Category Archives: Technology

OK, I’ve got a beef with Mr. Peabody

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As we all know, the people who created “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show” back in 1959 were geniuses, but none of the writers and animators were quite as brilliant, of course, as one of their creations, Mr. Peabody. I refer of course to the anthropomorpic hound who is, as Wikipedia states:

…the smartest being in existence, having graduated from Harvard when he was 3 years old. (“Wagna cum laude“).

But I’ve got a little beef with him about his Wayback Machine, which enabled him and Sherman to travel back through history at will.

More accurately, my problem is with the folks who set up the website named for Mr. Peabody’s most famous invention.

Don’t get me wrong. Those folks are wonderful. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is one of the most amazing things the internet has given us. It’s almost up there with Google Maps, which could thoroughly absorb me every minute of the rest of my life, if I let it. (Since I am the most distractable being in the universe, I can no longer read a book without pausing to look up each geographical reference to see where it is in respect to other places I know, checking the latitude and longitude, zooming down to ground level with the satellite filter and shifting to Street View to travel up and down the avenue, clicking in closer on interesting buildings… It’s ridiculous.)

The Wayback Machine may not take us back to enjoy a tête-à-tête with Cleopatra, but it does something else pretty startling. It gives us information that no longer exists (at least, not as we mere intermediate users can tell).

But here’s the thing: It’s not perfect. I don’t know if this has to do with different universes creating static and interfering with each other or what (forgive me if I’m getting too technical for you), but… well, it’s not perfect, Mr. Peabody.

Say, if you go back looking for something you wrote on a website that no longer exists, because (for instance) you don’t want to have to research and write that again, you may go back and connect to a site on a certain date, a date when you know the content you need was there, and you get to the home page, and you click on the page you want… and the content isn’t there, or is only partially there.

Which is a bit of a letdown. This probably doesn’t matter much to you, but it’s a big deal to me, because I see the internet a bit differently, as a result of my own particular history of traumatic experiences. You know how veterans of war or horrific natural disasters have trouble shaking the experience, sometimes for the rest of their lives?

Well, my form of PTSD results from all those decades of putting out newspapers under severe time pressure and space limitations. And while you may rightly regard that as less serious than those other kinds of PTSD, it produces some of the same symptoms. Such as dreams. For instance, I frequently wake up exhausted from what seems like hours of trying to crank out the paper in spite of inexplicable technical problems.

Anyway, the Web would be a magnificent thing, to me, even if it did nothing but eliminate this one former problem: As a reporter in the olden days, you’d work yourself half to death getting the needed info and writing it, and then the next day, it’s being used to wrap fish. I don’t begrudge readers using it that way, if fish wrap is what they need. But the thing is, after you publish that first story, you will then have to write multiple followups, assuming the story is ongoing, and most big, breaking stories end up in that category.

And since what you wrote before is now inaccessible to the reader, every single time there is a new development, you have to waste half of the few inches of precious space you have giving the background of what happened before this latest development. It’s ENORMOUSLY wasteful.

With the Web, there’s zero need for that. Give the reader an HTML link, and you’re done.

That is, assuming the frickin’ link works.

So… to put it in different terms, I cannot for a second understand why kids would waste time posting on, say, Snapchat. Or post on Instagram in that way that it goes away as soon as (or before) you’ve had a chance to glance at it.

If I don’t want it to be there and handy after I write it, why would I write it in the first place? (Even if it is something silly like this post.)

It’s not that I expect the Web to be eternal. Or at least, not exactly. I realize it could all disappear instantly if Dr. Evil figured out how to set off EMP devices over every population center on the planet. Suddenly, we’d be back in the Stone Age (or back in times before Google Maps, which, if you look at things from a geological perspective, is practically the same thing, being no more than 15 millennia or so off).

So, speaking of the Stone Age, I’d like stuff to last at least as long as something one of my Neanderthal ancestors once etched on a rock. I mean, that’s not an easy medium to store in a library, but at least it’s something.

All I want is for the Wayback Machine to work perfectly. Is that really too much to ask, Mr. Peabody?

On Tubi and the return of the TV commercial

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The Washington Post had a mildly interesting piece today about Tubi, which reminded me of something else I wanted to muse upon.

The headline is “Tubi or not Tubi? The weirdest streaming service has the most devoted fans.”

You know Tubi. It’s that thing you run into sometimes when you want to stream a certain movie, and it’s not on Netflix, or Prime, or Britbox or any of the services you PAY for, but it is on Tubi — for free.

The Post story is about what a vast variety of material you can find on that service, from stuff so awful that it would make one of the robots on “Mystery Science Theatre 3000” blush, to gems that you would expect to pay for on Criterion — and loads of random stuff in-between.

And it’s free, it a very old-fashioned sense. As the story notes, “But Tubi is a streaming service that doesn’t feel like one. Owned by Fox, it’s free, so long as you can stomach a few ads (you know, like old TV).”

And that’s what I wanted to talk about.

Is the future of screen entertainment going to be the past — the way, way, past, going back before we first got VCRs so we could tape what we wanted to see, and skim past the commercials?

Later, moving into the current century, we thought we were really, truly free — with no ads at all. And without even recording anything on low-res magnetic tape, we were no longer slaves to the clock! Whatever we wanted to see was on whenever we wanted to see it, and in 4k! And no bloodsucking cable!

Except, of course, we had to pay new fees to a bewildering, growing array of ravenous streaming companies. And the worst part is, I for one have NO IDEA how much I spend on these services. Sure, I could look it up and calculate a figure, but I really don’t want to. How would that make me happy? And there’s so much good stuff, way better than broadcast days! You want me to get all depressed and have to drop AppleTV + just as they’re releasing a new season of “Slow Horses?” Of course not. I mean, a TV show starring Gary Oldman, with the theme song sung by Mick Jagger? What’s wrong with you?

But then an interesting thing happened a year or two back. Suddenly, the already huge selection on Prime got much, much bigger, with an amazing proportion of the new content being really top-drawer stuff.

There was just a small catch — most of this new stuff you’d just discovered came with… commercials. Commercials you couldn’t just fast-forward through (or at least, I don’t know how to).

And you know what? I don’t mind. At least, not much. Just keep giving me an expanding supply of high-quality material like this, and you won’t hear any complaints from me.

In fact… you remember when these 15-second ads were 60 seconds? Like on Captain Kangaroo? That was OK. That was our break time. Hit the loo, and come back with another bowl of Kellogg’s cereal. And when you’re back, there’s Tom Terrific!

I wouldn’t even complain about a full minute. But I want one thing — you’ve gotta bring back the Captain. Oh, and Mr. Green Jeans…

Nice playlist, YouTube!

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When I first listened to this, I was initially going to try to say something about how impressed I was that artificial intelligence had gotten so much better.

Screenshot

But then, I realized that such a preference-driven thing as this wasn’t really artificial (or any other kind of) “thinking” at all. It’s more of a case of you press button A multiple times, and the machine keeps showing you A — not even something as smart as “thinks like A,” but A itself. In some way or other, you could probably have built a machine that could do that a hundred years ago. Press these 12 buttons; get these 12 results. Duh…

It wasn’t even as “smart” as the thing I admired Pandora doing several years back — long before, say, ChatGPT and such. That’s when I noticed that, based on the tunes I had elected to hear, the algorithm was intuiting that I would also like this other tune, of which I had never heard. And it was right. I made some really happy discoveries through that process. I was impressed because Netflix had been presented at the time as being able to do that with movies and TV shows, and it failed miserably. I wasn’t sure whether that was because there are fewer variables with music, or because Pandora was just that much smarter than Netflix.

