This is what happens when you don’t vote Dem all the way down the ticket.
Beijing Is Ruining TikTok – The Atlantic
«The world posts on Facebook and Instagram; relatively few outside of China use WeChat or Weibo. TikTok was the exception—a potential goodwill ambassador for China’s rise, cut off at the knees by the hard realities of Chinese authoritarianism.»
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/03/tiktok-bytedance-bill-national-security-risks/677860/?gift=ly-h2TZGdDJyaoFv6n-KaTOG3DDkJfLT5DTcN5Le88s&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
(Gift link.)
Ignore the hate. No one is better prepared than Kamala Harris
Source: https://www.editorialboard.com/ignore-the-hate-no-one-is-better-prepared-than-kamala-harris/
«One thing won’t change, however. That’s public opinion about Kamala Harris. Why? Because — my second point – no one cares about vice presidents! The only people who are paying attention to this one are people who say she was “picked because she was Black and female.” Moreover, if voters know nothing else about her, and they almost certainly know nothing else about her, because no one pays attention to vice presidents, they do know she’s Black and female, and they know that fact very well, because people who say she was “picked because she was Black and female” can’t stop won’t stop talking about it. »
Universities Have a Computer-Science Problem – The Atlantic
(It’s not just universities.)
«Universities are conservative institutions, steeped in tradition. When they elevate computing to the status of a college, with departments and a budget, they are declaring it a higher-order domain of knowledge and practice, akin to law or engineering. That decision will inform a fundamental question: whether computing ought to be seen as a superfield that lords over all others, or just a servant of other domains, subordinated to their interests and control. This is, by no happenstance, also the basic question about computing in our society writ large.
…
An American university is organized like this, into divisions that are sometimes called colleges, and sometimes schools. These typically enjoy a good deal of independence to define their courses of study and requirements as well as research practices for their constituent disciplines. Included in this purview: whether a CS student really needs to learn French.
…
Near the end of our conversation, Isbell mentioned the engineering fallacy, which he summarized like this: Someone asks you to solve a problem, and you solve it without asking if it’s a problem worth solving. I used to think computing education might be stuck in a nesting-doll version of the engineer’s fallacy, in which CS departments have been asked to train more software engineers without considering whether more software engineers are really what the world needs. Now I worry that they have a bigger problem to address: how to make computer people care about everything else as much as they care about computers.»
Elon Musk Keeps Spreading a Very Specific Kind of Racism – Mother Jones
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/03/elon-musk-racist-tweets-science-video/
«“There’s a kind of fusion between old-school gutter racism that everyone can recognize and this new-school Silicon Valley, data-driven analysis. And I think that this is very confusing to people,” said Gusev. “They don’t know what to do with it. They say, ‘Hey, there’s this thing that I recognize as ugly, and then there’s somebody posting a hundred charts that seem to support it.’”»

https://chi2innovations.com/blog/discover-stats-blog-series/graphs-prove-correlation-not-causation/
Granola recipe
Some people have been making granola. I present my sister’s* granola recipe, which in spite of the fact that it’s stellar, I have not made in years.
Granola
Mix in bowl:
3 cups oats
1 cup sliced almonds
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
1/4 cup flaxseeds
Heat, not boil:
6 tblsp honey
6 tblsp oil
1 tsp cardomom
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ( sorta) vanilla
Stir honey mixture into oat mixture
Spread on cookie sheet
Bake on middle rack at 325 about 12-15 min
Flip stuff over and bake 12-15 mom
Scrape
Let cool & stir in dried fruit
Goal: golden brown, not dark, although dark is edible ( voice of
experience)
*She got it from somewhere, but, for me, it will always be “my sister’s granola recipe.”
Adapting David Drake to video
«Vierziger wasn’t wearing body armor; he’d claimed it would interfere with his driving. Now he reached left-handed into one of his tunic’s front bellows pockets and drew out a red-banded grenade that he had no business carrying.
David Drake, Hammer’s Slammers vol. 3, The Sharp End
He struck the safety cap off against the side of the building with casual ease. Malaveda had seen troopers trying to arm a grenade that way, proving how macho they were. He’d never seen anybody succeed so perfectly, and with such little concern, as Vierziger did now.»
How do you put this in a (video) episode of something?
(I keep thinking how this stuff would be so good on Netflix or Amazon.)
Whitmire: Is Katie Britt for real? – al.com
Al.com is teh bomb.
«Britt’s problem is an old one in Alabama politics — she couldn’t be genuine and win. So she chose to be fake.
There might be a simple explanation for Britt’s odd delivery Thursday night: Perhaps she couldn’t believe what she was saying either.
And like so many Alabama politicians before her, she left us asking …
Was she ever real?»
https://www.al.com/news/2024/03/whitmire-is-katie-britt-for-real.html
American Autocracy Threat Tracker
Blech. Really unpleasant reading (and I have given up, at least temporarily), but it’s all here, in one concentrated, smoking lump of evil.
Business Insider: I Used Resume Spammers to Apply for 120 Jobs. Chaos Ensued.
https://www.businessinsider.com/job-applications-hiring-ai-bots-spam-resume-cover-letter-2024-3
Hmm, is this our future?