Reading the Star Trek fan forums, I see that most fans hate, hate hate this week’s episode. I liked it, but did not love it. A pleasant 53 minutes. Nice to see Rachel Harris — I’m a fan of that actress. The season continues to advance Spock and La’an’s story arcs. On the dow...

I just posted the following to LinkedIn and I am inordinately pleased with myself about it: “Questex, the company where I have happily worked for the past two years, is now Forge, and ‘Forge’ is now my second-favorite F-word.”

Kyla Scanlon “on wealth vs. labor and ownership vs. effort." Over half of Americans no longer believe full-time work will get them to their financial goals, Scanlon writes. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to be financially comfortable just through work, even if your wo...

The Sand Letters

“On his deathbed, President Chester Arthur ordered that all of his personal and professional papers be burned. Three barrels of documents went up in flames. But 23 letters survived, initialed only ‘J.I.S.'”

Arthur was a prince of the spoils system of government — institutionalized corruption and bribery — that was standard through most of the 19th Century. But as President he led dismantling that system and replacing it with professional civil service that drove many of the great advances of the U.S. in the 20th Century.

Arthur was turned around, to a large extent, by those 23 letters, from Julia Isabella Sand, a woman who lived an obscure life in New York. Though she exerted great influence on Arthur, she and the President never met.

Comedian and amateur historian Elliot Kalan and 99% Invisible host Roman Mars tell the story.

Use an LLM to build a personal wiki for areas of research

At the beginning of April, the prominent AI researcher Andrej Karpathy tweeted (https://x.com/karpathy/status/2039805659525644595) out an idea that was, for a certain kind of productivity nerd, an infohazard. He described the idea this way: ‘Something I’m finding very useful recently: using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases for various topics of research interest.’ He proceeded to describe his process: adding source documents to a local folder and using an LLM to extract and organize their contents into a Markdown wiki that gets updated as he adds new material."

I don’t know whether I will do this but it sure is intriguing.

Anthony Bourdain in 2005: Direct from cassette. “Two hours turned into a highly personal conversation, recorded on a cassette that sat untouched for twenty years. This week, that tape gets its first public airing, and we discuss Tony’s preferred sucker-punch etiquette, his loyalty to cigarettes and the Chateau Marmont, ayahuasca in Peru, and the talk show he dreamed up with Christopher Walken in mind.”

“You can’t predict fire. But you can trade on it." California senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff want financial regulators to restrict people from using prediction markets to bet on how wildfires will spread, citing concerns that bettors could resort to arson to secure outcomes.

The Rest is History looks at the Irish Troubles. There are strong parallels to Israel and the Palestinians. The violence in Northern Ireland eventually ended, which is a cause for cautious hope in Israel/Palestine.

I admired Anthony Bourdain. I consumed his interviews and read as many articles by him as I could find. I found “Kitchen Confidential” among the most inspiring books I’ve read.

When he killed himself, I came to think of his public persona as a lie, and stopped watching, listening to or reading him.

But now I think the public Bourdain was a character he created, played and tried to live, and I should resume appreciating his life and work.

“Short sleepers, who make up less than one per cent of the population, spend significantly less time snoozing without any apparent health consequences.” By Shayla Love at The New Yorker.

I envy these people — I need 8-9 hours. I get less than that most days, often as little as five, and that’s no fun.

Short sleepers are often lonesome, awake at night when there’s nobody around. Is that true for short sleepers who are also introverts? Or is that a combination that does not exist?

Maybe one day science will figure out a way to drastically reduce or even eliminate our need for sleep. But it’s a hairy problem — science doesn’t even know why we sleep, not really. So I’m not hopeful that’ll come in my lifetime.

Sure, I oppose Musk — but that’s not what keeps me off X. I don’t see Zuck as being vastly superior to Musk. Paraphrasing Walter Sobchak from “The Big Lebowski” — Musk is a Nazi but Zuck is a nihilist who is happy to work with Nazis if there is profit in it. And yet I’m acti...

Watched: Lanterns S1E1, Pilot 📺 I’ll stay with it, see where it goes.

Harrison’s administration had been “beyond question the best business administration the country has ever seen,” one businessmen’s club declared, and losing that administration would be a calamity, especially since, according to Republicans, Democrats were socialists and anarchists who wanted to destroy America. The Chicago Tribune told readers that a lower tariff would destroy industries and throw people out of work, but it seemed fine with the prospect: “The working classes of the country need such a lesson.

— Letters From an American

Not mentioned by Richardson in this article: An immigrant named Frederick Trump made a fortune during the Gold Rush running a restaurant and brothel for miners. His grandson is, of course, the President today.

