I, For One, Welcome Our New Data Overlords
09:41 Saturday, 28 June 2014
Words: 802
Yesterday, the A.V. Club posted that Facebook had published a scientific paper with the pithy title, "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks," about an experiment it ran manipulating the feeds of 600,000 Facebook users.
Now, I’ve read the abstract, and I don’t think it’s the sort of thing that’s going to get people all up in arms — but it should.
Also yesterday, Shawn Blanc posted that he’d just gotten Google fiber to his home, and now he has more bandwidth than God. In his post, he kind of went through his thinking about letting Google into his home as a "dumb pipe" (my words, not his). But he did offer his rationalization for letting Google into his home in return for more bandwidth than any household can possibly use. (Yes, I recall that Bill Gates said nobody would ever need more than 640K of RAM, and IBM thought the world only needed, like, 4 computers. But still, really?)
Obviously, now that they’re my ISP, they will be able to garner more information about my house. Basically they now have visibility into anything we do online that’s not an encrypted transaction, such as the movies we stream from Netflix, the products we browse on Amazon, what songs we stream over Rdio, every website we visit, and who knows what else. It sounds creepy when you put it like that, but it’s also no different than any other ISP relationship I’ve had (AOL, Time Warner, Verizon, AT&T). It’s just that none of the others were in to Big Data as much as Google is.
He goes on to explain how the really important stuff is safe because it’s encrypted. But the point is, data is data. There is no such thing as "bad data," because "bad data" helps you understand what "good data" is. It’s all just data! And Shawn is willing to give Google all of his.
Back when I was a young ensign in the United States Navy, going to Communications Officer School in the depths of winter in Newport, Rhode Island, I had to learn about the Navy’s cryptographic systems. One of the features of a good cryptographic system, without getting into details that may or may not be classified any longer, is that it always sends an encrypted data stream. Just sometimes that data is just noise. Because we knew, and we knew our adversaries knew, that one of the ways you may derive your adversary’s intentions is by the amount of his communications. ("Listen! The drums have stopped." Cue ominous music.) This is called "traffic flow analysis."
Google will derive useful, meaningful data, encrypted or not, through traffic flow analysis. Lots and lots of it.
And that probably seems benign, and who cares how often I look at baby goat videos?
But then you’ve got this Facebook thing. The "experiment" reported above. I’m amazed Facebook communications let that get published. But thankfully, they did. Because it helps build the picture of the challenge these big data companies pose.
Do you suppose there was "informed consent" on the part of the experiment’s subjects. Oh, yeah. The "terms of service." You signed up to be a guinea pig. But it probably never really said that, even if you ever actually did, you know, read the terms of service.
The problem with Google, especially Google, and also Facebook and Amazon and perhaps to a lesser extent, we don’t really know, the advertising data brokering houses, but especially Google, is that there is no transparency as to what they’re doing with that data in their data centers. None. Zero. Nada. We don’t get to know, even though they’re doing it to us. As Facebook has kindly just revealed. You can bet your ass Google is doing the same things.
I believe this, because it’s exactly what I would do. And you would too, if you thought about it and had the opportunity.
So, in return for the ease of sharing snapshots, bitching about the food at your high school cafeteria, being able to stream Netflix faster than your neighbor, to have the latest shiny widget ordered with one click and free two-day delivery, we’re giving these companies unfettered access to every bit of information about us, and allowing them to use it however they wish, ostensibly to provide us with the "best app experience."
It’s a death of a thousand cuts. We’re frogs in a pot of water, with the heat slowly being turned up. So nobody complains. We get all this cool shit! What’s to complain about?
Yep, got more bandwidth than God. And Google and Facebook and Amazon are going to show you the world they want you to see, and it’s going to be their world and not yours.
Welcome to The Matrix.
Choices Matter, But This Is Bullshit
13:14 Saturday, 28 June 2014
Words: 567
Advertising drives the online world. It is proving to be absolutely the worst possible business model, that makes the worst possible use of what may be the best communications medium humanity has ever created, spoken and written word excepted.
Advertising requires attention, so companies must compete for attention. The best way to compete for attention is to make hyperbolic claims, to instill the "fight or flight" response. This is partly why our political views have become so polarized, those folks are competing for attention with everyone else. If you’re calm, rational and sober, you’re boring. You don’t exist. Nobody reads you. So everybody runs to the extremes, though we all supposedly "hate" it.
