Notices by Eric A. Meyer (meyerweb@mastodon.social)

In every relationship there is one person who loads the grocery belt like a Scandinavian architect, and one who loads it like a racoon on crystal meth.

It’s really uncanny how much Nancy Mace sounds like Nancy Grace.

@brad_frost This is how meyerweb.com is run; my way to do that is everything outside WP is static files with SSIs for header/footer inclusion, plus the occasional PHP page where I need some kind of local computation. It’s kind of soothing to open up an SFTP client (Transmit for me) and just edit stuff directly, honestly.

News today that in his will, Henry Kissinger directed funds should be spent to erect a monument to him in Arlington National Cemetery.

Entire sections of Arlington already stand as a monument to your work, Henry. That will have to suffice.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/11/05/henry-kissingers-final-monumental-request-00187290

Billionaire Peter Thiel once wrote that “capitalist democracy” is an “oxymoron”, and as the years go by and my experience of the world continues to grow, I find myself in agreement with him.

Where we diverge is that he would resolve this incompatibility by sacrificing democracy, whereas I would go the other way.

“Scientists have concluded that widespread physical distancing and masking practiced during the early days of COVID-19 appear to have pushed B/Yamagata into oblivion.

“This surprised many who study influenza, as it would be the first documented instance of a virus going extinct due to changes in human behavior, said Dr. Rebecca Wurtz, an infectious disease physician and epidemiologist…”

**The flu shot is different this year, thanks to COVID**: https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/10/17/nx-s1-5155104/flu-shot-vaccine-b-yamagata-extinct

For more details on how this came to be and some well-deserved thanks, please see my blog post: https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2024/10/10/design-for-real-life-online-for-free-and-on-sale-for-money/

Hey, everyone! “Design for Real Life” is now available online, in full, for free, at https://dfrlbook.com. It’s all the same content Sara Wachter-Boettcher and I wrote in 2016, but now it’s free for everyone. (If you’d like your own paper or electronic copy, there’s a “Buy the book” page on the site.) Read, share, spread the word—thanks!

Can’t be too careful, I guess #wordpress

So… O’Reilly sent me email today hyping up how my books (really, just the one, I assume) is going to be AI-translated into Spanish and German, with other languages to follow. This was probably inevitable, but I still have concerns.

First: are there no human translators of these languages?

Second: who’s going to proof-read all 1,126 pages to make sure nothing got botched, especially given the technical nature of the content? The readers? Which isn’t even crowd-sourcing: it’s customer-sourcing.

I should probably rethink the placement of these on my desk.

Guy who invited the Taliban to Camp David on 9/11 shows up to 9/11 memorial ceremony to have partisans loudly politicize event; nobody shocked, most disgusted.

@sarajw @eaton FYI, @molly0xfff uses some really nice sidenotes in her online newsletter; not sure if she’s written up how they’re done, but I imagine the Web Inspector will reveal much. See, as an example, https://www.citationneeded.news/coinbase-campaign-finance-violation/ .

I just saw J D Vance called a “broligarch-funded shillbilly” and I can only wish I could write half so well ☠️

📘📰 With the closure of A Book Apart, “Design for Real Life” is now fully in Sara’s and my hands, so we’ve slashed the price on both the print and ebook editions while we work on long-term plans for the book. Find out more on Der Blögenator: https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2024/07/22/design-for-real-life-news/

@annika @zvava I feel like advocating for the construction of a particle collider very much makes you an accelerationist HEY-OHHHH

I just saw someone characterize running a Mastodon instance as being “no harder than running your own mail server” and I thought “off, that’s a savage takedown” before grasping that they meant it as a positive.

“Well, when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
—Richard Nixon, 1977; The FedSoc Six, 2024

To all the fathers who have lost a child or children—whether before they were born, or hours or days or years after—you are seen today and every day. What you have suffered is indescribable and I am so sorry you have had to endure it.

HOLY SHIT HE RAN THE TABLE