Depending on how stoned you’re interested in getting, and your cognitive abilities under the influence, consider Mad Ape Den.

At its core, Mad Ape Den is a writing exercise where you only use words composed of three letters or less:

To bid you a bit of it, the gab may go as so.

Our favorite thing to do is to make a guessing game of it. Have everyone else try to guess something you’ve chosen, describing it using Mad Ape Den. Your turn ends if you mess up and use a longer word. For example:

He is a man, but he is a bat, too.

Batman!

Cars made to be sold and driven in Japan (aka JDM vehicles, for Japanese Domestic Market) can not be imported into the US until they are over 25 years old. This is part of a series of import laws that American vehicle manufacturers lobbied for to keep foreign cars from dominating domestic marketplaces.

The US also has crash test safety standards that domestic cars must meet because a) safety is good, and b) people drive tanks like maniacs. Kei cars used to be pretty awful in crash tests, but have gotten a lot better in recent years.

Regular Car Reviews had some genuine signature insight on this…

https://youtube.com/shorts/DetsWY3e99w

“Yumyumyumyum, these boots taste amazing!”

the fink and the furher

Solid article. I imagine the folks at the cyberwire podcast will be doing more digging over the weekend for a solid summary come Monday.

I CAN FEEL IT

If your employer requires you to have a phone for official use, keep it separate from your personal phone; different device, different number, different networks if possible (ie: only let it join your home’s guest network). Don’t do personal things on your work devices, including logging into personal services, social networks or communication tools.

Obligatory:

I’m Comic Sans, Asshole by Mike Lacher from McSweeney’s Short Imagined Monologues June 15, 2010

I listened to the 404 Media podcast about this yesterday and the author argues that the subject of the article’s ire is intended to be the researchers themselves. Specifically, the bad ethics of testing this integration on non-consenting individuals (even though it was seemingly done with good intent).

Luckily the researchers realized what the fuck they had just made and pivoted the project to being about how to break the integration (ie: opt out of facial recognition systems and freeze your credit score).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

The panopticon is a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control, originated by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single corrections officer, without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched.

Although it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the inmates’ cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched motivates them to act as though they are all being watched at all times. They are effectively compelled to self-regulation. The architecture consists of a rotunda with an inspection house at its centre. From the centre, the manager or staff are able to watch the inmates. Bentham conceived the basic plan as being equally applicable to hospitals, schools, sanatoriums, and asylums. He devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a panopticon prison, so the term now usually refers to that.

Thin steel frame, no air bags, no crumple zones.

Check out the crash tests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roLcNwRi1Sk&t=40s

Periodic office hours are tremendously helpful as well.

Block an hour, once or twice a week, for people to come by an ask you (and your team) about literally anything they want. And open it to everyone at your organization. Have your team stop answering one-off questions and tell people to bring it to office hours.

Team leads and tpms should help with logistics, messaging and hand-slapping.

I worked for Akamai for 7 years.

This is why, if your CDN infra is core to the operation of your business, you make your systems accommodate multi-CDN integration. Cutting one CDN off shouldn’t be significantly difficult, and it comes in handy during contract negotiations. All the major players work this way.

That cable management is horrendous. Pull them out.

The current generation of the ford mustang Mach-e has its mobile telemetry cellular antenna wired to an isolated fuse that you can just pull out to kill it. I was astonished to learn how straight forward the process is supposed to be.

Move on from the dog-murder shit already. Rural and farm animals get killed by their owners. That’s how farms work. Grow the fuck up about it.

Anyone with any practical experience in farming knows that the lives of animals used for service are cheap and are freely killed when they outlast their practical usefulness.

This happens every day. And all the pearl-clutching over this only serves to alienate rural voters who are well-aware of this. And maybe they could be reached with appeals to livable wages, lack of access to viable health care or the autonomy of their own bodies. But framing a “yuck” campaign around the unpleasant truths of rural life drives an empathy wedge between that voter and pearl-clutching “animal loving” city dwellers who adore their dogs and cats and don’t give a second thought to where their hamburgers and chicken nuggets come from.

This is not important. What matters is her legislative history. Working to amend the 14th amendment to define “personhood” as conception, loosening gun control, being an opponent of the Affordable Care Act, supporting Trump’s 2017 Muslim travel ban. These things matter.

Show me your “There is no war in Ba Sing Se!” face.

It’s going to make a really interesting vision-of-tomorrow snapshot that we’ll be able to look back on in a decade or so.

Back around 2000, there was a low budget US political thriller called Deterrence about the son of Saddam Hussein controlling Iraq and threatening to use nukes while the US President is snowed into a Colorado diner during a campaign stop (setting up a ‘in a bottle’ plot scenario). It’s a fine little thriller, but mostly fascinating in terms of its vision of global politics in the near future… right before 9/11.

Mr Robot is going to be like that, right before LLMs and asset generation tools changed everything.

It doesn’t matter if Trump in reality is an insurrectionist

That’s incorrect. It absolutely does matter if the candidate is an insurrectionist. It’s literally the only thing that matters.

Read Section 3 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Section_3:_Disqualification_from_office_for_insurrection_or_rebellion ):

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

The language is deliberately vague here. It doesn’t say a person needs to be convicted of anything, only that they committed the act. Colorado put forth an excellent case that the actions Trump engaged in count as insurrection.

During oral arguments in the court today, the justices hand-waved this aside and changed the subject, asking “what if” questions about them allowing Trump’s removal, speculating that any state could easily gin-up boloney insurrection arguments against any candidate and have them yanked off the ballot. “What would we do then?” they kept asking.

From home, I’m yelling “You do your fucking job.” Let the speculative bullshit charges be made, appealed, heard and rejected for the bullshit that they are, shaming the shit-slinging politicians for wasting the peoples’ time.

That’s a fair point. I was invoking those names as contemporary examples of that caliber of creator. I feel like we’re always going to have a rolling cadre of seasoned top tier talent with the clout to make “we’re doing it THIS WAY” choices. I like Masaaki Yuasa for the next generation of those folks (even if he never really makes anything else himself anymore and just and guides Science Saru).