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.

Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand how to live. “An AI future of sleek, streamlined, and totally empty relationships.” Elizabeth Lopatto shreds Zuck’s AI manifesto. “Look, I am coming to believe we need a better quality of AI booster…. Is the point of life merely to stockpile accomplishments? If that is what Silicon Valley believes, no wonder all the billionaires seem so unhappy all the time!”

Why you can’t find a primary care doctor. Prevention isn’t a priority in US healthcare. The profit is in damage control. Why should healthcare providers invest in primary care physicians to help you lose weight, eat healthy and get fit when there is so much money to be made in prescription meds and heart surgery?

On AI Coding and Its Discontents.

Cal Newport says the honeymoon phase of AI coding is over. Early advocates of using AI to write code are scaling back their ambitions. Turns out AI-generated code is often buggy, hard to fix and hard to maintain. Coders are still using AI in their work, but in controlled and limited ways. “AI is not a magic ‘infinity machine’ that can solve all our problems, and ultimately deliver us a sense of meaning in a cold, confusing world. It’s a normal technology, and perhaps it’s time we start talking about it that way.”

Bobby Brainworms comes to San Diego to make homelessness remediation as successful as the war in Iran and fixing the reflecting pool.

Anthropic will watermark text and other file types to identify AI-generated content. I’m intrigued by how that would work in text — seems impossible.

I loved the movie “Up In the Air,” starring George Clooney and Anna Kendrick as contractors who break the bad news to employees during corporate layoffs.

I saw it the night I was laid off from a job. It was, I think, my second time being laid off, not my first. The first time you’re laid off it’s traumatic. After that — the second, and subsequent occasions — you’re like yeah sure whatever just tell me about my severance and COBRA.

Also, I have been a frequent business traveler nearly all of my career (though nowhere near as frequent as George Clooney’s character).

Bluesky’s active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app. X is shrinking too but Threads is growing.

“It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” — Harry S Truman

Breaking out the dino undies? She must be really special.

I spent a few minutes on the Democratic Socialists of America website, paying particular attention to their platform. Much of it is aspirational and utopian and entirely agreeable. This is the world we’d like to see in 25, 50 or 100 years, not necessarily tomorrow. However t...

I updated the template for my newsletter to set the maximum width for the body to 600 pixels, so the newsletter doesn’t stretch alllllllll the way across a widescreen. I had Claude do the code and it appeared to get it right in one shot, which is too good to be true.

If you’re reading this in the newsletter and the formatting is funny, please let me know. And if the newsletter is so badly formatted that you can’t read it, well, I hope my attempt at mental telepathy is working.

Shared privately by a friend, who says, “A valid and rational response. Smart kid. Looks into the abyss and averts his eyes.”

This is cool: The cast of “The Pitt” will do a live table reading of the first broadcast episode of “Star Trek” to celebrate the show’s 60th anniversary and benefit the Writers' Guild Foundation. Noah Wylie will play Kirk, and other cast participating include Katherine LaNasa, Fiona Dourif, Taylor Dearden, Shabana Azeez and Ayesha Harris

We missed the San Diego Carnivorous Plant Society Sale and Show. It was last weekend. Darnit!

In other news: San Diego has a carnivorous plant society. Is it a society of carnivorous plants?

If there’s a movie based on a book, and you plan to both see the movie and read the book, what order should you do it in?

I think most readers would say you should read the book first, but a friend makes a compelling, brief argument for seeing the movie first: the book will have so much more to it than the movie. You watch the movie to get the broad strokes and read the book the appreciate the details.

With “Project Hail Mary,” I did something I don’t think I’ve ever done before: I read about half of the book, then watched the movie, then read the rest of the book. I loved the movie, thought parts of the book were great but much of it was “meh.”