Links
I hope Facebook’s executive team are investing in some quality knee pads… 🔗 bloomberg.com
🔗 Ben Nacar is an incredible pianist who, I recently learned, does an annual video surveying the classical music that left copyright protection that year. The video he did this year features music from 1929, all of which is now in the public domain.
Akshay Kulkarni, Shaurya Kshatri and William Burr reporting at Canada’s CBC News:
B.C. Premier David Eby has announced immediate countermeasures in response to incoming U.S. tariffs, saying the province will take action to protect B.C. workers and businesses. […] As an initial response, Eby said he has directed the B.C. Liquor Distribution Branch to immediately stop purchasing American liquor from Republican-led “red states” and remove the top-selling brands from public liquor store shelves.
You love to see it.
Rusty Foster at Today in Tabs has some good advice on how to approach what I refer to as the malevolent-jackass express:
First, deny this regime your compliance whenever and wherever you can, in ways as large or as small as you are able. Defend your communities, especially the most vulnerable—trans people, queer people, the chronically ill, immigrants, ethnic and religious minorities. And above all, seek to depose any officeholder, political appointee, bureaucrat, or business leader who cooperates with this criminal administration, as well as any who fail to effectively oppose it, by any means available to you.
🔗 Mike Masnick is always a must-read, but his recent piece calling bullshit on Zuckerberg’s “move” of Meta’s moderation teams just proves how important his voice is as we all buckle up for a four-year ride on the malevolent-jackass express…
🔗 Mike Masnick is always a must-read, but his recent piece calling bullshit on Zuckerberg's "move" of Meta's moderation teams (https://www.techdirt.com/2025/01/21/the-emptiness-of-zucks-promise-to-move-biased-trust-safety-from-california-) just proves how important his voice is as we all buckle up for a four-year ride on the malevolent-jackass express…
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 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.
I don’t pay much attention to polls, so I had no idea Nate Silver had gone so far down his own rabbit hole. It’s so bad that he thinks polling based on, wait for it, the data, takes “an incredible amount of guts.”
And just like that, someone I have idolized since I was a young child shows themselves willing to deliver our republic to death by authoritarianism.
Sam Cole, writing at 404 Media about Matt Mullenweg’s ongoing, unforced founder mode flameout:
“We were unaware that Matt redirected sign-up emails until current Automattic employees contacted our support team,” a spokesperson for Blind told me, adding that they’d “never seen a CEO or executive try to limit their employees from signing up for Blind by redirecting emails.”
This is just gross. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would still want to work for him now that toxicity is the norm, but he still has fans inside the company:
“There is a vocal group of sycophants who are cheering on Matt’s actions via Anonymattic,” [an employee] said, “drawing favorable comparisons to how Elon Musk and Donald Trump operate. Their morale seems high, but I can’t relate.” Screenshots viewed by 404 Media show some staff having changed their Slack usernames to include “[STAYING]” to signal their support of Mullenweg and intention to remain at the company.
The thing is, whether you agree with him or not, it’s not the rhetorical position he has taken that’s the problem, it’s the way he’s expressing and defending that position that is the problem. And it’s such a problem that it’s hard to see anyone defending his recent behavior as having much of a reputation left after all of this.
As I’ve said before, I don’t envy his/the company’s lawyers the job of litigating around his ongoing meltdown. I’ll be keeping an eye on the filings at CourtListener.
I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I find it strange that my Google TV with Chromecast started outputting green static and weird noises on every input of my LG CX the day before the all new Google TV streamer is set to go on sale…
Watching these “network state” clowns fail will be fun, but that shouldn’t overshadow the predatory nature of their worldview.
Matt Webb wrote about his open source in-page chat tool, cursor party:
“If you’ve visited my actual website, rather than reading by email or whatever, such as reading this very post, you may notice somebody else’s cursor pass by as you’re reading.”
It’s a wonderful, playful, well-executed idea.
This 1956 promotional video is a time capsule of New Jersey when my parents were kids.
This Technicolor color film was produced in 1956 for the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company, and based on a 1953 John T. Cunningham book This is New Jersey.
It’s surprisingly light on corporate propaganda. However, the mention that one third of the state was below the Mason-Dixon Line was a little too… wistful, especially given the paucity of people of color in the film.
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
🔗 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.