Addicted to exercise? By Edith Zimmerman on Kottke.org
Group chats rule the world.
Most of the interesting conversations in tech now happen in private group chats: Whatsapp, Telegram, Signal, small invite-only Discord groups.
Also:
… every group chat has a n-1 group containing everyone except that annoying member. And if you think your chat doesn’t have such a group, oh boy, do I have some bad news for you.
I loved the “Planet of the Apes” movies and TV series when I was a kid. We’ve recently seen the first two of the current series, starting with “Rise” in 2011, and I think those are pretty great too.
We watched “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” last night. The motion-capture/CGI performances of the ape characters were brilliant. Thematically, the movie was of a piece with the 1968-70s series, at least as I remember it, about the futility and misery of violence, war and hate, and of seeing other races as animals—“vermin”—and how violence and hate becomes a tide that sweeps good people away.
The movie came out in 2014, and some of the parallels to the ten years of events that were to follow—the last 10 years we’ve lived through—are eerie. A plague. The rise of a megalomanial leader who’s driven by self-love and hate for others.
Jamelle Bouie: The Underappreciated Genius of ‘Planet of the Apes’
There is no franchise in Hollywood filmmaking that is as consistently good, and as consistently interesting, as “Planet of the Apes.”
I feel very strongly about this, and not because I am an admitted enthusiast of genre filmmaking. Like any long-running series, “Planet of the Apes” – which spans 10 films and more than 50 years – has its lows. But those are well outnumbered by the films that deliver real thrills, showcase strong (and occasionally exceptional) performances and, rare among Hollywood movies of its type, provoke thoughtful discussion of serious ideas.
John Scalzi has finished writing his next novel. It looks ridiculously cheesy. How the hell does he keep getting away with this? whatever.scalzi.com/2024/05/1…
When Humanity Gets Messy, Sometimes the Best Tech Solution Is To Do Nothing — The people who set up the New York-Dublin video portal learned the wrong lesson, says Mike Masnick. They should have just kept it going, and accepted a certain amount of bad behavior.
The rise and fall of the personal jetpack
Jetpacks were ubiquitous in midcentury pop culture, including James Bond, the Jetsons and Gilligan’s Island. “… it felt like a matter of time before people could ride a jetpack to work.” But we never got personal jetpacks. This delightful episode of the 99% Invisible podcast looks at the history of the jetpack—how it came to be developed after World War II, how it became a pop culture phenom, and why it flopped. As always, the website has great images to accompany the podcast. 99percentinvisible.org
Also: Cory Doctorow—You were promised a jetpack by liars. pluralistic.net
The jetpack—technically a rocket belt—was developed by Wendell Moore at Bell Aircraft Corp. in the 1960s.
Moore was a consummate showman, which is to say, a bullshitter. He was forever telling the press that his jetpacks would be on everyone’s back in one to two years, and he got an impressionable young man, Bill Suitor, to stage showy public demonstrations of the rocket belt. If you ever saw a video of a brave rocketeer piloting a jetpack, it was almost certainly Suitor. Suitor was Connery’s stunt-double in Thunderball, and it was he who flew the rocket belt around Sleeping Beauty castle.
Suitor’s interview … for the podcast is delightful. Suitor is a hilarious, profane old airman who led an extraordinary life and tells stories with expert timing, busting out great phrases like “a surprise is a fart with a lump in it.”
But what’s most striking about the tale of the Bell rocket belt is the shape of the deception that Moore and Bell pulled off. By conspicuously failing to mention the rocket belt’s limitations, and by callously risking Suitor’s life over and over again, they were able to create the impression that jetpacks were everywhere, and that they were trembling on the verge of widespread, popular adoption.
What’s more, they played a double game: all the public enthusiasm they manufactured with their carefully stage-managed, canned demos was designed to help them win more defense contracts to keep their dream alive. Ultimately, Uncle Sucker declined to continue funding their boondoggle, and the demos petered out, and the “promise” of a jetpack was broken.
As I listened to the 99 Percent Invisible episode, I was struck by the familiarity of this shuck: this is exactly what the self-driving car bros did over the past decade to convince us all that the human driver was already obsolete. The playbook was nearly identical, right down to the shameless huckster insisting that “full self-driving is one to two years away” every year for a decade:
Cory also sees similar scams in hype about robots and AI.
I’m far less skeptical about AI than Cory is. Generative AI in particular. I use GenAI several times a week, and find it helpful. Still, I wave off claims that GenAI is on the verge of superhuman intelligence. Lesser claims, that GenAI will be as transformative as the smartphone or Internet, are more credible. But I’ll believe that when I see it.
I asked ChatGPT to summarize the 99% Invisible podcast episode about jetpacks, and it summarized the wrong episode. When I pointed it to the right episode, the summary it delivered was bland and useless. ChatGPT gets it spectacularly wrong like that nearly as often as it gets it right.
Floppy disks are still in use today, in planes, trains, industrial sewing machines and more.
Steven Vaughan-Nichols @sjvn@mastodon.social:
In the late 1960s, IBM engineers Alan Shugart and David L. Noble envisioned a compact and portable solution for storing data. This pioneering work, Project Minnow, led to the creation of the first commercially viable 8-inch floppy disk in 1971. Its 79K of storage may seem like nothing to you, but it held the equivalent of 3,000 punched cards. Which would you rather drop? A single disk or thousands of cards?
🌮An Oakland, California woman was arrested after allegedly stealing a taco truck and being discovered by police inside the vehicle, consuming its contents.
She explained that she was hungry.
I do not often work in Microsoft Word, and when I do, I remember why.
WORD: “You’ve been writing this document in a 12-point font. 10-point font from now on!”
ME: “Why are you doing this?”
WORD: “I was bored.”
We saw a trailer for “Evil” last night and liked it enough to add it to the to-watch list. “Team investigating paranormal shit” is a good formula.
We like our current vet but they do not take appointments. I got up early on two Saturdays in a row and found they already had a 3+ hour wait. This does not bode well for our long-term relationship.
