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A short collection of delightful and/or appalling confessions, rendered in an excruciatingly painful format. Some of these are extremely raunchy, so don’t read them to the kiddos.

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Jamelle Bouie: Why an Unremarkable Racist Enjoyed the Backing of Billionaires

Silicon Valley billionaires and millionaires support racist Richard Hanania, who advocated eugenics, forced sterilization, and opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing,” Bouie writes. Hanania wrote, “These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people on subways or walking around in suits.” Racists are the natural ally of plutocrats, Bouie says. By supporting an argument that some people are naturally inferior, the plutocrats support the argument that other people are natural elites.
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I could watch a 2-1/2 hour movie of Peter Quill and his grandpa eating breakfast and gossiping about the neighbors.

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We just watched Guardians of the Galaxy 3. I hope they make about ten more of those movies. So good.

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Kottke: Glamor photos of vintage calculators, 1968-83.

In the 1970s, calculators weren’t just for calculating. They were luxury items. In a world before iPods and iPhones, calculators were the first aspirational personal electronics.”

My Dad was an accountant and started using calculators very early. I remember visiting his office as a boy around 1970 and seeing a desktop calculator. All it did was add, subtract, multiply and divide, and it was the size of a cash register.

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Kottke: The accidental secret ingredient that made Chicago Vienna Sausages delicious.

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Reddit seems to have successfully put down its moderator revolt, but is destroying the site in the process

Occasionally I like to not dress like a person who works from home and dribbles food down the front of their shirt. When I’d Google for fashion advice, I’d end often up on r/malefashionadvice. Morgan Sung reports on TechCrunch that Reddit’s menswear hub is the latest casualty of its battle with moderators. If you follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, or Mastodon, you know that I like to share memes and vintage ads and photos, and I used to often find them on Reddit.

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I saw this leaflet on a utility pole when walking with Minnie.

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Currently reading: The Gutenberg Parenthesis by Jeff Jarvis 📚

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Cory Doctorow: Verizon’s “repeated incompetence and waste on an unimaginable scale.”

“The long bezzle: Verizon can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” Verizon shutters BlueJeans, three years after buying it for $400M, the latest in a long series of failures for the company. Techdirt: Verizon Fails Again, Shutters Attempted Zoom Alternative BlueJeans After Paying $400 Million For It: These repeated failures by Verizon would be less of an issue if the company didn’t have such a long history of skimping on essential broadband network upgrades.

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How Will Artificial Intelligence Change Journalism?

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EFF: Congress Amended KOSA, But It’s Still A Censorship Bill. Despite small changes, the Kids Online Safety Act “is a censorship bill that will harm the rights of both adult and minor users. We oppose it, and urge you to contact your congressperson about it today.”

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To demonstrate representational bias, the London Interdiscipinary School asked the AI tool Midjourney to generate images of a typical prisoner, lawyer, nurse, drug dealer, etc. The results showed striking racial and ethnic stereotyping.

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My latest: Snowflake wants to help telcos ditch silos with a blizzard of data. With its telco ambitions, is Snowflake getting over its skis? The company launched its Telco Data Cloud this year to help providers make better decisions for network planning, customer service, and growing revenue.

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“This question has two parts, neither of which have anything to do with the other or the subject at hand. Also, this question has four parts.” Every Question In Every Q&A Session Ever.

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Daring Fireball: “Colonel Harland Sanders, who founded Kentucky Fried Chicken, sold the company to a conglomerate in 1964, and then remained their paid spokesman for the remainder of his life, despite the fact that he despised their food and professed deep regret that he sold the chain.”

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Jason Kottke writes about the joys of being a regular at your neighborhood restaurant.

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Despite’s Zoom’s attempts to walk back its changed terms, the service is still a privacy mess, according to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols' research.

I’ve been using Zoom several times per week for three years. It’s been my go-to videoconferencing service. I need to think about whether to stay with it.

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Oracle expands its hybrid cloud footprint to the enterprise. My latest: Big Red introduces Compute Cloud@Customer, a microcosm of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure that runs in the customer data center.

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Investigating the provenance of archive.today, useful for circumventing paywalls to read articles on sites such as Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, etc.