“Both of these things are good. You want feminine energy. You want masculine energy. You’re gonna have parts of society that have more of one or the other. I think that that’s all good. But I do think the corporate culture had swung toward being this somewhat more neutered thing.” And it’s not just the corporate world. The CEO also said that society “has become very, like, neutered, or emasculated.”
Ann Telnaes explains why she quit the Washington Post after more than fifteen years as an editorial cartoonist at the now-Bezos-owned newspaper:
The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump. There have been multiple articles recently about these men with lucrative government contracts and an interest in eliminating regulations making their way to Mar-a-lago. The group in the cartoon included Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook & Meta founder and CEO, Sam Altman/AI CEO, Patrick Soon-Shiong/LA Times publisher, the Walt Disney Company/ABC News, and Jeff Bezos/Washington Post owner.
Democracy ain’t dead yet, but it sure is starting to look under the weather…
▶️ I reviewed our digital subscriptions in preparation for the new year and one of the services I let go (at least for now) is YouTube Premium. It’s wild to me how shitty the ads are on YouTube. Google is probably the largest advertising provider in the world and YouTube ads are just pure garbage.
🎄 I think my kids had a good Christmas, but the disappointment in my three-year-old son’s voice this morning when he walked out to the Christmas tree and said “but there’s no more presents under the tree…” was palpable. And it was even worse when I explained Christmas is only one morning a year.
This ominous photo I took tonight of the Disney castle lit by red fireworks is my new header for, possibly, forever because shit is just ominous these days okay?
🧱 I don’t think the The Verge’s paywall will last, given that it’s very porous, most Verge readers likely block ads anyway, and the comments section is already… lively. They should offer an easy way to support them without degrading the free experience, but I can’t blame them for trying something.
🧱 I don’t think the The Verge’s paywall will last, given that it’s very porous, most Verge readers likely block ads anyway, and the comments section is already… lively... They should offer an easy way to support them without degrading the free experience, but I can’t blame them for trying something.
Seeing my Micro.blog profile in a Mastodon app, where my username is @joe@joeross.me, really makes me want to use it as my primary fediverse account. I just find the transfer process daunting, and I recall Mb may not be a full implementation of an ActivityPub account, though maybe that has changed.
🦃 Now that the kids are mostly sentient, Thanksgiving means fielding questions from them about why we’re vegetarians and most people aren’t. If anyone has any ideas let me know. I’m not sure they’ll understand I was radicalized by a YouTube rabbithole decades ago, given they’re both younger than 5…
Threads can brag about hundreds of millions of users and more daily signups than all of Bluesky, but its recent feature sprint shows competition is having the desired effect. Bluesky’s best move would be to ship true, easy federation ASAP. Easier said than done, I’m sure, but the sooner the better.
I recently posted a photo of my cat on Bluesky, as any serious person does on a growing social network. While carefully preparing the post (again, I am serious person) I asked four different LLMs for alt text to include with the photo. They all did okay, but as you can see Claude went pretty hard…
▶️ Once in a while, I remember that the overwhelming majority of human beings prefer everything Coldplay did afterParachutes over that absolute gem of a record, and I realize that I should’ve known when that thought first occurred to me that I was in one of the darker timelines.
I told myself I wouldn’t participate the discourse, but everyone who voted for Trump had enough information to know this was a likelihood and they did it anyway. Each and every one of them shares responsibility for those will suffer or die as a direct result of RFK Jr. running HHS if he’s confirmed.
I was sad to read that Radio Free Fedi is shutting down early next year. It got me thinking about how easy it is to spin up awesome stuff on the Fediverse. On the one hand, that’s awesome! But on the other, it means that stuff often outgrows the metaphorical bandwidth of its creators pretty fast.
Chris Geidner writes at Law Dork that progressives should be litigating “narrow challenges brought on conservative grounds — using the reasoning of the right, […] fighting with the tools that can work.”
This is the way. Forcing liberal arguments through conservative courts won’t work.
