Tonight the 2024 NFL season kicks off, and with that one of the best time of the year with the MLB pennant races in progress leading up to the World Series while hockey and basketball season begins in October.
@JohnPhilpin Agree, being Gen X I appreciate the somewhat historical references. You know it didn't happen that way, but it it didn't, right?
@manton Alexa is basically a sales bot. The most useful use case for me is package notifications. The only reason why I have one is that I bought the very first Echo when it was first released, but I mostly use Google Home for my home automation assistance.
A nice autumn evening in southeast Michigan. In August.
Daniel Miessler suggests replacing the phrase “Artificial Intelligence” with “Intelligence Tasks.” The explanation he provides for what are Intelligence Tasks does a good job of describing how this new technology is more than automation. I recommend reading and saving this article.
A Weinermobile rolls over on a U.S. freeway, oh the humanity!
Starting a virtual walk of the John Muir Trail.
Today I completed walking the 535 mile distance of the Camino de Santiago, tracked in the Walk The Distance app.
@danielpunkass That and the "northern" coast of Lake Michigan along the Upper Peninsula between St. Ignace and Manistique on US-2. There is a reason why they are the Great Lakes!
@ReaderJohn Which Christianity, Constantine or Jesus? I think the Christianity that 90% of the world knows is of Constantine, which is why I think any notion of "Christian Nationalism" is really just it's true nature. We also need to gain a better of understanding of what is religion, which is that to which we bind our identities to. The real problem is too much religion and religion that is used by the Powers to build and maintain power. All of this is within a context of what is the normalcy of civilization and our ultimate evolutionary threat.
@ReaderJohn I am irritated by them to the point of saying that MLB should reinstate Pete Rose.
@numericcitizen @ner3y Before there were ICQ numbers there were CompuServe numbers. 73217,351.
@KimberlyHirsh Regarding using an LLM with your blog as source, I have done this with Google’s Notebook LM, notebooklm.google.com. Provide the URLs of your blog archive pages as web sources.
@numericcitizen The new Logitech Keys-To-Go looks appealing, if you haven't heard of it. ir.logitech.com/press-rel...
@jsonbecker Justices don't seat without Senate approval. Whether or not Biden wins, the Senate is extremely important.
@manton At the root of 2016 election is hubris. I don’t think Hilary and the Democrats took Trump seriously nor did they recognize the real state of the Republican Party.
@jsonbecker I think there needs to be less focus on the President and more on the Senate and Supreme Court, which is where the real carnage is being done. No law gets passed and no Justice gets seated without 60 senate votes.
@patrickrhone What may be more important than POTUS is the Senate. No law, SCOTUS appointment, or impeachment conviction happens without 60 votes in the Senate.
@Denny Problem is, too many of us what to talk of America is if it were a separate thing, when it is us! However, given that we find it acceptable and good for one to profit from the suffering of others within our own country, why should we expect anything different in how we view actions outside our country?
@paultibbetts Any of the bloggers here provide interesting things to read: frankmcpherson.blog/other-blo...
@rickcogley It was already installed when I started working at the place in '90, was run for terminals and "word processors." The cable could have been run in the '70s or early '80s.
@rickcogley I am old enough to have created a similar pile of coax cables to make room for that stuff in the picture.
@numericcitizen The decisions Apple has made are not just technology architecture decisions, but also business decisions. It's not worth it to Apple to allocate FTEs (or percentages thereof) to developing these "missing" apps because they being missing is not preventing sales.
@manton I've never really thought of micro.blog in terms of federation. Micro.blog to me is really an integration of what one traditionally calls blogging (this be the hosted blogs) and what one traditionally calls social networks (this be the micro.blog timeline and discover).
For me micro.blog is and has always been the "thing" that Dave Winer is trying to do now with a reboot of blogrolls, but I think the micro.blog approach is the better option. And honestly, the "micro" part really means titleless because there is no limit to how much I type in a timeline post.
The micro.blog timeline is my main social network. I have accounts on other socials, but I don't participate in them to the extent I do here.
@ReaderJohn It does feel like the United States is still battling the root question over which the civil war was fought. Are we a single country or a commonwealth/confederation/union (like European Union) of states? The former requires common principles and tolerance the later allows "divorce" when states cannot tolerate each other. Problem is, while the Constitution has provisions for joining the union, it does not have any for leaving.
@toddgrotenhuis I enjoyed it but I am pre-disposed so because I am in agreement in what I think the author is implying that "empire" is short hand for the norm of civilization, and all nation/states perpetuate this norm. The author is explicit in saying the state of Israel is just the current empire occupying the land that historically has been known as Palestine. In my opinion the author correctly identifies empire, this norm of civilization, as the root problem, as Jesus did through his alternative way of civilization he called the "kingdom of God" or "reign of God." As such while the book is specifically about the state of Israel and the Palestinians, I think it is also applicable to us in the U.S. and anyone around the world. Note the book was written some time ago, so obviously none of the current events are included.
@ReaderJohn All volunteer also includes mercenaries, which is another can of worms. One would hope a draft would cause citizens to be more critical about the military actions we take abroad and put pressure on politicians, but I am not sure how successful that was with Vietnam.
@manton I define long form posts as posts with titles and I tend to think of them as essays. I personally struggle with where to write/host essays. Some times I write them on micro.blog and other times I write them and host them in Drummer and link to them from a micro.blog post.
The reason why I haven't settled on writing and hosting essays in micro.blog is that I don't really like having the entire content of an essay appear in the main page of my blog site. I prefer that essays can be their own page with their own URL and I could automatically write a lede to the essay and have that appear in the main blog page.
I know I could use pages in micro.blog but they aren't integrated well, in my opinion, with micro.blog. I think they exist for reasons other than writing, such as the photos page on my site: frankmcpherson.blog/photos/.
I do like the Essays category that I have on my site that is "generated" from a filter of posts with titles. See frankmcpherson.blog/categorie... I just would prefer not not have the entire content of an essay, such as frankmcpherson.blog/2024/02/0... appear in the main blog page frankmcpherson.blog.
Honestly, this one thing of how micro.blog treats titled posts amounts to my one wish for change of a 99.999% perfect product.
@patrickrhone Get off my lawn!