clive

clive, 10 days ago (edited 10 days ago) to random

People of Mastodon!

I'm researching the growth of ebikes ...

... in cities around the US

I've talked to many people who love them!

But also want to include the perspective of folks who have concerns ...

... i.e. about the speed and weight of ebikes in accidents with pedestrians or other cyclists, and the like

If anyone has thoughts they wanna share, ping me! I'm all ears: clive@clivethompson.net

Pass this along if you know anyone else with perspective they want to share

#fedibikes

clive, 5 months ago to random

I just realized i've never had a red bull

what am I missing?

clive, 8 months ago to random

"Let's Stop Calling It 'Content''

I first starting noticing the word "content" in the late 90s

Companies looking to put writing, animation, video or art on their web sites would call it "content"

It flattened innumerable forms of culture into a sort of goo, extruded from a tube

25 years on, the term "content" has metastasized, eating whole the way many people talk about -- think about -- culture.

Let's stop now

My essay: https://clivethompson.medium.com/lets-stop-calling-it-content-8410bf5f94a9

A free link: https://clivethompson.medium.com/lets-stop-calling-it-content-8410bf5f94a9?sk=7a2668c44c31a4359876cfcd25a5f2d0

clive, 5 months ago to random

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 😅

clive, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to random

Why are so many American pedestrians being killed by car-drivers at night?

Fascinating piece in the New York Times (free link here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/11/upshot/nighttime-deaths.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FE0.uEMf.FuV3jZhYzZHu&hpgrp=k-abar&smid=url-share) on this question

After years of decline, the number of pedestrians killed by drivers began to rise in 2008 -- but only at night

No-one's quite sure why

Embiggified vehicles don't seem to be the cause ...

... though distracted driving does seem to be part of it

Also: more people living alongside massive highway-esque suburban roads

clive, 6 months ago to random

"The Laptop That Wouldn't Die"

In a few of my blog posts on right-to-repair culture, I've mentioned my 12-year-old Thinkpad T420

It is: indestructible

My six-year-old Macbook Pro just died, so I'm using the thinkpad while I await a replacement

This Thinkpad has outlived two of my top of the line Macbooks

It was built when my eldest son was six ... he's now in college

And it's still going

My ode to it: https://clivethompson.medium.com/the-laptop-that-wont-die-0c478c3fe46c

Free "friend" link: https://clivethompson.medium.com/the-laptop-that-wont-die-0c478c3fe46c?sk=dc587d3647aa02107f8b447e01d095f9

clive, 3 months ago to random

I'm reading Janette Sadik-Khan's "Street Fight" -- her book about her time as transportation head of NYC, building bike lanes, bikeshare, and pedestrian avenues

She prints this "city of the future" model from the 1939 World's Fair

Massive highways circling mammoth buildings; virtually no non-car routes; hilariously few trees

I'd love to read about: How did this become the vision of "the future" back in 1939?

What are some good books on that? Any recommendations, I'm all ears!

clive, 8 months ago to random

So, I founded a rock band last year, "Lipstick Driver"

It's loud

REALLY loud

And I was a fool who didn't wear hearing protection, so ...

... I got tinnitus! Wheeee

My essay about it all: https://clivethompson.medium.com/musicians-protect-your-ears-aa782825f9b0

A "friend" link in case you're not a subscriber to Medium: https://clivethompson.medium.com/musicians-protect-your-ears-aa782825f9b0?sk=baf68e0ff7aff0bb737d6afe2e69bd2f

clive, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to random

I repeat this anecdote a lot so forgive me if you've heard it, but ...

... my Ukrainian-Canadian grandfather ran his dairy farm using a 1960s-era truck ...

which was by today's standards tiny: Lower-slung, small cab

But!

It was more usable than today's monstrosities

It had a longer bed than today's trucks; being lower-slung made loading/unloading easier

Again: He ran a whole-ass farm with this vehicle; drove over rough terrain

Few people need today's bloated, paramilitary trucks

clive, 6 months ago to random

“The Literary Style of Alt-Text”

For years, I didn’t add alt-text to my online images

But I’ve started doing it all the time now — being on Mastodon is what showed me how important it is!

Along the way, I’ve started noticing …

…. what an oddly literary activity it is

Here’s an image I wrote alt-text for when I blogged a few weeks ago, below

My essay on alt-texting: https://clivethompson.medium.com/the-literary-style-of-alt-text-9f1595cd8f0c

A free “friend” link in case you don’t subscribe to Medium: https://clivethompson.medium.com/the-literary-style-of-alt-text-9f1595cd8f0c?sk=1d9cd685997cb08d8909da687a2d03cf

A screenshot of a story written by the author, describing how he wrote alt-text for the attached photo. I reads: And at first I just wrote a simple description, something like "a cyclist going down the street." Then I added more details, including that the cyclist is in the center of the picture, and behind them are a bus stop and a brightly lit store, and that the cyclist is moving quickly. But as I was writing that last clause - "the cyclist is moving quickly" - I realized something curious about the composition of the photo: The cyclist is crisp, while the background is blurred. That's not an easy effect for the photographer to achieve! And it' precisely what gives the image its power. So I wound up writing the alt-text thusly ... “A cyclist going rapidly down a city street. The photo is taken from the side, and the cyclist is in the center of the image, heading towards our right. In behind the cyclist we see a bus stop and a brightly lit store. Interestingly, despite the fact that the cyclist is moving quickly, they are unblurred and crisp in the photo - while the background is blurred. The ultimate effect is curious: It's as if the store were moving quickly, while the cyclist was standing still” One could critique this alt-text for being too damn long. Fair enough! And there's something a bit narcissistic about me focusing on the internal experience I have while puzzling over how best to describe this image.

clive, 8 months ago to random

I was just thinking about how hilarious it was that in the original superman comics he was a reporter for a newspaper

That really dates things, doesn’t it?

