davidcarlton

[davidcarlton]

A good deal for good books.

[davidcarlton]

This makes Dubai and the United Arab Emirates sound pretty neat; I didn’t know basically any of this stuff.

[davidcarlton]

Neat - they use vibrations from the motion sensor in your phone to figure out when your train is moving and use that plus other information to figure out what station your train is arriving at or moving to.

[davidcarlton]

I mean, yeah, strictly speaking nature has no freaks; every species that exists, belongs; everything is a product of evolution and Life’s Rich Pageant, yadda yadda.  But the Portuguese man-o’-war  — Physalia physalis, for you biologists — is honestly kinda freaky.  Because Physalia is a colonial organism. What this means: a single Portuguese man-o’-war is composed of four or five separate animals.  (We’re not actually sure how many.)  One animal is the balloon-sail-thingy on top; another is the stinging tentacles; another is the digestive system; another is the gonads.  And they’re completely distinct organisms. How this happens: when a Physalia egg is fertilized, it starts dividing, like every other fertilized egg.  But pretty quickly it breaks apart into two and then more distinct embryos — genetically identical, but physically separate.  And those embryos develop into completely different creatures.  Then, later in development, those creatures re-attach to form a single Frankenstein organism.  The various parts have their own nervous systems, which don’t seem to connect. Here’s an analogy: imagine that before birth, you are identical twins.  But instead of growing into two babies, one twin grows into a bodiless head, the other into a headless body.  Then just before birth they stick together, but they don’t actually merge back into one.  No, going forward you are a bodiless head glued on top of a headless body, ever after.  It’s kind of like that.

Occasional Paper: Four Hidden Species of Portuguese man-o’-war — Crooked Timber

Wow.

[davidcarlton]

Identity has many components. For my part, I identify as an American, a Texan, a liberal, a rabbit keeper, a writer, a nerd, a PhD holder, a science fiction fan, a Jew, a white person, a Lithuanian-American, and so on.3 If politicians primarily spoke to me as part of the “Jewish community”, I would be annoyed, because I don’t necessarily want to be defined by that component of my identity. I don’t reject it, but I don’t want to be reduced to it either. And if politicians tried to appeal to me with policies targeted through Jewish organizations to benefit Jews, I would simply not care. In fact, I would be a little conflicted about accepting any of those benefits, since it would pigeonhole me into prioritizing an identity that exists as only one component among many. Even more fundamentally, being constantly minoritized — being told to think of myself as a Jew first and as an American second — would pressure me to shrink the circle of people that I consider part of my own in-group. Because I think of myself as an American first and foremost, I feel like there are 330 million other people who share my primary identity — 330 million people on my “team”. But if I were to think of myself first and foremost as a Jewish person, that would shrink my in-group to only 16 million, almost none of whom live near me. It would make me feel more isolated, and might even cause me to start questioning whether the 323 million non-Jewish Americans who live all around me have my best interests in mind. In other words, being set apart from your fellow countrymen and neighbors is generally not a desirable thing, even if the reason is to put you on a pedestal. I suspect many Hispanic Americans feel the same way. Talking to Hispanic folks (remember, I’ve lived most of my life in either Texas or California) and reading books like The Diversity Paradox, The New Americans?, and The Great Demographic Illusion, it seems clear that most would like to think of themselves as regular Americans — not to give up or forget their national origins or ethnic identity, but to prioritize their American-ness. The progressive movement of the 2010s told us that this was a bad thing. “Assimilation” became a dirty word in progressive circles, and the University of California told their faculty not to call the U.S. a “melting pot”. The implicit assumption was that given the choice, people would like to prioritize their racial and ethnic identities, and that only forcible conformity pressure from American institutions — or from White people — was preventing people of color doing that. The Democratic party’s embrace of identity politics — its habit of targeting racial “communities” with encouraging rhetoric and specific material benefits — was seen as a way to counteract the pressures of assimilation.

Identity politics isn't working - by Noah Smith

(Doing a longer quote because I think the full thing is behind a paywall?  Another interesting bit was where he talked about outsiders assigning labels for ethnic groups, with “Latinx” as the specific example there - so it’s not just that you’re being put in a box, you don’t even get to decide yourself what the label is for the box that you’re being put in.)

[davidcarlton]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2023/cleveland-downtown-empty-offices-transform/

Yay Cleveland.

[davidcarlton]

Yay Cleveland.

[davidcarlton]

Ciabatta (/tʃəˈbɑːtə, -ˈbæt-/, Italian: [tʃaˈbatta]; lit. 'slipper')[1] is an Italian white bread created in 1982[2][3] by a baker in Adria, province of Rovigo, Veneto, in response to the popularity of French baguettes.

Ciabatta - Wikipedia

1982?!

[davidcarlton]

The feud between WP Engine and Matt Mullenweg, WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO, recently came to a head when the web hosting service sued the latter, accusing him of "abuse of power, extortion and greed." In a new blog post, Mullenweg said his opponent's attacks on him and his company have been effective enough so that "a good chunk of [his] Automattic colleagues disagreed with [him and his] actions." As a response, he created a "buy-out package" that offered employees $30,000 or six months of salary, whichever is higher, if they resign. A total of 159 people, or 8.4 percent of the company, took the offer.

159 employees leave WordPress founder's company after extortion lawsuit

[davidcarlton]

In a client/server world, be the client http, desktop, or mobile, I see developers spend a lot of time using the client for their own wicked non-customer purposes. They want to see a flow, or double-check that their code does what they think it does. They want to check that their new code is really being called. They want to show something to another developer or a manager. They want to do developer stuff. They want to do stuff developers want to do, and that is the crux of the problem: The shipping app is tuned to the needs of a customer, not the needs of a developer. When a developer tries to use some version of the shipping app to do developer stuff, because that app isn’t tuned to their needs, a lot of wasted time, repetitive activity, and endless wait-states and lag cause them to work much more slowly than they might.

Basic Concepts of the “Making App” – GeePawHill.org

Interesting idea.

[davidcarlton]

Car makers in Europe are being encouraged to stop using touchscreens for basic functions like turn signals and wipers in an attempt to promote safer driving. As reported by the Times, the European New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) — an independent and well-regarded safety body for the automotive industry  — is set to introduce new rules in January 2026 that require the vehicles it assesses to have physical controls to receive a full five-star safety rating.

Vehicles need fewer screens and more buttons, says EU automotive body - The Verge

Yay.  Been a decade and a half since we’ve last bought a car, and this is one of the things I’d been worried about for the next time we have to do that.

[davidcarlton]

Juice it or lose it - a talk by Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho

Neat talk.

[davidcarlton]

Neat podcast interview about owls.

[davidcarlton]

NisshokuNatsuko - Water flow Rock / THE FIRST TAKE

I do like Nisshoku Natsuko.

[davidcarlton]

Interesting read, I didn’t know about this.

[davidcarlton]

I’d been wondering what was going on with those notices that had been showing up, but I assumed that there was at least something behind them; sounds like total bullshit, sounds like Matt Mullenweg doesn’t really want to be running an open source project any more?  In retrospect, I feel like I’d been hearing some stories about him behaving oddly over the last year, I wonder what’s going on...

[davidcarlton]

Here is a mini-meditation guide with the aim of achieving a better relationship with the sometimes-difficult fact of existence, of being alive in the world.

matthewseiji - "Enlightenment in a Post, or, How to Feel Less Bad"

This is a good intro to a form of meditation, and explanation of why you might want to do it.