Stories of “people finding weird, wild and defiant ways to avoid using AI in their professional lives”. Like: “I keep a to-do list in a paper notebook, but my boss believes I have an AI task-keeping assistant via Claude.”

Crocs Has a Trick for Dodging Taxes: a Tiny Office in Malta. “Come tax season, the Broomfield, Colo., company has claimed that all its global profits were actually earned in this two-person office.” The US is not a serious country.

The Doulas Who Help Us Die. “Instead of assisting in the birthing room or the nursery, end-of-life doulas could keep vigil over people during their last hours, providing comfort and companionship and helping a family find peace.”

Tom Chiarella shares his rules for giving a eulogy.

It may hurt to write it. And reading it? For some, that’s the worst part. The world might spin a little, and everything familiar to you might fade for a few minutes. But remember, remind yourself as you stand there, you are the lucky one.

And that’s not because you aren’t dead. You were selected. You get to stand, face the group, the family, the world, and add it up. You’re being asked to do something at the very moment when nothing can be done. You get the last word in the attempt to define the outlines of a life. I don’t care what you say, bub: That is a gift.

This rule surprised me:

You must make them laugh. Laughs are a pivot point in a funeral. They are your responsibility. The best laughs come by forcing people not to idealize the dead. In order to do this, you have to be willing to tell a story, at the closing of which you draw conclusions that no one expects.

[This is a vintage post originally from Jun 2014.]

Tags: death · how to · timeless posts · Tom Chiarella

NASA has provided some early-stage funding to explore the idea of releasing a swarm of tiny probes (weighing only a few grams each) into Saturn’s rings to study them up close.

So, I’m not exactly sure what this is, but what it appears to be is a fan-assembled album of the recording sessions for Tron: Legacy by Daft Punk & Joseph Trapanese. 67 tracks in this YouTube playlist and 61 tracks from the Internet Archive (not sure of the overlap here…) Some of it sounds just like the 31 tracks from the “Complete Edition” of the soundtrack, some of it is alternate studio takes, and some of it is probably just random bits and bobs from the movie that didn’t make it onto the soundtrack.

Anyway, if you love this album as much as I do, I’ll leave you to explore.

Tags: Daft Punk · Joseph Trapanese · music · Tron Legacy · video

Subaru Socialists and the Great Disappointed. “A whole lot of people under the age of 45 no longer believe that indicators such as wages, unemployment, or the number of college degrees that are handed out…have much to do with a healthy economy.”

If You Haven’t Recently Used Claude Code, You Might Not Understand Where AI Is At. “There’s a huge gulf between a chatbot that’s just putting text into your brain and an agent that uses code to interact with an external environment.”

Socialists Are Winning Because They Listen to People (and don’t just treat them like ATMs). “The best of them are running campaigns that acknowledge that to win, Democrats are going to have to organize voters — not just fund-raise off them.”

Thing that I am now invested in: this woman has spent 30 weeks secretly training to beat her brother (a former competitive player) at Dance Dance Revolution. The showdown is today…

The video rental store as “third place”. “Decades before recommendation algorithms, video stores served as social hubs where conversation and camaraderie became a form of taste-making.”

This image was tweeted out by the NASA Europa Mission account the other day:

One of these images is of Europa, Jupiter’s icy moon, and the other eight are frying pans. Can you pick Europa out? Hint: frying pans tend not to have impact craters.

Update: The photos of the frying pans were taken by Christopher Jonassen, whose work I featured back in 2011 (which I had totally forgotten about). At the time, I even joked about the pans looking like a Jovian moon. kottke.org is a flat circle. (thx, tony)

[This is a vintage post originally from Aug 2015.]

Tags: astronomy · Christopher Jonassen · Europa · Jupiter · NASA · space · timeless posts

The End of Google Search. The internet giant is “changing the formula” of its products and media folks are beginning to assume that there will be no search traffic in the future…and fretting about their survival.

Media Matters: “ABC, CBS, and NBC aired a combined 194 segments about the three major heat events” that hit the US this summer and not a single one of them mentioned climate change. Not one!

Fun little review by Marcin Wichary of a 1984 flying video game called Sopwith, which was never supposed to be released to the public (an event that the game’s creator didn’t learn about until years later).

I love this little video of burbling pasta sauces (sound on). Wish there was a 10-hour YT version for work background noise…

I’d Be Lead Harpooner on the Pequod If It Wasn’t for These DEI Hires. “I’m just telling you that it’s getting hard out there for us blue-collar Nantucket lads when all the ships’ owners are catching the Abolitionist Mind Virus.”

25 things that explain America, including personal injury lawyer advertisements, Crest Whitestrips, Costco rotisserie chicken, and the Pizza Hut lamp. “The T-shirt cannon merges three American obsessions: guns, sports and freebie giveaways.”

This is a completely fantastic look at how the Enigma Machine works. Jared Owen constructed a 3D model of the German cipher device and clearly walks the viewer through how the electricity flows through the machine to scramble and unscramble secret messages.

When electricity travels through one rotor it changes the letter once. But remember, we have three of these rotors and they each have different wirings on the inside. When electricity travels through all three of them it changes the letter three times.

Then at the end, we have the reflector. This also has 26 metal contacts. Inside is more wiring that connects the letters in pairs. So it goes in as one letter and then comes out as another letter.

To the right of here is the input wheel. It has 26 wires that go in and connects to the 26 metal contacts.

Let’s put this all together. Electricity flows through one of the 26 wires, let’s say the wire for the letter Y. Then it gets changed to a different letter at all three rotors. Then it hits the reflector, which again, changes the letter. And then it goes back through the rotors again which changes the letter three more times. And it comes back out on a wire that represents a completely different letter. And if you were counting, this means the letter was changed seven times.

Seriously, this is one of the best explanations I’ve ever seen of anything on YouTube — by the end of it, I was pretty sure I could now build an Enigma Machine if I needed to. (via benn jordan)

Tags: Enigma machine · Jared Owen · video

How Wildfire Smoke Is Reshaping Childhood. “Repeated smoke events are changing children’s daily routines, limiting opportunities for outdoor play and social interaction and reshaping how many families experience summer.”