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kottke_org_feedterribleminds_feedSo here’s where we’re at in APPLETOWN — I’ve still got a half-dozen or so reviews to fire off here, though for most of them I’ve done videos over at Instagram. And I’m hoping to get a couple more apples yet from the local orchard (their Goldrush was running weirdly late this year), and I’ll also probably scurry about the grocery store like a weird apple-eating spider to see if I can pick up any varieties I’ve yet to review here.
That said, for the most part, I’ll probably skip the pontificating preamble for most of these and just jump right into the review. It’s the holidays, I’m busy, you’re busy, and October was heavy on the apple content, so I think there’s a value-add in me just cutting to the fucking chase and throwing my apple reviews at your face. Which rhymes. I am an apple poet; grapple with my pro wit. Boom. Drop the mic. On my foot. Why did I drop the mic. That was a bad idea. Oh god what did I do to my toe. Mistakes were made. I should stick to eating apples, no more of this foolish rhyming business.
All right.
Today, we have a two-fer —
Two apples that blush from the inside, with pinkish-reddish flesh — that, due to the anthocyanins inside the apple, which can be a function of the apple variety, but also goosed by exposure to the sun, and further, increased by how many human sacrifices you have laid at the base of the tree while wassailing the orchard in ancient song and apple hymn.
How do these two APPLE SIBLINGS compare?
My review of a Lucy Rose from Sprouts, early December:
My memory of this apple was that, as the name suggests, it was very very rose-forward. But the apple I ate now was no such thing.
In fact, the flavor of this apple would be “long-chewed bubblegum.”
The bite was, up front, incredibly, profoundly juicy — I hesitate to be weird and gross and call this apple a squirter, but I’m going to go ahead and do it anyway because honestly, if I’m not a little weird and a little gross, who even am I? But seriously, the juice from this thing was unparalleled — a drippy apple, salivating so much I think its kind was wanting to be eaten.
(Seriously, watch the video if you don’t believe me.)
Problem is, the juice is… watery. There’s not a lot of there there. The skin was tough. The floral bubblegum flavor faded so fast I’m not sure it was ever there. It occasionally flirted with the taste of pennies, which made me think I’d bitten my lip or something while eating it? The crunch was admitted satisfying — like biting into the skull of a long-held foe. But the meh flavor coupled with a long chew and a weird aftertaste made this less fun for me.
Oh! Oh, and it’s supposed to be all red and awesome inside but it was mostly white with like, light stains of pink, which makes it look biological. Like something you’ll pull out of a medical waste bin.
Not great. Let’s go 2.0 and call it a day.
(By the way, I know my photo there sort of sucks. Which matches the apple! Because the apple also sucked! Parity and parallel structure, baby.)
Lucy Rose: Pre-chewed bubblegum, yet alarmingly wet
My review of a Lucy Glo from Sprouts, late November:
So, the Lucy Rose sucked.
Presumably, the Lucy Glo also sucks?
WELL, YOU’D BE WRONG. It’s like the saying goes:
IF YOU PRESUMABLY YOU MAKE A PRES OUT OF U AND MABLY.
I mean, I think the’s the saying? Whatever.
So — the Lucy Glo stands in stark contrast to her far weaker sister.
What I found here was a refreshing pink lemonade-tasting, raw-red-innarded, Lemonheads-sour apple with a cider vinegar tingle in the throat — it was a little crunchy but just the right kind of soft where the flesh starts strong but then quickly goes cotton candy, not lingering longly in the mouth. The flavor goes down with the ship, which is what you want with any apple.
It’s more sour than sweet, and I think more candy sour than citrus sour?
But it’s great! Really great. Only thing to ding it, I think, was there was a papery finish and aftertaste to it — it’s like the taste in my coffee if I don’t rinse the brown paper filters before hand, that paper taste carries over. Except here, no paper existed, but it still tastes that way.
Truly a surprising grocery store apple, and though the outside is middlingly ugly (kind of a sicky-blush), the inside was pink-red-pretty. The kind of innards a serial killer would admire, probably.
