We’ve moved from a system where corruption hides in shadows to one where it operates in plain sight, confident that we’ve all accepted it as just how things work.

— Mike Masnick, We Have All Become Too Comfortable With Corruption www.techdirt.com/2025/06/2…

I think I just don’t like Twitter-like services anymore — not Mastodon and not Bluesky

I was a Twitter addict in the late 2000s and 2010s, but I lost interest in Twitter even before its change of ownership. I think I’ve lost interest in reading or writing prose chopped up into 300- or 500-character chunks.

Too much of Bluesky is people being outraged about politics and posting unverified news rumors. Too much of Mastodon is people being outraged about politics, unverified news rumors, and posting about technology issues that I’m not involved in. I still check both daily, but my heart isn’t in it.

Nowadays, I like blogs, newsletters and news and magazine websites, like I did in the 2000s.

I like Tumblr and Reddit. They’re great sources for the memes, vintage photos and vintage ads that I’m addicted to, as well as odd, delightful personal essays. I post regularly to Tumblr. I rarely post to Reddit — it’s too much work running the gauntlet of moderators and rules.

Seriously, I am surprised how much I continue to like Tumblr.

I like the community and connections on Facebook, but I hate Facebook as a software platform. Too much noise! It’s like trying to carry on a quiet conversation in a noisy, rocking subway car, with a smelly guy next to you shouting randomly.

Here’s where to find me on those other platforms, if you’re interested. Not on that list: Facebook. I’m trying to discourage people from connecting with me on Facebook. Eventually, no one will be left connecting with me on Facebook, and I can pull the plug.

The rise and fall of the mail chute

Lewin Day at Hackaday:

Born in 1848 in Albany, New York, James Goold Cutler would come to build his life in the state. He lived and worked in the growing state, and as an architect, he soon came to identify an obvious problem. For those occupying higher floors in taller buildings, the simple act of sending a piece of mail could quickly become a tedious exercise. One would have to make their way all the way to a street level post box, which grew increasingly tiresome as buildings grew ever taller.

Cutler saw that there was an obvious solution—install a vertical chute running through the building’s core, add mail slots on each floor, and let gravity do the work. It then became as simple as dropping a letter in, and down it would go to a collection box at the bottom, where postal workers could retrieve it during their regular rounds. Cutler filed a patent for this simple design in 1883. He was sure to include a critical security feature—a hand guard behind each floor’s mail chute. This was intended to stop those on lower levels reaching into the chute to steal the mail passing by from above. Installations in taller buildings were also to be fitted with an “elastic cushion” in the bottom to “prevent injury to the mail” from higher drop heights.

More Than 90 Percent Of ICE Detainees Have Never Been Convicted Of Violent Crimes

Tim Cushing at Techdirt:

Who are we ejecting from this country at the rate of dozens of people per day? Hardworking, law-abiding migrants who’ve done nothing more than seek jobs, pay taxes, and carve out a better life for their loved ones. The government knows what it’s doing. After all, it already has all the evidence it needs to show its mass deportation program has nothing to do with making this nation safer or more secure.

…

The pretense of making America safer has been discarded. America won’t get any safer, just as surely as it won’t get any greater under this president. For years, it’s been known that migrants commit fewer crimes than natural-born citizens.

…

It’s nothing more than a racist purge…. just looking at ICE’s numbers, it’s easy to see this isn’t about ejecting criminals. It’s about getting rid of non-white people.

Mamdani and the Moguls of Madness: Will he be a good mayor? Nobody knows. But the hysteria is revealing.

Paul Krugman:

I was enormously cheered by Mamdani’s victory, not because I think he’ll be a great mayor — honestly I have no idea — but because a Cuomo victory would have been deeply depressing. Why? Because it would have been an affirmation of elite impunity and lack of accountability. Cuomo is by all accounts a terrible person, and his bungled response to Covid killed people. For him to make a comeback simply because he’s part of the old boys’ club and had the big money behind him would have said that the rules only apply to the little people.

There’s a huge argument among Democrats about whether they need to run more centrist candidates. I am not ready to weigh in on that debate. But if you’re going to take that side, find better centrists. I mean, are Cuomo and Eric Adams the best you can do?

…

Oh, and centrist Democrats often urge leftier types to rally behind their nominees in general elections. I agree. Anyone claiming that there’s no difference between the parties is a fool. But this deal has to be reciprocal. Zamdani will be the Democratic nominee, and anyone calling themselves a Democrat should support him.