Anyway, this is nothing like that. I’ve chosen at some time or other to call up every clip on this list (except perhaps one), and YouTube just put them together and played them back for me.

But as dumb and obvious as that may be, I really enjoyed it. So I thought I’d share. Maybe you’ll dig it, or some of it, too. Here’s what it presented to me under the “My Mix” heading:

  1. “New Lace Sleeves,” Elvis Costello and the Attractions — What kind of music would you call this? I would have called it “jazz,” based on what that rhythm section is doing. But Wikipedia doesn’t say “jazz” once, which I guess shows yet again that I am a musical ignoramus. It puts both Elvis and the song under “New Wave,” which is hard to argue with. I says Elvis himself said it was inspired by Devo‘s cover of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and Stevie Wonder‘s “Superstition“. I can see the Devo, but not the Stevie. At least Wikipedia admits that Elvis’ wife plays jazz.
  2. “Tired of Being Alone,” Al Green — No mystery here. I listen to the Rev. Al quite a bit. As should everyone. And this one may be the best, although, to quote Ed Grimley, it’s difficult to say…
  3. “Elenore,” the Turtles — I love the story people tell about this one. The Turtles wanted to get all creative and produce a Sgt. Pepper or a Pet Sounds, but their label just wanted another “Happy Together.” So they decided to write the worst piece of crap they could think up, and that was “Elenore,” and the studio recorded it, and it was fantastic. Another big hit, because it’s simply an awesome pop song. Even the Turtles had to admit it. It’s even creative — I like the rhyming with the first syllable: “ELenore, gee I think you’re/SWELL and you really do me/WELL..” and so forth. Yes, the lyrics are moronic, but in a clever way, I always thought. I thought the dumb words were a way of saying that Elenore blows the guy’s mind to such an extent that he is rendered incoherent….
  4. “Use Ta Be My Girl,” the O’Jays — Not sure why this is on here. Not that I hate it, but I don’t remember having deliberately played it.
  5. “I’m an Old Cowhand,” Gene Autrey — I know why this one’s here. My mother was talking about enjoying the singing cowboy when she was a child, so I was showing her how to find some of his stuff on YouTube…
  6. “New Amsterdam,” Elvis Costello and the Attractions — Played this a lot before we went to Europe, especially since we’d be spending close to half the time in Amsterdam. Talk about fun, goofy lyrics… “New Amsterdam it’s become much too much/Till I have the possession of everything she touches/Till I step on the brakes to get out of her clutches/Till I speak double dutch to a real double duchess.” Maybe ol’ Declan is saying something super-deep about New York. I dunno. I just dig the wordplay. I listen to it the way I do “I Am the Walrus” — although this is better.
  7. “King Harvest,” The Band — I’ve mentioned my appreciation of this many times before, and this is a great time to listen to it — the most autumnal song by the most autumnal band ever. I first found this video of the guys playing it live in the studio years ago, and consider it a bit of a treasure.
  8. “Happy Together,” the Turtles — Hey, you can’t put “Elenore” near the beginning of a playlist and leave this one out altogether. As Nick Hornby said about making a mix tape, there are a lot of rules. And apparently YouTube’s algorithm follows them.
  9. “Sulky Girl,” Elvis Costello — I’ve mentioned how impressive I found this one before, so of course YouTube puts it in.
  10. “Delta Lady,” Leon Russell — This clip is another classic in the “live in the studio” genre. And of course, this was a time when musicians were fond of putting glitches and restarts on vinyl, to give listeners an illusion of being there. But this is special. When Leon starts, and stops everyone and starts again — twice — you are hearing the Master of Space and Time himself, an actual leading member of the Wrecking Crew, at work…
  11. “A Day in the Life,” The Beatles — No need for explanation here, is there?
  12. “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding,” Elvis and the Attractions — One of the great things about this is that it comes across as the quintessential Elvis Costello song, suiting his persona perfectly. And yet it’s not. Nick Lowe wrote it… but he could never bring it to life as well as Elvis. Nick sings it too gently. When Elvis does it, he says the title in a way that sounds like he’s ready to fight, and daring you to tell him what’s so funny about it…

So there you go. It’s been a rough week, folks. Enjoy…

You know who inspired “Delta Lady,” right? Rita Coolidge.

 

 

How on Earth is this ploy supposed to work?

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In “Office Space,” there’s a scene in which the three computer engineers, having sort of backed their way into a serious crime, are talking about laundering their ill-gotten money. But they don’t know how. They are reduced to looking up “money-laundering” in a dictionary. And Michael Bolton complains,

How is it that all these stupid, Neanderthal, Mafia guys can be so good at crime and smart guys like us can suck so badly at it?

I’ve often thought something like that, only I don’t think those guys are stupid. I think maybe I am. I couldn’t begin to follow a scam I once heard described on “The Sopranos.” I forget the deal. Maybe it was selling phone cards to Mexican migrants. Whatever it was, I could not see at all how anybody made money from it.

And I really, truly can’t figure out how something like the scam text above, which I got tonight, is supposed to work. It seems to me to be predicated on the recipient getting all worried, thinking:

OhmyGod! My transaction for $292.55 got rejected! Now I’m not going to get that thing I just tried to buy for $292.55!

Suppose someone does think that. What’s going to keep him from then thinking…

Wait. WHAT thing I bought for $292.55? I didn’t buy anything for $292.55!

Also:

And when did I ever do business of any kind with Wells Fargo? No, excuse me, with “W3lls Fargo?” And if I did, what kind of business can’t spell its own name?

And then:

Apparently, I’m supposed to reach out in a panic to the sender of the message. But they didn’t tell me how to do that. Where’s the link they want me to click, so they can steal my identity or whatever?

Maybe this deal is so brilliant that I can’t suss it out. Or maybe this is legit, and the sender was so anxious to help the recipient that he forgot how to spell “Wells,” forgot to provide the contact, and sent it to the wrong person.

But I don’t think so. I suspect there’s a bot out there that’s missing a few lines of code…

 

OK, I give up. How do I exile Yahoo from Chrome PERMANENTLY?

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… which is not what I wanted to KNOW!…

Yahoo search engine is to me what Mexicans are to a Trump supporter. I want to deport it, and make sure it NEVER sneaks back in.

But whenever I try to find out how to do that, all I can find is simple instructions telling me how to switch the Chrome default browser back to Google, and then remove Yahoo from the options.

What am I, an idiot? (And despite that opening, I won’t let you get abusive in comments.) I freaking know how to do that! I’ve done it maybe 15 times now in recent months. And yeah, it always works — at first. But within days, the usurper is back on Google’s throne, and in its own castle — Chrome! That’s like a random Mexican guy crossing the Rio and making himself POTUS (which would not be good, but of course, better than having Trump).

I keep searching, with different wording in the search field. They keep giving me the same instructions I’ve encountered and so many times before.

Do y’all have any good advice to share?

(Yes, I’ll get to your comments and post something new soon, but right now I’m ticked off about this.)

Let me know if you can read these two good Dionne pieces

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OK, I’m going to conduct an experiment here. Please help me out.

The last couple of weeks, E.J. Dionne has had two really excellent columns. There’s nothing unusual about that. But there’s something new — or something that I hadn’t previously noticed — about them. Here’s the first:

Did you see that at the end of the tweet — “my column free access?” I’m asking y’all to try to link and read the column, and let me know if you’re able to do so without being a subscriber. Then, leave your thoughts on the column.

