Today, after a typical barrage of dad jokes during a break from playing with my kids, my niece told me I am saved in her phone as “Joe Ross Cringe Uncle.”
She even showed me the contact card to prove it.
She and my wife both thought I would, and should, take it as an insult.
I did not.
🤪
Linked Links: Google Docs Can Import and Export Markdown by Michael Tsai
Maybe I’ll use Google Docs more often now that it can copy/paste and import/export Markdown.
I still remember using it for hours at a time throughout law school, but most firms maintain their vise grip on Microsoft Word.
Linked Links is my term for posts where I’m linking to someone else’s link post. Maybe I’ll stick with it as a recurring post type. Maybe not. Blogs are weird, and so am I. 🤷🏻♂️
I never found Letterman funny, and he comes off as mean and a little bigoted in this clip with the late, great Richard Simmons. But Simmons has a ton more charisma than Letterman, outshining him in a 4-minute clip produced by Letterman’s own team.
Everyone who has ever traveled by airplane has at least one infuriating story, including me. But when I missed a scheduled flight on American Airlines last week, the customer service person put me on the next flight with none of the fees, up-charges or judgment that I was expecting, and it was nice.
Oral Argument for Hachette Book Group, Inc. v. Internet Archive – CourtListener.com
This oral argument before the 2nd Circuit about the legality of Internet Archive’s controlled digital lending program is a great listen, regardless of what side you support.
Find all the litigation filings here.
Edit: for my convenience as well as yours, I’ve embedded the audio below. Let me know if you have trouble playing it.
Sure, Elon, I’ll go right ahead and disable my privacy related extensions…
Laurens Hof, writing in Episode 73 of his Last Week in Fediverse newsletter:
What makes the situation with rumours of Mastodon leaking private messages so interesting to me is that the original posts that contained the rumours got significantly more engagement than the corrections. So it seems to me that the structural feature of decentralised networks that ‘significantly limits the reach of fake news’ can also work to limit the reach of corrections to fake news as well.
This is a good point, but the structural aspect of decentralized networks that makes it as difficult to circulate corrections as it is to circulate fake news is susceptible to some white hat manipulation. To paraphrase a misquote/cliché, we have to be the circulation we wish to see in the network.
Decentralization significantly reduces virality, allowing users to more carefully control the spread of information. We can spread corrections effectively, it just takes effort.
I don’t have a solution, but here’s something ive been thinking about: Perhaps there is some way of building corrections into ActivityPub as a special type of edit that triggers a notification to users who interacted with the original post.
I would advocate for making this mechanism opt-out to maximize the flow of corrections, but I know that may be naïve, and that perhaps I’m ignorant of the likelihood that some would find a way to abuse such a tool to spread fake news after all. It’s a fun thought experiment, and I’m open to discussing with other nerds who think about this stuff at weird hours of the night when they should be sleeping.
Louisiana classrooms now required by law to display the Ten Commandments | CNN Politics
I haven’t looked into yet, but my first thought is that this middle finger to the Constitution has the stench of Leonard Leo and his ilk all over it.
🦎 What are some good dinosaur apps and games to learn and play with your kids on iOS?
I’m happy to pay for good apps, I just want to avoid scams and low-effort nonsense.
Nick Heer has a great post about the vapid coverage of vapid Elon Musk, but this bit from the end of Heer’s post struck me as the perfect Twitter bio for Musk:
words from the fingers of a dipshit
Now that Spotify’s family plan costs $20/month I don’t have much incentive not to switch to YouTube Music, which comes with the YouTube Premium I’m already paying for. I’m also giving the Tidal 30-day trial a shot, but that would be $22/month for a family plan.
⌨️ A quick MS Word tip: Press control + shift + F9 to remove all hyperlinks in a selection of text. You may need to include the Fn or equivalent key if you're a keyboard nerd using several layers.
This is handy for work because while I'm writing briefs I like to keep the citations hyperlinked for easy reference/collaboration/discussion, but when it's time to file, those links usually go bye bye .
Alito's intellectual honesty
TenBlueLinks.org shows you how to make Google’s old school, AI-free search filter, called, and this is true, Google Web, the default.
I’m not a fan of Chrome on iOS, or anywhere really, so I added the &udm=14 suffix to the Google action I use in Drafts and shared it to the Drafts directory.
🪶 This is only my opinion, but it is one I strongly hold: Tom Bombadil is equal parts omnipotence and ADHD.
My Neighbor Totoro, 1988 - ★★★★★ (contains spoilers)
This review may contain spoilers.
We watched this with the kids for Mother’s Day and they loved it. We were worried some of the characters would look scary to their Disney sensibilities, and at first they probably did, but the kids acclimated quickly and fell in love with Totoro. I can’t wait to watch more Miyazaki with them.
🔗 Apple Will Revamp Siri to Catch Up to Its Chatbot Competitors
Tripp Mickle, Brian X. Chen and Cade Metz report at The New York Times that:
The decision came after the executives Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea spent weeks testing OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT. The product’s use of generative artificial intelligence, which can write poetry, create computer code and answer complex questions, made Siri look antiquated, said two people familiar with the company’s work, who didn’t have permission to speak publicly.
Apple can’t be serious here. My earliest IFTTT recipes made Siri look antiquated. Siri has been, to put it as politely as Siri deserves, trash for years. The user experience of the earliest Echo Auto was head and shoulders above Siri. If you need a reminder set, Siri will work more often than not. But that’s been its only viable use case since release.
Apple has been marketing off of machine learning since 2018 and probably earlier, so it’s just bonkers that they didn’t decide to scrap Siri at least that long ago and turn their machine learning resources toward something better.
🔗 Does the Statute of Limitations Ever Apply in Legal Malpractice?
Hey look, my employer has a blog about the kind of work I do, and I wrote a thing for it.