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On Bill Watterson’s Refusal To License Calvin and Hobbes is a great read. Let’s call this reverse enshittification. – via Links You’ll Love
“If a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance, thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance.”
Do your shoelaces sit crooked? Do you retie your shoes several times a day? These are both signs of a Granny Knot. Learn the trick for keeping your shoes neatly and securely tied. – via Jodi Ettenberg
Handy tool if you ever deal with email configurations: Quickly view your DomainKeys, DKIM, and SPF validity, and SpamAssassin score with DKIMValidator. – via @ofaolain.com
Even the best parents of the best kids have had this thought: “Children are overbearing, supercilious, passionate, envious, inquisitive, egotistical, idle, fickle, timid, intemperate, liars, and dissemblers; they laugh and weep easily, are excessive in their joys and sorrows, and that about the most trifling objects; they bear no pain, but like to inflict it on others.” – Jean de La Bruyère, via Daily Dad
The International Energy Agency has said the electricity usage of data centers worldwide might double in just four years. US electricity demand alone could jump 20 percent by 2030, driven mostly by AI. – via @longreads.com
No. I don’t think I’ll ever get over Macho Grande.

Jumblie is yet another fun little word game you can add to your morning routine of Wordle, Connections, &c.
The appeal to nature fallacy is not a viable healthcare strategy. Sometimes “all natural” is far better, but other times nature tries to kill us. – via @kmpanthagani.bsky.social
Matthew Green wrote a post about how AI will interface with end-to-end encryption. TL;DR: Maybe not so well! – via @matthewdgreen.bsky.social
Related: Another day, another horrific and troubling example of AI going wrong – via @emily.space
Related: Scientists covered a robot finger in living human skin.
Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. Unfortunately those who do study history are also involuntarily dragged along for the ride.
In college a friend suggested I read The Myth Adventure series by Robert Asprin. At the time it had been almost a decade since I’d read The Hobbit and the rest of Tolkien, and I thoroughly enjoyed returning to stories of dragons and wizards and swords. It looks like they’re no longer being published, but if you’re into that sort of tale, I’m sure you can find them used somewhere.

Axios has put together a handy list of which companies are rolling back DEI policies and which are standing firm.
Related: One of my favorite podcasts is The Rest is History. A recent episode highlights an incontrovertible fact plainly obvious to anyone who’s ever had to deal with a toddler. It doesn’t matter whether you’re dealing with a schoolyard bully, a demanding client, a political rival, or Hitler himself. Appeasement never works.
If you have an Apple computer, you can click the command key and the plus key to increase the font size in (almost) every app. And command with the minus key makes the font smaller, natch. It might seem like a silly tip, but I can’t tell you how many times someone has been delighted when I show them this.
Put your Taylor Swift musical knowledge to the test. – via @lilmisssunshine
“Nobody controls me. I’m uncontrollable. The only one who controls me is me, and that’s just barely possible.” – John Lennon
If you got a new laptop for Christmas, you should grab (at least) one of these 5-in-1 USB-C / HDMI hubs. I keep one in my computer bag and the other is (essentially) what I use as a docking station at home.
“Artificial Intelligence will finally have arrived when my laptop can tell me specifically which process is actually still accessing the flash drive I’m trying to eject after closing every open app on the machine.” – via @kiplet

