cats think arms are 7-foot-long tentacles.

Anxious about the coming week? Cowles Mountain has a message for you.

I saw this sign while hiking today. That’s Lake Murray in the background.

In defense of Mastodon threads (and Twitter threads too):

Threading an essay requires the author to compose it in stanzas, each of which is a standalone, complete thought – and that means that readers can engage with each though separately, by replying to just that stanza.

For me, that stanza-by-stanza discussion – a kind of pro-fisking structural affordance – is the most interesting and powerful innovation of the social media thread. I

— Cory Doctorow, How To Make the Least-Worst Mastodon Threads.

Great insight—but too much work for me, as a general thing.

It’s been years since I hiked Cowles Mountain and I think it’s gotten taller.

Oh my knees.

Good hike though.

Elon Musk’s Free-Speech Charade Is Over

Musk’s “‘free-speech absolutism’ was mostly code for a high tolerance for bigotry toward particular groups, a smoke screen that obscured an obvious hostility toward any speech that threatened his ability to make money.”

Adam Serwer at The Atlantic:

Conservatives built an entire body of jurisprudence around the First Amendment’s protection of corporate speech when large corporations were reliably funding Republican causes and campaigns…. But once some corporate actors decided it was in their financial interests to make decisions that the GOP disliked, conservative lawyers then turned around and argued that speech was no longer protected if it was used for purposes they opposed.

…

For them, free speech is when they can say what they want, and when you can say what they want.

I shot this photo at Lake Murray using the pano setting on the iPhone. It came out a little wobbly.

We watched “Executive Suite” (1954). The powerful head of a nationwide furniture company drops dead on a Friday evening without naming a successor, and five vice presidents fight for the presidency over the next 24 hours. Features the highest high tech of its era: person-to-person calls, intercoms and telegrams. Pretty good movie.

Slouching is bad for your back, unless you’re in bed with a cat in your lap.

When Picard and his posse took their stations on the bridge, I expected them to land in their seats and go “oy” like a bunch of old Jews.