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“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

Forms of Transportation that Were Supposed to Change the World (But Didn’t…). youtu.be

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

The GOP Is Way Too Fucking Excited About Using US Troops On American Protestors. By Mike Masnick. techdirt.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 asked ChatGPT what I would look like as a dog.

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.”

Covid-19 is spiking again as the US government is making it harder to get vaccines. CalMatters

“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

Season 2 of “The Last of Us:” Yes or no?

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.

How to Disappear: Inside the world of extreme-privacy consultants, who, for the right fee, will make you and your personal information very hard to find. By Benjamin Wallace. The Atlantic

Omaha swung 43 points to elect Democrat John Ewing Jr. over a transphobic GOP incumbent by focusing on real issues, not hate. Dems, take note.

Omaha, Nebraska, swung by 43 points to elect Black Democrat John Ewing Jr. over a Republican MAGA incumbent who ran on a platform of trans hate. Ewing focused on quality-of-life issues that voters care about.

A huge Democratic victory in Omaha offers a lesson for the party (Katrina vanden Heuvel | The Guardian)

Republican incumbent Jean Stothert won her 2021 reelection bid for a third term with almost two-thirds of the vote, and she followed the standard Republican playbook for attacking progressives.

Ewing has credentials that would appeal to conservatives. He’s a retired deputy police chief and associate minister of the city’s Salem Baptist Church.

He described Stothert’s transphobic campaign as “a made-up issue by Jean Stothert and the Republican Party.” Ewing focused on economic development, housing and road repair.

And he didn’t run away from the LGBTQ+ community, actively campaigning for the support of LGBTQ+ voters.

The Democratic message was reinforced on social media with a waggish image of the mayor peeking under the door of a bathroom stall, which featured the tagline, “Jean is focused on potties. John is focused on fixing potholes.”

How Democrats Crushed a Despicable Anti-Trans Campaign and Won a Major Election (John Nichols / The Nation)

Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail is still inspiring and worth reading today. “We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’….”

We have been trained to think we have enormous power over the world. Whatever you dream, you can do. Anything can be bent to your will. But actually isn’t it much more interesting to imagine that you’re quite small?

— Ian Bogost

Between Memorial Day and Labor Day 30% of the conversation between me and Julie is arguing about whether to turn on the air conditioner. Another 20% is saying, “What?!” after the other person says something.

I migrated from Mastodon to Micro.blog. Here's what worked well, and where I have problems

If you were following me on Mastodon or any other Fediverse service, you should now be following me on Micro.blog, without you having to do anything about it.

I started using the Micro.blog service regularly in late 2022 to host mitchw.blog, about the same time I became active on Mastodon. Both Micro.blog and Mastodon are part of the Fediverse, meaning they can communicate with the world using the ActivityPub protocol.1

Until mid-May this year, I posted to both Mastodon and Micro.blog, using Micro.blog’s automated and manual cross-posting tools. About a week ago, I decided to consolidate Mastodon onto Micro.blog

Why did I make the change?

Simplicity: One less place to post, check replies, and otherwise manage.

Formatting: Micro.blog supports links, blockquotes, embedded images and other formatting. Mastodon does not.

I can post as long or as short as I want: Micro.blog supports posts of any length. Most Mastodon instances limit posts to 500 characters.

Indeed, that’s one of the best features of Micro.blog: Titles are optional, and posts can be of any length and complexity. They can be just a few words, like a tweet, or they can be full-fledged articles with embedded media.

Design: Micro.blog gives me a nicely formatted blog on the web. Mine is at mitchw.blog. My Mastodon account looks like every other Mastodon account.

Newsletter and syndication: Micro.blog gives me a daily newsletter, and automatically syndicates to Bluesky and Tumblr.

My followers stay with me: Because Mastodon and Micro.blog are both part of the Fediverse, Mastodon users can follow me on Micro.blog. Most of them won’t even notice the difference, except that my posts will be formatted more nicely.

I just like blogs, RSS and newsletters better than social media platforms: I like the IndieWeb philosophy: Own your own domain, publish to your own site first and optionally syndicate elsewhere.

Glitches and trade-offs

No reposting: Micro.blog doesn’t support reposting or let me see other people’s reposts. This is a significant problem for me because I like seeing what other people repost. But I can live without that.

Follower invisibility: Micro.blog doesn’t let me see how many followers I have. I don’t care about that.