Anyway, in the competition for attention, we write endless streams of utterly bullshit headlines. Which, naturally, top pages of utter bullshit artfully presented with suitable whitespace and large images, to make the ton of shit you’re about to eat taste like a ham-and-cheese sandwich!
And the bullshit works, because here I am, familiar with the article because it caught my attention, and I should know better. Worse yet, I’m linking to it! Which just feeds the beast. "That which you feed, grows."
Anyway, read this stinking, fetid pile of lazy, incompetent, intelligence-free, regurgitation of manufactured narrative, written not to inform or to illuminate, but to garner page-clicks. Please. I want you to read it.
Think about what "open" and "closed" really mean. It means a hell of a lot more than whose DRM works on what devices. The "open" and "closed" ecosystem narrative tropes are bullshit. It’s not the ecosystems.
It’s not.
It’s more about how the world is presented to you. Apple’s not in that business. Google is. Amazon is. Facebook is. If Google Chrome is your default browser, you live in Google’s world, though Facebook and Amazon get to share it. If you buy Amazon’s phone, you’re in Amazon’s world. Whenever you’re on Facebook, Instagram, whatever other property Facebook has acquired, you’re in Facebook’s world.
Apple’s world? It’s hardware.
Apple wants you to buy their shiny widgets. They make computers. Big ones, tiny ones. They make the vast majority of their money selling hardware. Stuff. Things you hold in your hand or put on a desk and take pictures of that you post on your blog. Yeah, they want you to believe they’re all sunshine and rainbows; but other than that, they largely don’t care about what you’re doing, only that you’re happy doing it with their hardware.
Google, Amazon, and Facebook are all in the business of trying to get inside your head, so they can influence you and they can sell that influence to the highest bidder, be they corporations or political parties, though the distinction is getting harder to tell these days.
So yeah, it matters what platform you choose. But it’s not about ecosystems being "open" or "closed." It’s about what your relationship is to the platform. In Apple’s world, you’re the customer. In Google’s and Facebook’s world, you’re the product. In Amazon’s world, you’re both the product and the customer, because Amazon is also a retailer. A big-data retailer.
After you’ve consumed that useless piece of information junk-food, read this little missive here.
There is a choice, but it’s not about "ecosystems." It’s not about "religion."
It’s about what kind of world you want to live in. And that choice matters.
Aperture f3.5
16:08 Saturday, 28 June 2014
Words: 475
Apple has announced, in a very fucked-up way, that they’ve ceased development of Aperture, its "pro"-level photo asset management and editing app. It, along with iPhoto, are to be replaced by its new Photos app, which won’t be released until sometime in 2015.
This is probably the first real stumble I’ve seen from Apple in terms of corporate communications since, I think, "Antennagate," and I don’t know if it’s a result of the new, more "open" Apple we’ve been kind of seeing since WWDC. Apparently, Apple responded to queries from Jim Dalrymple at The Loop, and Matthew Panzarino at TechCrunch, though why those two would inquire, and at the same time seems kind of weird.
This is the kind of thing I’d expect to see in a press release, along with some promotional material, or even a beta, for the new Photos app. As it stands, we have two blogs saying Aperture and iPhoto are dead, being replaced by a product nobody is going to see until next year. Maybe. It’s not like release schedules never slip.
But you’ll still see Aperture, front and center in Apple’s "Pro" apps page. Mixed messages! It’s still for sale on the App Store, which is probably not the wisest move, absent a real announcement.
From time to time, you’d read rumors that development was still underway, but only small updates were ever issued. The most recent major release is 3.5 with the current version being 3.5.1.
What I’ve enjoyed about Aperture was that it was far more capable than iPhoto in terms of editing images, but it still had ease of use in terms of organization.
I’ve purchased a couple versions of Lightroom, but I’ve never really warmed up to it and I’m not enamored with Adobe’s corporate direction. (Essentially, you rent your software. And let us not recall the unfortunate Flash on iOS bullshit.)
It’s possible that Photos will be a completely acceptable replacement for the "serious" hobbyist like me, I don’t know. I know I was delighted to discover the additional RAW editing features in Aperture that allowed me to recover large amounts of highlight detail in RAW images I shot at a friend’s wedding. Hopefully, they’ll offer that level of utility in Photos.
There are other apps out there that do what Aperture and Lightroom do, they’re generally more expensive and it’s never clear how long you might expect them to be supported. And if Get Info yielded more more exif data on a photo, you could probably get by just with Finder and a good editor.
I’m not too concerned about Aperture going away. Hopefully, it’ll continue to run under Yosemite, and I can continue to use it while I evaluate Photos and other options.