Let’s call it a 7.9 — allllllmost an 8, but just shy.
Behold me chomping on the apple.
Lucy Glo: The superior Lucy, tastes of Lemonheads, with flesh that would appeal to Hannibal Lecter probably
Reviews in 2025: Honeycrisp, Sweetie, Crimson Crisp, Knobbed Russet, Cortland, Maidenâs Blush, Coxâs Orange Pippin, Reine des Reinettes, Ingrid Marie, Hudsonâs Golden Gem, Holstein, Suncrisp, Ashmeadâs Kernel, Opalescent, Orleans Reinette, Black Gilliflower, Red Delicious Double Feature, Jonathan, Ruby Mac, Crimson Topaz, Esopus Spitzenburg, Mutsu, Hunnyz, Winesap, Stayman Winesap, Winter Banana, Ribston Pippin, Rhode Island Greening, Roxbury Russet, Opal, Cosmic Crisp, Black Oxford, Ananas Reinette, Sugarbee, Granny Smith
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james_davis_nicoll
charlie_stross_diary_feedIt should be fairly obvious to anyone who's been paying attention to the tech news that many companies are pushing the adoption of "AI" (large language models) among their own employees--from software developers to management--and the push is coming from the top down, as C-suite executives order their staff to use AI, Or Else. But we know that LLMs reduce programmer productivity-- one major study showed that "developers believed that using AI tools helped them perform 20% faster -- but they actually worked 19% slower." (Source.)
Another recent study found that 87% of executives are using AI on the job, compared with just 27% of employees: "AI adoption varies by seniority, with 87% of executives using it on the job, compared with 57% of managers and 27% of employees. It also finds that executives are 45% more likely to use the technology on the job than Gen Zers, the youngest members of today's workforce and the first generation to have grown up with the internet.
"The findings are based on a survey of roughly 7,000 professionals age 18 and older who work in the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, and New Zealand. It was commissioned by HR software company Dayforce and conducted online from July 22 to August 6."
Why are executives pushing the use of new and highly questionable tools on their subordinates, even when they reduce productivity?
I speculate that to understand this disconnect, you need to look at what executives do.
Gordon Moore, long-time co-founder and CEO of Intel, explained how he saw the CEO's job in his book on management: a CEO is a tie-breaker. Effective enterprises delegate decision making to the lowest level possible, because obviously decisions should be made by the people most closely involved in the work. But if a dispute arises, for example between two business units disagreeing on which of two projects to assign scarce resources to, the two units need to consult a higher level management team about where their projects fit into the enterprise's priorities. Then the argument can be settled ... or not, in which case it propagates up through the layers of the management tree until it lands in the CEO's in-tray. At which point, the buck can no longer be passed on and someone (the CEO) has to make a ruling.
So a lot of a CEO's job, aside from leading on strategic policy, is to arbitrate between conflicting sides in an argument. They're a referee, or maybe a judge.
Now, today's LLMs are not intelligent. But they're very good at generating plausible-sounding arguments, because they're language models. If you ask an LLM a question it does not answer the question, but it uses its probabilistic model of language to generate something that closely resembles the semantic structure of an answer.
LLMs are effectively optimized for bamboozling CEOs into mistaking them for intelligent activity, rather than autocomplete on steroids. And so the corporate leaders extrapolate from their own experience to that of their employees, and assume that anyone not sprinkling magic AI pixie dust on their work is obviously a dirty slacker or a luddite.
(And this false optimization serves the purposes of the AI companies very well indeed because CEOs make the big ticket buying decisions, and internally all corporations ultimately turn out to be Stalinist command economies.)
Anyway, this is my hypothesis: we're seeing an insane push for LLM adoption in all lines of work, however inappropriate, because they directly exploit a cognitive bias to which senior management is vulnerable.
opinionatedgamers_feeddarths_and_droids_feed
Information is something that can be either extremely difficult to come by, or be essentially free for the taking. In the modern age, and for non-dystopian future science fiction settings, you can pretty much find anything online and download whatever you want. If you want to keep things unknown, you need to come up with reasons why the knowledge wouldn't already be widely spread. It can be top secret, guarded by governments or other institutions, or perhaps lost to civilisation and only recoverable through a perilous expedition.
