Tag: Pocket

I recently made the mistake of going to some of these groups’ pages to try to understand who they are, finding words clearly written by actual humans like “an official Facebook page for providing our fans with the best internet content” and “One Day Maybe You Will Have a Tiny House” and a comment with a human name praising the group as “A page where I found really useful information. There is a lot of content on the website. I enjoy spending time on this page.” There is no useful information on this page and I do not enjoy spending time on it, buddy, but I recognize that by engaging with it, even in hatred, Facebook will turn my engagement around on me to show me more of these monstrosities. I am trapped in a hell house of tiny houses, each less tiny and house-like than the last

— Read on aftermath.site/facebook-ai-tiny-house

I cannot remember the last time I actually went to a website and browsed, took my time discovering the way a person expressed themselves through code. Does anyone else remember the website Superbad, a little personal project that took you through bizarre web design experiments? Zombo com? These websites are still around because they don’t depend on the benevolence of a billionaire for their existence.

— Read on aftermath.site/website-musk-twitter-facebook-internet

Via Kottke

Make a pact with yourself.  Draw blood.  Break the pact.

Write down 9 essential qualities of mentorship.

Call an old friend with whom you nurse a grudge.  Air it out.

Imagine yourself naked, on a donkey, going where you customarily buy cheese.

— Read on substack.com/@danbern/p-152080379

Smit fell just short of the department’s minimum height of five feet and nine inches, but was able to join the force in 1966 after he had his cousin hit him over the skull with a nightstick, allowing him to meet the height minimum when he was remeasured the following day with the bump on his head.

— Read on en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Smit

This person posted a bunch of images of their dad’s old VHS tapes with lovingly hand-drawn labels indicating their contents. Kids, this is what people did before the internet.

Link

But deep down, what motivates them is the same twitch in the eye that brought me to the subreddit in the first place. “I’m not a very rageful person,” Gatto said, “but for some reason, these lights brought it out of me. And I kind of realized that’s why I had to do something about it. Because no one’s going to come help us.”

— Read on theringer.com/2024/12/03/tech/headlight-brightness-cars-accidents

But now we have a word for it – for outputs driven by metrics and features divorced from the reality they are meant to capture – slop.

— Read on bradleyrobb.net/notes/183/

The best available model of such an event is an ultrasecret 1983 Pentagon war game called Proud Prophet. That game was a nuclear test of sorts, and it provided critical lessons that remain crucial today. It was unique in that by design it was largely unscripted, involved the highest levels of the U.S. military and its global warfighting commands and used actual communication channels, doctrines and secret war plans. One of its great strengths was that unlike any other war game involving the possibility of small-yield nuclear weapons, it ran freely and was allowed to play out to its natural conclusion: global devastation.

— Read on www.nytimes.com/2024/12/02/magazine/nuclear-strategy-proud-prophet.html

The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein.

— Read on www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/us-culture-moral-education-formation/674765/