If I ever got name-checked on The Simpsons, I think I would spontaneously combust. – via @sepinwall
How Gen Z Came to See Books as a Waste of Time – via @theatlantic
For about a year and a half I was really into intermittent fasting. I used a great app called Simple that helped me track my daily water consumption and weight, and also handled reminding me when my fasting windows were, let me log what I was eating and when, etc. The app was so good, I even gladly paid for an annual subscription to unlock bonus features. And then — for reasons I cannot imagine — the developers rolled out a “new” version loaded to the gills with whiz-bang AI features that made the app completely useless and incomprehensibly frustrating. I tried for a few months to get used to the new system, but eventually abandoned it, canceled my subscription, and still haven’t found a decent replacement. I abhor the continued enshittification of everything.
Male bigfin reef squid may be the best fathers of all cephalopods. [Ed. note: But can they make Sunday morning chocolate chip pancakes?]
It’s really a shame that Russell Brand has gone crazy, because Forgetting Sarah Marshall is easily one of the all-time best comedies.
Strong Lloyd Dobler vibes in this essay, and I am here for it: “[P]eople do want to work, just not for the paltry wages they were making before the pandemic.”
“If you spell your name backwards and place an umlaut over one of the vowels, that’s your IKEA name.” [Ed. note: Mine is Engäg and I’m a kitchen drawer divider.] – via @drewtalbert
Regular exercisers drink more, a new study confirms, but are less likely to be problem drinkers. – via @outsidemagazine
Black Friday / Holiday Sales:
- The world’s comfiest t-shirts and coziest sweatpants are crazy expensive, but this weekend almost everything is on sale at Aviator Nation.
- Everything at ’47 Brand is 30% off this weekend. Get all the best sports gear gifts here.
- Need some everyday walking shoes? Everything is 50% off at Allbirds this weekend.
- I have an AirPods Pro case and a wallet from Saddleback Leather Co. and they’re both exquisite. Not everything is on sale, but they do have some pretty good deals this weekend on a few things. (Their motto is, “They’ll fight over it when you’re dead.”)
- Use promo code BLACKFRIDAY to get 30% off (and free shipping) on everything at J. Peterman this weekend.
Fun Fact: Jon Gries, the actor who portrayed Lazlo Hollyfeld in Real Genius (TriStar Pictures, 1985), went on to play Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite (Searchlight Pictures, 2004) and the love interest of Jennifer Coolidge in The White Lotus (HBO, 2021).

I love The Octonauts, although I do sometimes worry it’s giving my son an unrealistic perception of the coffee consumption rate of the average undersea exploration headquarters polar bear captain. – via @gatordavid
How The Netherlands Built a Biking Utopia – via distilled
Here’s some cool stuff you can do with Bluesky (aside from following me, of course).
There’s No Longer Any Doubt That Hollywood Writing Is Powering AI – via @rking_618
This is your annual reminder that the album Sugar & Booze by SNL alum Ana Gasteyer is chock full of fantastic holiday music and you can stream it on Alexa.
In part he cried because he knew what lay ahead. The families of the dead, the people who were shot, had now been in war, like he had. They would struggle like he and so many of his combat buddies had.
I joined Mastodon seven years ago — a full decade after I started using Twitter, by the way — and still have absolutely no idea how it works. (Note that I’ve spent the last thirty years building web and mobile applications.)
This kid’s reaction to Lamar Jackson‘s scramble last weekend is the best (via Ravens). – via @randderuiter

Want 33,000 classic sound effects for free? Check out the BBC Sound Effects Archive.
I am very much concerned about the many, many, many possible negative consequences of nefarious, incompetent, and/or misguided generative AI. Ruining wikipedia should have been on my bingo card.
A University College London demographer’s work debunking ‘Blue Zone’ regions of exceptional lifespans won an Ig Nobel prize. I always thought blue zones sounded fishy.
Ugh. Scientists are worried that persisting cognitive issues sparked by COVID-19 may signal a coming surge of dementia and other mental conditions.
Philip Moscovitch‘s Halifax Examiner article Beyond the Link Tax: Journalism and the Changing Nature of the Internet contains some interesting ideas about potentially taxing megacorporations to subsidize good reporting. But what grabbed me was the line, “Essentially, what we are seeing is the slow death of the hyperlink […]” Sites like Threads, Instagram, Twitter / X, et.al. have a vested interest in keeping you from leaving. They are, in fact, designed to make it more difficult for you to get to the “rest” of the Internet. I have been occasionally combing through old posts here and it is alarming — for someone who’s been blogging regularly for more than a quarter of a century — how many links simply no longer work. And I’m not talking about links from twenty years ago which should work but don’t (because the site’s gone offline or developers didn’t bother to redirect URLs). I’m talking about links from just a year or two ago. The wayback machine has been a fantastic resource to help me find archived content, but it’s not perfect and it’s grossly underfunded for how important it is to anyone who cares. See also: link rot
Speaking of being extremely online, you should read Reclaiming Social Media in a Fragmented World. I love the concept of POSSE and it’s been something I’ve really tried to remember the last few years, especially after what’s happened with Twitter.
On Ghost Networks: Ravi Coutinho bought a health insurance plan thinking it would deliver on its promise of access to mental health providers. But even after twenty-one phone calls and multiple hospitalizations, no one could find him a therapist.

AI Is Becoming More Like People: and Some People Are Insane

Posts tagged “artificial intelligence”

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