Silly Little Plastic Cat

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Ran across Zack Grant’s Silly Little Plastic Cat on Colossal last night. I really enjoyed it.

I’d heard about the phenomena before: Since the early 1980s, pieces of bright orange #Garfield telephones have been washing up on the beaches of #Brittany. Locals have collected thousands of them, and in some cases use them for decor.

Rather than being frustrated at the defacing of their shoreline with cartoon #junk, most Bretons seem to have developed an add sort of affection for Garfield—at least the phone version of him—and have adopted him as a local mascot. It’s a strange combination: a part of #France known for its rustic, unchanging nature, represented by a creation that’s as iconic a part of American kitschy consumerism as Mickey Mouse.

Cute it might be, but Grant doesn’t shy from the larger, unsettling reality of the Garfield phenomena: the phones are still emerging decades later because plastic is forever. “The electronics are melted into the rocks now,” one man says. In 2019, a local farmer revealed the source of these things: a shipping container lodged in a mostly inaccessible cave along the coast.

As a couple people point out, if the contents of a single shipping container can pollute a shoreline for forty years, imagine the impact from however many hundreds are lost at sea each year. Another resident sums up what the unending tide of Garfield phones really is: “…catastrophic toxic #waste [and] an ecological time bomb.”

head-explode-emoji

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    Someone figured out how to write functional #DOS programs using only emoji. Including a Mandelbrot generator.

    I wouldn’t have guessed this could work if they hadn’t explained it, but the technique is pretty clever: they realized that #emoji code points (each emoji’s unique ID), when translated to raw UTF-8 byte sequences, can also be interpreted as Intel 8088 machine-code instructions. A carefully arranged string of emoji results in a series of bytes that’s both valid UTF-8 text and an executable DOS program. It’s fun to read.

    As an example, here’s the program running in my mind right now: 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯

    VocabularAI

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      GPTZero lists words and phrases that are common indicators of #AI. The problem is that the words and phrases themselves are very common: “consequences”, “such as”, “primarily”.

      These supposed AI-detection tools always make me uneasy. It’s hardly surprising that AI has a strong predilection for cliches of formal #writing; that’s what it’s trained on. It wouldn’t surprise me if #Wikipedia content alone has a noticeable impact on how these models write.

      But the upshot is that it’s getting harder and harder to not sound like AI. I try to avoid cliches to begin with, but if I’m writing something boring and technical (like for work), that’s not always easy.

      I understand the suspicion around AI. What’s worrying—and arguably as socially/culturally corrosive as the technology itself—is the superstition around it: seeing AI in every shadow, whether it’s there or not.

      Ministry of Pomology

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      From Matt Stein (whose post I found thanks to Naz Hamid): USDA Pomological Watercolors.

      In 1887 the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Division of Pomology began hiring artists to render illustrations of fruit varieties for lithographic reproduction in USDA articles, reports, and bulletins. Use of color lithography was critically important to enable the farmer to visualize and comprehend the subjects and principles covered in a particular publication. As a historic botanical resource, this collection documents new fruit and nut varieties, and specimens introduced by USDA plant explorers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

      The work is beautiful. Just look at these details.

      I love stuff like this. Just like I love the amazing achievements of NASA, or the Library of Congress, or any of these other vast, grand, publicly funded endeavors that exist because they should. Not because they make one crummy person richer, but because they make everyone richer.

      We’re only No. 2

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      Vox talks about the Slate, which looks like it is—or at least aspires to be—the Model T of electric vehicles.

      As is inevitable in any contemporary discussion of electric vehicles, #China came up. While you wouldn’t know this to look at American streets, the country with the world’s largest automotive industry is not the U.S., Japan, or in Europe: it’s China, and has been for the past twenty years. China’s electric car industry is vast, with sales worldwide. Moreover, Chinese electric cars are now both cheaper and, arguably, better than American ones, and the American auto industry does not want the competition.

      This is where we get to the quote of the day, from Andrew Hawkins, transportation editor at The Verge:

      In so many ways, the automotive industry is a stand-in for our whole economy. We hold up the auto industry as being this kind of beacon which represents our innovativeness and our leadership on the global stage. And I think that we’ve ceded that leadership now to China.

      China is now leading. They sell the most cars, they export the most cars, and they have the best technology. They’ve cracked the code on cheap EVs. I feel like America is always going to have an outsized reputation, but whether that reputation is actually earned anymore…is a very open question.

