“CNN’s new boss Chris Licht says that beginning today, CNN has added a “Breaking News” guideline to its stylebook, to address overuse of the breaking news banner across its network and cable news writ-large.” (Pro tip: Drop the breaking news banner and the news ticker altogether. If cable news actually covered the news, they wouldn’t need either.)
(H/t & kudos NextDraft)
I renewed my Chattanooga Public Library card. It cost me $50 because I no longer live in the city. My town, for reasons perhaps lost to time, doesn’t participate in the greater Chattanooga library system.
The town library does some things: readings for kids; events, or did in the before times; sells used books; and … hmmm … not much else.
I wonder about the rationale to keep the local library independent of the city system.
Anyway, if you are not part of your local library system or a nearby larger one, consider doing so. Libraries are wonderful resources. Support them.
Tennessee gov: No restricting firearms after mass shootings:
By KIMBERLEE KRUESI
Associated PressNASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) – Gov. Bill Lee has announced he does not support restricting firearms or strengthening gun control laws in response to recent mass shootings in Tennessee and around the country.
… because Bill Lee is a terrible governor who should resign.
Instead, Lee has joined a growing list of Republican governors who are stressing the need for more security at schools.
Guns kill people, people.
An experimental cancer-killing virus has been administered to a human patient for the first time, with hopes the testing will ultimately reveal evidence of a new means of successfully fighting cancer tumors in people’s bodies. The drug candidate, called CF33-hNIS (aka Vaxinia), is what’s called an oncolytic virus, a genetically modified virus designed to selectively infect and kill cancer cells while sparing healthy ones. In the case of CF33-hNIS, the modified pox virus works by entering cells and duplicating itself. Eventually, the infected cell bursts, releasing thousands of new virus particles that act as antigens, stimulating the immune system to attack nearby cancer cells. Previous research in animal models has shown the drug can harness the immune system in this way to hunt and destroy cancer cells, but up until now no testing has been done in humans. (Source: sciencealert.com et alia)
(Via John Ellis)
One thing the cloud does well is sync things so they are accessible and up-to-date. I have two simple, non-critical use cases – insecure email for newsletters and Real Simple Syndication (RSS) for articles – I will bring in house.
The RSS bit is relatively trivial, as is the insecure email for newsletters that are free. The complicated bit is the email for newsletters where it needs to be at least a bit secure as I need the email for a paid subscription, sometimes to a magazine or newspaper.
The other bit is that I want it all, RSS and the various newsletters, in a single app that is reading first. My RSS reader of choice right now is NetNewsWire on various Apple platforms, but if I move off of Apple whatever system I set up should serve Linux/BSD/Android as well.
The closest service is FeedBin, which offers a unique email address to which one can forward free newsletters. Its API connects to a bunch of readers. However, managing paid subscriptions through it is difficult to impossible. Also, some of my subscriptions have to go through my student email address. Anti-SPAM measures means forwarding or redirecting emails from various email accounts is a spotty endeavor.
Which is all to say that I don’t yet know precisely how I will achieve this end. This is not the first time I’ve traversed this path nor the first time I’ve written about it here.
And just in the nick of time! (“You haven’t lost your delicate sense of humor have you, Nancy!”) (“What?”)
I picked up a used but in great shape Thinkpad X260 with 16GB RAM and a 256GB disk. I installed Fedora 37 after updating the Windows 10 it came with and shrinking it on the disk. Why was this in the nick of time?
My six-month-old Apple MacBook Air M2, Narin, started crashing over the weekend. Universal Control it spontaneously breaks with no error message. iCloud will stop syncing for hours but will sync fine on the 2015 MacBook Pro, Takaosan, and the 2020 MacBook Pro, Nara (work), and the vintage Mac Minis are fine.
Part of Narin’s issues might be related to limited disk space, though again MacOS offered no error message to tell me space was getting tight. Off loading files to my NAS were painfully slow, made worse by the periodic crashing.
Meanwhile, the X260, Kanagawa, seems to have embraced Fedora. Everything just worked —- wifi, Bluetooth, fingerprint reader —- unlike almost every other time I’ve fresh installed a Linux distribution. I toyed mentally with installing OpenBSD.
Fedora 37 is polished. It looks the most together out-of-the-box of any *nix distribution I’ve tried in decades. And my favorite thing might be with the GNOME desktop and its method of launching and switching to apps and workspaces. Basically the best parts of the MacOS and Windows user experience mixed with a dash of a different approach that ties the two together is what hitting the Super (Win key, command key) gives. The metaphor is something of a revelation. I’ve avoided GNOME, preferring Cinnamon and KDE, and that might have been to my detriment. Better late than never, I guess.
Let’s spend a few moments talking about Apple hardware longevity. The ‘11 (Ama no Gawa) and ‘12 (Shinjuku) Mac Mini servers probably need to go to a farm upstate. I bought Ama as a refurb in 2012 because I bought my kids the white plastic MacBooks and I needed a machine to help manage them. I upgraded the memory and storage to the max and replaced the fan three times. I took it with me to Japan in 2016 and back in 2019.
I bought Shinjuku in 2020 so I could put the guts of Ama in it when it failed. I got tired of waiting and made it my desktop machine until I bought narin last year. Takaosan needs a new battery but otherwise is a tank, thankfully bought before the 2015 machines were discontinued.
