Flutterby™! (short)

As campus administrators across the country are solidly positioning themselves on the wrong side of history, I'm reminded of my Dad, who had a stint in the army that he actually really enjoyed (he was in Germany along the Iron Curtain and didn't re-up because Vietnam was finally catching up with him), observing that when his peers were protesting, he was enlisting, and that he should have been protesting.

Seriously, if anyone has recommendations for USB-C power cables that last any amount of time, please mention them. I'm, down to one 3' long one that I bought because it was $20 vs the $15 for the other ones, the original Apple one died, the magsafe connector on this M2 MBP seems to have died, and I'm sick of shoveling money down the USB-C hole.

Ed Zitron: The Man Who Killed Google Search. TLDR: They took the ex-McKinsey guy who ran Yahoo! search into the ground and let him degrade search so that people would spend more time looking at ads.

Hacker News thread, linked to because it's rare to see that many comments about a Google personality, with nobody stepping up to defend him.

MeFi thread

Oh that's A powerful observation: "It’s the first time the police have been invited onto Columbia’s campus since 1968. Like 1968, 2024 may go down as an inauspicious year for university administrations trying to defend the indefensible."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/april/at-columbia

Email from Chevrolet informs me that "Dan, there’s a world of tech in Blazer EV", and... no, I work with this stuff, let's limit that tech as much as possible...

For all of the horrible things McKinsey has done to the US, this feels an awful lot like taking down Al Capone via tax fraud, but I'll take it: McKinsey Faces US Criminal Probe Over Opioids Work, Sources Say

Not sure if "8 Cheese Pizza" means like 7 bladed razor, or "we had leftovers and a grater" or ... But that many seems excessive for a blend.

Charles Buhler's "reactionless drive" is making the rounds again, just as the reviews of all of these half-baked cell phones that talk to "AI assistants" are starting to come out. This morning it's The Verge talking about the Rabbit R1, in the wake of all of the hullabaloo over Marques Brownlee's review of the Humane AI pin titled "The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed... For Now" (YouTube).

And I'm reminded of that thing where it's useful to look at "what's the enabling technology here?". If Buhler's right, space travel is the absolutely least interesting thing about what he's pushing. If a company has developed interesting "AI assistant" technology, carrying around another device is the least interesting part of that.

A few years ago I was thinking "well, I could learn to play another instrument, or I could use my voice to generate MIDI", so I went looking for those technologies, and holy shit the number of people who were selling plugins that promised to do that, but bundling it with a cheap USB mic, were legion (especially once I triggered the Facebook ad demons). And, of course, none of them found any third party who'd credibly say "yeah, this works".

Anyway, wish more "AI" reviewers would do head-to-heads against the current state of Siri or Alexa.