In historical or fantasy settings, information can be a lot harder to find. Great quests must be made to learn precious trickles of fact. Perhaps only wizened old sages have the knowledge you need, hidden away in dusty tomes of yore. Or it can be magically concealed or erased from people's minds.
Either way, a quest for information can be just as good a goal as a quest for riches.
aurilee writes:
Oh, well, there we go. One set of coordinates, ready to use. And we're definitely heading there next judging by Chewie's comment. I'll bet the planet's major feature is city ruins. I think we've covered just about every other kind of planet, even with some repeats. Imagine the Resistance having to explore a place like Coruscant that's empty of people or visibly in disrepair? It might even be that industrial mirror place the Falcon accidentally jumped into!
And of course Poe causes the next problem. No surprise there. What is interesting is that Kylo appears to have been entranced by the wall pipes. Is there something on display just out of the panel? Was Kylo trying to use the Force for tracing the protagonists? Is he finally losing his mind and/or has run out of minions to vent his anger at? Who can say!
heathercoxrichardson_feedLast Wednesday, December 3, a reporter asked President Donald J. Trump if he would release the video of the September 2 strike on a small boat off the coast of Venezuela that killed two survivors of a previous strike that had split their boat, capsized it, and set it on fire. He answered: “I don’t know what they have, but whatever they have, we’d certainly release. No problem.”
Today, just five days later, a reporter began to ask Trump a question, beginning with the words: “You said you would have no problem with releasing the full video of that strike on September 2nd off the coast of Venezuela. Secretary Hegseth announced that….” Trump interrupted her. “I didn’t say that. You said that. I didn’t say that.” Turning slightly to make a side comment to someone else, he said: “This is ABC fake news.”
As G. Elliott Morris of Strength In Numbers estimates that 56.1% of Americans disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president while only 39.7% approve, and as his agenda appears more unpopular by the day, Trump and his loyalists appear to be trying to cement his power over the United States of America.
On Sunday, Trump appeared to pressure the Supreme Court to let his tariffs stand, despite the fact that the Constitution gives to Congress alone the power to regulate tariffs. Trump’s justification for seizing the power to impose them is the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which permits a president to regulate financial transactions after declaring a national emergency. Trump declared a national economic emergency in April before launching his tariff war.
Observers expect the Supreme Court to hand down a decision about the constitutionality of Trump’s tariffs later this week, and the justices’ questioning during oral arguments suggests they are not inclined to accept Trump’s assumption of such dramatic economic power over the U.S.
Last night, on social media, Trump tried to position tariffs as central to national security, an area where the right-wing justices on the Supreme Court have tended to uphold the president’s authority. He posted, “While the United States has other methods of charging TARIFFS against foreign countries, many of whom have, for YEARS, TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF OUR NATION, the current method of Tariffing before the United States Supreme Court is far more DIRECT, LESS CUMBERSOME, and MUCH FASTER, all ingredients necessary for A STRONG AND DECISIVE NATIONAL SECURITY RESULT. SPEED, POWER, AND CERTAINTY ARE, AT ALL TIMES, IMPORTANT FACTORS IN GETTING THE JOB DONE IN A LASTING AND VICTORIOUS MANNER.”
Trump continued: “I have settled 8 Wars in 10 months because of the rights clearly given to the President of the United States. If countries didn’t think these rights existed, they would have said so, LOUD AND CLEAR! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Last Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Andrew Ross Sorkin of CNBC’s Squawk Box that the administration believes it can continue its tariff agenda using different laws even if the Supreme Court strikes down its current policy.
Trump’s tariffs have hit farmers particularly hard, making imported goods like machinery and fertilizer more expensive while destroying the markets for products like corn, soybeans, and wheat to create what economists estimate could be losses of $44 billion in net cash income for farmers from their 2025–2026 crops.