I just find this "announcement" very un-Apple-like. It feels like amateur hour, in many ways.
Transmitting in the blind...
07:14 Thursday, 28 June 2018
Words: 998
Yesterday was the third day of my "internet fast." Did fine. Didn't seem to have any hiccups like IMDB. I did use my credit union app to check on my accounts, but I think that's a legitimate and harmless use. It's unlikely that I'll get sucked into reading credit offers or privacy policies.
This morning was a bit different. I got up early because it didn't seem as though I was going to go back to sleep, and since I didn't have a compelling book underway, I went through my email. Because I'm not "surfing," I actually spent a little time actually looking at them. Most of them are from mailing lists, and most of those are commercial, having to do with a product I registered. Most of the time it's just — swipe left, delete! This time I actually noticed the helpful little iOS banner that allows you to unsubscribe, and I used it on several of them. We'll see if it works.
Having dispensed with my email, I floundered a bit. I decided to look in iBooks to see if there was something I could read there. I found a sample I'd downloaded recently called Cognitive Productivity with MacOS. This had caught my attention because it seemed related to the ideas Douglas Englebart was pursuing in his augmentation work. The sample has little more than the table of contents, but one chapter mentioned a couple of apps to use the Finder more productively. I almost broke my fast. I'd launched Safari, and then remembered what I was doing and closed it. I scanned the remaining chapter titles and I think I'm going to risk $15 on it.
After that, I "updated" a bunch of books in iBooks. I confess, I have no idea why a book needs updating, particularly something like Robinson Crusoe or The Complete Sherlock Holmes. I tried reading a couple of pdf format books, but that's basically impossible in iBooks on the iPhone. Works fine on the iPad, but I didn't have it close to me.
Looking out the window, I noticed it was the "blue hour," so I grabbed a camera and took a walk around the property. The sky wasn't especially compelling, but I took a couple of shots and got my first 1500 steps in for the day. It occurred to me as I walked that I would ordinarily be up in the "command cave" surfing the web, instead of out walking, hearing the mockingbirds and cardinals singing. And it occurred to me that this had occurred to me; that is, I was "thinking," rather than just "consuming" others' thoughts and words.
I do feel the absence of the web. I have a mental list I'm going to have to commit to bits soon, of things I want to "look up," when I break my fast. Right now, my plan is to allow this coming Monday to be a web day; but I hope to confine my activities to things I want to look up; and catching up on social media a bit. Based on something I saw among the chapter headings in the cognitive MacOS book, I also wish to revisit RSS and see if I can't get a few blogs in there. I think RSS might be a good vehicle to keep up with some people I enjoy reading on the web, I'll have to see how many offer full text feeds, and how much the experience might suffer if I can't click on links. In any event, my current intention is to resume abstaining from the web for the remainder of the week, and see how practical that might be as a regular practice.
Yesterday I spent some time entering an Applesoft program into one the Apple //es I have set up here. I was doing it the old-fashioned way, typing it in on the computer itself. Nowadays people use things like BBEdit in MacOS, and then copy and paste the program into an emulator like Virtual II. If they want to run it on real hardware, they transfer the file via a number of means. I've done that myself, saving it to a disk image that I put on a micro-SD card that gets inserted into something called a Floppy-Emu, which emulates a 5.25" disk drive. But I wanted to experience what I did thirty some years ago.
I did afford myself a few modern conveniences. The computer boots from a modern 8MB memory card with battery-backed SRAM onboard, so if the computer hangs, it's the matter of a couple of seconds to get it back. I'm also using an old application, Program Writer, by Alan Bird of the Beagle Bros. to enter the program. It was maintained up until 1991, and it's a full-screen, memory resident Applesoft editor. You can exit the editor and run your program and then jump back into the editor to make changes. Ran into a glitch, for some reason I can't seem to save to the RAM disk. I can write a text file to it from a word processing app, but BASIC.SYSTEM seems to think it's saving the file, but it never appears in the directory. Fortunately, saving it to a physical floppy in the old DuoDisk still works. Something to look into, I suppose.
Today's agenda is relatively clear. Have a house guest coming tonight, so I think I'm on the hook to hang a picture (heh), and move some furniture. I started reading a collection of essays by John Gray yesterday. He's only slightly more pessimistic than I am.
The title of this morning's entry refers to the practice of transmitting a radio signal without having a working receiver. You can send, but you can't receive. Your signal goes out, but you don't know if anyone's listening and you have no real way to find out. Truthfully, it isn't much different with this blog when the receiver is working. But that's okay.
