Author Scott Lynch responds to a reader who objects to “unrealistic stereotypes of political correctness” in his fiction featuring a Black, middle-aged woman pirate captain. h/t Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr
Molly White: On anti-crypto toxicity.
I don’t think anyone should be pressured to be nice to evil people. But I think the belief that anyone who engages in crypto is evil has become rampant, and has been used to justify hate towards people who don’t deserve it. There is no doubt that there are plenty of evil people in crypto, but there are a lot of people in there too who, should you care to dig deeper, are after a lot of the same goals that you might be.
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If you feel the urge to “cyberbully” someone in crypto, direct it at the powerful players behind crypto projects that are actively taking advantage of the vulnerable. Or, just as reasonably, direct it at the powerful tech executives, venture capitalists, elected representatives, and lobbyists who have contributed to the untenable situation we find ourselves in. Or the policymakers and governmental agencies who have failed to uphold their duty in regulating crypto and enforcing existing regulation that would protect people from rampant fraud. But not the artist who hoped to earn a few bucks selling their digital art in what is otherwise an extremely difficult field, or the person who hoped that maybe a lucky crypto buy could help them dig out of crushing debt just a tiny bit faster.
Twitter to Increase Tweet Character Limit to 4,000, Elon Musk Says. By Sami Fathi at MacRumors.
Where Veteran Rockers Go to Reinvent Themselves. How the Hudson Valley and the Catskills became the home to grunge icons, ex-punks and one-hit wonders. By Sal Cataldi at The New York Times.
“Being a dentist up in Woodstock, with all these great musicians, is a pretty great second act. And what other dentist can say he is in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?”
On 2024, Romney won’t back Trump, even if he’s the GOP nominee. By Steve Benen.
When you live in a semi-arid climate and you only drive a couple of times a week, you can go for years without driving in heavy rain, and then you find out your wiper blades have turned into ineffectual shoelaces.
Highbrow Films Aimed at Winning Oscars Are Losing Audiences. By Brooks Barnes at The New York Times. Audiences aren’t coming to theaters for these movies, and nobody really knows why.
We watched the first half of “Spirited” last night, because I thought I was in the mood for a lightweight Christmas movie, but it turned out I was not – or at least not that one. Julie wasn’t feeling it either.
So instead, we watched the first episode of “Three Pines,” which turned out to be very good and entertaining.
“Three Pines” is a murder mystery, like about three quarters of the shows we’ve been watching over the last few years. But this one is not British for a change. It’s set in Quebec, and stars Alfred “Doc Ock” Molina.
So far, it’s like “Northern Exposure” but French and with a murder.
A remake of “Happy Days” would be set in the 2000s.
Yesterday I mistakenly had coffee at four in the afternoon. I thought it was decaf. But I slept soundly last night anyway. Makes me wonder what other superpowers I have evolved.
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.