Today Trump announced the administration intends to give farmers one-time payments totalling $12 billion. At an event at the White House, Trump told reporters: “[W]e love our farmers. And as you know, the farmers like me, because, you know, based on, based on voting trends, you could call it voting trends or anything else, but they’re great people.”
Utah County Democratic Party chair Darin Self commented: “The President of the United States unilaterally levied a tax on all of us and is redistributing our taxes to a core segment of his supporters.” “A bailout is like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound,” corn and soybean farmer John Bartman said on a press call for the Democratic National Committee in mid-October. “Government bailouts do not make up for our loss of income. We don’t want a bailout. We want markets for our crops. We want to be able to work hard every year and enjoy the fruits of our labor and know that we did it on our own.”
Administration officials are calling the program the “Farm Bridge Assistance” program, saying it is designed to help farmers until Trump’s economic policies become successful, a promise Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins echoed later in the day when she told Larry Kudlow of the Fox News Channel: “The relief is coming…. It really is a golden age just right around the corner.”
But Trump spent $28 billion bailing out farmers during his first term, during his first trade war with China, without creating a “golden age,” and Matt Grossman of the Wall Street Journal reported today that the administration has announced it will not publish an already-delayed October report on wholesale-price inflation, saying it will roll those figures into another delayed report due in November and release them in mid-January. It’s probably safe to assume those numbers will not tell a story the administration likes.
The right-wing justices on the Supreme Court might refuse to support Trump’s bid to take control of the country’s economic system, but in arguments today they appeared poised to give him the power to take control of the modern American government by stacking the independent agencies that do much of the government’s work with officials loyal to him.
In March, Trump fired the last remaining Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, Rebecca Slaughter. Since 1935, the Supreme Court has said the president does not have the power to fire members of independent agencies created by Congress except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Although Trump himself initially appointed Slaughter, he claimed he fired her because her continued service on the independent commission was “inconsistent with [the] Administration’s priorities” and that he had the right to do so under the authority granted to him by Article II of the Constitution despite the fact Congress set up the position in such a way that it would be shielded from presidential politics.
This argument is an attempt to establish the idea of the “unitary executive,” a theory the right wing has pushed since the 1980s, when it began to distrust the will of voters as they expressed it through Congress, and thus tried to find ways to assert the power of the president and reduce the power of Congress.
The theory of the unitary executive says that since the president is the head of one of the three independent branches of government—those are the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch—he has sole authority over the executive branch and cannot be reined in by the other two branches. Trump has leaned into this idea since 2019, when he told attendees at the Turning Point USA Teen Student Action Summit being held in Washington, D.C.: “I have an Article II, where I have…the right to do whatever I want as president.”
The Supreme Court’s 2024 Donald J. Trump v. United States decision supported Trump’s radical reading of the powers of the president when it took the radical position that a president could not be prosecuted for crimes committed in the course of official presidential duties. In his second term, Trump has worked to fit his power grabs within the contours of that decision. Now the Supreme Court appears primed to hand him another win by finding the president has complete control over the officers in the executive branch, including the independent agencies established by Congress but which Congress has been placing in the executive branch since the administration of President George Washington.
Representing the government, Solicitor General John Sauer told the court that the president must be able to remove officials in the agencies because “the President must have the power to control and…the one who has the power to remove is the one who…is the person that they have to fear and obey.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested that this political destruction of the independent agencies Congress had established to provide nonpartisan expertise on issues like how to regulate pollutants would hurt the country. “[H]aving a president come in and fire all the scientists, and the doctors, and the economists and the PhDs, and replacing them with loyalists and people who don’t know anything is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States,” she said.
Law professor Deborah Pearlstein wrote: “It is really, really hard to get your head around the raw hubris of the majority. They really will be destabilizing the operating structure of the entire U.S. government. Why? Because they believe they have a better idea about how the past century should’ve been done.”
