onfocus

"It’s almost gotten to be boring, the degree to which people believe that what they refer to as “free speech” should not only allow them to say whatever they want (which it does), but should also prevent other people from understanding them to be the sort of person who says those things."

Your periodic reminder that free speech does not mean speech that is free from consequences. I'm sure this mediocre cartoonist will have a career on the right's "victim" circuit. He should be shunned by everyone else for his repulsive racism.

"For generations, members of the Beers family of Canton, Ohio, have used Christian faith to sell health coverage to more than a hundred thousand people like Martin. Instead they delivered pain, debt and financial ruin, according to an investigation by ProPublica based on leaked internal documents, land records, court files and interviews. They have done this not once but twice and have faced few consequences."

Another side effect of our broken US health care system is evil people like these using people's faith and right wing media diet against them to steal money.

We just made Quentin up, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean stories like his aren’t potentially happening everywhere, constantly. Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions.

Sometimes an organization is so cartoonishly evil it takes a comedian to point it out. The Onion nails the tone of the bigoted NYT response to criticism of its reporting on trans issues.

"Bearing all this in mind, our ancestor from 1791 might well conclude that a legal system crafted to protect life and liberty should readily encompass the value of protecting people from being terrorized by gun-possessors with a propensity to physically harm others."

The ridiculous Federalist Society "mission" of interpreting law through a historic lens is only one narrow, misguided way to interpret history. I think it’s clear by now that this history garbage is obfuscation and their mission is enacting authoritarian policies.

"To reach this extraordinary conclusion, the court engaged in the worst version of Drunk History. It went all the way back to the English Militia Act of 1662 (not a typo) and treated us to a recitation of the king’s prerogatives, James II, and Oliver Cromwell, to conclude that the law’s restriction on “dangerous” individuals was not in line with the thinking of the authors of the US Constitution."

Please vote for Democrats so we can have reasonable gun laws in this country and save people’s lives. Republicans are out of control and nothing will change them but repeatedly losing elections.

"A few days later, Marc Benioff said in an interview that he took a 10-day digital detox that included a vacation to French Polynesia after the layoffs announcement."

It sounds really stressful to lay off 7,000 people for no good reason. Glad he got a nice vacation.

"University campuses as well as elementary through high schools, are supposed to be places where students can flourish—places where ideas can be generated and learned. They can’t serve this purpose if they are environments of mortal fear."

We can’t continue to watch this without changing anything.

"How will these smaller groups of happier people be monetized? This is a tough question for the billionaires. Happy people, the kind who eat sandwiches together, are boring. They don’t buy much. Their smartphones are six versions behind and have badly cracked screens. They fix bicycles, then they talk about fixing bicycles, then they show their friend, who just came over for no reason, how they fixed their bicycle, and their friend says, “Wow, good job,” and they make tea. That doesn’t seem like enough to build a town square on."

That sounds delightful, but doesn't scale. I would like to quote every sentence in this piece by Paul Ford. The scattering!

"In another example, an ad for the streaming service Peacock appeared next to a tweet from Anthime Gionet, an influencer known as Baked Alaska, who was recently sentenced for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. The ad appeared next to a tweet where Gionet asked his followers whether he should “say the n-word.”"

Twitter is toxic for people so it's a toxic place to build brands.

"One of the more scary themes in the TV show is that fungi communicate through long filaments. This is true. Fungi communicate by sending electrical impulses underground through thread-like structures (called hyphae). These can expand to form a network. In fact, scientists have found that fungi have at least 50 unique “words.” If we had a fungal pandemic, it could be highly coordinated."

Enjoying this show but not really enjoying learning fungus facts because sometimes I chanterelle the difference between fiction and real life.

"Letting an AI system do this work for you means giving up all of that. It's like sending a robot to do your WestWorld vacation for you, and just sharing the photos it took on your Instagram feed. Behaving in this way is not at all about cheating, it is about missing the whole point. If you care about having clear ideas and becoming better at what you do, you want to be writing."

I don't see anything in this post.

"In 2006, when scientists discovered that H5N1 had not spread easily among humans because it settles deep in their lungs, Kuiken of Erasmus University Medical Center warned that if the virus evolved to bind to receptors in the upper respiratory tract — from which it could become more easily airborne — the risk of a pandemic among humans would rise substantially. The mink outbreak in Spain is a signal that we might be moving along exactly that path."

So this is happening. I really appreciate Zeynep Tufekci's reporting.

"This makes me wonder what it would be like if I decided to take all my API evangelism superpowers and unionize all of the public API developers out there and ask them to stop working for free. Do not sign up for any new APIs. Do not work for free. I don’t care how interesting an API is, your time is too valuable."

The it’s just business! argument doesn’t ring true when companies expect free public work to build private value.

"We have plenty of shower space and time. The metered commodity here is water."

Fascinating slice of life from the land of polar bears.

"Stanford’s communicative infrastructure cannot depend on the judgment of social media companies or volunteer maintainers of servers, and social media is too important for our university to leave on the hands of profit-making enterprises or well-meaning nonprofits."

I think all institutions should be considering this if they believe social media is an important way to communicate.

"And that’s fair because this is new—not just the drug, but the idea of the drug. There’s no API or software to download, but this is nonetheless a technology that will reorder society. I have been the living embodiment of the deadly sin of gluttony, judged as greedy and weak since I was 10 years old—and now the sin is washed away. Baptism by injection."

Paul Ford shares his experience and anxieties taking a newly approved drug that removes hunger.