Notices by Clive Thompson (clive@saturation.social), page 4

As I behold "Crush!", the new Apple ad for their Ipad Pro ...

... I fluctuate, with heisenbergian indeterminacy, between "they are clearly trolling us" and "they are totally earnest and have no idea how completely sociopathic they appear"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntjkwIXWtrc

Welcome to the "rugpull internet"

(with a tip of the hat to @mcc here)

https://mastodon.social/@mcc/112407660306483283

“How could so many people accidentally start a campaign for President of Iceland?”

A truly wild tale of UX gone awry: https://uxdesign.cc/how-do-you-accidentally-run-for-president-of-iceland-0d71a4785a1e

Via @baldur

"ALICE" is the acronym for "asset limited, income constrained, employed" -- basically, folks who have jobs but ones that don't pay terribly well, and possess little wealth

Research shows this cohort of the American population is growing ...

... and they're stuck in a bad spot, policy-wise: They earn too much to quality for low-income government support, but too little to be comfortable amidst the big soaring costs of housing, health care, education and transportation

https://archive.is/UD8q2

So it's reached the stage of the evening where I'm idly surfing fake UFO footage on tik tok

totally cool and not at all a form of procrastination on my work

https://www.tiktok.com/@ufohunter51/video/7328506934036876586?lang=en

Awesome piece on BlackPlanet, the pioneering social network that got a lot of things right: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/05/blackplanet-social-media-history/677839/

“A death certificate would say he died of sepsis from a bone infection, but my friend and I have a term for the illness that killed him: end-stage poverty. We needed to coin a phrase because so many of our patients die of the same thing.”

Excellent essay by a US doctor describing how many of her patients suffer (and die) not from their illnesses but from the wildly precarious economics of their lives

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/11/opinion/doctor-safety-net-hospital.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jk0.4z6-.Jp89JtFlvuyi&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb

Ghost kitchens are using generative AI to make pictures of their food

The results:

“A piece of cake floating on top of the other without any affect on the layer below. Cheese that defies physics … Frutti Di Mare (Seafood) with Marinara Sauce that has some identifiable clams and calamari, but also a lot of creatures that look like they came from the mind of H.R. Giger.”

https://www.404media.co/ghost-kitchens-are-advertising-ai-generated-food-on-doordash-and-grubhub/

@thomasfuchs @swearyanthony

Maybe those are the devices that should develop witty repartee

Looks like I’ve come down with a mild case of the norovirus that’s going around

I think I’m only a 4 or 5 out of 10 thankfully

still, really not fun, would not want to be up there around 8 or 9 out of 10

A terrifying story by @aurynn of discovering her mastodon instance's bandwidth went *through the roof* due to a scraper ...

... but it all ended well because the people at Fastly are deeply cool *and* very committed to making Fediverse servers work ...

... so they offer specific support to protect against these sorts of vampiric surges

Read the whole thread here! https://cloudisland.nz/@aurynn/111937413329229286

@thomasfuchs

Photon Rescue League

Coleridge was fascinated by the aeolian harp ...

... an instrument that was played not by a human, but by the wind

A random-seeming input, with a system that transforms it into unpredictable and lovely outputs

(These days we'd call it "procedural art", lol)

Coleridge wondered if *humans* were, in essence, aeolian harps

The metaphor caught on: Romantics loved it

An essay considering this in the age of chatgpt

Item #11 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free here: https://buttondown.email/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-18-infinite-crafting-the-reverse/

“Theoretically, what would happen if every US household got a heat pump? According to a new study in the journal Joule, it could slash the emissions in the residential sector by a staggering 36 to 64 percent, and cut overall US emissions by 5 to 9 percent.”

https://www.wired.com/story/what-would-happen-if-every-american-got-a-heat-pump/

(Via @br00t4c)

Fantastic -- if super-distressing -- article by Gisele Navarro about the horrible state of product reviews online

The tl;dr is that Google seems to overweight reviews from longstanding big journalism brands ...

... but many of those brands, like Popular Science, were long ago bought up by private equity or conglomerates, then hollowed out ...

... so they now produce crappy articles that are *probably* lying about their "test labs" to please Google

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

Read it! So good

Behold this awesome art made from e-waste

Elias Sime takes cast-off electronics and turns them into sculptural pieces

It's a meditation on the piles of electronic garbage that get shipped from around the world to his hometown of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia

Item #5 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter -- check it out for free here: https://buttondown.email/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-18-infinite-crafting-the-reverse/

Globally, people want climate action …

… and are willing to personally pay for it

That’s the top finding from a survey of 130,000 people in 125 countries

Fully 69% of the people polled said they’d be willing to pay one percent of their income

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-024-01925-3

(Via @CelloMomOnCars)

@jonobie @Halpin @juneb

Yeah, women started getting shoved out of programming jobs in the 70s for a host of reasons -- including that it was becoming a recognizably significant corporate role, so firms wanted to hire coder who could ascend to management positions ... and they weren't willing to make women managers

Then when pop culture seized on computers in the early 80s, it was all young mostly-white boy nerds

In the days before digital computers, "computers" were human (as @Halpin just noted in a convo with me)

People doing calculations by hand

A large chunk of these human computers were women

Indeed, so *many* were women that ...

"... one contractor of the Applied Mathematics Panel used the term 'kilo­girl' to refer to 1,000 hours of female calculation work. Another astronomer spoke of 'girl-years' of work."

I wrote about this for Smithsonian magazine a few years ago: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-computers-180972202/

Here’s an ace harmonica player doing his version of David Gilmour’s guitar solo from “Comfortably Numb”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d87BQLUcqw4&utm_source=clivethompson&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=linkfest-18-infinite-crafting-the-reverse

I don’t much listen to Pink Floyd — though I respect the songwriting and musical chops — and now I’m wondering if they need *more harmonica*

This is astonishing

Item #3 in my latest “Linkfest” newsletter: https://buttondown.email/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-18-infinite-crafting-the-reverse/