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“Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle.”
“I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.” "It was 2017, and a YIMBY activist invited me to talk about my book Nixonland with his book club, which also happened to be Marc Andreessen’s book club." [more inside]
Ad Maiorem Gloriam Concreti
"Not-pleasant! I am causing you not-pleasant!"
The short science fiction story "Hello! Hello! Hello!" by Fiona Jones (published March 2024 in Clarkesworld) begins:
I express greetings and most joyful salutations!
I do not mean to interrupt you if you wish to be without company. It is only that I noticed you have been drifting alone for six flares of star-home-past-great-star-birthplace, and that is many flares! Your movement has been aimless, and I express concern!
Simply put, there is a *ton* of fascist-chic cosplay involved
Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations’: outdated and obsolescent.” [...] “What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said [last October], after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts.TNR: The Tech Baron Seeking to “Ethnically Cleanse” San Francisco: "If Balaji Srinivasan is any guide, then the Silicon Valley plutocrats are definitely not okay." [more inside]
The Dark Side of LED Lighting
The global transition to LED lighting seems to be having some concerning impacts on the natural world and human health.
There have been a lot of cowboys of color, their stories don’t get told
Wallace was Black. The men who helped him were white. One might imagine that such a scene would have been jaw-dropping in Depression-era Texas, where white hostility toward people of color was common. But the West Texas cowboy culture of the time was distinctive. Men of different races often supported and respected one another. And no cowboy was more respected than Wallace. In fact he was one of the most remarkable figures in our history. from The Former Slave Who Became a Cowboy, a Rancher, and a Texas Legend [Texas Monthly; ungated]
Passionate for subway tile and doggos
The end of "the end of passwords"?
At this point I think that Passkeys will fail in the hands of the general consumer population. We missed our golden chance to eliminate passwords through a desire to capture markets and promote hype. Corporate interests have overruled good user experience once again. Just like ad-blockers, I predict that Passkeys will only be used by a small subset of the technical population, and consumers will generally reject them. To reiterate - my partner, who is extremely intelligent, an avid computer gamer and veterinary surgeon has sworn off Passkeys because the user experience is so shit. She wants to go back to passwords. And I'm starting to agree - a password manager gives a better experience than passkeys. That's right. I'm here saying passwords are a better experience than passkeys. Do you know how much it pains me to write this sentence?Aussie software engineer William "Firstyear" Brown pours one out for the "shattered dream" of passkeys. [more inside]
I guess I have no choice but to love this song forever
Ultimately, cultural preferences are subject to generational relativism, heavily rooted in the media of our adolescence. It's strange how much your 13-year-old self defines your lifelong artistic tastes. At this age, we're unable to drive, vote, drink alcohol, or pay taxes, yet we're old enough to cultivate enduring musical preferences. The pervasive nature of music paralysis across generations suggests that the phenomenon's roots go beyond technology, likely stemming from developmental factors. So what changes as we age, and when does open-eardness decline? from When Do We Stop Finding New Music? A Statistical Analysis
Adorable footage of tiny bear cubs emerging from hibernation
Adorable footage of mother bear and tiny cubs emerging from den after hibernation. It’s spring time in Canada! (Video by Serge Wolf.)
The war between humanity and its oldest, archest of enemies: pain.
Mark Chrisler's podcast "The Constant" just concluded a 3 part series, "Comfortably Numb". Part 1 is about the horror and trauma due to the pain of surgery before anesthesia started being used in the 1840s, and ends with the question of why no one thought of using anesthetics before then despite their existence for decade(s) (nitrous oxide, chloroform) or centuries (ether) and their recreational use. Part 2 is about how anesthesia was introduced for surgery. Part 3 is about the fight between the men claiming to invent anesthesia led to their ruination. [more inside]
There She Is: Another Step
Happy Belated Flash Friday! Sort of! If you’ve been around the internet long enough, you might remember There She Is, a Korean Flash animation by Sambakza about a bunny girl smitten with a reluctant cat boy. The whole series has been remastered in HD and uploaded to YouTube as one long video (previously), but the real reason for this post is that, years later, there’s now actually a brand new installment in the series!
"Tonight I miss one legendary Quentin Tarantino."
Pulp Fiction cast on meeting Quentin Tarantino and changing film history | TCMFF 2024 [30m] "John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, and Harvey Keitel reunited at the TCM Classic Film Festival to celebrate the 30th anniversary of PULP FICTION."
It is prestige TV that you can fold laundry to
The Comfortable Problem of Mid TV "Mid TV, on the other hand, almost can’t be bad for some of the same reasons that keep it from being great. It’s often an echo of the last generation of breakthrough TV... Or it’s made by professionals who know how to make TV too well, and therefore miss a prerequisite of making great art, which is training yourself to forget how the thing was ever done and thus coming up with your own way of doing it... Mid is not a strict genre with a universal definition. But it’s what you get when you raise TV’s production values and lower its ambitions. It reminds you a little of something you once liked a lot. It substitutes great casting for great ideas."
The "G" is pronounced the same as in GIF
These lizards have evolved to make snakes the snack
Think snakes are scary? These lizards have evolved to make snakes the snack. Snakes and lizards in the Australian outback are locked in a battle of survival. Which is predator and which is prey comes down to strategies they've evolved to resist deadly venom, a study suggests.
Passersby were amazed at the unusually large amounts of synergy
G/O Media, the much-reviled owner of such internet landmarks as Kotaku, Gizmodo, Jalopnik, and The Root, has been selling off their assets recently, including ClickHole (sold to Cards Against Humanity), Lifehacker (Ziff Davis), Deadspin (gutted), Jezebel and the AV Club (Paste). Latest on the auction block is The Onion... who ended up with a surprising buyer: Global Tetrahedron, a name that might ring a few bells for longtime readers. But what does the advent of this ominous conglomerate mean for America's Finest News Source?™ [more inside]
"One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea"
When you often notice people "why-don't-they-just"-ing their way into a proposed solution to a gnarly problem, you might turn your criticisms into a checklist. "Your post advocates a [( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante] approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work." These templates often offer a summary of the problem space and a glimpse of experts' frustrations. Solution rejection checklists exist for fixing the housing crisis, beating the CAP Theorem, protecting against DDOS attacks, improving pharmaceutical drug discovery success rates, creating new programming languages and distributed social networks, and (MeFi comment!) saving journalism. [more inside]
Hardly the attitude of the next poet laureate
The World's Largest Wildlife Crossing Will Help Animals Walk Safely Over
The World's Largest Wildlife Crossing Will Help Animals Walk Safely Over Eight Lanes of California Traffic. The 210-foot-long bridge across a busy freeway in Los Angeles County is expected to be finished in 2025.