Don’t hate the playa

I have learned about Dr. Lou, via this found object.

I think @damonberes.com right that chatbots shouldn’t be your friends, and insidious stuff arises from treating them as such. But that doesn’t doom LLMs, which are useful and (sorry to ppl here) not purely evil. It would be nice to try to sort out the jumble, but our culture isn’t great at that!

“Copay” is such a perverse idea. Like your insurance wants a wingman. That’s just a payment bro.

Went shopping.

Further to this: In the cinnamon-gum era, cinnamon was considered freshening (“Give your breath long lasting freshness / With Big Red”), probably because of cinnamon’s tannins and associated astringency. Difficult to imagine cinnamon being considered “fresh” today.

Had my first sundubu of the season earlier this week. Made me think of this famous Hart Crane poem about sundubu: Steam—an opal psalm— breaks from the earthen mouth. Tofu, cloud-anchored, drifts— salt of the sea’s confession, heat of a star made broth.

On the surface, grade inflation might seem simple to address, @ibogost.com writes. But it’s a strange and wicked problem on campus, with no single cause or obvious solution: https://theatln.tc/ds5cBJAV

The biggest day in esports has arrived. Q-UP is out. store.steampowered.com/app/3730790/...

A new digital era is emerging, and it’s even more anti-social than the last. Damon Beres reports on the false promise of AI companionship:

I have unearthed and am sharing this specimen. I have 'dined' at Fresno's (which closed after multiple health-code violations). It offered "BBQ fajitas," which was sweet-and-sour meatlumps atop wet, boiled onions. I cannot speak for Galveston's, but fear it.

Hey girl,,,

Last week, Harvard released a report on curtailing "grade inflation," and (some) Harvard students kind of freaked out in an embarrassing way. It's easy to call the students coddled, but why grade inflation became a problem is a knotty, decades-long nightmare of a problem, which I wrote about:

Sad to report that I saw some posts this morning.

Hertz has added koans to Gold Plus Rewards

Nine years ago, I wrote about Sense, which could track home-energy usage. I explored the possible privacy and data concerns of "load disaggregation." This week, Sense announced it will stop selling the product, because the tech has been incorporated into most electrical meters directly ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have completed the latest season of Selling Sunset. The show is effectively over and should be abandoned. A reality soap like this must toe the line between (fake) authenticity and the (also fake) organic evolution of conflict. We now find ourselves with no plausible semblance of either lie. RIP

Love these. What reads as “lighting” is largely attributable to the different photographic designs and constraints of the period. Uncorrected aberrations, uncoated lenses w/reduced contrast and veiling flare, lower-contrast film, inconsistent lens element arrangement, glowing highlights wide open…

You can pretty clearly see the turkey, which does not appear to be fried. The fried elements are at top. They are… “turkey gobblers?”

Tried to watch the new season of Nobody Wants This but had to find something less cringe such as Selling Sunset.

“Hey babe, everything ok, you haven’t touched your enterprise B2B SaaS”

I had a difficult day Friday so I went for a walk to clear my head. When I returned a dead bird was at my stoop. It was still twitching. (Then it stopped.) Dear diary.

Good thing the universe isn't "misaligned with man" in any other ways, and that the sky darkening to black, to death black, at 5pm, where you will eventually return after you work indoors moving symbols between B2B SaaS services, driving home again amid the despair of human invention.

Listen…

Good (if characteristically blogstyle) Max Read on “platform temperance” and big tech as big tobacco. Dickish of me to say, but may I once again note that I made exactly the cigarette comparison, down to the details, in 2012, a time before The Atlantic’s CMS natively supported deks or top images.

Two competing thoughts on tzatziki: 1) Tzatziki is based, and would that it unseated aioli and other saucecore pretenders. 2) Tzatziki must be protected from the becoming-cringe of popular saucedom, and therefore must remain in plain sight's shadows.

Is anyone else noticing catastrophic memory leak issues in MacOS Tahoe?

Finally some good news. Mr. Pibb is coming back.

We need to talk about (by which I mean eliminate) flatbreads.

The correct number of possible actions one should be able to take with social media posts is zero. No replies, no reposts, no likes, no quotes. No posts, if possible.

This is my all-time favorite Word encounter. If you try to copy some deleted text from a change-tracked document (for example, to restore part of it elsewhere), it presents this modal dialog and then fails to carry out the clipboard copy

Imagine what it is like to be me in a time of buy-one-get-one promotions.

"You will be haunted," resumed the Ghost, "by three spirits."

what now

Fred Turner on "The Texan Ideology"

My costume is done.

I love how restaurant dress codes now amount to "pls we can't see y'all junk kthx"

Oh no

Been a while since I've been on my procedural rhetoric shit, but I thought this extremely simple quiz—you predict who got a person's vote based on their stated policy priorities—was a very good, extremely simple example of the difference between being told something and enacting it.

Again, the story here isn’t really about corporate consolidation or data center overinvestment or Amazon Is Evil, whatever just-so story you like best. It’s about sloppy, idiotic, roughshod software engineering.

I have resurfaced a traumatic memory from the late 1990s: Vignette StoryServer

I’m worried about hot dogs. They are terrific but—are they, or their symbolic payload, becoming too popular? Let us not overheat the hot dog. Please be careful out there.

It's happening

Context collapse feels much worse here than on Twitter. People respond to news stories without linking them. Multiple layers of nested quote posts. Vagueposting to the max. Thick spreads of smarmalade. It’s been four years since I wrote this piece, and the situation has gotten better—and worse.

Venn diagram

Ok. This quote is from two extremely accomplished senior scholars in the humanities, about U Chicago, (paywalled) in the Chronicle www.chronicle.com/article/rese... Bracketing the rest of the issue, I find this sentiment *infuriating*, selfish, disconnected from material reality, and even shameful.

I can't explain this but I truly believe that if you are wearing a pair of noise-cancelling headphones underneath a hoodie then you are invisible.

Just spent 10 minutes daydreaming about how to explain to Intel 386/Motorola 68030 me that a news article was consuming one (1) gigabyte of RAM.

With the greatest possible respect to the author of this piece, whose intentions seem earnest… I do not think we ought to enter the "We must protect fragile students from AI-shaming” stage of classroom AI.

When they give you coffee on the plane