The Atlantic
The Atlantic
This isn’t too far off from the software brain mindset that Nilay Patel was warning about in the previous post. Maybe software brain is intensified by the fact that tech culture is run by billionaires who never face consequences.
Welcome to onfocus—a weblog by pb where I post recommended links, my photos, and occasional thoughts. Subscribe here if you like RSS.
The Verge
The VergeYou can’t advertise people out of reacting to their own experiences. This is a fundamental disconnect between how tech people with software brains see the world and how regular people are living their lives.Nilay Patel explains the disconnect between tech culture and culture at large around AI.
civilbeat.org
civilbeat.org“I think this is a creative and ambitious bill,” he said. “It tries to get around Citizens United by arguing that corporations only have the powers the state chooses to grant them, and that Hawaiʻi can decline to grant the power to spend money on elections. That’s a genuinely innovative idea.”Nice to see a state even contemplate asserting its power to regulate. Fingers crossed.
onfocus moodboard
I subscribe to a lot of visual blogs via RSS. It's probably around 100 feeds that are mostly at tumblr, some indie blogs, some mastodon feeds, some subreddits, and various others like the fun MLTSHP community. I tend to view these via a masonry layout (like pinterest) I put together that talks with my feed reader via an API. From there I can mark posts as favorites and/or publish posts to a public feed for public reconsumption.
The process of going from favorite to published is a complex, multi-step gauntlet of curation that ensures any chosen image meets the high standards of the onfocus brand. (I click a button.)
So here's the current onfocus moodboard. The caption below each image is the title as found and links to the source of the image where I spotted it. There's a moodboard RSS feed if you're into that.
The process of going from favorite to published is a complex, multi-step gauntlet of curation that ensures any chosen image meets the high standards of the onfocus brand. (I click a button.)
So here's the current onfocus moodboard. The caption below each image is the title as found and links to the source of the image where I spotted it. There's a moodboard RSS feed if you're into that.
flickr.com
flickr.comThe NASA flickr account has stunning high-resolution images from the Artemis II trip around the moon.
YouTube Recommendations
A couple recent YouTube videos that seem very different are echoing similar, important themes. ContraPoints' meditation on The Saw movies is excellent and (spoiler alert) discusses themes of retributive violence. Meanwhile, in an entirely different universe, Hank Green discusses JD Vance's thoughts on UFOs. It's also good analysis and (spoiler alert) discusses magical thinking. I feel like this connecting theme of regression from reason is a helpful way to think about our modern hellscape.
pbump.net
pbump.netThe Varieties of Democracy project at the University of Gothenburg has done this measurement for more than a decade, establishing a consistent metric that allows for comparisons between and within nations and determinations of how democracy has changed over time.Nice liberal democracy we used to have here. Too bad we couldn’t keep it.
404 Media
404 MediaThe complete and utter failure of the metaverse is a reminder not just of the fact that the future Silicon Valley is force feeding us is not inevitable, but that quite often these oligarchs quite simply cannot relate to real people, don’t know how or why people use their products, and very often have no idea what they’re doing.What could we have done with $80 billion dollars? People like Zuckerberg shouldn’t control what we spend that amount of resources on.
Podcast Recommendations
Let's talk podcasts! Here are some of my favorites:
- A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs (music history) - About once a month or so, Andrew Hickey tells a documentary style story of a famous rock song. He includes a bunch of music clips and tries to give the cultural and musical context of why the song happened, not just the stories of the people involved.
- If Books Could Kill (books) - Peter and Michael discuss best selling self-help books. For some reason these guys crack me up, they have a lot of fun taking down this genre of book.
- 5-4 Pod (law and politics) - Peter (from If Books Could Kill) joins Michael and Rhiannon to discuss past terrible Supreme Court decisions. As the tagline says it's about how much the Supreme Court sucks, but it's also a way to learn more about how the law works (or doesn't).
- Serious Trouble (law and politics) - Ken White is a defense lawyer who became famous on the old Twitter as Popehat. He has a good way of explaining legal concepts and he and Josh Barro discuss current high profile legal cases and explain the laws at play.
- Josh Marshall Podcast (politics) - If you don't know Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, it's a blog that started in 2000 that grew into a mini media empire. I think of Marshall's view as a sort of mainstream progressive view of politics. It's an important niche in a world where all mainstream media has gone conservative. In the podcast Josh has a conversation with TPM reporter Kate Riga about the week's news.
- The Daily Blast (politics) - As titled, this is 20 minutes of Greg Sargent interviewing a progressive reporter about a story they've done. Pretty outrage-y, but also short.
- 404 Media (internet, tech culture) - 404 Media is a fantastic independent news organization started by four journalists who covered the internet for other publications. They get some amazing scoops from the tech world, and share some stories from their reporting on this podcast. It's a very unique take on the tech industry.
- Panic World (internet) - Ryan Broderick writes a newsletter called Garbage Day about internet culture. His podcast is usually an internet-adjacent topic that he discusses with a guest. He recently went to Minneapolis to do some live reporting and it was some of the best reporting I'd seen.
- Galaxy Brain (internet) - This is a podcast named after a long-running column about internet culture in The Atlantic by Charlie Warzel. He's new at podcasting (maybe fifteen episodes so far) but he tackles some big topics in his interviews and I've been enjoying these.
- Diabolical Lies (feminism) - I realize this podcast isn't for me, but I find the hosts very funny and they always give me new ways to look at things or new things to think about. Their episode about the popular culture reaction to the Wicked movies was great.
- Reign of Error (religion, politics) - This is a brand new podcast that tackles the topic of religion in politics, what could go wrong? This is a new podcast by Sarah Posner who has written books on this topic and covered this beat for a long time.
- Election Profit Makers (misc) - This is a favorite that I've been listening to since it began around 2016. It was originally about election prediction markets but now it's just two guys talking in the classic podcast format. I always enjoy hearing them talk about the news or city skylines or field recordings from listeners or whatever.
Those are some of my favorites, and I'm sure I've missed a few. Right now I feel like podcasts are filling the space weblogs used to fill before everyone moved to social media.
Oh I do have an honorable mention. If you have any interest in the satanic panic of the 80s, check out the limited run podcast The Devil You Know by Sarah Marshall. It explores why people had a moral panic in the 80s and 90s seeing devil worshipers everywhere without any real proof of devil worshipers anywhere.
archive.ph
archive.phLithium-ion battery prices don’t get constantly discussed the way crude is, but these declines add up to a decisive shift that will determine the energy landscape of the next decade. Solar and wind have been cheaper than fossil fuels for a while, but the last time we had an energy crisis like this, oil and gas still drove the prices paid by consumers. The falling cost of battery storage changes that.You can argue with math and even try to fight it, but the numbers aren't going to change. Solar and batteries for storage are the future.
npr.org
npr.orgRivera was brought to the U.S. illegally from Mexico when he was 2 years old. He's enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, better known as DACA, which granted him permission to legally work in the U.S., among other benefits, and allowed him to get a commercial driver's license in 2014 and start his own trucking company.Taking out around 5% of truck drivers for no good reason? Racism is a hell of a self-own.
404 Media
Most of the Americans surveyed believe that datacenters are bad for the environment, home energy costs, and the quality of life of people living nearby and the numbers aren’t close. Only four percent of people thought datacenters were good for the environment, six percent good for jobs, and six percent good for people’s quality of life.Oh, here’s another thing Americans can agree on.