Derek Thompson interviews Agnes Callard, the University of Chicago professor, about her new theory called “the uni-context.":

A context is a set of circumstances that tell you how you should act. For most of human history, contexts were local and multiple. If you wanted to know how you should act, you would look around. Am I in a field? Am I inside my home? Am I in the church? Am I in a bar? You would immediately get guidance by looking both at your physical environment and at the people around you and how they were acting.

The uni-context is a scenario in which the ways you should act become the same across all different contexts. There’s just one set of norms you should follow all times, irrespective of context.

G.P.S. has also led us to outsource existential skills: locating yourself in space, parsing out your surroundings, staying calm when you don’t know where you are. Do we lose something when we no longer get lost?

— Shayla Love at The New Yorker

I use GPS to get to places within ten miles of my house that I have been to dozens of times.

“Oh, she’s running,” writes Tressie McMillan Cottom at The New York Times. ⁠"Americans love to turn to women when the house is burning down. Social scientists call it the glass cliff – the phenomenon in which women are recruited to lead failing companies.⁠⁠" I first read thi...

I’m frustrated by the way the fediverse seems to be floundering because I prefer it to Bluesky as technology. And yet Bluesky is more and more where the interesting people are. Which is not to say there are no interesting people on Masto — but they are fewer.

I’m frustrated by the way the fediverse seems to be floundering because I prefer it to Bluesky as technology. And yet Bluesky is more and more where the interesting people are. Which is not to say there are no interesting people on Masto — but they are fewer.

I like Reddit for reading, finding memes and historical photos and illustrations, and occasionally leaving comments. I rarely post anymore. Redditors suffer deeply from Stockholm syndrome.

Posting on Reddit is too hard. Moderators are playing a massive homeowner association roleplaying game.

You’re not? Who knew? at the Western Hills Inn in Euless, Texas - 1960 reddit.com/r/TheWayW… Earle Bergey: Journey for Seven - Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1950 reddit.com/r/RetroFu… Edmund Emshwiller - The Last Spaceship - 1955 reddit.com/r/RetroFu… Roadmarks by Roger Zelazny. Del Rey 1979. Cover art by Darrell K Sweet. A favorite cover on a favorite novel by a favorite writer. reddit.com/r/CoolSci… Space Lords by Cordwainer Smith, cover Jack Gaughan reddit.com/r/CoolSci…

kottke.org: Jamelle Bouie “chastises American political & cultural pundits for their lack of moral seriousness w/r/t their focus on ‘wokeness’ instead of the real harms being done by the authoritarian Trump regime.”

MAGA is building concentration camps, purging Blacks from high levels of the military, taking billions of dollars in bribes, murdering protesters, protecting pedophiles, committing violent insurrection and protecting those insurrectionists, “imprisoning dissidents, dismantling public education and eroding democracy.

Meanwhile, pundits are concerned about pronouns.

Le Guin: “We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called ‘technology’ at all…. One way to illustrate that most technologies are, in fact, pretty ‘hi,’ is to ask yourself of any manmade object, Do I know how to make one? Anybody who ever lighted a fire without matches has probably gained some proper respect for ‘low’ or ‘primitive’ or ‘simple’ technologies; anybody who ever lighted a fire with matches should have the wits to respect that notable hi-tech invention.”

Corporate Power Approaches Escape Velocity. Hamilton Nolan: A failed Tesla strike in Sweden is a flashing warning light.

An example of this phenomenon, showing it’s not limited to young people: I recently re-read “Fer de Lance,” the first Nero Wolfe detective novel, published in 1934. Two of the characters are wealthy heirs, young men, who have become infatuated with flying. One has a private ...

Zoomers don’t know what Usenet is. Allegra Rosenberg has a good explanation, and she continues with a meditation on misconceptions that Generation Z have about life in the 90s and 2000s. This misunderstanding is not unique to GenZ; I think it’s a phenomenon of being in one’s...

An 18-year-old San Diego man pledd guilty to kicking a sea lion on a viral video. Sea lions are generally unthreatening but they are wild animals and will attack if stressed or threatened. They can get up to 200-800 pounds and have sharp teeth. I watched the video of that kid; he was cruelly picking on an animal that did him no harm. He’s lucky that a criminal sentence is the only penalty he received and if the sea lion had attacked him back, I would have thought of it as evolution in action.

“The Social Ritual That Made Me a Better Man: Long live guys' night." “… the couple of evenings a month that I shared with Steve and the others became for me a safe and premeditated truancy from domestic commitments. The ceremony amounted to a pressure valve. Once released, it sent us home tired and inebriated but also kinder, happier, and more giving.” By Thomas Chatterton Williams at The Atlantic.

Sailors in the USS Lincoln and their families are suffering low morale and mental illness due to long deployment. Multiple sailors have tried to go overboard.