I loved the piece, because E.J. is getting to the heart of my great appreciation of Joe Biden. Because I am both liberal and conservative myself, I see Joe as the only hope left to the country. We had plenty of such people to choose from in the decades after 1945. And we needed them. We need them more than ever now. But now there’s just Joe.

But E.J.’s piece also shames me a bit. I say the same things he’s saying here all the time, but I tend to present them as truth without the careful documentation and explanation. This is possibly because I grow weary of repeatedly explaining how I arrive at conclusions that have taken seven decades of thought and observation to reach. And people shrug it off, because they think it’s just the ranting of an alter cocker.

But I guess it’s also because I don’t get paid anymore to put in the time to dig up all the evidence supporting conclusions I reached long ago. So I don’t. Too much time spent doing what little I do to make a modest living. And doing it around those naps that are the residue of my stroke in 2000. I can do all the things I used to do, but I have less time in which to do them.

In any case, I’m very appreciative to E.J. for taking the time to explain it to his readers, especially since I know he’s busier than I am.

Now, the other column, which features the same “free access:”

First, again, please let me know if you can read it. Beyond that…

Another good piece. There are, of course, many things that, considered alone, tell us “all we need to know about him.” You could compile a lengthy list of things that, considered singly, should cause any voter to run the opposite way. But this should be, if not the top item, at least very close to it.

Anyway, I wanted to share these columns because they’re important, and I’m thinking E.J. gets these points across batter than I do.

Beyond that, though, I really want to know whether those links work for nonsubscribers.

This is one of the things that concerns me most about blogging these days. To me, almost everything worth discussing these days is from things I subscribe to. This was fine 10 or 15 years ago, before everybody got so serious about pay walls. Now, it’s a huge problem — I bring up something, and I want everyone to read it so we can have a discussion with everyone fully informed, but most people can’t open it. Because normal people don’t subscribe to four or five newspapers.

So when I get a chance to share, I seize it. But please let me know if it worked for you…

Submitting myself once again to that great time thief, Gmail

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No, I won’t read this or thousands of others. But it still takes time to glance over them and delete en masse…

I’m getting close to cleaning out my personal email once again. By “close,” I mean I succeeded in going through everything that comes in under the “Primary” tab on my Gmail IN box. Right now, I’m working on the 2,500 that still remained today under “Promotions” (which is much easier, since I delete almost everything — I’ve gotten it down under 2,000 in just a few minutes). I haven’t yet looked at the 238 I have under “Social” (doesn’t sound like much, but I have to look at quite a few of those individually).

But I’m taking a moment now to share with you something I read in The New York Times this morning. It’s a column from Ezra Klein, whose podcasts I enjoy so much. Here’s the special link that’s supposed to allow me to share it. I don’t know whether that means I can share it here, or just with one person. Please try it and let me know if it works.

The headline is “Happy 20th Anniversary, Gmail. I’m Sorry I’m Leaving You.” Basically, Ezra has a much worse Gmail problem than I do, so he’s given up, and trying alternatives. Here’s part of his explanation as to why:

A few months ago, I euthanized that Gmail account. I have more than a million unread messages in my inbox. Most of what’s there is junk. But not all of it. I was missing too much that I needed to see. Search could not save me. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Google’s algorithms had begun failing me. What they thought was a priority and what I thought was a priority diverged. I set up an auto-responder telling anyone and everyone who emailed me that the address was dead….

On one level, that makes me feel so much better. “More than a million?” Now, I won’t feel such shame when I let mine get up around the 20,000 range, which I occasionally do. That is technically manageable. All I have to do is neglect work, reading, and of course blogging, for at least several days. Then I have a clean IN box, and everything starts piling up again as I resume my life.

I’m not ready to do what Ezra has done, however much I understand why he did it. He says he’s moved to an email provider called “Hey.” My eyes lit up at that, because he said “Hey assumes that only the people you want email from should be able to email you.” Sounds nice, but then he went on to describe numerous drawbacks to Hey.

But I applaud his courage in striking out in search of an alternative. And I think he should not beat up on himself this way:

I do not blame anyone but myself for this. This is not something the corporations did to me. This is something I did to myself….

Lighten up, Ezra. You’re a busy man. You have a life. Actual humans (not the algorithms that send you most of those emails) are depending on you to do things in Meat World.

And if this were 1980 or 1814 or 44 BC or any other time — when you were only expected to answer an occasional letter from an actual acquaintance — you’d have no cause to issue such a mea culpa.

I’m sure the robots will have a time machine ready for us soon. Just kick back and wait…

Apparently, top editors suspect the Matrix is coming

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It really struck me that a day or two back, the editors of two of our nation’s premiere newspapers led their reports with the news that Sam Altman — a guy I’d only heard of, before this week, because I’ve listened to some really deep, detailed podcasts about AI in recent months — had been hired by Microsoft after being fired by OpenAI.

If you haven’t spent years of your life agonizing — and I mean agonizing — over what to put on a front page and how to play it, day after day, this may not seem to mean much.

But it meant volumes to me. Excuse me for oversimplifying the definition of a lede story, but it basically means that, at least for a moment or a day, this guy being hired was more important to the world than anything going on in Israel or Gaza or Ukraine or anywhere else in the world. Nothing presidents, kings or dictators were doing anywhere mattered as much.

Now why would that be? This is something you might expect to see, and sometimes still do, in a paper that’s historically all about business, by which I mean The Wall Street Journal. But these are general-purpose newspapers, and the cream of the crop.

So what pumps this up so?

Well, the guy was canned from OpenAI because some people on the board were worried about what AI might do to the human race, and thought Sam wasn’t as worried about it as they were.

But that’s a tempest in a teacup unless you, the editor making the play decision, think this guy’s work situation really IS of some sort of monumental importance to our shared fates — either because you’re worried about the Matrix or Skynet or some such, or because you think AI is so awesome that you believe where Sam has a job, and who he’s working for, overrides everything else in the world.

You wouldn’t be seeing this if the guy was the head of McDonald’s or something — unless, maybe, in the WSJ. They still love them some business.

So… if I see the White Rabbit, should I follow it? Should I keep an eye out for Terminators?

A Lyric Just in Time

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I had a fun little exchange on Twitter with a friend a couple of weeks back, when he posted this quote:


Hey, it’s always fun when people start quoting Elvis Costello. For me, anyway.

So I listened to the song several times, and got to thinking about how that one line is more than just fun:

He stands to be insulted and he pays for the privilege

You know how I frequently make the point that it’s harder and harder to get the kind of people who ought to run for elective office to run anymore? Reading those books from the late 19th century lately has driven home the point so much more painfully. Why do we almost never see the likes of Teddy Roosevelt or James Garfield — or, to reach higher, Abraham Lincoln — step forward any more? Or for that matter, the extraordinary men who served under them, in key positions — John Hay, Elihu Root, Henry Cabot Lodge?

Well, I know why — because of 24/7 TV “news,” and more recently and intensely, social media. Things that climb all over you and mobs that can’t wait to cancel you for the most trivial things. Consequently, instead of people who set brilliant careers aside to give back to the country by sitting down with other serious people and working out the country’s real problems, you get people who don’t give a damn about any of that. They don’t want to work out problems with anybody. They just want to posture for their respective bases.

And to gain the “privilege” of doing this, they spend every moment between elections raising the money to pay for it.