The court should decide the case in June.
But there are signs that Republican lawmakers are finally joining the Democrats to push back against Trump’s quest for power. CNN’s Natasha Bertrand reports that tomorrow, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, along with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, will brief the Gang of Eight, presumably on the military strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, especially the strike of September 2. The Gang of Eight is made up of the leaders from both parties in both chambers of Congress, and the chair and ranking member of each chamber’s intelligence committees.
Bertrand also reports that the head of U.S. Southern Command Admiral Alvin Holsey, who will retire two years ahead of schedule on December 12 after disagreements with Hegseth over the strikes, will meet virtually with members of the Senate and House Armed Services committees.
Lawmakers will be voting this week on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that lays out priorities and funding authorization for the Defense Department, funding that is then appropriated in different legislation. When the lawmakers released their final version of the bill on Sunday, they had put into it a measure to withhold 25% of Hegseth’s travel budget until the Defense Department hands over the “unedited video of strikes conducted against designated terrorist organizations in the area of responsibility of the United States Southern Command” to the House and Senate Armed Services committees.
—
Notes:
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-tariffs-2674376992/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/05/us/politics/ieepa-scotus-trump-tariffs.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3e073pglvzo
https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2025/25-332_p8k0.pdf (p. 54.)
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5634202-hegseth-holsey-boat-strikes/
https://www.wsj.com/economy/bls-to-skip-october-ppi-report-cefc4ef1
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/08/ndaa-boat-strikes-congress-hegseth-without-funds-00680679
Truth Social:
realDonaldTrump/posts/115680021178321608
Bluesky:
thebulwark.com/post/3m7iusrt5br27
darinself.com/post/3m7isf2wpu22s
atrupar.com/post/3m7ixcdl42i2q
daily_illuminator_feedaskamanager_feedIâm on vacation. Here are some past letters that Iâm making new again, rather than leaving them to wilt in the archives.
1. I saw my coworker buying a beer during work hours
I saw a coworker at the pharmacy near our office this morning (9:45 a.m.) buying a 40-ounce can of beer. I was confused at first and I couldnât figure out what to make out of it, but then I also remembered that this coworker always falls asleep in meetings.
I wasnât sure if I should have approached her (I didnât want her to think Iâm being nosy). I do not want to jump to conclusions because I also thought she might have bought the beer for someone else (i.e., a homeless person in NYC or whatever). She got back at her desk around 10:15ish without the bag. I also saw her sleeping at her desk (pen in hand, head down) at noon today.
In terms of her quality of work, my team and I stopped going to her because we never get good answers from her anyway. I also overheard her team members question her ability in doing a project. Is this something that I should report in case she needs help or in case this requires disciplinary action?
The fact that you saw a coworker buying a beer before work is not, in itself, damning. She could have been buying it for after work or, as you say, for someone else. Who knows.
If sheâs sleeping on the job or otherwise not performing her work in a way that affects you, or if sheâs coming to work smelling like alcohol and/or appearing intoxicated, you should absolutely talk to your manager about those things. But âmy coworker sucks at her jobâ and âI saw that same coworker buying a beerâ is not enough of a connection to report someone for being drunk at work â thatâs just too much speculation. Focus on the things you know for sure.
– 2018
2. Intern uses âstay gold” as her email sign off
There’s an intern at my office who signs off all her emails with “Stay gold.” For example, an email from her might read, “Thanks for sending me the TPS reports! Stay gold, Jane.” I asked her about it and she confirmed it’s from the quote “Stay gold, Ponyboy” from the book The Outsiders. We work in a pretty casual industry so it’s most likely that people will write it off as a weird quirk, but I’m afraid that if she tried using that sign-off in a more formal industry or office that people would think it’s unprofessional. Should I encourage her to start using a more common sign-off?
First, this is hilarious.
But yeah, thatâs going to come across weirdly in many (most?) offices, and as an intern she won’t have the capital built up to make it read âamusing quirkâ rather than âinexperienced worker who doesnât take work seriously / has no sense of professional norms.â
If youâre her manager or oversee any of her work, it would be a kindness to talk to her about professional sign-offs.
