no joke
It was truly nuts
BTW, after that car’s gas tank exploded, the leaves underneath rapidly spread the fire to the two adjoining cars parked next on either side
Within minutes, they were also in flames
Thankfully the fire department showed up before those two other gas tanks could ignite, so they never blew up
but they were all three completely decimated
@luckytran
Yep — I live a few blocks from this park, and if you want even crazier climate news …
… the city hasn’t cleaned the leaves on the curb of the street for three weeks, and the drought has made them so dry …
… that last week a fire started at 2:30 am in the leaves outside my house, probably a tossed cigarette butt
A leaf fire started; it spread under the car, and ignited the gas tank …
… and the car blew up. I woke up to the WHOOMP
the car was a ball of fire
Here, @pluralistic neatly distills the real problem with Bluesky ...
... which is that, because they don't offer a way to quickly leave *and take all your followers with you*, as Mastodon does ...
... it risks becoming a trap. You spend months, years, building up connections to tons of cool people ...
... and then Bluesky enshittifies, not because of any individual terrible decision, but because of a ton of small forced-hand ones
The essay: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast
Thank you -- I've been meaning to read that for ages, this is tipping me over to doing it
I mean it's not like the overall point -- that moral behavior is heavily influenced by our environment, and so environments/rules/jobs that encourage and endorse horrid behavior and power-wielding will *produce* horrid behavior -- is wrong
But the balance of understanding got decisively tipped away from probing and investigating the role and lure and satisfaction of cooperation in human affairs
It's interesting to think about what was going on, culturally, in this period of the mid-to-middle 20th century, that all these theories of "the horrible, selfish, violent people that lurk within us" gained such currency
WWI and WWII, certainly, but there's got to be a lot of factors at play in why these theories grew so big and loomed so high
5/5
And I'm thinking also of game theory -- which, when it emerged in the early-to-mid 20th century, predicted that people would behave as selfish maximizers
But when they started testing the theory with real people, it didn't work that way
real people were as liable to cooperate and give a fair shake to their supposed competitors
4/x
There's also "Lord of the Flies", which came out in 1954, and cemented the idea that young boys -- when removed from the moral guardrails of proper British society -- would become absolute terrors to one another
But when this happened in reality -- when six boys were marooned on a remote island for 15 months -- they all cheerfully banded together and co-operated, including carefully tending for one boy who broke his leg, while it healed: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months
3/x
More evidence -- this time with audio tapes from the original experiment -- showing that the Stanford Prison Experiment was rigged to encourage terrible behavior by the guards
In Medium: https://gen.medium.com/the-lifespan-of-a-lie-d869212b1f62
Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/K7gMN
Talking about this with my son, I was struck by how many pieces of major science/theory/culture in the mid-20th-century insisted that they "proved" humanity was inherently, natively selfish -- but turned out to be much less true
1/x
Check out the work of the anti-Trump PAC that is placing ads on porn sites warning that "Trump and Vance's Project 2025 will ban porn," adding "enjoy it while you can"
Turns out doing political advertising on porn sites is not only pretty cheap, but you can target swing states easily and be assured of reaching a lot of young men who are, statistically, likely Trump voters
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/01/nx-s1-5168877/2024-election-pac-trump-porn-sites
Project 2025 mentions banning porn on page 5 of the intro: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/project-2025-porn-ban-lgbtq-transgender-rcna161562
Behold the work of Darya Kawa Mirza, a self-taught Kurdish photographer who produces astonishingly detailed pictures of the moon ...
... by zooming in close on individual tiny craters, taking over 80,000 shots of those, then compositing them together into individual, incredibly detailed landscapes
Item #1 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free to read and subscribe to here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-26-cryptophasia-wigner-crystals-and-how/
Behold a custom-made 21-segment LED that uses a font design from 1898
Item #14 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free to read and subscribe to here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-25-the-third-thumb-prairie-strips-and/
This letter written by Charles Babbage in 1840 is fascinating ...
... since it appears to be his earliest ever attempt to describe computational recursion in plain language
He *had* to use plain language -- the very concepts he was struggling to enunciate didn't yet have names
As Bruce Sterling puts it, this passage is “a breathless, painful description of the unique ability of software to operate on itself”
Item #12 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-25-the-third-thumb-prairie-strips-and/
Mastodon hive-mind!
I require your assistance
I'm wondering -- what was the first American song written about the problems of becoming famous as a singer/performer? Of the hassles of fame, of life on the road, etc?
When did this become a subject matter of songwriters and performers?
Please boost, the more brains on this one the better
"If you are a weatherperson, you’re a target. The same goes for journalists, election workers, scientists, doctors, and first responders. These jobs are different, but the thing they share is that they all must attend to and describe the world as it is. This makes them dangerous to people who cannot abide by the agonizing constraints of reality"
Charlie Warzel on the flood of hurricane-related bullshit
What’s happening in America today is something darker than a misinformation crisis.
The Atlantic (www.theatlantic.com)
Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/PhRvu
oooooooo nice