U.S. Army veteran Sae Joon Park took two bullets in the spine defending America. Now he’s being deported. Meanwhile, ICE has arrested only 6% of known immigrant murderers. Also, ICE arrested a pregnant Tennessee woman who had a stillbirth while in detention. nextdraft.com/archives/…

The first meeting of RFKJr.’s CDC vaccination panel was “packed with anti-vaccine talking points and arguments” and they’re questioning all childhood vaccines. Children will die unnecessarily if this committee has its way. arstechnica.com/health/20…

Trailer for “London Calling,” starring Josh Duhamel, about a down on his luck hitman who has to babysit the teen-age son of his new crime boss. Looks good. youtu.be

If you're normal, people will vote for you actually

Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day:

Social media does not turn a bad candidate into a viable one. It’s just amplification. And the same platforms that can amplify the ugliness and hatred and resentment of someone like Trump can amplify the joy and earnestness and seemingly genuine conviction of a candidate like Mamdani. It cannot, however, make voters forget that a candidate like Cuomo killed their grandparents during COVID or that current New York Mayor Eric Adams is a genuine maniac. There’s no magic trick. Mamdani ran a regular ass campaign where he spoke clearly about what he cared about and was normal about it and it worked. Revolutionary! And I understand why this would all be very threatening to Democrats, seeing as how most of them do not seem to care about anything.

Congress, Now More Than Ever, Our Nation Needs Your Cowardice. theonion.com

⁠⁠Now is not the time for bravery or valor! This is the time for protecting your own hide and lining your pocket…. ⁠This is the time to let the wave of apathy and indifference roll over you as you think about getting a really nice renovation to your house in Kalorama.

An MIT student developed a system that uses AI-generated polymer masks to restore damaged paintings in hours rather than months. arstechnica.com

⁠⁠The Supreme Court just gave the Trump administration a green light to traffic humans to random countries around the world–including war zones where migrants face torture, slavery, or death. And they did so while offering literally zero explanation for why this is legal or constitutional.

— techdirt.com

The CDC’s once-revered vaccine panel is now a “farce,” and calls are growing to cancel its upcoming meeting. arstechnica.com

Infectious diseases physician Fiona Havers, who recently resigned from the agency in protest, said the CDC’s vaccine processes have been “corrupted in a way that I haven’t seen before.”

She said:

If it isn’t stopped, and some of this isn’t reversed, like, immediately, a lot of Americans are going to die as a result of vaccine-preventable diseases.

“The federal government has effectively given up on regulating driverless vehicles. That’s good news for Elon Musk.” theverge.com

“One of the most tech-savvy judges in the US has ruled that Anthropic is within its rights to scan purchased books to train its Claude AI model, but that pirating content is legally out of bounds.” theregister.com

The résumé is dying, and AI is holding the smoking gun. HR departments are being overwhelmed by “hiring slop” — applicants using AI to bulk-generate resumes. arstechnica.com

We’ve been traveling, and I’ve been mostly unplugged from the news during that time. I see we’re going to war in the Middle East again. I’m sure it will go well this time. Fourth time’s a charm, right?

A Republican lawmaker suffered delays receiving care for her life-threatening ectopic pregnancy, blames the left. Classic MAGA: Pass a bad law and then blame the people who opposed the law for the problems the law creates. theguardian.com

House staffers can’t have WhatsApp on their devices. The chief administrative officer claims the messaging app is “high-risk.” theverge.com

As ICE Raids Continue, Parts of a Vibrant City Go Empty. Missing vendors, markets of rotting food, and families too frightened to leave home: this is life in Los Angeles now. motherjones.com

“Let’s make sure that Venice is not remembered as a postcard venue where Bezos had his wedding but as the city that did not bend to oligarchs.” nytimes.com

Overheard: “Sometimes the toast falls off the plate and lands butter side up on another plate.”

A friend asked a group of tech journalists the most time we spent at an individual publication. I spent a long time poring over my memory and LinkedIn profile and am still not sure.

Mapping my career path is like working out the timelines of the Back to the Future movies. Or unbending a pretzel.

