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Loud motorcycles suck and should be banned.
I do not understand why it is legal for motorcycles to be so goddamned loud. I was out for a ride around town on my cycle this afternoon. While I was waiting to turn out from a quiet residential side street onto a more major thoroughfare, a guy rolled…
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Science fiction is not the future. It’s made-up stories about the past and the present.
The amount of time and energy that otherwise smart people spend convincing themselves (and trying to convince others) that made-up science fiction stories and shows/movies with actors playing fictional characters are actually some kind of blueprint for a…
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Algorithmic recommendations are shit.
🔗Jeff C. on Mastodon: Amazon: "I see that you're shopping for a rice cooker! Would you like to buy this rice cooker along with a rice cooker and another rice cooker?“ I am 100% convinced that, nearly two decades into the age of algorithmic…
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Donating to NPR and thinking about communal needs
As is my Sunday-morning habit, I am sitting here in my kitchen planning out the week and—as usual—I am listening to our local public radio station’s classical channel. Something about Sunday mornings just always says classical music to me. While…
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No one should have to say they’re redundant
I hate hate HATE that when huge companies make dumb, short-sighted decisions and then lay off people they don't give a shit about and think of as interchangeable parts, those same people are then forced to go on social media to talk about how their "role…
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Yeah, bubbles are fine.
🔗 the writer type: I deny that I'm in an echo chamber, and so do the voices.: The stark truth is that far from cocooning us, social media exposes us to a wide variety of previously unencountered people and opinions. These people are invariably weird, and…
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Fiction is ridiculous. And also great.
🔗 I Like Sally Rooney's Novels - The Biblioracle Recommends: When you get down to it, every novel is something of a con job where the author is trying to put one over on the reader. We know these people don’t exist, that everything is made up, an…
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The only way to stop platforms from exploiting personal data is to make it too expensive for them.
🔗 Social media and online video firms are conducting ‘vast surveillance’ on users, FTC finds | Technology | The Guardian: The FTC report published on Thursday looked at the data-gathering practices of Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Discord, Reddit, Amazon,…
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I kind of think all software should cost money.
Whenever someone posts a new privacy-focused app or service they have discovered—web-search, chat, social media, etc.—my first question is "How much does it cost?" If the answer is that it is free, my next question is "How does it make money?" If I can't…
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When that thing you like turns into a business
I think we need a word for that moment when you realize that the individual creator you like has turned their thing into a hustle. It’s when the podcast you’ve been enjoying that was about a specific topic is spending more and more of their time talking…
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On likes and boosts
There was a long discussion thread on Micro.blog this past week about the platform’s lack of “social” features such as likes and boosts, and how the community aspect of Micro.blog would be better if it had these sorts of features. Everyone is, of…
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Alien: Romulus is a pretty good movie.
I went to see Alien: Romulus a few nights ago with friends and you know what? It was pretty good! Not great, and I had some a few complaints about it, but overall the movie kept me entertained for two hours. I should say that I went into it with very low…
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Never underestimate greed and ignorance.
I feel like a corollary to Hanlon's Razor ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity") is that one should never underestimate the amount of damage and suffering that can be caused by stupidity. We look at terrible things…
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The good old days weren’t all that good, if we’re being honest.
I was just reading yet another terrible review of Jonathan Haidt’s books about how mobile devices are destroying a whole generation. I am not going to link to it—not because the review is bad but rather because that book has already sucked up more than…
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My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
I finished reading My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones earlier this week. While I didn’t love it, I liked it enough that I drove to the bookstore the day after I finished it to pick up the sequel. The book connected with all of the horror…
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Reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
I am about a hundred pages into Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which I am a bit embarrassed to admit that I have never read before. I have, of course, seen the old Universal movie with Boris Karloff as the Monster, and I think I saw the 1990s Kenneth…
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That so many people think Google is the only search engine basically proves they are a monopoly.
I was just reading some conversations on Mastodon about whether the antitrust ruling against Google will end up actually hurting them. As a matter of principle, I am all for these sorts of rulings. I hope that the DOJ has a bunch more cases in the…
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METALLICA!
The 14yo and I went to see Metallica in Boston on Friday night. It was his first concert, and my first time seeing Metallica live in nearly thirty years. While they are all clearly getting on in years (aren’t we all?), Metallica still puts on a great…
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Individual choices may not change the world, but they still matter.
🔗 Derf on Bluesky: As a former garbageman, I love stories like this. "Everything you're doing to cut down on waste is wrong." OK. So what SHOULD we do? "There's NOTHING you can do." Shut up. Derf is right. You should listen to Derf. It drives me kind of…
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Some David Lynch films, and also Abigail
Having watched Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway, and Muholland Drive over the course of the last week, I felt like I needed a bit of a break before taking on Inland Empire. We signed up for a month’s worth of Peacock to watch some Olympics stuff (I could…