Notices by Clive Thompson (clive@saturation.social)

Behold the AI slop that google served up when these folks asked it "does corn get digested"

I just checked that query, and it now serves up this story itself, bien sur

but overall I agree with the deck to the headline

"slopaggedon cometh"

https://futurism.com/google-image-corn-ai-slop

A spectacular piece by Brendan Koerner in Wired about the lives of young men doing door-to-door solar sales

one just came by my house the other day! (I already have panels, so there was no sale to make)

Every new industry produces some sort of Glengarry-Glen-Ross boiler-room culture

this is solar's, apparently

https://www.wired.com/story/spectacular-burnout-solar-panel-salesman/

@bmacDonald94 @soc_i_ety

lol

that reminds me of the lyric from "Love Shack" by the B-52s

"I got me a chrysler / it seats about 20"

Back last spring I visited Denver ...

... where the city was two years into a fascinating experiment:

Subsidizing residents who wanted to buy an e-bike

Turns out the program was exceptionally successful

People rode 'em 26 miles a week on average, rode them year-round ...

... removing 6 million miles of car-driving each year. Cleaner air, healthier residents getting exercise

And: *way* cheaper than subsidizing electric cars

My piece on it for Mother Jones: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/01/e-bike-subsidy-programs-denver-states-walkable-cities-urban-infrastructure/

Excellent analysis by Annie Lowery on how the volatility of the crypto market could infect the regular markets: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/cryptocurrency-deregulation-future-crash/681202/

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/iD2vy

You know about disposable vapes?

many brands are powered by the same lithium-ion cells that are used to make huge battery packs for electric cars or ebikes

but with vapes, they're just ... thrown out

Chris Doel got 130 dead vapes, took the batteries out, and used them to create a new rechargeable battery pack for his ebike

It worked *great*

His question: "Why they hell are they being thrown away after one use?"

Item #6 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-28-neolithic-octopuses-weeping-trees-and/

Apparently citydwellers in the US are walking 15% faster than they did in 1980

that's the result of some cool research ...

... by academics who acquired video from four major pedestrian areas in big cities, taken in 1979-80 ...

... then compared it to video from the same precise spots in 2008-2010

Other findings:
- people *linger* less
- they're more likely to be alone

Item #3 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, read/subscribe here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-28-neolithic-octopuses-weeping-trees-and/

A quick shout-out to @buttondown -- I realized it had been too long since I had exported and backed up my newsletters and subscriber list ...

... so I went into the dashboard and did it

It took, like *one and a half minutes*

*Including* poking around to figure out how to do it

very smooth

@andyinabox @anildash

I blogged about how renewable energies represent a fascinating shift ...

... which is that (apart from nuclear, a minority player in the history of energy) they are forms of power generation that do not involve burning anything

And this has mythopoetic stakes! Fire is gorgeous and primal, and we like not only being near it for warmth, but *seeing* it

So: *Some* of the disdain for renewables might burble up from this primal well

https://clivethompson.medium.com/the-end-of-burning-6fa52138326a (gift link)

Ed Zitron went to Amazon and bought its best-selling laptop — a $238 machine running Microsoft S, a hobbled version designed to limit what a user can do

The laptop is janky, slow, awful — and the internet it opens onto is a shitshow of upselling, slop, and con schemes, where the walled gardens are preferable mostly because they offer an illusion of order

His point: for *most* people, computing is psychologically abusive

He’s right

Read the whole thing!

https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

ChatGPT, being trained on a lot of pretty mediocre and overly flowery writing, tends to overuse some uselessly flourish-y words ...

... as with the discovery a while back that it keeps on saying "delve", as in, "let's delve into this" (something it picked up, reportedly, via training data from Nigerian business circles)

what *other* words does it overuse?

Jordan Gibbs did a fascinating analysis: https://medium.com/@jordan_gibbs/which-words-does-chatgpt-use-the-most-7c9ff02416a8

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/9CCq9

"If you’re not a breadwinner on Substack, you’re the yeast. The yeast is responsible for driving app downloads, granting access to their social graph, and funneling their readers towards the platform’s top earners."

Excellent essay by Tyler Denk, channeling recent and equally sharp critiques by @anildash

https://mail.bigdeskenergy.com/p/death-by-thousand-substacks

Some Concordia University professors set up a Minecraft server, and powered it with solar panels and a battery ...

... then added GUI text that shows players data on the energy ecosystem: Battery level, solar panel output, and how much energy the server is requiring at any given instant

fascinating psychological effects ensue ...

... as the players begin to notice how different actions they take inside the game use different levels of energy

Item #8 in my Linkfest: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-27-aztec-death-whistles-supercircular/

For dealing with climate-change-related coastal flooding, one idea has been gaining currency ...

... which is, don't resist the water, build high, or build dams. Instead, build canals that give the sea-swell a place to flow inland ...

... so it can flow in, then flow out

Somerset, UK has done this with great success

The canals have prevented flooding that used to strand villages ...

... and it has rebooted the area's "salt marshes"

Item #10 in my latest "Linkfest": https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-26-cryptophasia-wigner-crystals-and-how/

@mekkaokereke @tehstu @hazelnot @teadrinker

yep, that's my model!

and yeah, that review is a classic

@teadrinker

if you know what it is but don’t use it I would still put yourself in “never”!

I suspect there’s a lot of people here in the “never“ category who certainly know what Linux is and what it’s used for

Remember all the right wing folks were fulminating about collusion between social media and the government?

you know, the horrors of the "twitter files"?

how it's *incredibly dangerous* for social-media executives to be in close communication with the federal government?

the primrose path to censorship, and all that?

As @mmasnick notes, these folks are all *quite* silent about Musk being *completely in bed with the incoming Trump administration* https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-musk-partnership-x-twitter-files-rcna180427

a *banger* of a piece

@hyc @ariadne @slyecho @dalias

I’ve read a little bit about the trend towards having a solar roof on golf carts – if they have lithium ion batteries apparently it can extend the range a non-trivial amount; but again, that’s because the vehicle itself is very lightweight

(and slow: not something you’re going to use to accelerate on to the highway 😂)

@kp

Yeah, in the US parts of this were already in and out of place for centuries -- as with all the groups that in different ways and to different degrees (slaves, native americans, interred Japanese families, among others) were the bad others that needed to be crushed and contained

In 1945, the US War Department realized that its soldiers stationed in Europe fighting the Nazis probably needed a good pamphlet explaining what fascism was, and how it occurs ...

... so they wrote one

and in it, they noted that America was not at all immune to this

So they explained how fascism would come to the US

Heather Cox Richardson writes about it in the latest edition of her newsletter: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-26-2024