The Micro Macintosh is a programmable $43 miniature reproduction of the 1986 Macintosh Plus with a 0.85-inch screen that “runs animated images of the Mac OS 7 operating system and a captivating game of Pong.” It “serves as a delightful desktop toy that pays tribute to a bygone era of computing.” tindie.com

California Senator Alex Padilla was assaulted, handcuffed,forced to the ground and detained when he tried to confront Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at a press conference. politico.com

Tape, glass, and molecules – the future of archival storage. Tape is the standard for archival storage, but it has to be rewritten every five years or so, which is expensive. Microsoft and other vendors are working on technologies using etched glass and DNA that could last hundreds or thousands of years. theregister.com

Move over Disinformation Dozen — Meet the Hateful Eight. RFK Jr. is stacking the federal vaccine advisory council with anti-vaccine lunatics and grifters. Many people will die because of this. Violet Blue’s Threat Model

This article about the Dull Men's Club starts playfully, then becomes sad and moving

Meet the members of the Dull Men’s Club: ‘Some of them would bore the ears off you’. By Susan Chenery at The Guardian:

The 18th-century English writer Samuel Johnson once wrote, “He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others'. It’s a sentiment eagerly embraced by The Dull Men’s Club. Several million members in a number of connected Facebook groups strive to cause dullness in others on a daily basis. In this club, they wear their dullness with pride. The duller the better. This is where the nerds of the world unite.

“Posts that contain bitmoji-avatar-things are far too exciting, and will probably get deleted,” warn the rules of the Dull Men’s Club (Australian branch).

Maintaining standards of dullness is paramount. Alan Goodwin in the UK recently worried that seeing a lesser spotted woodpecker in his garden might be “a bit too exciting” for the group.

…

Australian member Andrew McKean, 85, had dullness thrust upon him. He is, dare I say it, an interesting anomaly in the Dull Men’s Club, a shift in tone. Three years ago, he had a heart attack. He recovered but the hospital’s social workers deemed him unable to care for his wife, Patricia, and they moved to a nursing home in New South Wales. There is nothing droll or amusing about being stuck in a nursing home. But he has elevated the dull institutional days into something poetic and poignant by writing about them and posting “to you strangers” in The Dull Men’s Club.

His life before moving into a home had been anything but dull. An electronics engineer, in 1967 he was connected to the Apollo moon mission. Then a career in the television broadcasting industry took him to the UK, Malta, West Africa and Canada.

Once a traveller who lived in a sprawling house at Pittwater who spent his days in the sea, now his life is reduced to a single room – “Every trace of my existence is contained within these walls.” Sitting in his worn, frayed armchair by the window “watching the light shift across the garden, he writes about ageing and “the slow unfolding of a life”.

He is surrounded by the “faint hum of machines and the shuffle of slippers … the squeak of a wheelchair, the smell of disinfectant”.

…

He lives for the bus and a few hours of freedom in a life that has shrunk. On the bus “something stirs in us, a flicker of youth perhaps”. He treats himself to KFC, “the sharp tang of it a small rebellion against the home’s bland meals”.

He sits on a park bench, an old man with a stick, invisible and inconspicuous to the people rushing past “watching the world’s parade, its wealth and hurry”. He observes it all and reports back to the Dull Men’s Club. “Though the world may not stop for me, I will not stop for it. I am here, still breathing, still remembering. And that in itself, is something.”

How Far Does $1,000 Take You on a Trip to London? We Found Out. The challenge: three days in the British capital with a teenager on spring break — Tom Vanderbilt. Thanks, Julie! wsj.com

Currently reading: Washington by Ron Chernow 📚I was going after Chernow’s new Mark Twain biography. I was a Mark Twain fanatic in my teens and 20s and read several biographies of him. I was eager to see what was new to be said about Mark Twain.

But I stumbled across this book and realized that I do not know a lot about George Washington’s life, so I decided to read this instead.

Julie and I went to visit Mount Vernon and Monticello in November 2016, and I thought then how those two presidents stood as Titans compared to the 🤡 who was then about to enter the White House. Everything that’s happened in the last nine years has confirmed that opinion.

Stand up for your neighbors in San Diego

In light of recent ICE raids at the Federal Courthouse and Buona Forchetta Restaurant in San Diego and in Los Angeles, and the outrageous and dangerous Republican overreaction to Los Angeles protests, it’s important for all of us to find ways to turn our grief and outrage into action for our immigrant neighbors.

