First Watch just isn’t the same.

Post-it notes. One pack is enough for like a third of the plane.

The US Bureau of Engraving & Printing has a mutilated currency redemption program for just this sort of thing.

https://www.bep.gov/services/mutilated-currency-redemption

Lawful holders of mutilated currency may receive a redemption at full value when:

1. Clearly more than 50% of a note identifiable as United States currency is present, along with sufficient remnants of any relevant security feature; or
2. 50% or less of a note identifiable as United States currency is present and the method of mutilation and supporting evidence demonstrate to the satisfaction of the BEP that the missing portions have been totally destroyed.

The web version of themoviedb.org has been my go-to for a while now. No app though.

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.

Yeah, tech. Updated my original comment to clarify.

Honestly, the bit from the article that rang most accurate was this:

Lastly, it’s possible that many Americans think the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s job opening figures are overstated. For example, some job seekers have reported encountering “ghost jobs” — listings on job platforms that companies are no longer actively hiring for.

I’ve been keeping track of the roles I’ve gone after (well within qualification for) and I’m seeing a lot of re-listings for roles that closed out my application (with no outreach) and just relisted the req after a few weeks, over and over again.

I’m not saying the listings are fake, but if they were fake, this is pretty much what it would look like from the outside.

I have no earthly clue what world economists are living in where the labor market is great.

I’ve been looking for a job for over a year (in tech, over a dozen years as an SDE, a dozen more as a TPM, lead role in both titles). Whenever I can get an employer to actually respond to the hundreds of applications I send, their salary offerings are a joke.

Are people just out there taking 20% - 30% haircuts on what they make?

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.

Three cheers for Evergreen for taking the protest demands seriously and saying “Yeah, ok, that sounds fine.” So everybody went home.

🎵👨🏼‍💼🎶 ➡️➡️➡️

Because there’s less gravity on the moon, time there moves a tad more quickly – 58.7 microseconds every day – compared with on Earth.

I thought time dilation was caused by bodies moving at high speeds relative to one another, not differences in gravity.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_time_dilation

Hey, it’s 6am and I learned something new today. :)

Gender affirming care is professionally administered interventions that help a person live an affirmed life as the gender they most identify with.

In practical terms, it’s a giant-ass flow chart with a bunch of different questions and options that end in a wide array of care options that properly guided individuals and either partake of, or not. Everything from talk therapy, to puberty blockers, to hormone replacement therapy, to physical surgeries on their genitals, to adding or removing breast mass, to changing the configuration of their face. Whatever makes sense to the individual.

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).

Read the article.

Machine learning and interpretative output are tools; just like the automobile, the spreadsheet and photoshop.

The introduction of new tools means there will be fewer people manually doing the things that machines can do more efficiently. The introduction of digital spreadsheets decimated the market for paper bookkeepers, but the need for accountants (people who could utilize the new tools) exploded.

I don’t know enough about modern animation production to speak authoritatively about this, but I’m imagining Katzenberg is talking about jobs like inbetweeners and other kinds of admittedly skilled labor that can be lazily farted out by machines. No QA for lazy productions, QA and varying levels of tweaks for high production value work, and all-by-hand for only the most rare auteur works. And most animated works are in that “lazy production” category. It’s gonna look like shit, everyone who cares will notice, but most of the people buying won’t care.

What this also means is that money will stop flowing to high-manual-effort works. The real creative, ground breaking stuff is going to come from either people utilizing the new tools in new ways, or old established artists who refuse to change (Miyazaki, Bill Plympton, Yuri Norstein & Francheska Yarbusova, etc).

I was a Hey user from the beginning until I learned about how they treat their employees.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22418208/basecamp-all-hands-meeting-employee-resignations-buyouts-implosion

I ditched my account immediately.

It’s only a few years old, but I’ve recently been charmed by Christmas Eve at the Downtown Thrifty-Thrift Store by Jawbone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8_qqVEB2s8

It’s not telling any kind of story, just painting a picture with words and music about tattered and mostly-forgotten things.

( sigh )

Everybody, shut the fuck up.

I read the NCRI-Rutgers report in question. You can, too.

The report’s conclusion states…

Given the research above, we assess a strong possibility that content on TikTok is either amplified or suppressed based on its alignment with the interests of the Chinese Government.

…but the data they present doesn’t prove that statement at all.

The report authors describe their data collection methodology at the top of Page 5 of the report. They state that they’re using each platform’s advertising management system to count the total number of posts/entries that feature a given hash tag, and comparing the counts on one platform to the counts on the other.

Think about that for a second. Those numbers are just aggregates of tagged user posts. To assert that ByteDance is “amplifying” or “suppressing” a given topic, the data would need to show evidence of raw posts in a given category being edited or deleted en mass, or that perhaps the content feeds and searches that each platform provides to its users are being modified to hide or promote posts aligned with specific subjects. The data doesn’t address any of that.

What the data DOES show is how many posts on each platform align with given topics that advertisers have access to. Taken at face value, this data can tell us a lot of interesting things about the users of these particular platforms. For example, TikTok seems to be a lot more into Shakira than Harry Styles. That’s interesting, I guess. Also, Instagram users are making more posts about Uyghurs than TikTok users. That’s also interesting, but that’s not necessarily evidence that ByteDance is suppressing content. What seems more likely is that people who give enough of a shit about Uyghurs to write posts about it aren’t using TikTok.

So ok, fine, let’s get into some deep-data-fuckery hypotheticals:

Could TikTok posts pertaining to topics that the Chinese government has expressed opinions about be being edited or deleted? Maybe. That should be easy enough to collect data on and test.

Could the aggregation of TikTok posts for the advertising/marketing systems be deliberately fudging the numbers by under-counting posts for some topics and/or over-counting for others? Maybe. The data doesn’t prove it. But… why? The function of those advertising systems is to allow marketers to buy ads and figure out costs. Lying about those numbers would mean ByteDance was scamming advertisers. Admittedly, that would be quite a scandal if it were happening, but that’s nowhere near the same thing as the report’s conclusion.

The report’s conclusion is a full-throated statement that ByteDance is tipping the scales in terms of what content is being served to TikTok’s users. This might actually be happening, and it’s absolutely worth investigating, but the evidence in this report does not back up that claim.

Finally, a pro-tip: if you’re skimming a research report and spot the authors misusing the phrase “begging the question”, it’s time to crank up your bullshit detector to maximum.

As originally reported over a week ago by 404 Media: https://www.404media.co/cmg-cox-media-actually-listening-to-phones-smartspeakers-for-ads-marketing/

They’ve actually posted several follow up articles and a podcast about it since then.

Y’all need to start reading my boy Rushkoff:

https://rushkoff.com/books/survival-of-the-richest-escape-fantasies-of-the-tech-billionaires/