Category: links_read

“As the day went on, assorted commentators dusted off their “whisper it, but Susan Hall could win” takes – not necessarily because they believed them, but simply because they didn’t want to be the one who’d laughed off the possibility if it happened. That evening the BBC political editor herself tweeted that, “No votes have been counted yet… but it is clear tonight that the race is much much closer than some polls had suggested…” How any such thing could be clear when no votes had been counted was an open question. All that was clear was that a lot of people were saying the race was much closer than some polls had suggested.

And the moment we started to see any actual vote numbers, the narrative collapsed”

https://jonn.substack.com/p/what-just-happened

“Logitech committed a bunch of sins with this mouse driver. First, it just seems ridiculous to add an AI prompt feature to a mouse driver. Second, no matter what the feature, it’s wrong to add a top-level folder to a user’s home directory — and it’s especially wrong to give such a folder a dumb name like “ai_overlay_tmp”

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/05/06/hackett-logitech-mouse-driver

One is that, in contrast to cuisines from many of the world’s other countries, you’re not likely to run into a “British restaurant” anywhere else in the world. The other is that a lot of Americans on social media periodically enjoy taunting the inhabitants of Airstrip One about our terrible, bland food. it doesn’t matter how often anyone points out that tourists are disproportionately likely to end up in tourist traps, that the national dish is curry, or that you can, in most British cities, now find decent food from any one of a dozen major cuisines: no American in history has encountered a single flavour anywhere upon the island of Great Britain, and the entire population of the UK is confidently believed to be so terrified of spices that we all shrivel up, slug like, in the presence of even half a pinch of salt.

https://jonn.substack.com/p/questions-of-appetite

“The law is Orwellian in the extreme, as its preamble proclaims that “the department of tourist development adopts as its official policy the principle of open records,” and that “A binding contract or agreement entered into or signed by the department that obligates public funds, together with all supporting records and documentation, is a public record and open for public inspection as of the date the contract or agreement is entered into or signed,” before creating a statute doing precisely the opposite”

https://boondoggle.substack.com/p/10-years-of-super-bowl-secrets

“Indian food delivery company Zomato is setting up micro-hubs to pilot last-mile delivery for already delivered food. “Walkers” will pick up the food from designated kiosks, and take it to the exact floor or location. The experiment aims to make deliveries frictionless by eliminating the need to call riders and wait for crowded elevators. A month ago, a Zomato program manager even advertised this fleet of walkers, asking people to fill out a Google form if their company didn’t allow delivery riders to go up to the office floors”

https://mailchi.mp/restofworld/indias-electric-rickshaws-are-leaving-evs-in-the-dust

“There’s the germ of something interesting here – an idea of kitchen-sink rock, writing directly but artfully about the real lives of kids in post-industrial Britain. You can see why it would work – and in a few months we’ll see it working a lot better. But there’s a tension even in early Stereophonics between that idea and the grimly basic musical tools the band have at hand to realise it. The group were like the post-Richey Manics, but for people who didn’t like any of that funny post-punk stuff, or hip-hop, or even glam. Whatever sensitivity Kelly Jones had as a writer didn’t transfer to his singing, a raspy rock bellow as tender as a sandpaper handjob. And it didn’t translate to his band, who sound like they considered meat and potatoes decadent luxuries”

https://popular-number1s.com/2024/04/24/stereophonics-dakota/

“In 2019, Barr explained to an audience at the University of Notre Dame the ideology behind the strong executive and weakened representation. Rejecting the clear words of the Constitution’s framers, Barr said that the U.S. was never meant to be a secular democracy. When the nation’s founders had spoken so extensively about self-government, he said, they had not meant the right to elect representatives of their own choosing. Instead, he said, the founders meant the ability of individuals to “restrain and govern themselves.” And, because people are willful, the only way to achieve self-government is through religion.

Those who believe the United States is a secular country, he said, are destroying the nation. It was imperative, he said, to reject those values and embrace religion as the basis for American government”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-28-2024