“Peggy Sue Got Married” for 2024. I like it.
For a research report, I’m looking for companies outside the tech industry that are doing interesting work with artificial intelligence. If that’s you, or if you have any leads, email me at mwagner@questex.com.
Anil Dash: The purpose of a system is what it does
Sunday, August 11, 2024
Dash: Unlike physical machines, the institutions that make up society are never broken. They always do precisely what they were designed to do.
… when our carceral system causes innocent people to be held in torturous or even deadly conditions because they could not afford bail, we must understand that this is the system working correctly. It is doing the thing it is designed to do. When we shout about the effect that this system is having, we are not filing a bug report, we are giving a systems update, and in fact we are reporting back to those with agency over the system that it is working properly….
In my own life, I’ve found the greatest reluctance to embrace this idea, and strongest rejection of its obvious truth, comes from the politically moderate, centrist-leaning suburban folks…. “
Accepting the principle of POSIWID is “a prerequisite for optimism that actually has impact. Mindless optimism says, ‘this system is supposed to have a good output, therefore if we support it hard enough, it’ll do the right thing.’”
Kid Rock Threw the Party. MAGA Faithful Brought the Joy, Rage and Smirnoff Ice..
A music festival headlined by the pro-Trump musician offered a snapshot of a maturing American subculture, with a mash-up of hedonism, rebellion and beer-guzzling pursuit of happiness.
Frank Zappa was a musical genius and a difficult father. His four children, now in their 50s, are still grappling with his legacy; Dweezil doesn’t even talk with the others.
Canadian sci-fi writer Robert Sawyer has released a free version of the venerable WordStar word processing program
Sunday, August 11, 2024
The app includes a DOS emulator so it can run on modern Windows, and Sawyer says it also supports Mac and Linux, according to Lia Proven at The Register.
WordStar users include Sawyer, who’s still using it, as well as Arthur C. Clarke, Anne Rice, George R. R. Martin (who still used it as of 2014), William F. Buckley Jr. and Ralph Ellison.
Sawyer’s project may be illegal — he declared WordStar to be abandonware but it may still technically be somebody’s intellectual property.
I was more of a XyWrite guy. I wonder whether there’s a version that runs on the Mac?
Facebook has decided I want to get notifications anytime somebody posts to any of the dozens and dozens of groups I’m a member of. Spoiler alert: I do not want to receive these notifications.
I have asked Facebook to change the name of the page I manage. Apparently, I have to ask for permission to change the page’s name? Because I’m five years old and Facebook is my auntie?
Facebook is such a shitty platform.
I think I may have figured out how to turn off Facebook notifications when someone reacts to one of my posts. If it works, this would make Facebook a million times friendlier.
TimWalzFixedYourBicycle.com. I’m just going to refresh that the rest of the day.
I just finished writing and submitted a major report for my editor’s review.
Proofreading it, I was amazed how many ways I could find to spell “Kubernetes.”
For the title of this morning’s blog post about “Battlestar Galactica,” I asked ChatGPT:
What are some playful plays on words for the title of “Battlestar Galactica” that would indicate we think it’s a bad show?
The response:
Here are a few playful and critical wordplays on “Battlestar Galactica”:
- “Battle-Snore Galactica”
- “Blunderstar Galactica”
- “Battlestar Lacklusterica”
- “Borestar Galactica”
- “Battlestar Catastrophica”
Not bad.
Battle-snore Galactica
Thursday, August 8, 2024
We never got into the 2004 “Battlestar Galactica.” We loved the mini-series, but the first episode of the full series didn’t appeal to us so, we bailed out.
For the next 20 years, I’ve heard people raving about how great the show is. It’s become a classic. I got FOMO.
We started watching the series recently. We rewatched the miniseries and 10 episodes of the series.
And I think we’re done. Every episode is the same. For a space opera, it’s awfully claustrophobic.
“Battlestar Galactica” today looks like a rough draft of “The Expanse” and “For All Mankind.” And, indeed, “For All Manknd” is executive-produced by Ronald Moore, who produced “Galactica.”