I even felt a moment of gratitude today when I heard the House GOP had gone behind closed doors to nominate a new speaker. No strutting or posturing for the mob. And they came out with Scalise, which I think is better, or at least not as horrible, as the alternative. Which isn’t much to celebrate, of course.

Anyway, Elvis said it better than I have:

He stands to be insulted and he pays for the privilege…

I’ll close with the video:

Top Five Gripes About Apple

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Years ago, I had no liking for Apple Inc.

I didn’t hate it or anything. I just wasn’t interested. I was a PC guy, and had been since 1991, and therefore had little reason to interact with the opposition. (I had a Mac in the office that I had to use to access the newspaper’s photo archives, because the photo department worked in that universe, but I didn’t like using it at all.)

But then, in (I think) the spring of 2011, I replaced my Blackberry with an iPhone. And I loved it. About a year later, I got an iPad — and if anything, I loved it more.

I still don’t have much use for Macs. They’re very solidly made — PCs feel structurally chintzy by comparison — but some very key functions that I perform without conscious thought on a PC (and have for more than 30 years) don’t work the same way, which slows me down. Also, some of the keys are in a slightly different place, leading to lots of errors. And the errors are hard to quickly fix, because the backspace key is positioned slightly differently.

Never mind that. I love my iPhone and my iPad, and have since the start. What I truly hate is the way Apple keeps changing them, apparently in the grossly mistaken belief that it is improving them.

And sometimes you do get actual improvements — greater speed and storage capacity, a better camera, sharper resolution, etc.

But other times Apple goes out of its way to take away good things, things that make life easier. And I hate that.

Here are the five worst, in terms of lost function on these products. Now, I’ll acknowledge that some of these losses were not inflicted by Apple. Maybe — and with No. 4 on the list, that seems a strong possibility — somebody else did it. And if y’all holler out, “That’s not Apple’s fault, ya eejit! You need to make this or that adjustment in the settings!,” I will be grateful. Here they are:

  1. Taking away the Home button. This was definitely and purely Apple’s fault, and it is by far the greatest sin on my list. And I have not been able to find a good reason for it. Oh, I’ve read about the business of removing a (theoretical, since I’ve never run across it with my four iPhones) mechanical vulnerability. But I suspect it was really about aesthetics, and that really ticks me off. If I want a bigger screen, I’ll use my iPad — which, incidentally, has a home button. Anyway, this is why I use an SE2, and if I replace it, I’ll get an SE3.
  2. Taking away the headphone jack. OK, we just dropped way down in importance. While I consider removing the home button a major offense, this one’s more of a misdemeanor — if that. Usually, it’s OK. Except when the only earbuds I can find is the old kind, and the tiny adaptor has gone missing. Or I don’t have earbuds, and want to use the free ones provided by the airline. Or — and here’s the semi-biggie — I badly need to recharge, but I want to use my earbuds at the same time. That’s one’s kind of moot, now that all sound from my phone goes to my hearing aids via Bluetooth. But it was a problem, and I suppose still is for people with normal hearing. And no, I would not consider investing in Airpods. Without a cord, they’re too easy to lose.
  3. Taking away the “find on page” function. OK, this one has really been ticking me off, because this was a huge part of the way I used my iPhone and iPad. I call up, say, a Wikipedia page that’s a couple of thousand words long, and I use the search function to go straight to what I’m trying to find out. But now, for a couple of months, I’ve had to wait until I’m at my PC to do this. At this point, I would cry out in rage, except, well… NEVER MIND… I finally found out, by searching Google one more time, that they just moved that function from the “share” button to the three dots in the corner. I still think that after this change, they should have prevented my phone from working until I had read a clear notice telling me this, but I’m satisfied. Let’s move on…
  4. Stopping me from tweeting straight from various apps. OK, I strongly suspect the real culprit here is Elon Musk. But since this is only a problem on my Apple devices, it made the list. And when you read as many different publications as I do each day, and tweet frequently, it’s a pain. After writing the tweet on the publication’s app, I get a notice that it has failed to post, and have to go to the Twitter app, call up “drafts,” and tweet it from there. And this, to me, sounds like a Musk thing.
  5. Constantly changing the freaking hardware. Have you heard about this?

Of course it we had an Apple Store in this town (a gripe that didn’t quite fit on this list), I could have taken my phone to the Genius Bar first, and wouldn’t have written this post. Because before posting, I made one more effort to find a workaround for some of these things, and I found one for restoring the home button. Sort of. And without my rage over that one, I wouldn’t have started on this tirade.

But here’s the thing — why should I have to find tricky workarounds for things that worked beautifully, simply, obviously and intuitively?

OK, enough. Bottom line, Apple makes some pretty great products. In fact, I almost had to go with only four things instead of five, because I had trouble thinking of the fifth. And in truth, this is not really a Top Five Gripes. It’s more like Five Gripes. But the feature is called “Top Five Lists,” and you wouldn’t want me to mess with the Hornby rules, would you?

 

 

 

 

Living the fantasy…

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If only this creature could evolve a LOT more quickly…

No, this isn’t about something starring Stormy Daniels. (That would be the grand jury case I haven’t bothered to comment on this far…)

No, this fantasy is less lurid, but probably more important in the long run. Basically, this post was originally a comment I wrote in reaction to one of bud and Doug’s usual arguments over public vs. private.

Then I started riffing a bit, and it led to something that was really more involved than a comment should be, so I’m raising it to post level.

Here’s what I wrote, in response to this and previous comments:

Well, bud already cited ONE example of something that was done right. I’ll leave it to him to answer your question further. I’m not going to take a couple of years off from life to become someone capable of parsing road contracts and passing judgment on their efficacy.

It’s a silly argument, anyway, talking public vs. private on a function that will only EVER be undertaken by government. The private sector isn’t going to build highways — except as contractors working for the government. That’s the way it is. I’d be fascinated to hear your alternative plan for providing the infrastructure that makes it possible to have an economy in which private businesses can thrive WITHOUT these danged, pesky governments….

It raises some interesting dystopian scenarios. If we ever do get to a scenario in which it economically feasible for a private entity to provide general infrastructure, that private entity will essentially BE the government, at least within that area. You know, like in the Middle Ages, when the local lord of the manor was over everything. The society in which we live is the product of several centuries of Europeans striving to disengage from that sort of system, and try to build a system in which the things upon which we all depend are controlled, at least indirectly, by all citizens.

Not that we haven’t moved that way a number of times as technology has progressed. In the 19th century, it was the railroads. And eventually, government stepped in to control the freewheeling mastery of the environment that the railroad barons wielded. Over time, other technologies have asserted similar societal dominance. (Anyone ever see “The President’s Analyst,” in which — SPOILER ALERT — the power behind everything was the Phone Company?)

Today, we’re engaged in debates about technology that plays a bigger, wider role in our lives than railroads ever did — dominating and reshaping not only how we communicate, but how we think (ones and zeroes). And of course, all that’s in private hands.