ICE raids are violent and excessive, but the community stepped up to fight back and block ICE’s departure. Here in San Diego, ICE responded with military tactics, including flashbangs and smoke grenades. As we write this (Sunday afternoon, June 8), it’s unclear how the situation in Los Angeles will play out. But it’s clear that Republicans want a mass, violent confrontation with protesters, and if they can’t find the occasion, they’ll manufacture it. And Republicans want to break blue states, starting with California.

Here are some things you can do to help preserve freedom and help your neighbors, compiled from local community organizations:

The No Kings March is Sunday, June 14, at Waterfront Park in San Diego. It’s part of a national day of action. See the link, preceding for information on that event and other No Kings events elsewhere in the county and online.

Volunteer to help elect Democrat Paloma Aguirre as County Supervisor in the July 1 special election. If Aguirre loses, the County Board of Supervisors flips Republican. The Aguirre campaign is asking people to canvass and phone-bank. While the district is overwhelmingly Democratic, Republican turnout is high, making this an at-risk election for us, as Democratic Party community leader Cynara Kidwell Velazquez noted at the recent June meeting of the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club.

What can you do if you see harassment? Sign up for bystander intervention training by Right To Be. That organization has classes to help protect against harassment of immigrants, women, disabled people, Jews, Muslims, LGBTQIA+ people, in public spaces, online, in the workplace, and so on.

Submit a public comment to your San Diego County Supervisor by June 12 to urge them to increase funding for immigration legal services. You can also email your county supervisor directly.

Also, tell the San Diego City Council that they should be funding community services, not surveillance tech. While our neighborhoods in San Diego are in desperate need of essential services such as libraries, parks and public restrooms, the city is cutting funding for those essential services, instead spending millions of dollars on a mass surveillance system: the Flock Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) and “smart” streetlight cameras—wasting money and threatening our privacy and civil liberties.

According to a petition on Change.org: “Flock ALPR tries to track the public movements of every individual in San Diego, 24/7, aligning with authoritarian agendas and the concerning trend of increasing surveillance. Instead of fostering community safety through positive and supportive measures, we are being forced into a society that values monitoring over meaningful safety solutions.” Sign the petition to oppose mass surveillance now.

Further resources:

I wrote this for an upcoming issue of the newsletter of the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club, along with fellow board member Janet Castaños .

S2E3 “The Last of Us.” Catherine O’Hara is a really bad therapist.

Reading the news since yesterday afternoon, this quote occurs to me:

“Wonderful things can happen,” Vincent said, “when you plant seeds of distrust in a garden of assholes.”

— Elmore Leonard, “Glitz”

I am reading "The Ministry of Time," a first novel by Kaliane Bradley, and I am finding it brilliant and compelling.

I was feeling like I was in a rut in my fiction reading — same genres, same authors — so I looked at this year’s line-up of Hugo nominees. This proved to be an excellent decision on my part.

The first book on the list was by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I tried a previous book by him and did not care for it. So I moved on to the second book in the list. That was the Bradley novel. The marketing blurb hooked me:

A time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all: Welcome to The Ministry of Time, the exhilarating debut novel by Kaliane Bradley.

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.

She is tasked with working as a “bridge”: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as “1847” or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,” “Spotify,” and “the collapse of the British Empire.” But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.

In conclusion:

  • If you’re a science fiction fan, and you’re looking for something new to read, the Hugo nominees are an excellent place to start
  • Good job, whoever wrote the marketing blurb for “The Ministry of Time.”

I saw this crow on a utility pole. It has something to say.

“Now I’m thinking about deep fried mushrooms.”

— Julie, while watching the climactic mass battle in Season 2, Episode 2 of “The Last of Us”

This morning, I spilled a little boiling water on my hand while making coffee. I shouted FUCK FUCK FUCKITY FUCK while waving my hand in the air. What do you shout when you do yourself a slight injury?

Good morning everyone! I hope I get lots of customer satisfaction surveys today!

For a happy life, spend money on experiences, not things.

Unless the things are luggage to use on your experiences.

Can’t we do better than building open source versions of the social media silos that rose in the 2010s?

[The] core driver and cause of the low standing of the Democratic Party right now is not wokeness or immigration or Joe Biden’s age but the fact that Democrats are simply not effective at advancing the policies they claim to support or protecting the constituencies they claim to defend. Put simply, they are some mix of unable and unwilling to wield power to achieve specific ends.