Radio Check...
14:58 Monday, 28 June 2021
Words: 12
Need to kick the tires and see if the battery's still good.
Glitches Abounding
07:32 Tuesday, 28 June 2022
Current Wx: Temp: 75.96°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 93% Wind: 0mph
Words: 456
I suppose it's easy to dismiss how much we take broadband internet access for granted. Even the term "broadband" is somewhat nebulous today. I supposed there's a specification somewhere, I'd look it up but I'm on DSL and virtually anything is an exercise in frustration.
I use Photos with the system library in iCloud. This doesn't work with DSL. Right now, my Photos library is out of sync with what's on my MBP, and Photos decides to stop trying whenever it feels like it, supposedly out of concern for my battery.
The result seems to be that I can't use the AppleScript workflow that was developed for me. At least, that's what I think the issue may be. It worked yesterday, but it's not working today and the image I'm trying to post isn't in my Photos library on my phone, so it hasn't made it to iCloud yet.
I hate beginning every paragraph with "I...", but here we go.
Tried developing a work-around. Instead of importing images to Photos, where I do pretty much everything, I started using Image Capture to import them to a folder on an external USB drive. I can then look at the images with QuickLook, if it seems promising, I can open it in Preview and then zoom in more than I can with QuickLook (which gets balky after zooming into more than a few images, don't ask me why).
If I like what I see in Preview, I can send it to Photos for editing. This significantly reduces the number of images that would ordinarily be sent to iCloud. When you're shooting sequentially at 20 frames per second, the number of images gets very large, very fast.
But apparently even that is over-taxing my 300 kilobits per second upload speed.
At home, I've got 205Mbps download and 75Mbps upload. Even then, I often get impatient. This is just intolerable.
I'd looked forward to doing what I started to do here, and post images I'd taken here to the marmot, eschewing Twitter and Flickr and so on. Of course, neither of those media sites are solutions either.
Using cellular data would be a solution it T-Mobile had anything approaching decent coverage. I can seem to get 2 bars of LTE down at the dock, but even that is hit or miss.
I don't know what to say. It's very frustrating. First world problem, I know. I guess I'll just enjoy my pictures by myself. It's probably hubris to think anyone else might enjoy them.
But it's also is a cause for reflection, on how much we depend upon network infrastructure, and how our lives would change should it cease to be available.
Something to think about anyway.
✍️ Reply by emailOld Florida
06:35 Wednesday, 28 June 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 79.05°F Pressure: 1008hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 401
A few years ago, I participated in something called the Northeast Florida Regional Leadership Academy, a program sponsored by an organization called the Northeast Florida Regional Council, an artifact of a time when Florida was actually a leader in managed development.
Anyway, once a month the class would attend a seminar hosted in one of the seven counties making up the region. I enjoyed it, I learned a lot. I think there should be more efforts like that, offered to more people, but whatever.
Anyway, the session in Flagler County, the one just south of me here in St Johns County, was held at Princess Place, which I'd never even heard of before. It's basically an Adirondack lodge built in 1887 on Pellicer Creek. Rich people, ya know?
I loved the place and figured Mitzi would enjoy seeing it. When we drove down to Kennedy Space Center earlier this month, I was reminded of it again as we passed it headed south on I-95. We have a friend who lives in St. Augustine Beach who we don't see often enough, and I mentioned we should make plans to pick her up and visit Princess Place.
So that's what we did last Saturday. Picked up Mary, had a nice lunch and headed south. It's not that far from here, it was only 25 minutes from where we had lunch. The lodge is only open for tours on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and there's only one tour at 2:00PM, so we timed everything around that. We got there early enough to walk around the place a bit before the tour started.
Enjoyed the tour, drove a little around the preserve where they now have some cabins you can rent. Headed back up to St. Augustine Beach and had ice cream at some new place. One of those fancy places that doesn't have many flavors you expect, but a lot of weird ones. The chocolate brownie was very good.
It was at the tail end of that weather pattern that delivered severe thunderstorms with alarming regularity, and we managed to get everything done before one started. A very pleasant day, altogether.
Cumberland Island has more of that sort of thing if you're interested in how the rich vacationed or wintered in the southeast in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But Princess Place is a little gem anyway.