So maybe I should take back my comment about it being dystopian fantasy. We’re dealing with the fantasy now…

I was teetering there on the cusp of busting out on a bunch of topics that are as habitual to me as public vs. private are to bud and Doug, things that are all affected profoundly by the things that have been coming out of Silicon Valley:

  • The Rabbit Hole.
  • The way technology has exponentially increased the problem of political polarization in our society. It had been a problem for decades, but in the years since the development of “social” media and broader technology that makes everyone on the planet more powerful (in terms of ability to instantly communicate with every other person on the planet, without editors or fact checkers or any other sort of mediation) than any newspaper publisher in history ever dreamed of being, humans have been trained to think like computers, in binary terms — ones and zeroes. Everything is black and white (words that newspapers now capitalize, by the way). There are no degrees of gray; there are no subtleties or nuances. There is no tolerance of those who disagree.
  • Of course, I include traditional media in this failure to cope with the problem. The new technology, having reshaped brains, distorts political events so that this madness is what the MSM have to cover, and tragically, they fall back on their old, comfortable love of conflict, covering politics like sports. And I don’t mean multilateral sports like golf or marathon running. I mean contests in which there are only two teams, and therefore only two ways of looking at anything. The deepest questions that get asked are: Who’s winning? Who’s losing? Which is profoundly tragic.
  • The inability of Western-style liberal democracies to deal with such polarizing forces, causing elements of the public to turn, over and over, to more oppressive, far less liberal, figures and imagined solutions. (The latest victim being Israel, trailing behind the U.S., of course.)
  • On a much deeper level than any of the above, the inability of Homo Sapiens to effectively cope with the change, since evolution takes millions of years longer than technological development.
  • That last point alone, of course, is one we could worry over for the rest of our lives, and still not get anywhere close to a helpful answer.

Seeing all of it as too much for a comment, I brought it here…

In “The President’s Analyst,” The Phone Company was Behind It All…

Good thing we’ve got these smartphones, huh?

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OK, technically this image is from my PC, not my phone, but you get the idea…

That’s that I said to my wife this morning: Good thing we’ve got these smartphones! Or pretty much any device with Google. (Or Microsoft’s Sydney, if you’re the adventurous type.)

This morning, after my shower (sure, I work from home now, but occasionally I do still take a shower), I was drying off and for the life of me, could not remember how many guitar pickers there were in Nashville. I was thinking it was 1,552, but I kept running it through my head, and I wasn’t at all sure about it.

Fortunately, my iPhone was right there on the cabinet where we keep the towels, so I didn’t have to wait until getting dressed and leaving the room to get my answer. Before I started shaving, I Googled it:

Nashville cats, play clean as country water
Nashville cats, play wild as mountain dew
Nashville cats, been playin’ since they’s babies
Nashville cats, get work before they’re two

Well, there’s thirteen hundred and fifty two
Guitar pickers in Nashville
And they can pick more notes than the number of ants
On a Tennessee ant hill…

And so forth. So I was like 200 git-tar pickers off. No telling what would have happened if I couldn’t have found out right away. My head might have exploded or something.

I don’t know what we did before having these phones, and Google. Well, I sort of know. I had a dictionary on my desk at the paper. I tried to avoid looking at it, and fortunately I’m good at spelling so I seldom had to. But occasionally I would think, “Is that really the word I want in this context?” and open it.

Well, that would be it for awhile. I’d look up that word, and the definition would contain another word that I just had to look up or bust. And something about that word would remind me of another one I hadn’t run into in awhile, and this suggested fond memories, and couldn’t resist looking that one up too for old times’ sake, and before you knew it, I’d have been darting here and there in that volume for 15 or 20 minutes, with deadline bearing down on me.

Of course, today we have Google and HTML links, which are among the most wonderful inventions in human history, and the problems I had back in the day with a mere dead-tree dictionary look pretty pitiful. Or at least quaint.

But it’s fun. Anyway, after looking up the Lovin’ Spoonful, I thought about taking a crack at Wordle, but resisted the temptation and went ahead and shaved. Discipline, baby, discipline.

Managing one’s time takes more willpower than our fathers e’er dreamed of…

We have indeed met the enemy, but he is not yet ours

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Ross Douthat made a good point today, although it’s a depressing one.

In the column, “I’m What’s Wrong With the Humanities,” he brought up the subject addressed in a sobering recent piece in The New Yorker, “The End of the English Major.”

We all have shaken our heads over those stupid kids today who can’t seem to make their way through so much as a sentence of 19th-century prose:

Like all the others who managed to make their way through Nathaniel Hawthorne in high school, I read this with a mix of smugness and horror. Then, naturally, I‌‌ scrolled to the next declinist indicator, the next sign of the cultural apocalypse.

What I did not do was click through and read the whole Heller piece (though I have read it now, I swear it!). Even more conspicuously, I definitely did not go pick up a copy of “The Scarlet Letter” or any other 19th-century novel and begin reading it for pleasure.

“The answer to the question, ‘What is wrong?’ is, or should be, ‘I am wrong,’” G.K. Chesterton once wrote. And any response to the question of what’s happened to the humanities has to include the same answer. The Harvard undergraduates who can’t parse a complex sentence from the American Renaissance are part of the problem. But so is the Harvard-educated newspaper columnist and self-styled cultural conservative who regularly unburdens himself of deep thoughts on pop TV but hasn’t read a complete 19th‌ -century novel for his own private enjoyment in — well, let’s just say it’s been a while…

Oh, Douthat lets us know he’s started to read, say, Les Misérables, but only gotten a hundred or so pages into it. He has similarly failed with shorter works.

He cites some of the things that he lets get in the way: website browsing; looking at his iPhone, “even at a live performance;” and long-form television, an obsession he attempts to justify by talking up Golden Age TV’s supposed literary virtues.

I have to confess to all of those, plus:

  • The little work I do these days to pay the bills.
  • Naps, which fortunately I’m able to blame on my stroke.
  • My fitful blogging.
  • And other stuff…

So it is that, while I have boasted a number of times here about how awesome “Moby Dick” truly is, and how I’m reading it with great enjoyment and a commitment to finishing it, I have failed to get anywhere near the point at which they finally find the white whale.

I’ve been saying that since — well, since I was still working as a newspaper editor. That’s quite a while, in blog terms.

Douthat goes on from moaning about the problem to prescription, but I’m not sure how workable his medications are. For instance, he refers to a piece in the WSJ headlined, “College Should Be More Like Prison.” To be fair, the idea is more reasonable than it sounds — the author of that piece (which, alas, I cannot read, since I let that subscription lapse) was referring to things she has learned from teaching maximum-security inmates. But I find it hard to imagine it being a practical cure for the rest of us.

I’ve gone on and on about, for instance, what diving down the Rabbit Hole has done to our ability to think, and to have a functioning representative democracy. But that’s as far as I’ve gotten, and I’m still at the whiteboard working on the diagnosis. I await the inspiration that leads to a remedy…

These days people love to quote Pogo’s twist on a famous saying: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Which works in this instance.

But I’m thinking of the saying that Walt Kelly was playing on, from Commodore Perry: “We have met the enemy and they are ours.”

Perry had captured two ships, two brigs, a schooner and a sloop from the British at the Battle of Lake Erie.

I, for one, cannot yet claim that the current enemy is ours. In darker moments, I fear that we have struck our colors, and we are his…

Perry at Lake Erie

Has Ford sped past Tesla? This writer thinks so…

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Admittedly, only 15,617 of these have sold, but that’s 15,617 more than the Cybertruck.

One of the greatest challenges I have on this blog is that I’ve largely lost interest in writing about the things that tout le monde is yammering about — the front-page stuff, which I usually find unbelievably repetitive and boring. But the world is still full of interesting things, things I’d like to discuss.

Unfortunately, the interesting ideas are usually here or there and coming from a single source. Which would have been fine back before newspapers figured out that their business was now online and that had to put up paywalls. (When I started blogging 18 years ago, that was not the case, except maybe for The Wall Street Journal.)