2015 is a bit of a watershed year for Apple hardware in that things started going poorly not long after. The infamous butterfly keyboards were introduced as was the touch bar (both not as bad and not as useful as people made out). IPhones slowly lost real buttons. And OSX started its slow descent into mediocrity.
Let’s assume I’m right about moving from Narin to Kanagawa as my daily driver. Work stays Apple, so those devices remain. What does the rest of the migration look like?
Ama no Gawa, Shinjuku, and Takaosan retire. I might try the battery swap on Takaosan. But the jobs the three do —- spam filtering, mail server, media server, print server, scanner server, and some other bits —- move to the Synology NAS.
Even before those sunset I would finish my move off of Apple’s services. iCloud is unreliable. Apple Music loses its mind sometimes. iTunes Store, when I try to buy music to play on non-Apple devices, often times gives me a DRM-ed useless file. Apple News is nearly good but not indispensable like Apple TV+. I could live without Apple Pay, I don’t want to, but that might be why I need to live without it.
Apple Music Match is great and maybe indispensable, so I need to sort that out. It’s similar to how I use almost nothing Google these days but Google Fi is maybe indispensable, or how I would be happy to step away from Amazon services but rely on the Kindle infrastructure for my library’s ebooks.
Back to Apple, the two devices that are nigh-on indispensable are Kasai, the current generation iPad Mini, and Ikigai, the iPhone XS Max. Boox Onyx sells an eInk Android tablet that, based on my use of the Nova2 I read most of my eBooks on, I could make a solid replacement. For the iPhone, maybe go for an eInk Android phone? Or a FairPhone?
Those who made it to the end of my long ramble, welcome to the recommendation I hinted at at the top: get to know Firesign Theatre and the Continuing Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye.
I am sure this is not a hot take, but is the sudden deluge of AI fake content merely to reëstablish the need for the blockchain and similar ledger systems?
Take the “Pope in a Coat” (please!). Via Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day:
Over the weekend, a user on Reddit’s r/midjourney subreddit posted an AI-generated image of Pope Francis wearing a big parka (and looking sick). And it’s not an accident that it was an image of the pope wearing what looks like Balenciaga. Generative-AI art communities share different meta strategies for good prompts and aesthetics that these tools can work within and more than few users have recently figured out that Midjourney is actually really good at rendering stuff that looks like high fashion photography. For instance, last week, there was an AI video of Balenciaga Harry Potter that went viral, though I’m guessing the prompts for that were more “80s dark fantasy”.
Either way, the image above was then shared on Twitter by a user named @skyferrori who captioned it, “OKAAYYY”. And it went super viral. It was retweeted over 18,000 times. And a lot of those people thought it was real (myself included). The tell that it’s fake is that he’s carrying what looks like a Starbucks cup in his right hand.
And it seems like the believability of this image was a real wakeup call for a lot of folks. As writer Joel Golby succinctly put it in The Guardian this morning, “I thought I was immune to being fooled online. Then I saw the pope in a coat.”
There’s no reason to worry, certainly not as 01 April approaches.
Let’s imagine a world where the energy issues with blockchain (and I’ll refer to all digital ledgers that operate basically the same in that umbrella term) are resolved. Let’s say blockchain becomes divorced in peoples’ mind from NFTs and associated grifts. And let’s say blockchain becomes both ubiquitous and open like the World Wide Web.
Could blockchain solve the deepfake problem? It would not be fast — legitimate sources would need to register (?) on the blockchain and prove their identity through something … ugh, I hate myself for even typing this … non-fungible … gah, I was right – I hate myself for using that word … in the physical world. Governments and NGOs would be able to set themselves up, central banks could set up regular banks who would set up their clients, and so on.
I see legion problems with this approach. I’m tired and need to go to bed. But an imperfect system backed with some validation beyond buying a blue checkmark from a space Karen is better than a Wild West, which is what we may have now.
I rewatched Michael Clayton (2007) [Amazon] when I was laid up last week. I first watched it on a flight to Brussels and loved it. Every so often I dust it off, and for good reason:
George Clooney turns in a towering performance as the title character, a “fixer” for a powerful New York law firm who’s grown tired of cleaning up the messes of the morally reprehensible. But there are no easy exits in this world, dreamed up by the writer-director Tony Gilroy as a sleek and shrewd snapshot of corporate malfeasance. He creates a showcase role for Tilda Swinton, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of a ruthless power broker whose confidence is diminishing by the minute. Manohla Dargis deemed it “adult, sincere, intelligent, absorbing.”
(Via NYTimes Watching newsletter)
The movie is more complex and subtle than this synopsis paints. One of the things I like about this film’s structure and George Clooney’s performance is that you can almost see the gears in his head turning, processing the compartmentalization he needs to do to manage the multiple threads.
There’s an economy here I wish so many other movies could emulate. Tom Wilkinson’s untethered Arthur could have been a caricature, and an unsympathetic one at that. Instead, the story conveys the both the humanity of someone struggling with mental health and ethical issues (which one triggered which?), and the painful frustration of those who want to help but can’t devote the time and attention needed.
Also, Merritt Weaver. She’s been in so many things I’ve watched in the past six months: New Girl, Marriage Story, this film, and I saw her in an old Law & Order. I first noticed her in Studio 60, and she never fails to deliver even when her role is relatively small.
Michael Clayton is scary in its believability. The bad guys are both ruthlessly efficient and vulnerable to the same things that frustrate the rest of us. And, of course, Tilda Swinton. It’s a 5 out of 5 for me, a must watch.