– 2020
3. Telling my boss his wife messed up his business travel
I used to work as an executive assistant to a person who did a lot of business travel, but also did a lot of travel for his side-business activities. This was all legit, above board kind of stuff and his main job was aware of it.
As his assistant, I handled all the business stuff: booking flights, doing expense claims, all that jazz. However, his wife handled the side-business travel and I was instructed to liaise with her to coordinate schedules and handle any times when business travel would occur in conjunction with side-gig travel. His spouse was awesome, really organized and a great person to work with, but this was still a little bit awkward. It became more awkward when she made a mistake and booked travel for him at a time he was required to be somewhere else for his main job. I double, triple, and quadruple checked all of our email correspondence and it was for sure something that had gotten mixed up on her end, I am confident in that. So I was between a rock and a hard place: it wasn’t MY mistake but I was probably going to wear it because how am I supposed to present all the evidence to my boss that his spouse, his partner in life for over 20 years, the mother of his children, was the one that made the error that was sort of a costly mistake? He and I had a great working relationship, great communication, he had my back, all in all he was a great person to work for.
I ended up just doing my best to fix it and make everything work out, but it never sat right with me that I had to sort of pretend that it was my fault. I think that if I had tried to present everything to him that it WASN’T my mistake might have just made me look like a jerk or be really self-serving. Did I only have those two choices: screw-up or jerk? Or was there a third option that I just didn’t realize?
You were being way too delicate! It wouldnât have been a jerky move to tell your boss that his wife mixed something up, because you wouldnât have said it in a jerky way. You would have just matter-of-factly told him, âHmmm, it looks like Jane booked you in Atlanta on the 20th when you need to be in San Diego. Iâll let her know.â Your brain was going way overboard with the âpartner in life for over 20 years, mother of his childrenâ thing. Itâs just a routine business thing, not particularly sensitive information.
If I were your boss and I found out that you were pretending something was your fault because you thought Iâd dislike you if you told me my spouse had messed something up … well, I’d actually be really concerned. Iâd worry about your judgment, or whether Iâd somehow given you the impression that I was too fragile to hear normal business stuff, or whether my spouse had done something to scare the crap out of you. Iâd wonder what else you might be sugarcoating, and what else I might want to know that you might not tell me.
Itâs worth looking at whether youâre being overly delicate with your current colleagues/manager, because this is a strange instinct! This is just normal business stuff, not anything you needed to dance around or hide.
– 2018
Read an update to this letter here.
4. My amazing new job has a catch: my father
I just started a new job at what appears to be a great company. On my first day, I learned that my new company is owned by the company my father works for. I also learned that interaction between the companies is expected to increase, and while it’s not probable, it’s possible that I could end up working with my father. At least one of the higher-up members in my division even knows him. (Aside: this company definitely has no concerns about relatives working together.)
The problem is that my father and I have not spoken for three years. I might be able to have a very distant professional relationship with him, but, to be frank, almost any interaction at all would make me want to quit.
It’s known that my father works for the parent company, but no one knows that we have had an intense falling out. Should I mention this to my team lead? I’d obviously couch it in professional verbiage, a la “My father works for [parent company], but we do not get along. If at all possible, I’d prefer that any work that might involve him or his team be delegated to someone else.”
This is literally my second day on the job, and Iâm worried about coming across as full of drama. Iâm also worried that even though it was my father who disowned me, my reporting our soured relationship will make me look bad, but I specifically want them to know that this goes beyond the potential awkwardness of working with family so that they never intentionally put us together. And, finally, Iâm so new to the company that I have no metric with which to gauge how reactions to this information would go.