No likes: Micro.blog doesn’t let me like other people’s posts, see who has liked my posts, or how many people have liked my posts. This is a minor inconvenience.

On social media platforms that permit likes and reactions, I like other people’s posts to acknowledge or thank them. But it’s relatively easy for me to just send a one-word response or emoji in that circumstance.

I also watch whether my posts get likes to see if anybody is reading particular posts.

And I sometimes find it interesting who likes my posts. Sometimes one of my posts gets liked by a celebrity, which can be cool. Just this morning as I write this, a politically conservative friend, with whom I have sometimes sparred online, liked one of my anti-Trump Facebook posts. That was interesting. Sometimes I get a like from a friend I haven’t been in contact with in years, or someone who has a big following on social media and whose posts I’ve admired. I feel good about that for a bit. But I can live without it; the tradeoff is worth it.

Second try’s the charm: I made two tries at this recently, the first time in early April, and the second time in mid-May. The first time I tried it, the migration failed; my followers on Mastodon failed to make the journey to Micro.blog. I reported the bug to Micro.blog but tech support on Micro.blog was unresponsive for several days2, so I reversed the process and did it again a month later.3

My second migration, in mid-May, was mostly successful. My Mastodon account still shows 157 followers. It should show zero followers — they should all have moved to Micro.blog. I’m just not going to worry about that for now.

Because Micro.blog does not show follower counts, or who is following me, I don’t know if my other 500 Mastodon followers successfully made the journey or whether they fell into the ether. I am getting replies to my Micro.blog posts from Mastodon, so I know that many people did make the journey. I can live with the uncertainty.

The big problem

As a first step in the transition, I exported the list of people I followed on Mastodon and imported that list to Micro.blog. I thought I would simply shut down my Mastodon account and live in Micro.blog. This part of the migration proved easy — and it was a bad idea!

Micro.blog is not a great Mastodon client; it doesn’t support link previews or (as noted above) Mastodon boosts.

After a day or two of struggling with Micro.blog’s limits as a Mastodon client, I reactivated my Mastodon account and am using it for reading but not posting. That means I can’t conveniently reply to Mastodon posts, but I find I rarely want to reply to something on Mastodon, so it’s no loss. Still, I’d love it if there were an easy way to open Mastodon posts in Micro.blog, or to spoof a “from” address in a reply from Mastodon. However, the latter solution would have major potential security problems.

I am now slowly unfollowing all Mastodon accounts from Micro.blog so that I am only following them from Mastodon. This is a painstaking process; I do a few every day. It’ll take a while, but that’s OK; I’m not in a rush.

What about BlueSky and Tumblr?

In addition to Micro.blog and Mastodon, I cross-post to BlueSky and Tumblr.

The split between Micro.blog and BlueSky doesn’t seem to be as much of a source of irritation for me as the split between Micro.blog and Mastodon. I’m having difficulty articulating why that is. BlueSky permits text formatting; that’s a big part of it. Oddly, while BlueSky permits formatting from syndicated services like Micro.blog, it does not permit formatting in native posts.

Similarly, Tumblr, like Micro.blog, supports posts of any length and complexity, and I don’t get many comments on my Tumblr posts, so the split between Micro.blog and Tumblr doesn’t seem like a big deal to me.

I don’t see Tumblr as a long-term problem; soon, either either Tumblr will shut down or I will quit.4

What about Facebook?

Most of the conversations on my posts happen on Facebook. I am not happy about this. There is no way to automatically post from Micro.blog to Facebook, so I manually cut-and-paste from one to the other.

An insight

I think I just don’t like Twitter-like services — not Mastodon and not Bluesky. I was a Twitter addict in the late 2000s and 2010s, but I lost interest in Twitter even before it became Nazified. I think I’ve lost interest in reading or writing prose chopped up into 300- or 500-character chunks.

Also, on both Mastodon and Bluesky I follow a large number of strangers who post a lot of political minutiae that pisses me off without enriching my life.

I’m in the process of unfollowing anybody whose posts don’t interest me. I’m spending just a few minutes a day on that process, and I expect it will play out over weeks.

If I end up following just a few people on Bluesky and Mastodon, I can live with that. I will continue to post to those services.

How’s it going so far?

I’m happy with my migration from Mastodon to Micro.blog.

Posting is easier now that I don’t have to worry about how my posts look on both Mastodon and Micro.blog.