And:

…if your goal is to show that you can address the needs and fears of ordinary citizens, the best way to do that is to try to address those needs and fears, and do so as they exist in this moment.

— Democrats’ Hamlet Moment Isn’t the Start of a Solution But the Heart of the Problem (Josh Marshall / Talking Points Memo)

I am learning, not for the first time, that the Aeropress is a forgiving way to make coffee, coffee is forgiving of different ways to make it, and you can make yourself insane trying to follow all the various Aeropress recipes you find on the internet.

For Aeropress coffee nerds

My coffee, which I make in an Aeropress XL, hasn’t been great lately, so I experimented with hotter water this morning.

We have a third tap on our kitchen sink, an instant hot water tap suitable for making hot beverages. However, it does not dispense boiling water, which is not up to code. I wondered whether that was the problem — whether the water was simply not hot enough. So I tried boiling water in a kettle instead.

According to the Internet, you should not use boiling water with the Aeropress. Instead, you use water at 195 degrees Fahrenheit. We don’t have a kettle with a thermostat, so I asked ChatGPT how long I should let water sit off the boil to get to the proper temperature. ChatGPT said two to three minutes. This is within the range of answers I find when I Google the question, so I tried it this morning.

I think that improves the flavor. The coffee is hotter, which is better.

ICE threw flash-bang grenades at a crowd and handcuffed a manager in a raid on a popular San Diego restaurant late Friday afternoon. Appalling. Times of San Diego

Annie Andrews is running against Lindsey Graham. Her campaign video here is outstanding. A case study in how Democrats should communicate. YouTube

I supported Newsom until this year but he is showing himself as a cynical hack who turns whichever direction he perceives the wind blowing. He perceives transphobia, xenophobia and anti-woke as fashionable now so he’s happy to embrace those beliefs. sfstandard.com

A genocide is happening in Gaza. We should say so.

Shadi Hamid at The Washington Post:

For Israel’s defenders, the cognitive dissonance is difficult to bear. I get it. Many Americans have long seen Israel as an ally, a country that shares our values — a Western, liberal outpost in a sea of supposed Arab barbarism. But Israel’s actions in Gaza should shatter that perception.

That a close ally of the United States would declare its intention to displace a population is remarkable. But many Israelis, including senior officials and ministers, have been saying this for a long time. Just one month into the war, Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter said, “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” explicitly referencing the 1948 expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their land. In December 2023, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich stated that “what needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration” and that having “100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not 2 million” would allow the desert to “bloom.” This month, Smotrich offered further clarification. The goal is to leave Gaza “totally destroyed,” he said. These are not opposition figures or fringe elements. These are members of the Israeli cabinet.

Also:

As the Economist recently reported, new research suggests that as many as 109,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel – which would represent about 5 percent of the prewar population. Even the lower-bound estimate – 77,000 killed – is 44 percent higher than the Gaza Ministry of Health’s figure of 53,500 dead.

About 90 percent of Gazans have been displaced, many multiple times, forced to flee from one “safe zone” to another as Israel’s military levels entire neighborhoods. More than 90 percent of housing units have been destroyed or damaged.

The engineered humanitarian emergency is equally damning. Israel has weaponized starvation as a method of warfare, blocking food and supplies from entering the territory for 10 weeks. The new Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report finds that 22 percent of the population faces catastrophic levels of food insecurity, with 71,000 children younger than 5 facing acute malnutrition.

Also:

Faced with assault on a population of this magnitude, one might expect universal condemnation. Yet, when atrocities are committed by a country perceived as sharing our values, powerful psychological forces activate to protect our beliefs. Israel can’t be that bad. It’s an advanced nation, where people speak English, vote in regular elections and launch tech start-ups. They seem like us….

Confirmation bias plays a part here, too. Imagine you had a close friend or family member who was accused of unspeakable crimes. You’d have strong incentives to explain away their actions — or, better yet, deny that they committed them in the first place. To admit that someone you love was capable of evil can simply be too difficult, because in some sense that realization would implicate you as well.

The way to end the Gaza war has been clear for nearly a year

David Ignatius at The Washington Post:

What’s agonizing is that Israeli military and intelligence leaders were ready to settle this conflict nearly a year ago. Working with U.S. and Emirati officials, they developed a plan for security “bubbles” that would contain the violence, starting in northern Gaza and moving south, backed by an international peacekeeping force that would include troops from European and moderate Arab countries.