✍️ Reply by emailThinking Out Loud
18:02 Wednesday, 28 June 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 79.07°F Pressure: 1008hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 4.61mph
Words: 509
We've reached that time of the year when it's warmer outside first thing in the morning than it is in the house. Even more so these days, since I've started lowering the thermostat to 75°F when we go to bed to help facilitate sleep. (It seems to help somewhat, more for Mitzi than for me.)
This just means we're actively cooling the interior 24 hours a day now, and there is no time of day when stepping outside isn't something of an unpleasant experience resembling stepping into a sauna, one that has biting flies and mosquitoes and can give you skin cancer.
Florida, in other words.
It also means that my camera lenses will fog when I go out, until they warm up above the dew point, which is 77°F at the moment, while it is still 75°F in the house.
I'm thinking about how much "news" I consume. One of the things I didn't enjoy about Twitter was the constant stream of "alarming" messages. It's possible to replicate that experience in Mastodon, although somewhat diminished simply by virtue of the fact that I "follow" fewer people; and also by the fact that I spend less time on Mastodon. Less "engaged."
It seems I've filled that time with other digital media, like RSS feeds and Apple News.
In terms of RSS, the Miami Herald has a pretty good RSS feed of their news coverage. Which isn't necessarily what I'm looking for either. Much of their coverage includes wire reports of horrible things going on in other states. Murders, car wrecks, babies left in hot cars, dogs killing people. A ridiculous number of stories about lottery winners.
It's probably not essential for me to be aware of all these things, but I can't see a way to filter them out. I don't usually click through to the entire story, but the headline and the first couple of lines in the RSS item are usually enough to give you that sense of alarm.
Apple News is algorithmic in an intrusive way. Bookmark an article you want to refer to later, and next thing you know, you're getting those kinds of stories all the time. Dopamine, for instance.
Plus, I subscribe to Apple News+, which means I'm paying for this service. Well, I've blocked Fox News, the NY Times and CNN. Rather than simply not show stories from those outlets, the layout, although it is algorithm-driven to be personalized for me, always includes a big, ugly square that says in large letters, "You blocked this channel," like an accusation.
Just omit those sources from the presentation, Apple.
I'm thinking about how I can manage that. Maybe just look at it once a day, between 1800 and 1900, like we used to get the TV news. Get it off the home screen and bury it somewhere a few screens back.
All I know is I'm reading too much news, and it's not making me better informed, it's making me ill. So, I'm thinking about that.
Out loud, it seems.
✍️ Reply by emailBreathe
08:47 Friday, 28 June 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 81.34°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 88% Wind: 4.61mph
Words: 120
Things looked pretty grim in December, 1941. They looked pretty grim in July, 1861.
They looked pretty grim last night.
But in both of the preceding cases, the fundamentals were strong and they ultimately decided the contest. The fundamentals are still strong.
Alexandra Petri captured much of my emotional reaction to the shit-show we witnessed last night. But Heather Cox walked me back from the ledge.
The stakes are as high as they were in 1861 and 1941. My Dad passed away 10 years ago tomorrow, though he passed in his sleep so it might have been 10 years ago tonight. For most of his later life his personal motto was "Keep the faith."
I hear his voice today.
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Current Wx: Temp: 81.34°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 88% Wind: 4.61mphWords: 0
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Montour
Current Wx: Temp: 84.33°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 68% Wind: 10.29mphWords: 868
For what promised to be a sleepy rural existence, things seem to go by pretty fast around here.
I asked Mitzi if she wanted to go for a ride yesterday afternoon. I figured it was time to start seeing where the roads went around here. We went down Coats Road, which we can see from the house, and looked over toward our place to see what it looked like from there. That was kind of cool.
That took us to Kellogg, which brought us back to South Hill Road. So we went on past the house and back down to 79 and turned right to investigate Texas Hollow Road.
Whoa! That was interesting. It's a long road that's unpaved for a large portion of it. We found that some paving is done near the few homes along that road, probably to keep the dust down as vehicles go by. There's not much traffic though. We encountered sheep in the road, which was a new one for me. It's mostly heavily forested land, and I didn't notice any power poles, so I guess the cabins we saw either had generators or did without. There were a couple of campgrounds too, as I recall. We ended up taking that road all the way to Odessa and back to 79. We were about halfway between Ithaca and Watkins Glen at that point.
After we got home, we were treated to the sight of two fawns playing in our backyard. They were chasing each other around the unmowed high grass behind the house, and generally horsing around with each other. Put a few pics up at Flickr.
We went out to dinner again last night at The Hungry Burd in Burdett. My burger was excellent, but Mitzi's fried haddock was disappointing. I'd had it before and it was outstanding. They were pretty slammed last night, so I suspect that had something to do with it.
