Mitch Wagner

Google bungled by killing Google Reader to build Google+, and then bungled again killing Google+ The company is like the proverbial donkey placed between a pile of hay and a bucket of water that ends up dying of hunger and thirst because it can’t decide between them.

How Google Reader died — and why the web misses it more than ever. By David Pierce at The Verge

Ten years after its untimely death, the team that built the much-beloved feed reader reflects on what went wrong and what could have been.

Google Reader was more than just an RSS reader. It was a general-purpose information hub and sharing platform. It achieved 30 million loyal users—a great success by real-world measures, but not Google scale.

Google’s bad reputation for killing and abandoning products started with Reader and has only gotten worse over time. But the real tragedy of Reader was that it had all the signs of being something big, and Google just couldn’t see it. Desperate to play catch-up to Facebook and Twitter, the company shut down one of its most prescient projects; you can see in Reader shades of everything from Twitter to the newsletter boom to the rising social web. To executives, Google Reader may have seemed like a humble feed aggregator built on boring technology. But for users, it was a way of organizing the internet, for making sense of the web, for collecting all the things you care about no matter its location or type, and helping you make the most of it.

Instead of building on Google Reader, Google wanted to build Google+, and look how that turned out.

I used Reader daily, but never got into the social features. I was barely aware they existed. I thought Google+ was great.

Doctors are starting to use generative AI to help with paperwork, which takes them literally hours every day—often evenings and weekends—and is a leading driver of burnout.

A.I. May Someday Work Medical Miracles. For Now, It Helps Do Paperwork.. By Steve Lohr at The New York Times.

I also talked with ChatGPT. I asked it whether AI is a threat to people’s jobs, and how people can maximize their success in their careers as AI becomes more prevalent. I didn’t include ChatGPT’s responses in the article. Read them here.

My latest: Surviving the AI job apocalypse. AI won’t kill the human race or take everybody’s job. But the workplace will be transformed, and some jobs are at risk. Workers are already starting to adapt.

I recently came across the IndieWeb concept of POSSE. Not the first time I’ve seen it, but this time I read it more closely and said, “Holy cow, there’s a name for the way I’ve always preferred to use social media?”

It should be called “POSCE”—“Publish on your Own Site, Copy Elsewhere.” It’s a more understandable explanation of the concept. Though understandability isn’t a great strength for the IndieWeb movement.

Suddenly, It Looks Like We’re in a Golden Age for Medicine. David Wallace-Wells / NYTimes.

Hard to reconcile with our disastrous Covid response. We did better with the 1918 flu.

There will never be another Harrison Ford

The guy’s 80, and instead of sliding into the traditional role of lifetime achievement award winner, memoir writer and maker of occasional cameo appearances, he’s back on billboards and the sides of buses for “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.”

Meanwhile his roles in “1923” and “Shrinking” could very well deliver not only his first Emmy nomination but his second as well.

Oh, and he just finished shooting his first Marvel movie, “Captain America: Brave New World,” in which he plays American President Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (a role formerly filled by the late, great William Hurt), who may or may not turn out to be the Red Hulk.

— Mary McNamara / LA Times

As AI becomes more prevalent, a vast underclass of people training the machines is emerging worldwide. Josh Dzieza reports in depth for The Verge.

There are people classifying the emotional content of TikTok videos, new variants of email spam, and the precise sexual provocativeness of online ads. Others are looking at credit-card transactions and figuring out what sort of purchase they relate to or checking e-commerce recommendations and deciding whether that shirt is really something you might like after buying that other shirt. Humans are correcting customer-service chatbots, listening to Alexa requests, and categorizing the emotions of people on video calls. They are labeling food so that smart refrigerators don’t get confused by new packaging, checking automated security cameras before sounding alarms, and identifying corn for baffled autonomous tractors.

AI Is a Lot of Work

Not to brag but I just selected the perfect size container for Julie’s leftover chili.

I saw this sign 10 years ago today in a barbershop window in Coronado.

Casey Newton at Platformer: How the Kids Online Safety Act puts us all at risk

Happy Independence Day to all of my American friends, and may you finish the day with the same number of fingers with which you began it.

RIP Frank Field, a local New York TV weatherman who was a fixture of the television landscape when I was a kid in the 70s. He was 100 years old.

Field, who died Saturday, was an evangelist for the Heimlich maneuver, which saved his life in 1985.

He was dining at a Manhattan restaurant with the CBS sportscaster Warner Wolf when a piece of roast beef became lodged in Dr. Field’s throat. “There was no pain,” he later told The New York Times. “I tried to swallow and could not. I tried to cough. I was perfectly calm, until I realized I couldn’t breathe.” He was also unable to speak to Mr. Wolf to convey his distress.

“So I pointed to my throat and stood up, to give him access,” Dr. Field said. “He did it the first time, and it didn’t work. I thought: ‘My God! It doesn’t work. If I fell unconscious, I wouldn’t make the 11 o’clock news.'”

When Mr. Wolf tried again, he expelled the meat.

“Warner had never done it,” Dr. Field said, “but he had seen me demonstrate it on television.”

Frank Field, Who Brought Expertise to TV Weathercasting, Dies at 100 (NYTimes / Richard Goldstein)

President Eisenhower signed the National Highway Act, “the largest infrastructure project in American history,” July 3, 1956—68 years ago today. The hosts of the This Day in Esoteric Political History podcast “are joined by Eddie Alterman, longtime editor of Car & Driver magazine, to discuss how the highway network reshaped the country and changed car culture.”

This Day in Esoteric Political History: “The Great American Road Trip”

I had thought the end of “Endeavour” might take place immediately prior to the first season of “Inspector Morse.” But then I thought that was wrong of me, because Shaun Evans is so much younger than John Thaw was.

Or not. Today I learned Thaw was 45 at the beginning of “Morse,” and Evans is 43.

Lovely, sad ending to “Endeavour.”