In place of Hamas, a Palestinian government, backed by a reformed Palestinian Authority, would take political control. This wasn’t a pipe dream. Officials worked out a detailed road map. They began planning to train the Palestinian security force that would replace Hamas. This was, as golfers like to say, “a makeable putt.”

But Netanyahu said no. His right-wing coalition partners demanded “total victory,” even though they couldn’t define just what that meant.

Also:

The Israeli-Palestinian dispute might seem intractable, but ending this conflict would be relatively easy. I’m told that Israeli military officials keep working on “day after” plans, honing details as recently as this week. But they have had no political support from Netanyahu.

“The ‘exit ramp’ has been staring us in the face for a long time,” argues Robert Satloff, director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. It’s a mix of Arab states and Gaza Palestinians, operating under a Palestinian Authority umbrella, he explains. “It is messy, with overlapping responsibilities and lots of dotted lines. But it checks all the boxes to enable the process of reconstruction and rehabilitation to get off the ground.”

“Four people have died as thousands of Palestinians burst into a United Nations warehouse in Gaza, tearing away sections of the building’s metal walls in a desperate attempt to find food.” The Guardian

Trump is a scammer and scammers are his “most important, best-served constituency…. The Trump II presidency is the most scam-friendly presidency in history, and everyone knows it. The scammers are lining up to get their scams okayed.” Cory Doctorow

Support for Palestinians and opposition to Israel are not anti-Semitism. Claims that they are anti-Semitism promote anti-Semitism and make my life as an American Jew incrementally more dangerous.

Never Look at Your Files Again: Wikilinks, Tags, and Search. cartography.pika.page — Use a personal wiki as your organization system for documents on your computer. This guide is for iA Writer, but the principle works with Obsidian, NotePlan, DevonThink, HookMark or any app that supports linking.

One of the women who participates in one of my regular weekly video meetings had her two dogs playing tug-of-war behind her. This should be a feature of every corporate meeting.

The ugly truth behind ICE agents’ masks. Will Bunch Newsletter — They can’t find enough hardened criminals to deport, so instead they’re going after college students and essential workers.

for every undocumented immigrant who commits a murder that gets the top-of-the-hour treatment from Fox News, there are hundreds of law-abiding college students and highway construction workers that ICE will instead target. The immoral stain of an American government’s war on these good people, led by goon squads who hide behind ski masks, may never be fully erased.

I just replicated the “I have a drinking problem” move from “Airplane” and not on purpose. How has your day been?

Ehud Barak, former Israeli Prime Minister, condemns Israeli war crimes in Gaza:

What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians. We’re not doing this due to loss of control in any specific sector, not due to some disproportionate outburst by some soldiers in some unit. Rather, it’s the result of government policy – knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated. Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.

AI is a new iteration of the industrial revolution, and not in a good way

Cory Doctorow at Pluralistic:

As has been the case since the Industrial Revolution, the project of automation isn’t just about increasing productivity, it’s about weakening labor power as a prelude to lowering quality.

Also:

The point of using automation to weaken labor isn’t just cheaper products – it’s cheaper, defective products, inflicted on the unsuspecting and defenseless public who are no longer protected by workers' professionalism and pride in their jobs.

And:

When techies describe their experience of AI, it sometimes sounds like they’re describing two completely different realities – and that’s because they are. For workers with power and control, automation turns them into centaurs, who get to use AI tools to improve their work-lives. For workers whose power is waning, AI is a tool for reverse-centaurism, an electronic whip that pushes them to work at superhuman speeds. And when they fail, these workers become “moral crumple zones,” absorbing the blame for the defective products their bosses pushed out in order to goose profits.

Cory connects:

  • The 19th Century Luddite movement — the Luddites get an unfair bum rap in this one. The Luddites were right and they were not anti-technology.
  • The recent incident where the Chicago Sun-Times included AI hallucinations in its list of recommended books for summer. The writer unfairly gets the blame.
  • And how AI is enabling Amazon to start treating tech workers as badly as warehouse workers.

Some of my favorite comfort movies

Writers for The Guardian list their favorite rewatchable comfort movies: Guardian writers on their ultimate feelgood movies: ‘ Pure sugar-rush’

A few of my favorites are on this list: “You’ve Got Mail,” “When Harry Met Sally,” “The Paper,” and “Defending Your Life.” There are a few more that are new to me, and that I’ve bookmarked for watching.

