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The Supreme Court Has Killed Affirmative Action. Mediocre Whites Can Rest Easier. via Kottke
I guess I can take some small solace in knowing that even without affirmative action, there will still be a lot of white rejects out there who will die mad.
What a line.
As I approach 40, I must remind myself that I’m glad I’m no longer young. This country — my home — seems to be tearing itself apart. If all we expect is the worst from each other, haven’t we lost the republic?
Advanced macOS Command-Line Tools
For fellow Mac nerds.
Everything Must Be Paid for Twice via Kottke
Paying a second price, unpleasant as it sounds, is a process you can acquire a taste for, and when you do, it’s exhilarating. It’s like picking your way through unmapped wilderness – the going is slow and there’s lots to trip over, but it’s new territory the whole way, and after the initial discomfort you feel very alive. Then when you come out the other side, this new territory has become part of your usual range, and you’re tougher and more interesting.
There’s a phrase that’s been rattling around my head for the last several months.
“I love you, but you are not serious people.”
Some narrative context.
These words feel like an indictment, both of me personally and of the country in which I live. We Americans are no longer serious people.
Our brains have been so thoroughly hijacked by capitalism. Our attention spans have corroded. We no longer believe in anything but money — everything has a price. Morality, integrity, civic duty… those ideals are antique and ornamental.
I want to have hope for us. I often wonder what my grandfather — the one that fought in World War II — felt about our country. I want for just a moment to feel what he felt. He seemed to believe in us.
Meta (aka Facebook) says its new speech-generating AI model is too dangerous for public release
Now, ten years later, I offer this as a time capsule of what those early months of Snowden were like.
Much of my work is drying up. AI is moving into my field faster than most others, and I have been both late to realize it and paralyzed with indecision. Given that many-if-not-most of my clients work in the intersection of tech and journalism, they’ve watched the rise of ChatGPT and that ilk over the last six months with great interest, which is perhaps why they’ve been so quick to adopt, despite some lasting reticence. For years, I’ve positioned myself at this intersection, creating a small-but-comfortable living for myself.
But now, that position is no longer tenable, or won’t be in the very near future, and I’m realizing that despite convincing myself I hadn’t, maybe I made my career into an identity?
Who am I if not an editor?
I’ve always felt secure in my work, which has allowed me to feel anything but attached to it. For years, I’ve worked digitally from my computer (or more recently, my iPad), which has afforded me tremendous freedom. Much of my contract work has been on-demand, and coupled with a lack of debt, I’ve been able to remain flexible in ways many people have not. So I moved to a small town in 2019 — a small town many, many miles from the nearest city — and now as I see my work starting to dry up, I wonder if that move was short-sighted.
Four years on, I’ve created a little life for myself, but as my work disappears, I’m starting to feel a little empty. Why am I here? If I can no longer do my job remotely — a job that’s afforded me modest financial stability, which includes the ability to leave this town when I want to see friends or family — why am I here? Is this house I bought four years ago — a house I love — becoming an albatross?
When people ask me why I’m here, I usually respond with something like “the mountains,” which, if I’m honest, is a half-truth. I didn’t move here for the mountains, I moved here in part because there was an unexplored mountain range not far from town. What a reason to move somewhere. I’ve since fallen in love with those mountains, and they’ve become a large part of my identity. I know much of this side of the range (“the southern flank,” as I call it) quite well, the twists and turns of this-or-that road, hidden springs, little caves and detours off the trails and old landslides and the best viewpoints.
But ‘the mountains’ no longer feels like a tenable identity. It seems that it was only in relation — or in contrast — to work, and now that one is disappearing, the other seems to be, too.
I’m left in a vacuum. Why am I here?
I’ve struggled to foster community in this place. While I have a few friends, I’m still wanting. As I approach forty in a rural area, there simply aren’t many people here like me. Most people in their late 30s are pairing up, having children, settling down. Most people, mindfully or not, follow a certain path I’ve come to call “heteronormativity.” Careers, children, marriage (and divorce)… it’s the typical story of American life. Growing up, that future wasn’t available to me, but now that I’m in my 30s and homosexuality has been adopted (or co-opted) into mainstream society — a marked change from my childhood — I’m feeling out-of-place. Looking around, I don’t feel at home in straight culture and I don’t feel at home in gay culture.
While I watch many of my gay peers adopt hallmarks of heteronormative culture, I have this nagging feeling that, no, I’m still not sure I want those things. Do I want to be married when I see so many dysfunctional, unhealthy marriages? Do I want a romantic relationship when most relationships I observe seem to be based in something a little fearful, a little controlling?
And then there is place. I don’t want to live in a city, and therefore I’m immersed in straight culture to a degree I find routinely suffocating. Misogyny, latent homophobia, mental illness, oppressive and painful masculinity, drug addiction… There’s a lot to love about rural culture, but there’s a lot that makes me recoil, too, and I have precious few friends that both want to live in a rural space and remain critical of it, careful to keep its miasmas at bay.
Beneath all this, there’s a clock ticking somewhere deep in my limbic system. While I pride myself on living on the fringes of culture, social pressures find their way in. Marriage, maybe a(n adopted) child… Maybe I do want these things. I definitely want to be closer to family as I (and they) age, and this will mean uprooting the life I’ve created for myself here.
More than any other impulse, this one has started to fill the vacuum. Family and community. I want more of both, and they aren’t going to be found in this place. That’s a painful and disappointing — and in hindsight, obvious — realization. What this means I don’t quite know yet.
Cormac McCarthy, Novelist of a Darker America, Is Dead at 89
With an eye for the darker side of human nature, his novels remain some of my favorite.
Yesterday was the military funeral for my neighbor that died in February. His ashes were interred at a state veteran’s cemetery of a neighboring (red) state, as all the veteran cemeteries in ours are located on the far more liberal side of the state, which he hated.