So when I see something I want to talk about, it tends to be in something I subscribe to, and others don’t.

That’s true of today’s topic, but I think I can summarize it easily enough to give everybody the idea. And I’ll try to quote from it within the vague Fair Use standard.

It was a “guest essay” in the Opinion section of The New York Times over the weekend, and it was headlined, “A 120-Year-Old Company Is Leaving Tesla in the Dust.” It’s written by Ezra Dyer, a columnist for Car and Driver magazine.

His point is that while everyone remains dazzled by Tesla, and while Elon Musk is making a spectacle of himself with his efforts to destroy Twitter, Ford has quietly sped past Tesla by such critical measurements as driverless and electric vehicles.

He starts off admitting that he once thought Tesla was the cool company, not only because it sold the only EVs you could drive for a reasonable distance without recharging, but also apparently because of the razzle-dazzle:

It made cars that performed animatronic holiday shows using their lights and power-operated doors. It came up with dog mode (a climate control system that stays running for dogs in a parked car), a GPS-linked air suspension that remembers where the speed bumps are and raises the car automatically, and “fart mode” (where the car makes fart sounds)….

But then, as a journalist covering the company, he started noticing that the people who worked there, his sources, were terrified to talk to him, being as evasive as spokesmen for a totalitarian government.

If you want to work for a flexible, modern company, you don’t apply to Tesla. You apply to 120-year-old Ford.

Tesla’s veneer of irreverence conceals an inflexible core, an old-fashioned corporate autocracy. Consider Tesla’s remote work policy, or lack thereof. Last year, Mr. Musk issued a decree that Tesla employees log 40 hours per week in an office — and not a home office — if they expected to keep their jobs. On Indeed.com, the question, “Can you work remotely at Tesla?” includes answers like, “No,” and “Absolutely not, they won’t let it happen under any circumstances,” and “No, Tesla will work you until you lose everything.”

But on the other hand, the cars make fart noises. What a zany and carefree company!…

More substantially, he noticed how Tesla lagged on the actual product front. He says Ford’s self-driving equipment is actually farther along than Tesla’s — and Tesla charges $15,000 for its feature that doesn’t fully work (he says the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has referred to it with the charming words, “Full Self-Driving Software May Cause Crash“), on the premise that it may work sometime in the future. As for EVs:

Tesla’s long-promised new vehicles, like the Cybertruck and a new version of its Roadster, also keep getting delayed. The Cybertruck was unveiled in 2019, and on Tesla’s most recent earnings call Mr. Musk admitted that it won’t be in production this year, which is becoming an annual refrain. Sure, Ford sold only 15,617 electric F-150 Lightning pickups in 2022, but that beats the Cybertruck’s sales by, let’s see, 15,617…

Anyway, I thought all that was interesting. I don’t know that Tesla is slipping, but I’m impressed at what I read about boring ol’ Ford. I guess it helps not to have a, shall we say, problematic eccentric in charge. Although, of course, Ford once had that problem, too.

Personally, I drive neither a Tesla nor an F-150. But by way of full disclosure, I do drive a 2000 Ranger. It doesn’t do anything fancy. It’s a four-cylinder straight shift, and it doesn’t even have power windows. But it keeps running, and I hope it does so for years to come…

Meanwhile, I gather from the column, this model can make fart noises!

A matter of perspective and proportion…

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I really need to go through the notifications on my iPad and turn some of them off. Or turn most of them off.

I would start with that irritating app called “Apple News,” except… occasionally, it offers me something interesting from The Wall Street Journal. I recently dropped the WSJ from my subscriptions, because I wasn’t using it enough to justify paying for it – and the cost is high, compared to my other subscriptions. When Apple News scoops one up to offer me for free, I can read it. And I like to check in with the WSJ – which has probably the strictest paywall in the business – occasionally. That app lets me do it.

So I like getting notifications when they have one – because I’m not going to be looking there on a regular basis. I need the heads-up.

Unfortunately, that means I get a lot of junk from it as well.

As you can see above.

But as you can also see above, they’re not the only ones hassling me. You’ll see notes from The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post. None of which I would want to turn off, because there are no entities in the world more likely to alert me to actual news, which is, you know, what I subscribe to five newspapers to get. (Well, that, and commentary.)

The problem comes when we get to deciding what “news” is.

As you can see, for awhile there last night, the most important in the universe was that Beyoncé has won a heap of Grammys. Which I suppose is important to her, at least. Personally, I have never cared for a moment about who has or has not won a Grammy, much less who has won the most of them. There was a time when I cared about who won this or that Oscar. But I quit caring about that a quarter-century ago. And now I’m not sure I can tell you clearly why I ever did care. It mystifies me.

But a lot of people care about things I don’t care about. For instance, I’ve noticed that some people – perhaps even some of you – take an interest in football.

So never mind me.

We have all these news organizations in consensus about the fact that Beyoncé winning all these music awards is the most important thing happening, so they must be right – right? In fact, it makes you wonder what’s wrong with The Washington Post, wasting time telling me about some dumb ol’ earthquake that has now killed – let me go check – 3,800 human beings.

But wait – that was a few minutes earlier than the really earth-shaking news at the Grammys. So surely the Post got on the stick later. Well, actually, I don’t think they did. I never got a notification from them about it, last night or today.

Which makes those slackers, well, my kind of newshounds, I suppose.

Now, you will protest that those notifications are merely a snapshot of a few minutes in time, and that those other organizations no doubt turned to actual, hard news later. Especially the NYT. And you’d be right – at least in the case of the NYT.

But you’d be putting your finger on something that still worries me.

You see, back in the olden days, when newspapers still roamed the Earth and I spend a great deal of time each day agonizing over what to put on the front page and how prominently to play it, editors saw it as their job to present news all at once, and in a hierarchy of importance. We assumed people had a finite amount of time in their lives, and didn’t want to waste any of it. So we told them the biggest news right up top, but gave them the other stuff, too, in case they had time for it. That was up to them.

We were able to spend time weighing how to present things, and in what order, because we only presented it once a day – or two or three times if we had that many editions. So we had some time to think before deadline arrived.

No more. Mind you, I think it’s awesome that it is now possible to provide news to readers right now, without having to spend the day using 19th-century technology to physically get a paper product to them. I used to fantasize about that back in the early ’80s – at that point, there were no more typewriters, and all writing was done on computers (a mainframe system), and I kept thinking, What if when I hit the button to send this to the copy desk, it just went straight to the reader?

And when that became possible, I rejoiced. But then something else happened. We went from being able to send stories out immediately to having to send them out immediately. No time to stop and think, How does this compare to all the other things going on?

No. Whatever was happening now became the most important thing in the world, the way things had always been on TV news – which was something I didn’t like about TV news. You could only see one thing at a time, so at that moment, there was nothing else.

Suppose you – like so many – didn’t agree with what the editors said was the most important news. That didn’t matter. You could decide for yourself. It was all presented to you at the same time, instead of this stream-of-unconsciousness madness that we have now: Now, it’s THIS is the most important thing. No, THIS is. No, THIS is…

And for awhile last night, that most important thing was that Beyoncé had won those awards – so I received a tsunami of notices about it.

Of course, newspaper readers can STILL see all the news presented on a paper’s app. Which is great. And it’s all freshly updated. And better yet, now the TV stations have websites where you can see a bunch of stuff being offered – not in any thoughtful hierarchy, but at least there’s a selection.

So that’s good – as long as you go looking for your news that deliberately, and consider it more or less holistically.