“Pink Flamingoes” is an interesting choice for a favorite comfort movie.

More of my choices:

“Almost Famous” (2000) is a fictionalized memoir by Cameron Crowe about how he became a Rolling Stone correspondent as a teenager in the 1970s and toured with an up-and-coming Southern Rock band. The movie stars Kate Hudson as the leader of a band of groupies, Billy Crudup as the band’s stardom-drunk lead singer, and Patrick Fugit as the teen journalist.

“My Favorite Year” (1982) is another fictionalized, nostalgic coming-of-age showbiz memoir, about a young, New York Jewish writer on a hit 1950s comedy-variety show, hired to watchdog one of his heroes, a swashbuckling movie star who’s now a charming, reckless drunk. Peter O’Toole plays the drunken swashbucker, based on Errol Flynn. Mark Linn-Baker plays the young writer, Benjy Stone, based on Mel Brooks. Hell of an ensemble cast: Joseph Bologna is the neurotic star of the comedy-variety show, based on Sid Caesar. Lainie Kazan is Benjy’s embarrassing New York Jewish mother, and Lou Jacobi steals his scene as Benjy’s embarrassing uncle (“Did you shtup her? " he asks Peter O’Toole’s character, about a rumored dalliance with a starlet. “Did you go all the way?!")

“Wonder Boys” is another 2000 coming-of-age story, this with a coming-of-age figure who is a middle-aged man. Michael Douglas plays an English professor at a small college who had a critically acclaimed novel as a young man, and is now struggling to follow that up. He is an aging ex-wonder boy, wandering Pittsburgh during a cold weekend in a ratty women’s bathrobe, hair uncombed, unshaven, making bad choices, accompanied by his equally reckless agent, played by pre-Iron Man, pre-recovery Robert Downey Jr., and a talented student, played by Tobey Maguire. The three have great buddy chemistry, and the movie has a strong supporting cast beyond those three, including Frances McDormand, Rip Torn and Richard Thomas. “Wonder Boys” is based on a novel by Michael Chabon. I love Chabon’s work, but this is not his best novel; the movie is better.

“Nobody’s Fool” is a 1994 coming-of-age story with a coming-of-age figure who is 60 years old, an aging handyman played by Paul Newman, who wanders around making bad choices one cold weekend in a declining small town in upstate New York. Newman was 70 when he made this movie; his performance is great despite his appearance — he looked too young to play a 60-year-old man. The movie features great characters, played by an outstanding ensemble cast, including Bruce Willis, Jessica Tandy, Melanie Griffith, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Margot Martindale. The movie is based on the first of a trilogy of novels by Richard Russo; the novels are each set about ten years apart. I love the novels and the movie.

“That Thing You Do” (1996) is a coming-of-age story about a fictional garage band in a small town in Pennsylvania in the mid 1960s that records a song that becomes a nationwide hit. The song is fizzy pop fun, and so is the movie. Tom Everett Scott stars as the jazz-loving drummer for the band, in a role that would have been played by Tom Hanks a decade earlier; Scott even looks and acts like young Tom Hanks. Hanks himself has a significant supporting role as the band manager, Mr. White, and he directed and wrote the movie. Liv Tyler is the lead singer’s girlfriend. I can imagine ways she could have had a meatier role without changing the movie much, but nobody asked me. She isn’t given much to work with but carries her scenes on sheer charisma. Steve Zahn steals every scene he’s in, as Steve Zahn does.

“The Mummy,” starring Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, John Hannah and Oded Fehr. Everybody loves “The Mummy.” For a change, this is not a coming-of-age story, unless returning from the dead to seek vengeance counts as coming of age.

And two more comfort favorites: “Home for the Holidays” and “Tombstone,” which I wrote about here

What Did People Do Before Smartphones? No one can remember

Ian Bogost:

In the idle time we now spend on our phones, people used to read anything and everything they saw—junk mail, subway ads, the backs of cereal boxes, the story on the restaurant placemat, the labels on the condiments.

I used to carry a book or magazines with me when I went out. Now I still do — they’re on my phone.

Also:

I cannot overemphasize how little there was to do before we all had smartphones. A barren expanse of empty time would stretch out before you: waiting for the bus, or for someone to come home, or for the next scheduled event to start. Someone might be late or take longer than expected, but no notice of such delay would arrive, so you’d stare out the window, hoping to see some sign of activity down the block.