I’ve been told this should bring some closure — I heard it repeated it all weekend — but I don’t feel any. I had ‘closure’ many months ago, and while it was nice to meet some of his family, this weekend only served to remind me how hollow so much of this feels.
The veteran’s cemetery abuts a subdivision several miles from the city center, the green manicured grass pushing into the sagebrush desert that surrounds it. I presume a veteran’s cemetery is designed to inspire, I don’t know, reverence? But who comes to a place like this and feels anything but horror at the ticky-tacky of it all? Is this what patriotism is now? A few acres beside Shady Acres?
Once, I had an idea of cemeteries as hallowed ground, as spaces that were meant to persist into the future, to demonstrate to future generations the respect and reverence we felt for those in the ground, veterans or not. Yet the more I see, the more I realize the cemeteries of our time are just suburbs of the dead, mere cul-de-sacs of headstones. I rarely see anyone visiting cemeteries, no families picnicking as was once customary and common. Built on the edge of town (on land given as a tax write-off) and accessible only by car, they’re bereft of anything remotely natural. The grass endlessly mowed and sprayed with chemicals, the ground as embalmed as the bodies beneath.
It’s bullshit.
Nearly every principle, every belief, every assumption that undergirds that cemetery is fake. Patriotism, afterlife, “respect for the dead”… it’s all bullshit. Our culture doesn’t respect the dead, we want them out of the way. We don’t create lasting monuments to their sacrifices, we put them at the edge of town so we won’t be bothered. These are not monuments to the dead, but shrines to convenience and willful ignorance.
Archive Your Reddit Data While You Still Can
I’ve been a fairly active Redditor for more than 11 years. Until now, it’s been the website with the best mix of community, popularity, developer ecosystem, and web-search-ability. The non-monetary value Reddit as a knowledge store is literally priceless; it’s a modern-day Library of Alexandria.
By now, you probably know my thoughts on social media. (Fuck social media.) But Reddit was always the exception. When I hear “social media,” I think “toxic stew of projection and posturing designed to make you feel bad about yourself in the service of serving you advertisements,” and by that definition, Reddit isn’t social media.
I’ve made friends on Reddit. Real-life friends. Pen pals. Some people I’ve met in person, others I haven’t. Fellow writers and amateur programmers, fellow HomeKit-ers and hikers and GaiaGPS power users and Stoics and people who live in old homes and lovers of the American West. For many years, on a night when I couldn’t sleep, I’d hop on r/depression and talk to people on the edge of suicide, hoping my past experiences might help them in some way. I’d come to Reddit for good vibes or a little schadenfreude. For help with dinner or a laugh. I met other people with my very, very specific interests. Antinatalists. Techno-grumps. Privacy nerds. Plant daddies. Nature lovers. Righteous tenants and geologists and people just as fascinated by the world in which we live.
Reddit was the promise of the internet in one place. A group of people, each passionate about something, talking and supporting and, yes, sometimes fighting with each other. It’s been a good place. The best of human nature.
Everything changes and nothing is free. Not in this culture, anyway. I know this. But it’s still painful when the pursuit of profit comes for a community you love so dearly. We’ll see how these API changes play out, but I’m not hopeful.
Enshittification comes for us all.
(Update: my blogging idol with a very good point over on Daring Fireball.)
Headed Into the Abyss by Brian T. Watson 📚
I just finished, laying here in my bed, the dogs and cat asleep beside me. Crickets chirp out my window. In the distance a train’s whistle breaks and rolls over the valley.
More than anything, I prize seeing things clearly. Nothing fills me with that particular and precious joie de vivre — that electric sizzle — quite like close proximity to the truth. But most people don’t like the truth. We’ll do anything to avoid it, if we know it at all. So it’s a rare thrill to read something so transgressive in its honesty, so clear-eyed.
Credit to Brian T. Watson for his courage to accept the inevitable, and then to write it. May his acceptance be an inspiration.
Around the world, discontent can be heard. The extremists are grinding their knives and moving in as the machine’s coughing and stuttering exposes the inadequacies of the political oligarchies who claimed to have everything in hand. Old gods are rearing their heads, and old answers: revolution, war, ethnic strife. Politics as we have known it totters, like the machine it was built to sustain. In its place could easily arise something more elemental, with a dark heart.
A lot has changed since I first read this almost 15 years ago, but it has only become more prescient.
I’d been watching this on a loop when it hit me: she dances just like me when I’m home alone. I give it 10/10.
11/10 if you include marks for confidence. I mean just look at how much fun she’s having.
12/10 if we include that jumper. 😍
Daring Fireball: First Impressions of Vision Pro and VisionOS
Astrud Gilberto: The Girl from Ipanema singer dies at 83
Getz/Gilberto remains one of the most sublime albums ever recorded.
Deliberate Explosion Inside Ukraine Dam Most Likely Caused Collapse, Experts Say
Ukrainian officials said the Russians wanted to create an emergency at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which uses river water for cooling, to stall an expected Ukrainian offensive.
Huh.
TV’s Streaming Model Is Broken. It’s Also Not Going Away.
“If you could bring back the heyday of Brandon Tartikoff–Warren Littlefield NBC with shows like The West Wing, ER, Friends, and Seinfeld — maybe with some nudity and F-bombs — every streamer would be very happy right now.”
Adding plug-ins closes an air gap that has so far prevented large language models from taking actions on a person’s behalf. “We know that the models can be jailbroken, and now we’re hooking them up to the internet so that they can potentially take actions,” Hendrycks says. “That isn’t to say that by its own volition ChatGPT is going to build bombs or something, but it makes it a lot easier to do these sorts of things.”