Mitch's Blog

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.

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.

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.

Big Tech is parasitic on the news industry, but click taxing isn’t the answer, says Cory Doctorow, who has four better ideas.

jwz: “Today I learned that Church Molestation Liability Insurance is a thing that exists

You know what’s not a thing that exists? Drag Show and LGBTQ Bar Molestation Insurance. Because drag shows and LGBTQ bars aren’t threats to kids.

Disney Pulls Plug on $1 Billion Development in Florida. Daring Fireball: “Vote for Republicans, they’re good for business.”

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.

Today I learned the phrase “Taco Tuesday” is a registered trademark of the fast food chain Taco John. But Taco Bell is going to court to liberate “Taco Tuesday” for everyone.

Cory Doctorow: The IRS will do your taxes for you (if that’s what you prefer) “After years of expensively purchased delay, Turbotax and its fellow tax-profiteers are losing the fight to make you pay them to tell the government what it already knows.”

Today I learned Jeff Bezos’s biological father was a unicycle hockey player and owned and operated a bicycle shop.

Elon Musk: Work from home ‘morally wrong’ when some have to show up (CNBC). Wait til he finds out some people are billionaires while others struggle with poverty.

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.

I Will Defend Free Speech to the Death. Or Until an Autocrat Asks Me to Stop. “Let every petty dictator take notice: If you want Twitter to censor its users, just send me an email.” Via kottke.org

Want to read: Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders by John Mortimer 📚

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.

The Ugly Truth Behind “We Buy Ugly Houses”. ProPublica’s Anjeanette Damon, Byard Duncan and Mollie Simon investigate HomeVestors of America, which preys on homeowners desperate to sell, including older adults who have dementia or are in the final stages of terminal illness.

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.

You’re not uncool. Making friends as an adult is just hard. One important suggestion: Assume that people will like you when they meet you, says University of Maryland professor Marisa G. Franco. “We all have this tendency to think we’re more likely to be rejected than we actually are."

Bluesky should be pronounced “blooski.”

Follow me for more branding tips.

For years I’ve complained that there’s no online equivalent to being able to buy one issue of a magazine or newspaper. Columbia Journalism Review explains the business obstacles: Why micropayments will never be a thing in journalism.

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.

Today I learned there’s a “Babylon 5” animated movie coming. Casting details here. I’ll watch!

America’s Caffeine Addiction: Why Some Experts Say It’s Time to Quit. Good article, clickbait headline. Caffeine in moderation is fine, but some of y’all are pounding 10 cups of joe and energy drinks daily and that ain’t right.

Inside the Last Old-School Seltzer Shop in New York. “Good seltzer should hurt — it should be carbonated enough that it kind of stings the back of your throat.” (NYTimes / Corey Kilgannon. Photos and video by Juan Arredondo)

The Enduring Mystery of Barbara Lowe and the Lost ‘Jeopardy!’ Episodes. I had no idea “Jeopardy” fandom was so large and organized. (The Ringer / Claire McNear)

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.

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.

Don’t replace your people with ChatGPT or other AI services (Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols / Computerworld). ChatGPT and other AI aren’t ready to replace workers, and only an idiot would think they are.

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.

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.

I’m on the hot new social app. @mitchw.bsky.social. Instead of Bluesky, they should call it “déjà vu.”

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.

My latest: VMware customers should find ‘exit ramps’ ahead of Broadcom deal: Gartner. VMware customers need to look for alternatives in case Broadcom puts the screws on post-acquisition.

Paramount Can’t Say No to the Man Behind ‘Yellowstone’: $50,000 a Week for His Ranch, $25 Per Cow. By Erich Schwartzel and Joe Flint at The Wall Street Journal

ChatGPT is powered by these contractors making $15 per hour. Two OpenAI contractors spoke to NBC News about their work training the system behind ChatGPT. One worker, Alex Savreux, says the AI gig work helped pull him out of homelessness.

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

Marissa Mayer says she wishes she’d bought Hulu or Netflix instead of Tumblr. She also talks about the AI search race, technology fears, and other Yahoo regrets. (Tech Brew)

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.

TikTok tracked users who watched LGBTQ content. (WSJ) Imagine what a backward religious dictatorship like Saudi Arabia or Alabama could do with that information.

Elon Musk’s goal for Twitter is “unregretted user-minutes.” (WSJ) A good idea, but how do you measure that?

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.

Dave Winer: “I definitely want Bluesky to just go away. I don’t like it because if it gains traction it has potential of replacing Twitter as the festering turd in the middle of what should have been a vibrant growing market that keeps anything else from rising in competition with it."

Dave Winer: “As a user, I no longer want to have to visit five sites to see what’s new. I no longer want to have to copy/paste my writing into those same five sites." Preach it, Dave. I’m sick of that copy-pasting.

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’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.

jwz: Blue skies over Mastodon

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

Michael J. Fox says life with Parkinson’s is ‘getting harder’: “I’m not gonna be 80'

Boost Your ChatGPT Skills: 7 Gems Straight from OpenAI’s Dev Docs (TfTHacker)

5G Not Enough? Telecom Companies Look to 5.5G (WSJ) This time it’ll succeed, because it goes to 11.

What Is Pleroma?. Like Mastodon, but different.

Sexism Toward Secretaries: How Women Were Treated on the Job in the US (Teen Vogue)

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.

Interesting: “Work is starting on a protocol bridge between ActivityPub and the AT protocol (the protocol that Bluesky uses).”. So BlueSky users would be able to connect with folks on Mastodon and other Fediverse services, and vice-versa?

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.”

Techdirt’s Mike Masnick looks at options post-twitter. Six Months In: Thoughts On The Current Post-Twitter Diaspora Options

35 Ways Real People Are Using A.I. Right Now (The New York Times)

Why Your Family Name Was Not Changed at Ellis Island (and One That Was). (The New York Public Library)

Tech journalist and online safety expert Larry Magid describes a terrifying exchange with scammers who claimed to have kidnapped his wife.

Dropbox is laying off 500 people and pivoting to AI (The Verge). Dropbox is done. Steve Jobs was right. It’s a feature, not a company.

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.

Ron DeSantis’s Disney Miscalculation: ‘Disney Is Playing the Long Game’. Even Florida Republicans are questioning DeSantis’s strategy. (WSJ)

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.

Timothy Lee: “Why I’m not worried about AI causing mass unemployment. Software didn’t eat the world and AI won’t either.”

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.

Somebody swiped samples of the “world’s most expensive chocolate” from the newsroom refrigerator of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times. The samples were “needed for an article.”

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!