But I fear that not enough people do. I worry that too many let it wash over them the way the Grammys were washing over me last night. And I think it causes them to lose all perspective. And it causes the journalists to lose it, too, since decisions of what to cover and how to play it and what to send notifications about are now so driven by clicks.

At this point, many of you are rolling your eyes and thinking (as many of you habitually do), there goes that has-been newspaperman, reminiscing about how great things were in the old days. Which means you’re missing the point entirely.

It’s not about me. I actually love my iPad and the incredibly wide access to dependable news sources it gives me. In the unlamented old days, I wouldn’t have been able to subscribe to all these papers and received them while the news was still hot. And this is of great value.

But I worry very much about the effect these “news” tsunamis I’m speaking of have on society as a whole. It’s not just a matter of people being overly concerned with silly pop culture stuff. Hey, I love pop culture, as any reader of this blog knows. But the problem is, serious things – such as politics – get covered this way as well. It’s gotten to be all about the outrage of the day, the stupidest things that were said or done, the things most likely to drive us farther apart from each other. And yeah, it helps explain – not entirely, but in part – how Donald Trump got elected in 2016.

As I’ve said so many times, nothing like that ever came close to happening before that election. And I keep trying to figure out why it did happen. And this is one of the things I see contributing to it – this utter lack of perspective and proportion with regard to news…

Anybody having trouble with the blog?

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via GIPHY

I mean, trouble other than the usual “dealing with that idiot Brad Warthen” stuff.

I’m talking about weird technical problems.

Starting a couple of days back, right after I posted Paul DeMarco’s piece about his trip to Sicily, Paul told me via text that it wasn’t showing up, and in fact, the most recent post showing at the top of the home page was this highly forgettable one, from way back on Jan. 16.

I know that I don’t post with anything near my old frequency, but there had been nine posts after that one. Ten now, counting this one.

Anyway, when Paul told me that, I immediately checked, and everything was fine!

But that was on Chrome. Before reporting back to Paul that he was imagining things, I tried looking at the blog on Firefox, Edge and Safari. No dice. The most recent post was the one from Jan. 16. Which, let’s face it, was not a great post.

And I found later that my wife couldn’t even get the recent stuff on Chrome on her iPad.

I’ve been scrambling — whenever I’ve had a moment for the blog — ever since. Night before last, I spent 52 minutes on hold with my hosting service, and never got to speak to anybody. No luck with their “chat” service, either.

I’m about to try them again. But in the meantime, things have changed. This morning, everything’s fine on my Firefox browser — as well as Chrome, of course. But Paul said this morning he couldn’t get the recent stuff on Chrome. I urged him to try clearing out his cache. He did, and it worked! I can’t swear that would work for everybody.

Meanwhile, this morning I discovered another problem. I got an email from Ken complaining about his comments not appearing. So I was like, “What comments?” Because there weren’t any when I logged in this morning. But before I finished answering him by email, I looked again — and there they were, with some from other folks.

Weird.

And yeah, what’s weirder is me telling you about all this stuff when, if you have a problem, you probably can’t see this post.

But if you can, please let me know whether you have HAD any problems, and please describe them. I’m still trying to work this out…

Some stats documenting our Raskolnikov Syndrome

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Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

Yeah, I’m on about my Raskolnikov Syndrome theory again. But hey, I haven’t mentioned it since April, so…

The theory is that people lose their minds — and often become shockingly violent — when they cut themselves off from other people. Ten years ago, I summarized it in part this way:

I’ve long had this theory that people who do truly horrendous things that Ordinary Decent People can’t fathom do them because they’ve actually entered another state of being that society, because it is society, can’t relate to…

You know, the way Raskolnikov did. Brilliant guy, but as he cut himself off from family and friends and sat in his grubby garret brooding on self-centered theories, he became capable of horrible things. Well, you know what he did. If you don’t, read the book. Everyone should. I suspect it’s what made Mel Brooks say, “My God, I’d love to smash into the casket of Dostoyevsky, grab that bony hand and scream at the remains, ‘Well done, you god-damn genius.’ ”

Anyway, it’s come up again because of this piece I read the other day in The Washington Post., headlined “Americans are choosing to be alone. Here’s why we should reverse that..”  It included some scary numbers, to me:

And now for the scarier news: Our social lives were withering dramatically before covid-19. Between 2014 and 2019, time spent with friends went down (and time spent alone went up) by more than it did during the pandemic.

According to the Census Bureau’s American Time Use Survey, the amount of time the average American spent with friends was stable, at 6½ hours per week, between 2010 and 2013. Then, in 2014, time spent with friends began to decline.

By 2019, the average American was spending only four hours per week with friends (a sharp, 37 percent decline from five years before). Social media, political polarization and new technologies all played a role in the drop. (It is notable that market penetration for smartphones crossed 50 percent in 2014.)

Covid then deepened this trend. During the pandemic, time with friends fell further — in 2021, the average American spent only two hours and 45 minutes a week with close friends (a 58 percent decline relative to 2010-2013)…

On average, Americans did not transfer that lost time to spouses, partners or children. Instead, they chose to be alone….

Take that, and combine it with the Rabbit Hole, and you have a dangerous situation, with a society that is dangerously alienated, and no longer understands what a fact is. And yeah, I’m talking about the 2016 election, and the “stop the steal” cult, but a lot of other stuff as well.

Look around at some of the bad craziness going on, and this helps explain it…

If I were inclined to be a pessimist, here’s what I’d worry about

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I hope Gary Larson doesn’t sue me for using this. I just saw it on Pinterest, and thought it a way better illustration for this post than the boring shot of Putin I originally put here.

Well, these are some of the things I’d worry about. Not all are even near the top of the list. These are just things that were in the news today — actually, all three were in one of the several papers to which I subscribe — so they’re on my mind at the moment.

