The Internet, Filtered

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Yeah, it’s very Midwest. People always say if you’re coming down 95 on the west coast, it’s mostly New Yorkers who moved down. And then the Midwest usually populates a lot of my part of Florida. There’s a ton of people from Ohio. A lot of people from Texas. People just go there because it’s pretty nice. I think a lot of people move there thinking that they’re going to change, but they don’t really change. They’re just in a nicer setting. So, if you’re a redneck from Ohio and you moved there, it’s going to be the same life. It’s just going to be a little nicer out. Nothing really gets better unless you get better.

Thomas Dollbaum Is A Budding Countryish Indie Rock Star

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But what Nate didn't understand is that The Devil Wears Prada is a romantic comedy about a girl and her career. Andy has to become the assistant to the evil Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) and succeed in her terrible job at Runway by sacrificing her morals, because she knows that she needs the connections. The movie ends with Andy getting a job at the Mirror, a newspaper, on Miranda's recommendation. One year of hell as someone's assistant for the job you want doesn't seem like that bad of a trade, because the core of the movie is Andy's optimistic belief in the power of journalism, and her commitment to the job.

Even In The Movies, Journalism Is Fucked | Defector

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The Laboratory notebook, intended to receive the account of the results of experiments, should always be at hand, as should also pen and ink. All the results worthy of record should be entered at the time the experiments are made, whilst the things themselves are under the eye, and can be re-examined if doubt or difficulty arise. The practice of delaying to note until the end of a train of experiments or to the conclusion of the day, is a bad one, as it then becomes difficult accurately to remember that succession of events. There is a probability also that some important point which may suggest itself during writing, cannot be ascertained by reference to experiment, because of its occurrence to the mind at too late a period.

A Brief History of Lab Notebooks

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(via Post by @coreyatad.com — Bluesky)

Competence Porn is a thing.

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Slop exists at scale.

Slop remixes culture without understanding it.

Slop has contempt for both creators and audiences.

Slop hides producers from consumers, and vice versa.

Slop exploits parasocial identification with right-wing power.

Slop erodes your sense of the real.

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The best way to understand Dokoupil’s CBS Evening News is as an extension of Weiss’s media persona, which has been built around a peculiar sort of performance. She brands herself as a heterodox thinker, a champion of free speech, even someone who leans to the left, and then  adopts positions that flatter the reactionary oligarch class. She isn’t a conservative! She just independently thinks her way to conservative conclusions over and over again. If you’re a rich white man convinced that pronouns and trans athletes are the greatest threats facing America today, Weiss is there to assure you not just that you’re right, but also that your bile is proof of your intellectual fearlessness.

What a fucking disgrace

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He starts the week as a stubborn stage resigned to polishing silverware, a task he sees as “punishment for being ancillary.”

...“They’re treating this like going into battle,” Russell adds. “And the battle is against everything that can go wrong.”

...“This is a time where he begins to take not just himself seriously, but he takes his life with his daughter seriously, he takes his job seriously,” Wehde says. “This is kind of the big pivot point.”

This is my favorite episode of television. At least top 5. Probably top 3.

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How Shinzo Abe’s Assassination Brought the Moonies Back Into the Limelight

“His initial target was a leader of the Church, but he eventually fixated on Abe, who regularly appeared in public, and whose party, the Liberal Democrats, or L.D.P., had dominated Japanese politics since the Second World War. Abe “is not really my enemy,” Yamagami wrote. “He is simply one of the most influential Unification Church sympathizers in the real world.” For decades, Abe’s faction of the L.D.P. relied on votes and extensive campaign support from the Moonies. Church members served as reliable “special forces,” in Moon’s words—door-knockers and rally-goers. “They would flood the streets with people handing out postcards, leaflets, or be on a sound truck that’s just calling out the candidate’s name over and over,” Jeff Kingston, a historian at Temple University, Japan, told me. “When it comes to elections, Japan is a really analog place.””

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Am I too stupid to vibe code?

Vibe coding, like every new trend coming out of Silicon Valley, turns this process — the entire act of creativity, itself — into a slot machine. One more pull on the AI and maybe it will figure it out for you. You won’t understand how any of it works, of course, or feel particularly proud of what you’ve done, but maybe you’ll have something.

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But as I spent a bit more time there, the sheer weight of it all began to hit me. The hundreds of pallets in that warehouse were just a portion of the thousands of pallets sitting in storage across the country, all containing stuff that consumers and stores didn’t want.

It’s huge. It’s wasteful. And it’s overwhelming.

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The problem with TikTok and Facebook isn't their size

The problem is what all these companies are competing to do. The data we have, let alone the data I expect we’ll eventually have, indicates that the modern internet is addictive, makes us miserable, and perhaps makes us hate each other.

...And yes, if a black-box content algorithm causes depression or promotes harmful behavior among children, and the creators know the algorithms will do this and then make them as addictive as possible without any detailed knowledge of their inner workings except that they grab and hold our attention, they have not exercised due care and should be subject to suit.

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(via MJ Lenderman Brings Out NYC Mayorial Candidate Zohran Mamdani At Brooklyn Steel)

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These days, thanks to the “courseware” that has become ubiquitous in higher ed, students can see exactly how they are performing in every course all the time. The software can even project their final grade based on how they’ve done so far, in a data-dashboard sort of way. Students love this, or think they do, because they don’t want to be surprised. But the courseware data dashboards have another clear effect: Like so many other aspects of the current college experience, they orient students’ attention toward their grades above all else.

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(via Christie's Auctions Jane Birkin's Hermès Haut à Courroies Bag | Hypebeast)

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"Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."

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The more I thought about search engine optimization and how a bunch of megalomaniacal jerks were degrading our collective sense of reality because they wanted to buy Lamborghinis and prove they could vanquish the almighty algorithm — which, technically, constitutes many algorithms, but we think of as a single force — the more I looked forward to going to Florida for this alligator party. Maybe, I thought, I would get to see someone who made millions clogging the internet with bullshit get the ultimate comeuppance. Maybe an SEO professional would get attacked by a gigantic, prehistoric-looking reptile right there in front of me. Maybe I could even repackage such a tragedy into a sensationalized anecdote for a viral article about the people who do SEO for a living, strongly implying that nature was here to punish the bad guy while somehow also assuming the ethical high ground and pretending I hadn’t been hoping this exact thing would happen from the start.

...As a person who militantly unsubscribes to any and all marketing emails, I suddenly felt claustrophobic, surrounded by people who annoy the rest of us for a living. Why does it always seem to surprise me, even after all these years, that the way we behave on the internet is often quite different from how we act in real life?

...“The SEO people are just trying to make money,” said Peter Kent, the author of several dozen explanatory tech books, including SEO for Dummies and Bitcoin for Dummies. “The cryptocurrency people are trying to make money, but they’re also trying to overthrow, you know, the existing system.”

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Gary was a frequent poster in the forum and self-taught lepidopterist—even learning how to inflate a moth bladder during recreational moth genital dissection—who almost exclusively wore denim. Gary told Himmelman that all he wants out of life is "a warm summer night with a sheet, a mercury vapor light, a six-pack, some mosquito repellent, and my buddies Dave and Chris. Lots of stars. Some night birds. And every now and then a REALLY GOOD moth."

I went moth-ing last summer with my niece. Good times.