I saw these ducks do this mildly surprising thing at Lake Murray.
The Los Angeles Police Department is here to serve and protect… the powerful. The rest of you are on your own.
After audio recordings leaked of Los Angeles city lawmakers making shockingly racist statements, police want to find and prosecute the leakers.
LAPD Thinks Best Response To Leaked Recording Of Councilmembers’ Racist Remarks Is Going After Reddit Users. By Tim Cushing at Techdirt.
This letter from Mickey Mantle, recalling his ‘outstanding experience’ at Yankee stadium, is delightfully obscene, as is this 1898 memo to all Major League Baseball teams to reduce cursing.
The 1898 memo was “so expletive-laden and obscene as to be ‘unmailable’ to its intended audience via the postal service, and so was delivered by hand to each of the League’s 12 clubs and their foul-mouthed players.”
(Thanks, Daring Fireball!)
Dyson’s Air Purifying Headphones Will Cost $949, Plus Your Pride. By Andrew Liszewski at Gizmodo.
McSweeney’s: Middle School Party Games, Revised for Thirty-Five-Year-Olds.
Truth or Dare
If a player chooses “truth,” they must reveal how much money they make. If they choose “dare,” they must hand someone their phone and let them look at every tab they have open on their browser.
By Nicole Beckley
The New Yorker: Cory Doctorow Wants You to Know What Computers Can and Can’t Do.
A conversation about the “mediocre monopolists” of Big Tech, the weirdness of crypto, and the real lessons of science fiction.
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This will all be so great if we don’t screw it up.
By Christopher Byrd.
Cory also talks about the limitations of perfect productivity: Once you’ve pared away all the unimportant tasks in your life, everything left is important and there’s nothing left to pare.
Fortunately, this is not a problem for me. I waste plenty of time!
I’m very impressed that Cory was featured in the New Yorker.
I saw this dapper gentleman at the park today.
The promise and the peril of ChatGPT. By Casey Newton.
Reading about the potential for abuse here, I found myself thinking about the classic science fiction story “A Logic Named Joe,” in which author Murray Leinster predicts the consumer internet in 1946. One of the computers on the network gets a little wonky and starts answering questions on how to commit murder.
People are already using ChatGPT to get answers to potentially lethal questions.
Less significantly, ChatGPT could potentially be the end of Google and industries that have grown around it—advertising and search engine optimization. Google gives search results, but ChatGPT provides answers.
Yes, It’s Censorship: Stop picking that nit, it’ll never heal. A few big companies, including Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Twitter, monopolize public discourse, setting the rules for what we’re allowed to talk about.
Cory Doctorow:
The decision to make our “digital public square,” into a privatized, monopoly-friendly corporate shopping mall whose owners can wield the power of the state against rivals who dare to compete with them may not violate the First Amendment, but it sure as hell isn’t good for free expression.
Ancient Rome did not fall. It was destroyed from within, by the same forces we see playing out in America today. By Barry Gander, a self-described “Canadian from Connecticut,” on Medium.