So worry away, folks…

  1. Classic American tragedy — The headline was “Teen sought in Amber Alert dies in shootout after running toward deputies.” Basically, a 15-year-old girl that authorities were seeking to rescue from her armed-and-crazy, murderous father is now dead — shot by, well, authorities. So your initial reaction is, there go the stupid cops again. But then, if you care at all, you actually read about what happened. And you see it’s not so simple. What happened (so far as know at this point) was, shots were fired near a school. The school is placed briefly on lockdown. Then cops find a woman with multiple gunshot wounds, who is pronounced dead at a hospital. The call goes out to look for the husband, Anthony Graziano, and the couple’s young daughter, Savannah. Graziano’s Nissan is spotted, and pursued. He starts shooting, putting several rounds through a police car windshield. With bullets still flying both ways, someone, “wearing protective equipment, including a tactical helmet, emerged from the passenger side of the vehicle, ran toward sheriff’s deputies and then fell amid the gunfire.” When it’s all over, it’s discovered that someone is Savannah, and she and her father are both dead. What do you think should be done to prevent such things? This is very much like what happened to Breonna Taylor — someone with the victim starts shooting at police, and the victim is killed in the crossfire — but since she was black, a lot of people simplified it to “racism.” With Savannah being white, one is tempted to simplify by saying, “guns.” For instance, since I watch at LOT of British cop shows, I think, why can’t our cops go unarmed, like them? But of course that ignores the fact that there are 393 million guns in private hands in this country, and a lot of those hands belong to people who like to shoot first, like Graziano. So no, I don’t know that answer, but I’m pretty sure it can’t be summed up in one word.
  2. A big AI advance — I often sneer at artificial intelligence, noting that it may be artificial, but it certainly isn’t intelligent. Well, something like this makes me take a step back, and have “Matrix” thoughts. See that block of images below. None was taken by a camera. And they were generated not by hours of work by a CGI artist, but by “the artificial intelligence text-to-image generator DALL-E.” The one at the upper right came into being in response to the phrase, ““A woman in a red coat looking up at the sky in the middle of Times Square.” The only human input for the one at bottom left was, “Red and yellow bell peppers in a bowl with a floral pattern on a green rug photo.” I don’t know what the prompt was for the boy in black-and-white, but this is scary. Note that I say, “the phrase,” “input,” and “prompt.” Each time, I almost wrote “command,” but dare we speak of issuing orders to our future digital overlords?
  3. Ukraine dilemma — If you don’t spend too much time thinking about it, you can conclude that the thing to do is simply cheer for Ukraine to win, and Putin to lose. And I do. But I also worry. As I have since the start. Those of you who think Brad is just this wild warmonger — because I would sometimes use military force when you would not — may have been taken aback by the way I worried when all this started. I was running about like Neville Chamberlain, wringing my hands — sort of, anyway. Once it started, I continued to worry, while following the above formula. But while I rooted for Ukraine, and was pleased by that country’s recent successes, I continued worrying about the big picture, which goes like this: Putin needs to be humiliated, so he stops doing this. He didn’t pay a price in Georgia, or for his early moves on Ukraine. This has to stop. He needs to go. But he’s got all those nukes, and what will he do with them on his way out the door? Anyway, I urge you to read this piece, “Putin is limping toward an endgame in Ukraine. Should the West go along?” Read the whole thing, if you can. It basically asks, if fixing “elections” so he can save some face by annexing part of Ukraine — again — should we let him do this disgusting thing, to prevent a nuclear holocaust? My gut, of course, says the hell with him. But I don’t want nuclear hell unleashed on the rest of us, either. What’s the right move?

The first and the third problems are very similar. Any intelligent, or merely satisfying, response to either has enormous barriers in front of it. Get rid of those 393 million guns (the only thing that would really fix the problem)? Good luck. And imagine Joe Biden, in this poisonous political environment, trying to steer a course that does something enormously sickening to all sides, in order to avoid Armageddon. Forget about the consequences in the midterms — would it even be possible to do it?

Maybe we should stop worrying about 1 and 3, and let 2 happen, so the algorithms can make the decisions.

Anyway, as I said, if I were inclined to be pessimistic about life, the universe and everything, I’d spend all my time thinking about things such as these…

The upper-right was generated by “A woman in a red coat looking up at the sky in the middle of Times Square.”

Open Thread on Technology for Tuesday, August 23, 2022

2 Replies

The Singularity hasn’t arrived, but we’re all pretty obsessed with the Matrix, as it currently exists…

Editor’s note: I wrote this on Tuesday, but didn’t post it because I thought it wasn’t very good. But today — Friday — I decided not to waste that time I spent typing it. So here it is, with only slight editing. But I didn’t take the time to edit all the places where it said “today,” which at the time meant Tuesday.

I have to be careful here. After all, there are already those who see me as an old guy (the insolent puppies). I don’t want to give them any additional reason to see me as Uncle Ben in “Spider-Man,” looking in the physical, dead-tree newspaper for a job (which shows you how long ago 2002 was), and seeing a help-wanted ad for a computer analyst, moans, “My Lord, even the computers need analysts these days!”

All my adult life, I was always on the leading edge of technology — when newspapers went from typewriters to mainframe, and then from mainframe to PCs, I was one of the people who learned it first and taught the others. I paginated the editorial pages before the rest of the newspaper followed. When I got canned in 2009, I was the only person at the paper actively blogging and regularly interacting with readers online.

But lately I’ve been noticing something a bit unsettling. Gradually, the news I read is less about what people do, and more about what their technology does. I’m not saying the singularity is imminent — artificial intelligence is still too stupid — but we’re moving in that direction, in terms of what we pay attention to. Maybe it’s because we’ve spent too much time observing stupid people, and no longer notice the intellectual limitations in the tech.

Anyway, these were all in The Washington Post today:

  • You’re charging wrong: 5 ways to make gadget batteries last longer — Hey, I love my iPhone and my iPad, and am on decent terms with my PC. But I’ll respect them all more — especially the iPhone — when the batteries are better. Or at least, more reasonable. Here’s what reasonable would look like: When I take off my phone and am not using it — which means when I’m sleeping — it should be charging, and without damaging the battery. And please, don’t do this thing where you take all fricking night to charge. Ever since that started, I’ll wake up in the night and reach over to unplug it, because it’s been a couple of hours and should be charged — but it’s nowhere near done, because it’s aiming to finish around 5 a.m. I’ve tried turning off this “convenient” feature in the past, but failed. So it charges all night, but gradually. But what if I needed to grab it and go in the middle of the night?
  • How a photo of a woman yelling in a guy’s ear became a viral meme — That sounds stupid, doesn’t it? That’s because it is. Not as stupid, say, as ‘haul videos” were, but pretty dumb. Apparently, it’s news because as a meme, it is somehow evocative of other memes, and has meaning to someone who spends all his or her time thinking about memes instead of, say, great literature. It’s an actual international sensation, apparently.
  • Strangers rallied worldwide to help this Maryland mom find where she parked her car — In this case, the amazing part isn’t about the technology. The amazing thing is the way this lady managed to lose the car she had hurriedly parked on the way to take a child to the doctor. Which is reasonable to anyone who has had to spend a little time remembering exactly where in the lot, or the garage, the car was parked. That I get. What blows my mind is that she didn’t even know in which nearby parking garage she had parked it. Which means she arrived at the doctor so flustered that she didn’t know how she’d gotten there, even roughly. So after unsuccessfully searching, she posted something about it on social media, and went home, defeated. And people around the world jumped in to solve the mystery, and two days later, someone found it. Which is cool, and even nice. But how did this happen to begin with?
  • Down and out and extremely online? No problem: Just enter a new ‘era.’ — You’ll have to read a few grafs of the story even to understand what it’s about. But when you do, you may react as I did, wondering how anyone could become this lost in narcissism. (Which is really something, coming from a guy who blogs.) And then, you’ll wonder about something even more perplexing: Who would actually watch such a thing? Compared to this, haul videos actually made sense.
  • Former security chief claims Twitter buried ‘egregious deficiencies’ — I put this last, but this morning, this was actually the lede story on the app. So Elon Musk isn’t the only one complaining. But then, he’s looking for something in Twitter other than what I see, and enjoy. I use it all the time, and it works great. I post something, and it shows up, and people interact with it. Yeah, lying to regulators is a bad thing and all, but if you want to go after a social medium that really sucks, take on Facebook. Or Instagram. Or Snapchat. Twitter remains my fave.

This saturation in tech news today reminded me of another story about something I want to complain about, from last week:

How to send text messages from the comfort of your computer — The only reason I read this was because I use an iPhone for my phone, and a PC for my computer. Which means I’m up the creek, unlike people who use all Apple products — their texts are shared smoothly on all their platforms. So I started reading, thinking that maybe, just maybe, I won’t have to shell out a fortune to get a Mac when my Dell gives out. And I read on even though the subhed warned me what was coming: “The process ranges from ‘surprisingly simple’ to ‘ugh’ depending on your mix of devices.” Of course, they save the “iPhone + Windows” scenario for the end, at which point they say that it’s technically possible, but…

So I kind of wasted my time there…