Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
This week has been a bit of a struggle. I’m still sick and feel exhausted and our country is being dismantled.
My thoughts are not so good. I’m so pissed off.
I hope you all had positive weeks and enjoy the links. ❤️
Iván Carrillo • Knowable Magazine
North America’s largest bird disappeared from the wild in the late 1980s. Reintroduction work in the United States and Mexico has brought this huge vulture back to the skies. This is the story of its comeback.
I remember these beautiful monsters as a kid and remember being really bummed out when they became extinct.
This gives me a bit of hope.
While the work was done with trapped ions, almost every type of qubit in development can be controlled with photons, so the general approach is hardware agnostic. And, given the sophistication of our optical hardware, it should be possible to link multiple chips at a variety of distances, all using hardware that doesn’t require the best vacuum or the lowest temperatures we can generate.
I find quantum computing to be way more fascinating than LLMs. When — if? — these machines become reality the world changes dramatically, again.
I’ll probably be dead before it reaches a state of usefulness, but I hope it does, and I hope the “AIs” of the world or climate change don’t kill us off as a species before then.
Sara Hashemi • Smithsonian Magazine
In Summerville, South Carolina, a mysterious light has been seen hovering over old railroad tracks. Legend has it, it’s the glow of a lantern lighting the path of a ghost searching for her decapitated husband.
I love a good ghost story and a mystery. I also learned something new! I had no idea earthquakes could produce Earthquake lights!
Now, it’s not nearly as exciting as a good ghost story but it’s still fun nonetheless. 😀
A long dive into the features that make my ideal music app, and why nothing currently fulfils the brief.
If you have the time to read a longer post and understand how some folks prefer their music apps to work, this article is for you.
As a developer I want my music player to work a certain way and be beautiful to boot but designers can go to an entirely different level when it comes to the beauty of a thing.
Both perspectives are very necessary to make beloved software.
It’s being reported that the British government secretly ordered Apple to create a security backdoor into all content uploaded by iCloud users anywhere in the world.
This is really shameful of the British government if they’ve really asked for a back door.
Remember, once you make an exception for the “good guys” the bad guys will exploit it for their own needs.
What we need now is for Apple to implement end-to-end encryption for messages and other systems. Tighten it up, don’t dumb it down.
Every awards season, movie fans and aspiring pundits across the country become obsessed with the ever-coveted Academy Awards. The longstanding awards show has long been considered the holy grail of the film industry and can often feel like an all-encompassing part of the discourse, particularly around the four acting categories. In the lead-up to Oscar Sunday, many of us debate who will win, and once the ceremony comes and goes, there are still debates over who should have won.
Some of these actors shocked me, like Samuel L. Jackson. He’s extremely good in everything he does. Two roles that come to mind are Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction and Major Marquis Warren in The Hateful Eight. Oh, I also loved him in The Red Violin. I’m 100% certain I’m missing a critically acclaimed film in this mix. The man has done so much over his lifetime.
Generation X is the last cohort to have one foot firmly planted in the pre-digital world while seamlessly adapting to the rapid technological changes that followed. We were raised on mixtapes, handwritten letters, and Saturday morning cartoons, yet we were also the first to embrace personal computers, email, and the internet. This unique position grants us a rare perspective—one that values both the patience and craftsmanship of an analog world and the speed and efficiency of the digital revolution. We understand progress because we lived through it, adapting with each new wave of innovation while maintaining the ability to unplug and appreciate the world beyond the screen.
I know not everyone enjoyed their childhood but I did. We were kids of two worlds. One side middle class the other poor. But, rarely did we ever want for the basics and we always had a tremendous amount of love surrounding us thanks to an amazing mother and grandparents.
As a kid my brothers and I lived outside. During the summer we’d get up, get on our bike, and disappear for long periods of time. If not that we’d be at the trailer park swimming pool or out in the street playing football or baseball. There was always the brick yard to occupy us — the brick yard was a deep and wide hole in the ground we’d play in, swimming in the pond or jumping our bikes into it. We had lots of fun tied together with the occasional mischief.
Jerry, the middle brother, got a Commodore 64 when he was around 10 and it was great for games and the die rolling program he wrote, we played a lot of D & D as teens. I never really used his computer, he is the brains of the family, but I was fascinated by it. I also knew I wanted to be a computer programmer at some point in my life. In high school I had the chance to write some BASIC programs and I sucked at it. I was always a horrible student but at some point I figured it out.
All that to say I agree with the article. Generation X is the perfect mix of analog and digital life. We touched grass a lot and as a generation helped build some of the greatest technology on the planet.
Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath are reuniting for one last time, to play a fund-raising concert in Birmingham on 5 July.
This show is going to be amazing. Not just because of Ozzy and Sabbath. This is one for the ages and whoever gets to attend will probably have some great stories to tell. 🎙️
I didn’t think that my former (extremely former) friend and coworker could be more of an unmitigated piece of shit, but “We hired this completely inexperienced guy solely because he murdered a black man” really takes it up a level.
Mark Andressen has turned out to be a real piece of crap human being. Why anyone would work with him is beyond me. Especially now. Garbage.
Politics
Here’s the section many of you may want to avoid. Cursing may ensue, hostile opinions for sure, and general disgust lie ahead.
You’ve been warned.
We are in the early days of the destruction of our democracy. No, that’s not hyperbole. If we manage to go back to being a democracy after the next four years it will be a miracle. There’s a better than average chance the Marmalade Messiah and his boss, Space Karen, don’t leave the White House and install themselves as dictator of this new nation.
In the last three weeks Space Karen has been dismantling our Federal Government through our computer systems. He is in control, illegally.
USAID and other agencies are being ripped out, root and all, by Space Karen and his merry band of pimple faced teenagers.
When is someone with any authority going to walk into whatever building they’re occupying and arrest the entire team, Musk included?
Better yet. When will the violence begin? Musk and Trump have proven they do not respect the law and will continue to go about dismantling things until they are stopped.
Of the two Musk is certainly the bigger threat. I don’t believe he’s the genius everyone thought he was but he is smart and a narcissistic sociopath. He’s not gonna stop. The law can’t or won’t stop him. It going to take a citizen or group of citizens to end what he’s doing.
Assholes. They’re all assholes and violence may be the only way to stop them.
In the past two weeks, Elon Musk — a man no one elected to any office — has gained unprecedented access to Social Security payment systems, fired thousands of federal workers, shuttered entire agencies, and installed his loyalists throughout the government. If this were happening in any other country, we’d call it what it is: a coup.
In truth, Musk is emerging as a government within the government, using the time-honored revolutionary tactic of developing dual power in order to seize control.
Vittoria Elliott and Leah Feiger • WIRED
A US Treasury Threat Intelligence Analysis Designates DOGE Staff as ‘Insider Threat’
Let’s start here: In a sane world, Elon Musk and his merry band of marauding miscreants would have already been arrested. For crying out loud: They have taken control of government computer systems at the United States Treasury and invaded the databases containing the private records of nearly every American, including personal medical records and financial information from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, all under the pretext of rooting out waste and fraud.
Katherine Stewart • The New York Times
To be clear, “they” are not just Donald Trump and his billionaire co-pilot. Over the past half-century, an anti-democratic movement has coalesced in the United States. It draws on super-wealthy funders, ideologues of the new right, purveyors of disinformation and Christian nationalist activists. Though it pretends to revere the founders and the Constitution, it fundamentally rejects the idea of America as a modern pluralistic democracy.
The violence is coming. At some point people will break. It’s just a matter of time.
