Obligatory:

I’m Comic Sans, Asshole by Mike Lacher from McSweeney’s Short Imagined Monologues June 15, 2010

Thin steel frame, no air bags, no crumple zones.

Check out the crash tests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roLcNwRi1Sk&t=40s

I worked for Akamai for 7 years.

This is why, if your CDN infra is core to the operation of your business, you make your systems accommodate multi-CDN integration. Cutting one CDN off shouldn’t be significantly difficult, and it comes in handy during contract negotiations. All the major players work this way.

That cable management is horrendous. Pull them out.

The current generation of the ford mustang Mach-e has its mobile telemetry cellular antenna wired to an isolated fuse that you can just pull out to kill it. I was astonished to learn how straight forward the process is supposed to be.

The CEO of HP, Enrique Lores, has explicitly said that the company is aiming to turn printing into a service model.

“Our long-term objective is to make printing a subscription," Lores said. “This is really what we have been driving.”

Fuck this noise.

https://news.yahoo.com/hp-ceo-says-goal-printing-223058918.html

That’s a fair point. I was invoking those names as contemporary examples of that caliber of creator. I feel like we’re always going to have a rolling cadre of seasoned top tier talent with the clout to make “we’re doing it THIS WAY” choices. I like Masaaki Yuasa for the next generation of those folks (even if he never really makes anything else himself anymore and just and guides Science Saru).

Read the article.

Machine learning and interpretative output are tools; just like the automobile, the spreadsheet and photoshop.

The introduction of new tools means there will be fewer people manually doing the things that machines can do more efficiently. The introduction of digital spreadsheets decimated the market for paper bookkeepers, but the need for accountants (people who could utilize the new tools) exploded.

I don’t know enough about modern animation production to speak authoritatively about this, but I’m imagining Katzenberg is talking about jobs like inbetweeners and other kinds of admittedly skilled labor that can be lazily farted out by machines. No QA for lazy productions, QA and varying levels of tweaks for high production value work, and all-by-hand for only the most rare auteur works. And most animated works are in that “lazy production” category. It’s gonna look like shit, everyone who cares will notice, but most of the people buying won’t care.

What this also means is that money will stop flowing to high-manual-effort works. The real creative, ground breaking stuff is going to come from either people utilizing the new tools in new ways, or old established artists who refuse to change (Miyazaki, Bill Plympton, Yuri Norstein & Francheska Yarbusova, etc).

I was a Hey user from the beginning until I learned about how they treat their employees.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22418208/basecamp-all-hands-meeting-employee-resignations-buyouts-implosion

I ditched my account immediately.

Y’all need to start reading my boy Rushkoff:

https://rushkoff.com/books/survival-of-the-richest-escape-fantasies-of-the-tech-billionaires/

This article does not make clear whether or not the new board will remain committed to its non-profit position.

I presume that’s what this whole sordid affair is all about, but no one is saying it.

NPR does maintain a number of good RSS feeds ( https://feeds.npr.org/ ), which are being simulcasted onto Mastodon by press.coop. They are doing this for a ton of news organizations: https://press.coop/directory