Notices by Clive Thompson (clive@saturation.social), page 5

@jkottke

Oh man now I’m wondering if there’s an organization with the acronym WHAT

@mekkaokereke

I actually think someone should design a headset that’s as light as possible and doesn’t strap on — the point is to hold it up, check out something rad, then excitedly it to your friend nearby to see … so you can both marvel at it

F2F social VR!

That’s exactly the dynamic of the original VR — stereoscopes

You invited a friend over and handed the viewer back and forth

I learned a ton about em while writing this a few years ago: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/sterographs-original-virtual-reality-180964771/

@mekkaokereke

Yep yep

I actually think the whole “quick hit whoa check it out” experience is really *the* big allure with VR — it’s only the tech obsession with Snow Crash and/or VCs’ desperation to find a new green-field to dominate that keeps them pushing “we’re all gonna wear goggles for 8 hours”

@babe @zombierustpunk

Those winamp skins were some of coolest digital art I've ever seen

@gaysteve @overholt @forteller

This is my favorite thread on the entire Internet today

@gaysteve

finer Internet content cannot be had

I offer a crisp salute

I realize one cannot judge the reliability of a piece of engineering by its name, but wow “door plug” does not inspire confidence

https://www.npr.org/2024/01/08/1223427243/boeing-flight-door-plug-alaska-airlines

@arclight @outie @Wolf_Baginski @cstross

I tried Wine — it worked well, but as I recall made it impossible to synchronize a Scrivener file to other machines via dropbox or other cloud-storage services

I currently hop between a Mac laptop and a windows desktop, opening my Scrivener file on either one

Last time I tried to do that with wine on Ubuntu it wouldn’t sync …. Maybe there’s a way to make it work I hadn’t hit a pond?

@cstross @arclight @Wolf_Baginski @outie

Yep that’s a good idea

I might give that a whirl!

@bencurthoys

whoa that is SUPER cool

I'm gonna tinker with that this weekend, thank you!!

Here's Alvin and the Chipmunks singing "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" ... except slowed down to 16 RPM:

https://soundcloud.com/alvin-thechipmunkson16sp/have-yourself-a-merry-little-christmas

Make sure to read all the listener annotations on the song's timeline 😅

This is part of a larger project -- a Toronto guy found an LP of Alvin and the Chipmunks covering pop songs

The guy had an old record player that could play at 16 RPM

So he played them all

They're here: https://soundcloud.com/alvin-thechipmunkson16sp

The version of Tom Petty's "Refugee" will haunt your dreams

I wept with uncontrollable laughter for the first two minutes of "Jesse's Girl"

omg the version of Blondie's "Call Me"

I am not going to be able to *sleep* tonight

@tchambers @pinsk @AnthonyBaker @jerry @buttondown

I use buttondown and love it!

I don’t know if it’s open source though?

The CIA's 1944 guide to disrupting meetings

Honestly, it reads like stuff you see pretty regularly at civic and company meetings 😅

(Technically it was written not by the CIA but by its predecessor organization, the OSS)

Item #7 in my latest Linkfest newsletter, free to read here: https://buttondown.email/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-15-altruistic-pigs-the-truetown/

Man, the "dead internet" is arriving

@bhawthorne describes his recent experience searching for basic info online -- he looked for the temperature to roast hazelnuts, and got nothing but stochastic-parrot garbage: https://infosec.exchange/@bhawthorne/111601578642616056

He concludes:

"I think it may be time to download an archive copy of the 2022 Wikipedia before we lose all of our reference material. It was nice having all the world’s knowledge at my fingertips for a couple of decades, but that time seems to be past."

I just realized i've never had a red bull

what am I missing?

It's wild looking at all sites you can pay to flood the internet with grey-goo AI-authored articles for SEO

I just hit upon Findable, which says you can "use our no-code product suite to deploy a tonne of pages as quickly as possible": https://www.findable.au/

Deploy a *ton* of pages!

Here's their blog post detailing some of terms they recommend autogenerating stories on: https://www.findable.au/blog/head-terms-for-pseo

None of this is new, but always fascinating to see how *straightforward* they are

I just received a pitch email with the title "Your Writing on Teeth Whitening!"

It begins ...

"Hi Clive,

I’m reaching out to you because I noticed you wrote about teeth whitening in the past. I felt you might be interested in learning about us because we are known to have a best-selling whitening strip product on Amazon and are changing the oral care industry!"

I get a lot of positively *unglued* pitches, but this one made my day

@blogdiva

I am *this* close to starting a blog on it, just so I can make this guy's wish true