Wouldn’t we all rather have the possibility of finding pleasure and delight in literally anything we might encounter? Instead of assuming that actually there are only these three things where pleasure and delight are possible. Like oh, it’s television and socialization and work, and then everything else is the smoke I have to somehow choke my way through in order to get to the good parts.

— Ian Bogost

Yep, I'm faceblind

Faceblindness, technically called prosopagnosia, is the inability to recognize faces. I think I first learned about this condition in 2019, in this Washington Post article, and I said, “Yes, that’s me!” I often fail to recognize people I’ve met before.

Lately I’ve been second-guessing my self-diagnosis. While I often fail to recognize people, that is usually not the case. Usually I do recognize folks.

Last week, I listened to this interesting episode of the Revisionist History podcast, which talked about faceblindness and its opposite — super-recognizers, with extraordinary ability to remember the faces of people they’ve met once briefly, or even just seen in a photograph for a few seconds years before.

The podcast shownotes included two links to tests for faceblindness:

troublewithfaces.org
Cambridge Face Memory Test

The first test asked questions about my opinion of how well I recognize faces. I scored 65. The test result said that people who score below 70 may have “developmental prosopagnosia” (whatever that is). I considered this test non-definitive.

When I took the second test, holy crap did I score terribly!

The test was in two rounds. The first round showed dozens of faces of people who appeared to be white men, with their hair and ears cropped away from the photos. This is important because faceblind people often look at hairstyles and ear shape as clues for facial recognition. All the men had approximately the same skin color — again, skin color being another gross clue that faceblind people can use to identify faces.

The first batch of photos showed one face at a time, three views — full face, turned a little to the left and a little to the right. I concentrated on the shapes of the chins. One face had a cleft chin, another a pointy chin, another a round chin, another seemed to have a featureless chin.

I thought I maybe did OK on that round of questions.

The second round of photos was different.

For each of the second round, the test showed six of those hairless, earless faces, and asked me to memorize them. Then, the test showed three faces, and asked me to pick the one that had appeared in the previous array of photos.

After going through one or two of those questions, I grinned, because I had absolutely no idea which face appeared in the previous series. The faces did appear different from each other. But I was unable to fix in my mind how they were different. The instant the faces disappeared from the screen, the visual memory of those faces disappeared from my mind. I was guessing entirely at random.

The results page told me that the average score on the test was 80%. A score of 60% or lower “may indicate facebliindness,” the test results page said. My score was 35%.

I am weirdly pleased and proud of this. If I’m going to fail a test, I want to fail spectacularly badly.

So how is it that I am able to recognize faces most of the time? The same way everybody with faceblindness does: Contextual clues. I remember hairstyles, height, build, glasses, skin color, people’s habitual clothing styles. Facial blemish.

Location is a big clue. If I’m expecting to see a person in a particular location and time, I can usually recognize that person.

The other day, I arrived at a dinner in a private room of a local restaurant. I was early — the second person there. I instantly recognized the person who arrived before me. I recognized her skin color, complexion, the shape of her face, her hairstyle. In a social group where many of us wear T-shirts, she is usually dressed nicely — that was a big clue. And she was one of a half-dozen people I expected to attend that dinner. I recognized her easily and greeted her warmly.

Now imagine the same restaurant, if I did not expect to see this woman. Same woman, dressed the same. She recognizes me and greets me — and that’s probably going to be the way it happens, because I am probably not going to recognize her if I am not expecting to see her. In that circumstance, as we talk, I might recognize her voice, which is distinctive. I’ll pick up on clues like her dress, hairstyle, shape of her face, height and so on. Likely she’ll drop a hint in the conversation by mentioning the community association we’re both on the board of. Given that information, I can often recognize a person. And maybe she doesn’t drop that hint, and we talk for a few minutes and then Julie asks me who she was and I say, “I have no idea.”

How do I cope with the disability of faceblindness?

I deal. It’s all I know. It’s not a disability at all. I have led a successful, even privileged life. I have my compensation mechanisms and I do fine.

On the other hand, I have been an introvert my whole life, and have strugged with that, and I think my faceblindness has something to do with that.

But as far as I know, there is nothing I can do about being faceblind, so I live with it and am grateful for my many other blessings.