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        The #Apple logo banner on apple.com has a distinctly Siri-esque shine to it today.

        This being a Monday, I don’t have time to watch #WWDC, but I’ll be very curious to see if whatever Apple rolls out here fixes anything. #Siri is probably the most conspicuously underpowered product in Apple’s lineup right now, at a time when Apple is—supposedly—working on small wearable devices that do not have touchscreens and will, I assume, use Siri as their primary interface.

        I have one such product already: a HomePod that I never use, mainly because I hate dealing with Siri. The fact that Apple is apparently upgrading Siri with a custom version of Gemini isn’t encouraging; we use #Gemini at work, and I haven’t found it to be nearly as capable as either #ChatGPT or #Claude. Still, Apple is not in a great place AI-wise right now, and the new #AI guy, Amar Subramanya, ran Gemini at Google, so I guess Gemini is the most obvious option.

        Best case, Siri turns out to be like Apple Maps: a rough start, but improving year over year.

        Worst case, Siri turns out to be like Apple Maps: even after 14 years of improvements, it still hasn’t fully caught up.

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          I’ll probably never completely leave #macOS, but given the degraded state of that platform, I’m looking at #Linux a lot more seriously than I used to.

          It’s not even for all the Linuxy reasons that tech people prefer. It’s because I just want a user environment that isn’t overtly disrespectful: refusing to let me customize the UI, throwing ads and popups in my face every damned minute.

          Switching from Mac to Linux because the user experience is better: think about that one for a sec.

          It was as if some occult hand had

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            A good Wikipedia Category: page is my happy place. And I just found one: journalistic hoaxes.

            Some are serious and legendary: Stephen Glass, of The New Republic fame; Jayson Blair (New York Times); Janet Cooke (Washington Post). You’ve probably heard of these.

            Some aren’t as legendary, like Ruth Shalit, another New Republic alum. And I’d never heard about Jonah Lehrer, or Tom Kummer, or Scott Thomas Beauchamp, yet another New Republic writer (seriously, what was going on at TNR back then? Good grief.)

            While Glass et al were trying to pass off their hoaxes as legitimate journalism, a number of these others seem to have been intended as Yes Men-style social commentary. Like Paul Horner, whose fictitious articles may or may not have impacted the 2016 election, or Martin Eisenstadt, or Thatchergate, in which a British punk band faked a damning conversation between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Still others are strange experiments: The Shed at Dulwich, Masal Bugduv.

            The weirdest ones are openly unbelievable enough that whether or not they’re actually hoaxes, so much as absurdist satire, is debatable:

            My favorite isn’t even really a hoax: The Order of the Occult Hand, “…a secret society of American journalists who slip the meaningless and telltale phrase ‘It was as if some occult hand had…’ in print as an inside joke.”

            Let me know if you ever see one of these.

            FRSH Monza

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            Back in early 2018, I subscribed to a newsletter called Fresh Fonts, by Noemi Stauffer. Fresh Fonts highlighted new foundries and font releases, often including really good free/open-source ones. For paying subscribers, though, FF offered something even better: one free, high-quality font every month. These were commercial typefaces that Noemi was able to make available to subscribers through negotiations with the foundries. I got some of the best #fonts in my library from Fresh Fonts, including the one you’re looking at right now (MD Lórien).

            Late last year, Fresh Fonts pivoted to something even more interesting: publishing their own fonts. They’ve released two so far, FRSH Monza and FRSH Clask. I’ve been experimenting with both. They’re lovely, Clask especially.

            A few of my recent sketches with Monza are attached.

            A design with the text
            A bookcover with the title
            A mockup for the front page of a fashion magazine called
            A design of what looks like a luggage tag or ticket. It has an orange stripe, a tan background, and the text

            Say please

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              I’m starting to think that the best way to conceptualize #AI isn’t as vast, potentially malicious, hyper-advanced systems, but as vast, potentially malicious, hyper-advanced systems that power the most gullible, bumbling assistant you’ve ever worked with.

              Like the sort of eager-to-please person who would give hackers access because they asked nicely. Or the overzealous go-getter who deletes all your emails and then apologizes for it.

              Both at #Meta, by the way. One gets the sense that that “move fast and break things” cultspeak has not scaled so well.