I enjoyed watching the people there. I saw many I now recognize as regulars, and some folks who I think were from out of town. At one point, one of the regulars, a woman I'd seen in there twice before, got up from her table and spoke to a man at another table, I couldn't make out what they were saying. At one point they both laughed and the woman bent down and put her arm around the gentlman, and they both wore the broadest smiles.
I loved that.
I told Mitzi it reminded me of Canastota, when Mom and Dad still lived there, and they'd often eat at a diner near the edge of town. They were regulars and people would stop by the table and say hello and make a few jokes and good-natured jabs.
I never saw that in Florida. I'm sure it exists, but probably not in the ambitious beach cities and sprawling suburban developments, where everyone seems to be grasping for something. Where everyone always seems to be posing, whether for selfies with their phones, or just for the benefit of all the strangers around them.
I took the wire fencing and trash down to the transfer station this morning. The Maverick is starting to look like a truck, with a lot of hay and dirt in the bed and scratches in the paint. I'll probably get a spray-in bed liner before winter comes, along with undercoating. I took a chance and left the tailgate down so I could get all the fencing down there in one trip, using a bunch of bungie cords to secure the fencing. It all went well.
At 10:00 a.m. we went to Montour Falls to participate in a walking tour and history of Montour Falls. Well worth the time, which is all it cost. The only downside was that a portion of the tour consisted of three quarters of a mile down a former railway, now used as a hiking and biking path. The weather was beautiful, but the mosquitoes were active. They weren't as thick as in places I've been to in Florida, but we hadn't put on any spray, so stopping to listen to the guide while he spoke about the businesses along the railroad made us sitting ducks for an aerial assault.
We stopped in the library, which had been built as a bank in the early 1800s (I think. Don't quote me.), and converted to a library in 1906. It has a bay window made of Tiffany glass, which is protected by plexiglass on both sides. That diminishes the beauty somewhat, but I was astonished that they even kept the windows there in the building.
After speaking with the librarian about the history of the building, we went and had lunch at Jerlando's Pizza. There's another Jerlando's in Watkins Glen. Mitzi had the eggplant parmesan, which she said was excellent. I had a small sausage and peppers sub, which was good, but not among the best I've ever had.
And here I am. It's a little warm at 84°F, but the humidity is low and there's a breeze. I'm in the house with the windows open and no AC and quite comfortable.
And the beat goes on...
✍️ Reply by emailTonight's Sunset 6-28-25
Current Wx: Temp: 71.28°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 78% Wind: 5.41mphWords: 7
Worth the price of admission, I'd say.
✍️ Reply by emailWorth a Read
19:48 Sunday, 28 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 65.68°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 92% Wind: 0.49mph
Words: 85
I have a folder of RSS feeds called "The Crisis." It contains feeds from Talking Points Memo, Heather Cox Richardson, Empty Wheel and Timothy Snyder.
I seldom read many of the posts in that folder. It's too depressing, and they're seldom writing about anything that is surprising or actionable.
This post from Timothy Snyder should be no exception, except I did read it. There's little that's surprising or actionable, but I thought it was interesting.
Depressing too, perhaps. But that's the nature of the present.
✍️ Reply by emailDays of Future Passed
19:53 Sunday, 28 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 65.8°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 0.49mph
Words: 249
There are a couple of posts in today's On This Day in the marmot that I liked. (Those are links to the original posts in the archives, because On This Day changes every day. The latter (later?) one puzzles me because I refer to a link that doesn't appear in the post. Weird.
Also weird is that the Aperture 3.5 post is in today's On This Day, when the June 2014 html exported archive on the server has it posted on the 27th. Part of the temporal rift that ravaged the marmot some years back and continues to cause chaos in the timeline. Something I must have missed when I made an attempt to restore order.
The post about choices makes me think. Today Apple is much more than a widget company. And Apple's use of Private Cloud Compute also suggests that Apple is presenting to you their version of "the world." Is it a distinction without a difference? I don't know.
Those posts were written twelve years ago. Twelve years from now I'll be 81. Twelve years ago tomorrow, Dad passed away at 87. I follow a number of octogenarian bloggers, perhaps I'll be one someday. I rather hope so, because I want to enjoy this house that we're building. But who knows?
The point is, or may be, the pace of change is accelerating. I think Apple has grown to be more like Google and Facebook and Amazon. Can we alter this trajectory?
I rather hope so.
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