No Scroll November | alternative

Quite easy. Don’t visit youtube, any social media — facebook, twitter, instagram and so on; leave aside youtube (be honest, that one valuable video is surrounded by over a dozen useless crappy montages), espeacially avoid tik-tok and other reels-based shit; confront yourself with your porn addiction and stop it; use SMS to prompt communication (with Short Messages, nomen omen) — don’t write endless streams of consiousness on Messenger, Whatsup etc. Just don’t use any scroll-based app or site.

Maybe. It could be time for a scrolling cleanse.

Happy Mountain Goats day to those celebrating! (Wait, there was another popular album coming out today?!)

Amazon ditched plastic mailers in one US fulfillment center - The Verge

Amazon is fulfilling a small part of its promise to switch from using plastic bubble mailers and air pillows to all recyclable paper packaging for its shipments. The company announced that it has outfitted one facility in Euclid, Ohio, with an upgraded packaging machine that can automatically fold custom-fit boxes to wrap some products, use paper mailers for small items, and slide in paper fillers instead of plastic ones in standard boxes.

At Amazon’s scale, every small improvement can make a huge difference.

“Happy Holidays” is a kindness

My family celebrates Christmas. We’re all varying levels of religious, but Christmas is the holiday we celebrate together as a family. I don’t walk in the door December 24th and yell, “happy holidays!” I say “merry Christmas.” Likewise, when I talk to friends who celebrate other things, I call those out.

But if I don’t know you well enough to know what you do, I generally say “happy holidays.” I don’t operate a business, but if I did I would 100% say “happy holidays” as well since my customers would surely have a bunch of beliefs.

This is the way.

Oh man, send help — I’m considering buying a Meta hardware product. The new Ray-Ban glasses look perfect for snapping pics and videos while out adventuring. They’d be a genuine safety improvement over trying to dig my phone out of my pocket while rock climbing with clients and friends. 😎

10 years at TechCrunch | TechCrunch

Most of our writers also have direct access to the publish button and generally write their own headlines, deks and ledes. You know, that trust thing.

Why would we hire people who were genuinely obsessed with a given technology or space and then not use their most potent asset: their sense of taste.

These days, you could argue that taste is the only moat. And when you apply that to everything from story sense to sourcing, you get a product that remains vital.

This is the way.

NotebookLM: hands-on with Google’s AI-powered note-taking app - The Verge

What if you could have a conversation with your notes? That question has consumed a corner of the internet recently, as companies like Dropbox, Box, Notion, and others have built generative AI tools that let you interact with and create new things from the data you already have in their systems. 

Google’s version of this is called NotebookLM. It’s an AI-powered research tool that is meant to help you organize and interact with your own notes.

I’m all for personalized LLMs. I’d love to ask questions of my Apple Notes.

🆕📝 Considering Apple’s Oddball ‘Scary Fast’ Event Next Week

The more I think about this event, the more I feel like Charlie from ‘Its Always Sunny’ with his yarn-riddled Mail Room conspiracy wall.

🆕📝 macOS Sonoma Web Apps Save Me From Constant Discord Updates

Inspiration hit in the middle of another project, so of course I spent the last hour on this quick tip blog post. I hope you like it, Discord nerds. 😉

Now to try to claw my way back to focus.

🆕📝 Bight Gear is joining Black Diamond…get their stuff now while you can!

Their excellent, boutique-brand gear has been a favorite of mine. Get it at a discount before getting they’re subsumed by the big name brand.

Leaving Twitter — Benedict Evans

Meanwhile, beyond the chaos, there has been no sense for the actual users of where we’re going. There was a plan, both ruthless and chaotic, to reset a broken and grotesquely overstaffed company culture and turn it into a place that can execute, but no coherent sense of what it should be executing. What should those newly hard-core engineers be shipping? A ‘super app’? A universal content platform with no external links? Your financial life? Seriously? 

And then, there are the Nazis.

🆕📝 You know, I think Apple won its bet on those gold watches

What if the gold Edition watches were about mindshare and not marketshare?

🆕📝 7 Things This Week [#115]

I just watched the new Taylor Swift movie and don’t get the hype. The thing was riddled with plot holes!

🆕📝 ‘Speak Screen’ was the final piece to my ideal read-it-later setup

Turns out™ there was a much easier way than ‘Speak Selection’ to get articles read out loud using accessibility features. And then there was ANOTHER even easier way to kick off the narration. But now it all works super well. 😁

Hey @danielpunkass, say I was thinking about moving my Tweets onto my main microblog to live as equal microposts, but wanted to tag them all as “Tweets”. Is there a way to bulk-add tags to posts?

Here comes another Netflix price hike - The Verge

Netflix is getting another price increase. As part of the streamer’s third quarter earnings results, Netflix announced that starting today, users on its $9.99 per month Basic plan will now have to pay $11.99, and those paying $19.99 per month for Premium will have to pay $22.99. Netflix’s $6.99 ad-supported plan and $15.49 Standard tier will stay the same price.

Damn. $20 was pushing it. $23 feels over the edge just to get 4K quality out of the TV we own. But that’s easy for me to say as the relatively light TV watcher of my wife and me.

Weirdly enough, I think I’d be more likely to move my whole blogging experience to Micro.blog from Blot if @danielpunkass@mastodon.social’s MarsEdit came to iOS. Text files synced with Dropbox are my whole blogging UI with Blot, but that basically means 1Writer & iA Writer are my blogging apps. MarsEdit lets me have that same list of local text files on a Mac, but I’m less keen about having to dive through the web UI of Micro.blog to edit pages and old posts.

Flipped coins found not to be as fair as thought

The researchers found that Diaconis was right—there was a slight bias. They found the coin landed with the same side up as when it was launched 50.8% of the time. […]

The team concludes that while the bias they found is slight, it could be meaningful if multiple coin tosses are used to determine an outcome—for example, flipping a quarter 1,000 times and betting $1 each time (with winnings of 0 or 2$ each round) should result in an average overall win of $19.

Perhaps a (ahem) chance for @jamesthomson@mastodon.social’s unbiased(?) Dice by PCalc.

Teaching tax in school | ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ Herman’s blog

Misunderstanding tax also leads to mistrust in government. And a healthy amount of mistrust is necessary in a functioning democracy, but when the system is too opaque, problems become harder to address. Most people have a vague notion that tax is used to pay for things like roads and other infrastructure. However, I think if people fully understood the purpose of taxation and the way that money is regulated and spent, they would be slightly less bitter about it. Maybe.

🆕📝 The Spiciest of New Apple Pencil Hot Takes

Let’s all thank @parkerortolani for the laughs today.

Oooh! Look what just arrived! I’m in for some light reading! 📚🧗

After the FineWoven charging port snafu, now I’m wondering how many USB-C cables are not going to fit in that sliding cap-revealed channel of the new Apple Pencil. Or how many people will try a charging-only, no data cable and have issues with pairing. Going all USB-C will have its own pains.

The will-they, won’t-they iPad mystery appears solved. We got a more sane USB-C Apple Pencil for the 10th-gen iPad that offers a slightly reduced feature set at a slightly reduced price, also good for the rest of the USB-C iPad lineup. MacStories has a good summary of the (lengthy) press release.

🆕📝 Letters with Robert, October 2023 [#1]

In which you meet the fantastic @rsilvernail and hear a few stories of our early escapades.