I buy audiobooks from Libro.fm rather than Audible, primarily so that I can listen to the audio using the Overcast podcast app. Overcast is more familiar to me than the Audible app, and Overcast has excellent audio quality.
As a side-benefit, I also get non-DRMed audiobooks, which means I’m not locked into the Audible ecosystem. Also, I get to support a competitor to the Amazon monopoly. I buy plenty of stuff from Amazon, but it’s nice to occasionally shop elsewhere.
Inspired by this post on Threads, I hit Wikipedia to read the synopsis of “Flowers in the Attic.”
I remember the book being hugely popular, but I have never read it. I thought: It’s about children who live in an attic, which I guess is kind of nice, right?
No, it’s not nice. Holy shit. Just when I think it’s hit maximum fucked-upness, it takes another turn.
On this day in 1888, Bertha Benz took the first documented road trip in an automobile, to visit her mother, 60 miles away
Monday, August 5, 2024
The German Bertha was born into a wealthy family and married engineer Karl Benz, writes Sari Rosenberg at Lifetime.
Bertha used her family money to finance her husband’s creation of a horseless carriage. Under modern day law, Bertha would have actually owned the patent rights. However, German law in the 1880s prohibited married women from even applying for a patent.
Her husband, Karl Benz, gets the credit for the invention, but her money, marketing “and chutzpah” built the business.
Benz’s Motorwagen was made of wood, with two wheels in back, one in front and a “handle-like contraption” for steering, and could reach speeds up to 25 mph, Rosenberg writes.
People were reluctant to buy a machine that only traveled short distances, and “Bertha realized the only way to sell more cars was if they demystified the public’s fear of driving.”
With only a small amount of fuel in the carburetor, Bertha had to plan her route around where apothecaries were located so she could buy ligroin, a detergent that was used as fuel.
…
When a fuel line got clogged, she used a long hat pin to fix it. She used a garter to repair a broken ignition. At one point, she had to employ the help of a blacksmith to help fix a broken chain. When the brakes on the car began to fail, Bertha visited a cobbler who installed leather on them, hence creating the first brake pads. Meanwhile, at a time before roadmaps even existed, she literally forged her own path on the trip via automobile to her mom’s house.
As Israel braces for attack, ordinary citizens fear that Netanyahu has destroyed a country and a dream
Monday, August 5, 2024
“We used to be better than they are, we used to be good.… Now we are the same.” Journalist Aviya Kushner writes at The Forward about her encounter at an Israeli light rail station with a woman older than the state of Israel itself.
Israelis opposing Netanyahu use the word “hamadena” to describe what Netanyahu is destroying. “For Israelis, that word, hamedina, or ‘the state’ is not just the State of Israel, but the dream of the State of Israel.”
I think the elderly woman is oversimplifying. I, too, used to believe Israel was good. Since the reaction to the Oct. 7 attack, I have come to see that Israel is founded on injustice.
Israel is not unique or fundamentally evil. As Ezra Klein said, nearly every state is founded in blood.
However, Israel can’t just go back to locking the Palestinians in the basement and nailing the door shut. Israel has to do better.
This is a thoughtful article, and I agree with the overall thrust. But I disagree with key premises. Many people don’t use social media or just use it occasionally. This is true even in the tech industry, marketing and journalism.
The ‘Trans Boxer’ story isn’t what you think: Gender wars, Russian influence ops, and our addiction to rage bait — Unusual circumstances are great for inciting Internet rage wars, and Russia is happy to fan the flames.
📷 Some things I saw walking the dog
Sunday, August 4, 2024
We had stopped for a minute for me to pick up the dog’s by-product. I heard the chickens before I saw them. and thought, “WTF is that?” The sound was simultaneously very familiar and utterly strange.
We live in an ordinary Southern California suburb, not farm country by any means. By SoCal standards, we live in the city. I have heard people keep chickens around here, but have not encountered it in person for 15 years or so.
When you see an El Camino, you are required to photograph it and share the photo. Those are the rules.