Yes, mention it to your manager. Your wording is good, but Iâd tweak it to this: âI hadnât realized the extent to which [this company] works with [parent company], but now that I do, I feel I should let you know that my father works for [parent company] and weâve been estranged for several years. I wouldnât want that to cause any awkwardness in a work context, so Iâm hoping that if we ever have work that might involve him or his team, it could be assigned to someone else.â
Companies generally donât want to invite family drama into their work, and itâs pretty likely that if thereâs a way to keep you from having to work with your dad, theyâll try to accommodate that. (There might not be, of course, but itâs a reasonable thing to flag.) Youâre not going to come across as full as drama as long as you donât ⊠come across as full of drama. In other words, if you conduct yourself professionally and maturely (as opposed to, say, complaining about him all the time, sobbing in meetings when his company name is mentioned, etc.), thatâs not going to be outweighed by having a difficult family connection.
And remember, lots of people have tough family dynamics. Youâre not weird or dramatic for having one too.
– 2019
Read an update to this letter here.
The post I saw my coworker buying a beer during work hours, my boss’s wife messed up his business travel, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.
jwz_org_feed
Here are the 2025 top ten domains from orders placed on the DNA Lounge store. Remember this the next time someone uses email as an example of a federation success story. | 73.0% | gmail.com |
| 8.5% | yahoo.com |
| 7.1% | icloud.com |
| 2.6% | hotmail.com |
| 0.7% | outlook.com |
| 0.6% | aol.com |
| 0.5% | comcast.net |
| 0.5% | me.com |
| 0.4% | sbcglobal.net |
| 0.3% | live.com |
| 5.8% | everything else |
jazzfishfloggingbabel_feed.%
This begins an occasional-at-best series of brief introductions to books I could but almost certainly won't ever write. Enjoy!
Introduction: The Simple Act of Going to Dinner
Friends!
I was at a Capclave one year (this was before the alt-sex group hung an NYC policeman from a water sprinkler, triggering a massive flood and evacuation of the hotel in the middle of the night; see chapter 14) and a group of writers, editors, friends, and such assembled to go out to dinner. There were ten of us in all--two cars' worth. Jack Dann found a restaurant in D. C. and made reservations. Chatting, we ambled to the parking lot. Along the way, somebody started to tell a mesmerizing story that obviously wasn't going to finish anytime soon. As a result, Jack, Ellen Datlow, and everybody else wanted to be in the car being driven by the storyteller, even though that meant that several of them would have to sit on each others' laps. I was driving the second car. Only Tim Sullivan was willing to ride with me, and he only because he took pity on me.
I turned out of the parking lot, followed by the overloaded second car. Feeling dreadfully sorry for myself, I made my way to the ring road around Washington. Then a thought occurred to me.
Turning to Tim, I said, âYou and I are the only two who know where the restaurant is, aren't we?â
In a puzzled tone, Tim said, âYes?â
âGood,â I said. And I floored it.
How fast was I going? Eighty? Ninety? More? It didn't matter. My faithless friends had no choice but to match speeds with me.
When, finally, I pulled off at the exit ramp and came to a stop at the traffic signal, the other car pulled up alongside me and everyone within it, laughing, gave me the finger.
That was what it was like in the science fiction community of the early 1980s. We were all young and full of beans. Science fiction fandom gave us a matrix within which we could meet, mate, love, quarrel, feud, and be geniuses-in-utero. And, by God, we took advantage of it. The world we created was a small and private one, admittedly, the sort of personal Eden that never gets documented.
Except, this once, here and now, in this book.
*
daringfireball_feedCNBC:
Apple chip leader Johny Srouji addressed rumors of his impending exit in a memo to staff on Monday, saying he doesnât plan on leaving the company anytime soon. âI love my team, and I love my job at Apple, and I donât plan on leaving anytime soon,â he wrote.
Bloomberg reported on Saturday that Srouji had told CEO Tim Cook that he was considering leaving, citing people with knowledge of the matter.
It wasnât rumors, plural. It was one report, on Saturday, from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, and Srouji just called bullshit on it.
What a colossal fuck-up for Gurman and Bloomberg. Thereâs no possible scenario where Srouji was threatening to leave Apple for a competitor on Saturday and telling his staff (in a memo meant to leak to the press) âI love my job at Apple, and I donât plan on leaving anytime soonâ Monday morning.