I seem to be getting significantly more discussion for my posts on Micro.blog than I did when I was splitting between Mastodon and Micro.blog. I don’t know why that is, but I’m happy about it.

And if I change my mind about migrating from Mastodon to Micro.blog, I’ll just reverse. I’ve done it before. That’s something that’s great about the fediverse; it’s easy to join a particular server, and easy to leave.

Here’s a helpful post on how to migrate from Mastodon to Micro.blog and here’s another.

  1. If this paragraph doesn’t make sense to you, maybe quit reading here, because the rest of this is super-nerdy and not of interest to most people. ↩︎

  2. This is a significant concern I have with Micro.blog. I’m overall satisfied with the service, but tech support is hit-or-miss whether they’ll respond to requests in a timely fashion. ↩︎

  3. When you migrate your account from Mastodon.social, the server puts a 26-day lock on your account before you can do it again. I expect this is done to prevent tomfoolery. ↩︎

  4. I’ve been saying that Tumblr will soon either shut down or I will quit for about 15 years. I expect I will continue to say it for many years more, while continuing to remain active on Tumblr. ↩︎

NYC is so big that when some small disaster happens here we mostly hear about it from relatives that live out of state and see it on tv and then text us assuming we were nearby. Like no mom I didn’t get squished by the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man I was in a different borough

— @claytoncubitt.bsky.social

We live in the world of paywalled content, unilateral contract modification, micro transactions, serialised content, upsells, and the list goes on and on and on. Everyone is trying to find a way to extract money in one way or another, and that is something I find personally draining and soul-crushing.

— Manu Moreale, quoted by Manton Reece

I follow conversations among professional educators who all report the same phenomenon, which is that their students use ChatGPT for everything, and in consequence learn nothing. We may end up with at least one generation of people who are like the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, in that they are mental weaklings utterly dependent on technologies that they don’t understand and that they could never rebuild from scratch were they to break down.

— Neal Stephenson, as quoted on simonwillison.net

For One Hilarious, Terrifying Day, Elon Musk’s Chatbot Lost Its Mind

Zeynep Tufekci / NYTimes

How Grok’s AI became obsessed with false reports about white genocide in South Africa, and what the incident tells us about generative AI.

Grok says someone instructed it to accept this racist propaganda as real, and xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, says the culprit was a “rogue employee.” But you can’t believe either of them.

The incident is a perfect example of generative AI’s limitations, Zufekci says.

L.L.M.s [are] extremely useful tools at the hands of someone who can and will vigilantly root out the fakery, but powerfully misleading at the hands of someone who’s just trying to learn.

Yes. Chatbots are great for casual, low-stakes research, the kind of thing where you’d accept Wikipedia or some credible-looking Internet source.

They are outstanding for reminding you of a fact you once knew, and still half-remember.

Chatbots are fantastic for suggesting ideas — solving the blank-screen problem.

They are excellent for writing summaries of text you feed into them (which is, surprisingly, a significant part of my job).

They are also excellent for serious research — but you have to fact-check the chatbot’s output thoroughly.

I fed ChatGPT a link to Zufekci’s article and asked for a summary. ChatGPT wrote two paragraphs, most of which came from other sources — not Zufekci’s article. Those two paragraphs may have contained other errors; I didn’t bother to check.

ChatGPT demonstrated the limitations of AI while writing a bad summary of an article about the limitations of AI.

"Trumpism relies on the fusion of two groups of people: a tiny number of oligarchs, and millions of everyday people who are constantly victimized by those oligarchs."

… To get this latter group of Christmas-voting turkeys to stay in the coalition, Trump needs to deliver something that keeps them happy. Mostly, Trump delivers negative things to keep them happy – the spectacle of public cruelty to immigrants, women, trans people, academics, etc. There is a certain libidinal satisfaction that comes from watching your enemies suffer – but you can’t eat schadenfreude. You can’t make rent or put braces on your kids' teeth or pay your medical bills with the sadistic happiness you feel when you hear the sobs of people you’ve been taught to despise.

For Trump to keep the turkeys voting for Christmas, he needs to do something for them. He can’t just do things to scapegoats. But America’s eminently guillotineable oligarchs have found so many ways to turn working peoples' torment into riches, and they are so greedy and unwilling to give up any of those grifts, that Trump can’t manage to deliver anything positive to his base.

— Cory Doctorow