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Sumit Chandel and Eldhose Mathokkil Babu, writing for the Google Developers blog: In 2018, we announced the deprecation and transition of Google URL Shortener to Firebase Dynamic Links because of the changes we’ve seen in how people find content on the internet, and the ...

An eye-opening segment on Brian Lehrer's show today. The first half is an interview with Hakeem Jeffries, you can skip that part, pretty standard stuff. It gets interesting at 17:50 when they take calls from listeners. A lot of different points of view from people of all age...

Ina Fried, reporting for Axios: “We will release a multimodal Llama model over the coming months, but not in the EU due to the unpredictable nature of the European regulatory environment,” Meta said in a statement to Axios. Apple similarly said last month that it won’t ...

Tom Warren, The Verge: Thousands of Windows machines are experiencing a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) issue at boot today, impacting banks, airlines, TV broadcasters, supermarkets, and many more businesses worldwide. A faulty update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike ...

Now that Elon Musk is giving so generously, dollars and flow, to the fascists, he's encouraging more of us to use Zuckerberg's twitter-like system, aka Threads. But Zuck isn't making it go down easy. There's a piece in Bloomberg (paywall) that says Trump is badass but isn't supporting either candidate. What could possibly go wrong?

Matt says some interesting new stuff is coming from Automattic now that WordPress 6.6 is out. Something for writers? Perhaps something that moves WordPress into a space adjacent to twitter-like systems? They just added support for Threads to WordPress, so now you can crosspost from a blog to a thread. Haven't tried it yet. They also have a new identity system built around Gravatar, announced in early June. It'll be interesting to see what they come out with. I wonder if there is a developer ecosystem building on this, and if they have an evangelism program. I have my own vision of how these things should work.

If the world doesn't know you did something you might as well not have done it. This is what Doug Engelbart learned, and what we learned in his aftermath. He is known for inventing the mouse, because that's the one thing he invented everyone knows about. He also developed software that pioneered using a computer to organize your ideas. For the most part people don't know about that because (I guess) most people don't organize their work?

I'm avoiding the actual RNC, the speakers are just actors. Trump looks like the Queens kid he is. People from Queens don't feel like we really belong, except with other Queens people. We expect to be thought of as the kid from Queens. I know this so well. So the "boss" slumps around not sure what to do or say. He's not gregarious. Not in charge of anything.

Nancy Wicklund Gonzalez: "I’ve had to switch to watching the BBC. American news is unwatchable. Between the lionization of a sociopath and the denigration of a decent man, I just can’t even."

Today's song: It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).

I don’t post many affiliate links but here’s a great one: Amazon has second-gen AirPods Pro for just $169 for Prime Day, discounted a full third from the usual price of $249. AirPods Pro are not just my favorite earbuds ever, they’re one of my favorite products ever, full stop. Buy through this link and I’ll get rich.

SMS wasn’t dying, but it was slowly fading away, and should have been left for things like automated “your table is ready” notifications from restaurants. RCS is just going to give carrier-based messaging new legs that it shouldn’t have gotten.

The Repubs can win by throwing the election into the House. They can probably get it by the courts in enough places, just a couple of swing states, and they win even if they lose by normal vote-counting methods. The whole bit about Biden's age is meant to distract us from the fact it probably doesn't matter how old the Democratic candidate is.

A podcast about listening to the podcasts from 2004.

This is a short episode about what I learned, and what's coming up.

Humbling experience.

Pete Wells: The first thing you learn as a restaurant critic is that nobody wants to hear you complain. The work of going out to eat every night with hand-chosen groups of friends and family sounds suspiciously like what other people do on vacation. If you happen to work...

Highly recommend this Netflix series -- esp the last three episodes. I found it enlightening, even though I lived through most of this history, I never saw it all put together in a series of events over decades. I came out of it with a much clearer perspective of where we are in the Cold War. It never was over. "The end of history" was too good to be true. Also glad I read so much about slavery a few years ago. If you put both these together, you get the USA, and the deep and lasting wounds we keep re-opening.

Today's adventure: "The great and cute Wordle Kitty was surprisingly chosen to be the running mate of the most popular presidential candidate in the history of the United States, who happens to also be very very old so that’s why they nominated the cute little cat to be the vice president because she is so young and so incredibly cute."

And btw, don't panic. You can't accomplish anything that way.

The problem with JD Vance is that he's empty inside, he'll be whatever he needs to be to get more power, and he's young. He's as empty as Trump, and much younger, so we can't hope to outwait him. Now we have a real problem, because Trump has a successor. I imagine Trump's so...