The most gracious interpretation for Gurman and Bloomberg is that Srouji had expressed this to Cook, at some point in the recent past, and Cook addressed whatever it took to keep Srouji on board. But even in that scenario, they ran a story Saturday that was wrong at the time it was published.
The more likely scenario is the one suggested by Neil Cybart:
If someone wanted to sow seeds of doubt among Apple employees in an effort to help their own poaching efforts, there are at least three publications who would have no problem offering an anonymous microphone to that person.
I.e., the source for this story about Srouji being unhappy at Apple and considering leaving for a competitor was aligned with one of those competitors, and Gurman and his editors Bloomberg said âSure, weâll print that.â Meta, of course, is the competitor that comes to mind.
It speaks to Gurmanâs personal and Bloombergâs institutional influence that Srouji and Apple saw the need to shoot the bogus narrative down in public like this. I canât remember the last time an Apple executive saw the need to send an intended-to-leak memo like this to shoot down one bogus story. After last week, though, this one couldnât be ignored.
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dr_drang_feedHereâs a fun post by Andrew Plotkin. Heâs a late riser, so the shortest day of the year, which is on the solstice, means nothing to him. Heâs interested in the date of the earliest sunset, because that means his sunlight hours will be increasing after that date. He calls it the Nighthawkâs Solstice and figures that itâs today, December 8.
But thereâs some ambiguity:
Itâs a bit tricky to pin down which day this is. Thereâs a million ad-encrusted sites which show you sunset times, but they mostly work in minutes, which means thereâs a stretch of days which are âthe earliestâ. Itâs the bottom of a long flat curve.
He could avoid the ads by going to this US Naval Observatory website. But that wonât solve the long flat curve problem. Heâs run into the same problem I did a couple of years ago when I was trying to position the âSunriseâ and âSunsetâ labels on my sunlight plots.
As I said back then:
Because the USNO data reports the sunrises and sunsets to the nearest minute, the minimum value of sunrise and maximum value of sunset last for several days. I want the labels to be centered within those stretches.
Whatâs true for the earliest sunrise and latest sunset is also true for the latest sunrise and earliest sunset. My solution for positioning the labels was the same as Andrewâs solution for fixing the date of Nighthawkâs Solstice: picking the date in the middle of the flat stretch.
Since Iâve been using Mathematica a lot lately, I wondered if I could do better. And I can. Mathematica has Sunrise and Sunset functions that return the dates and times to the nearest second. So I made this short notebook to find the latest sunrise and earliest sunset for Naperville, Illinois, where I live:
It first sets the location for all the calculations to the Nichols Library in downtown Naperville and circles the location on a satellite view. It then uses the DateRange and DateObject functions to build a list of dates from the beginning of December to the middle of January.
Passing that list of dates to Sunrise and Sunset returns an EventSeries for each. The Values property for these series extracts just the time and date for each sunrise and sunset. Finally, using MaximalBy pulls out the sunrise with the latest time. Similarly, using MinimalBy for the sunsets gets the sunset with the earliest time.
As you can see, Andrewâs eyeball estimate of December 8 as the earliest sunset is correct.1 So today is (or wasâIâm typing this after sunset) Nighthawkâs Solstice.
A few comments:
Sunrise and Sunset, youâll see that they have lots of options for zeroing in on exactly what kind of sunrise or sunset youâre calculating. Are you looking for when the middle of the sun is at the horizon? The upper limb? The lower limb? And are you accounting for refraction? What about elevation? As you can see from the code, Iâm accepting Mathematicaâs defaults for all of those options. Iâm not especially worried about any imprecision that might creep in because of this. I donât care about the exact rise and set times, only in how they change from day to day. As long as Iâm consistent in the method of calculation, the dates of the minimum and maximum should be correct.Sunrise and Sunset use consistent assumptions that allow the calculations to proceed, real world observations notwithstanding.