It’s been so long since I read the comic that I’m wondering …

Did he ever … write anything? Did the comic, with any frequency, describe stories he’d filed, the reception of them … the execution of his job, as it were?

there have got to be Superman experts on Mastodon who know the answer to this question 😂

clive, 1 year ago to random

I built this tool a year ago but I feel like Mastodon folks would like it

The "Weird Old Book Finder"

Type in a search query, and it'll find one randomly-chosen public-domain book that matches the query -- and present it for immediate reading: https://weird-old-book-finder.glitch.me

Why only one book? To prevent the paradox of choice! Just start readin'

Can't promise every book will be weird, but most are

A longer essay on how/why I developed it: https://debugger.medium.com/a-search-engine-that-finds-you-weird-old-books-3a74fbb5f3d4

This was a search for "mastodon"

clive, 6 months ago to random

A bot that automatically does stock trades …

… by identifying trades being done by US politicians …

… who probably have inside (I.e. and thus basically illegal-to-act-upon) knowledge of market-moving government info …

… and doing the same trades

He’s up 20% since May 2022

https://www.threads.net/@quiverquantitative/post/CzcB-Gsgqow/?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

clive, 6 months ago to random

Can you imagine the conversations going on right now in all the startup companies that built their product on top of ChatGPT?

I don't mean to mock or belittle any of them -- some of those services are good, some are just a layer of html/css/javascript dirt on top of OpenAI

But it really shows the risks of building a company entirely on top of someone else's product

clive, 7 months ago to random

Google search is getting so bad it almost makes me wish someone would mount an old-school Yahoo!-style site again

Hand-crafted taxonomized guide to what's online

https://boingboing.net/2023/10/27/google-returning-ai-nonsense-in-search-highlights.html

clive, 10 months ago to random

When I get some time free I'm gonna program a version of Pac-Man where you play as the fruit

Tight close-up on the part of the maze where you appear

When you appear, you have no control over anything

All you do is wait

And wonder

If you're going to get eaten

You can hear, in the distance, the sounds of the game; see the ghosts go by; hear the approach of Pac-Man, hear him fade further away

If you don't get eaten in that round, you score one point

If you do get eaten, the game's over

clive, 6 months ago to random

How much better designed are Airpods than knockoff brands?

Lumafield took CT scans of them all to see

Their verdict: Apple's engineering is much more tightly packed -- allowing for bigger and possibly safer batteries, and better-quality audio components

(I'm still afraid to buy them because I know I'll immediately lose them 😅 )

Item #3 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter: https://buttondown.email/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-13-17th-century-chatgpt-the-merovingian/

clive, 22 days ago to random

As I behold "Crush!", the new Apple ad for their Ipad Pro ...

... I fluctuate, with heisenbergian indeterminacy, between "they are clearly trolling us" and "they are totally earnest and have no idea how completely sociopathic they appear"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntjkwIXWtrc

clive, 10 months ago to random

Every time someone talks to ChatGPT for 20 exchanges or so ...

... Microsoft's servers use a half-liter of freshwater to cool down

AI is thirsty

My essay on some implications of this: https://clivethompson.medium.com/ai-is-thirsty-37f99f24a26e

A "friend" link, in case you don't subscribe to Medium: https://clivethompson.medium.com/ai-is-thirsty-37f99f24a26e?sk=f5b2ea10c649a34236577139fecfd86a

clive, 5 months ago to random

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

clive, 7 months ago to random

"A Gloriously Fixable Laptop, Pt. 2"

In which I continue my blubbering praise for the Framework laptops ...

... observing how folks who've owned an older model can, with trivial ease, put in a whole damn new processor to make it run faster

In like 15 minutes

This is how all laptops should be

My essay: https://clivethompson.medium.com/a-gloriously-fixable-laptop-pt-2-53d7c2fd3fb9

A free "friend" link in case you're not a Medium subscriber: https://clivethompson.medium.com/a-gloriously-fixable-laptop-pt-2-53d7c2fd3fb9?sk=f1d5b7714dc00c4c33cd1c57be15b6da

clive, 3 months ago to random

Fantastic -- if super-distressing -- article by Gisele Navarro about the horrible state of product reviews online

The tl;dr is that Google seems to overweight reviews from longstanding big journalism brands ...

... but many of those brands, like Popular Science, were long ago bought up by private equity or conglomerates, then hollowed out ...

... so they now produce crappy articles that are probably lying about their "test labs" to please Google

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

Read it! So good

clive, 5 months ago to random

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

clive, 5 months ago to random

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."

clive, 9 months ago to random

“Clive” is a kind of weird name in the US

Every so often, a service worker asks if my name is pronounced “C-Live”

As if I were a DJ or something

I’m tempted to roll with it