Bits & Bobs for the Week of 02 July 2023
Bits & Bobs for the Week of 02 July 2023
Below is a collection of the interesting things I've been reading over the last week or so, plus my thoughts on stuff.
Long Reads (> 20 minutes)
I'm currently re-reading Cats's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. I'm pretty sure it's the third time at this point, but my memory is so bad that it mostly feels new again. This time, I'm vibing on the concept of one’s karass — a “group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial linkages are not evident”.
I remember in my early college days, well before I’d ever heard the term karass, I easily found mine. They were mostly a group of hackers, tinkerers, techies, and policy nerds, and it really did feel cosmically significant — and I don’t just mean when we got stoned. Since then, I’ve drifted in and out of many different karasses — but still feel like I have yet to find my true karass here in Ireland. I’m not sure if this is a product of age, life getting in the way, being too disillusioned with the world to pay attention, or something else, but I’d like to fix that situation. I’m consciously going to keep myself open to finding my karass, and hope that by putting my thoughts out there, it might be a little easier.
I was motivated to re-read Cat’s Cradle after I listened to a recent Cautionary Tales episode on Irving Langmuir, the real-life Felix Hoennikker, a key, albeit entirely off-stage character in Cat’s Cradle who created a devastating compound that wreaks havoc in the novel, called ice-nine. It turns out Vonnegut modeled the Hoennikker character on Langmuir, in part as a warning against unrestrained scientific development without due consideration of the consequences. Also, ice-nine actually exists, though it’s not the stuff Vonnegut dreamed up.
Who Killed Google Reader - The Verge (David Pierce): Google Reader was a mainstay application for me (and 30 million other news junkies) prior to its death in March 2013. For the unfamiliar, “[Google Reader] was a way of organizing the internet, for making sense of the web, for collecting all the things you care about no matter its location or type.” It was so much bigger than just an RSS reader, and the engineers responsible for its creation had even bigger plans. It helped that Reader was dead simple to use, intuitive, and didn’t involve any flashy bullshit, ads, or tracking. That, Google’s big move into social (which poached many of Reader’s devs), and the fact that Marisa Mayer hated it, is why it is no more.
Like so many great Google applications, Google Reader came about in a fit of engineering frustration, did something genuinely useful for the world, and then was canned for a shittier, corporate-approved thing (Google Buzz, and then Google+). Frankly, I’m still a little salty about the fact that Google killed Reader, and it took me nearly a decade before I found a suitable replacement in the form of Readwise.io’s Read app. If that dies, I might give up on the internet entirely.
The Making of an Underclass: AOL (originally Netwars, now preserved on Archive.org): On Tuesday, I wrote about the potential for a splintered Fediverse should a vocal group of Mastodon Admins prevail and manage to block Meta from joining the protocol. What I forgot to include in my piece (because I didn’t know of its existence until Wendy Grossman enlightened me), was that everything old is new again, and much of the current Fediverse saga has familiar themes to the long-ago times of Usenet, when hordes of AOL users bombarded forums, annoyed and offended the locals, and failed to respect the culture. Anyway, regardless of where you stand on the Fediverse issue, you should read this piece, if for no other reason, than to understand how we keep fighting these battles anew and never learning. My favorite line from the Netwars piece:
But several factors ensured that AOLers' transgressions would not be forgotten. First was the sheer volume of new users; if only a small percentage of a million people causes trouble, that's still a lot of people. Second was the fact that, unlike each year's arriving freshman class, all AOLers came from a single domain: *aol.com*.
Medium Reads (5-20 minutes)
In researching my latest article on finding meaningful work and whether compliance could ever meet that ideal, I read a few great pieces on the subject, and the value of having impact. I’m sharing them here as well.
- ’s piece below hypothesizing on women’s incentives to justify getting married and having children was interesting, even if I didn’t entirely agree with some of their conclusions. To be fair, trying to assess matters of the heart against the cool calculus of economics and game theory tends to, as they note, come across to most as “horrifying”. It also tends to be reductionist. After analyzing the relative incentives and disincentives that might drive women to/away from marriage, The author rightly observes that if there is a marriage decline, women need more incentives, but IMHO, omits a big possible one: get better men.
Let me explain. We’ve had a little over a century of enfranchisement for women in most parts of the Western world. Women being able to have gainful employment, make meaningful choices about their bodily autonomy, own property, and choose when and who or not to marry, are relatively new phenomena, in terms of human timescales, and in many cases, they’re not always guaranteed.
This liberation has changed thinking and behaviors, especially in how women make choices, but it feels to me (largely through some very painful trial-and-error and observation), that many men are still lagging behind. These coincidentally, tend to be the guys who bitch the loudest about how women’s lib has made women shrill, gold-digging, man-hating feminists, unwilling to marry “nice guys”.
Short Reads (<5 minutes)
This one here is just wild.
did the work and discovered that Disney’s creepy animatronic of the President-who-shall-not-be-named, was originally supposed to be Hillary Clinton. From The Cool Dude Zone:The conspiracy goes like this: in 2016 the folks in charge at Disney, much like large swaths of the country, believed Hillary Clinton would win, and even before she was elected were hard at work on a Hillary animatronic for the Walt Disney World Hall of Presidents attraction.
… When they were surprised by a donald trump (sic) victory, they were forced to hastily repurpose the Hillary animatronic as a Donald Trump one, to comedically grotesque effect.
It’s super gross, and was eventually replaced by a less artificially grotesque version, but this delighted me, and I wanted to share it with the world.
This week, Ireland’s Department of Justice obtained a High Court (an intermediate or appellate court here in Ireland) order requiring mobile phone companies to indiscriminately store the metadata of all mobile users for an indeterminate period of time, and provide access to the Garda (Ireland’s police) during investigations. The order was obtained quickly and in secret, and apparently the Minister didn’t feel the need to do a lot of the basic things one should do if they want to indiscriminately record civilians without cause. It also turns out that the High Court order likely violates a whole bunch of laws and importantly, an EU Court of Justice ruling made against an earlier Irish High Court ruling on the very same issue (the Dwyer case). The CJEU in Dwyer held that EU law precludes the general and indiscriminate retention of electronic traffic and location data for the purposes of combating serious crime. Thankfully, the good folks over at Digital Rights Ireland issued a series of Twenty Questions to the Minister, including the most obvious one about how y’know, this doesn’t violate a direct EU Court decision. Lets see if she answers.