Alan Jacobs

The value of a papal encyclical — certainly for non-Catholics and maybe even for Catholics — stems not from the quality of the arguments it makes but rather from the quality of the responses it provokes. Leah Libresco Sargeant’s new piece is an excellent example.

I continue to be bemused by the sheer number of these AI-generated book-promotion scams — I get them every day. Most of them never make it to my inbox, which speaks well for current spam-filtering software, because they look more legit than spam typically does. This too shall pass, and I will be glad when it does. 

Dorothy L. Sayers: Works and Days is now available for pre-order at Amazon as well as the OUP website. (It’s not yet on bookshop.org.) And the pub date has been moved up to September 28! 

Robin Sloan:

Basically, this is one of those designs that might not totally “work”, but the attempt is so vital and so valiant that it punches through the dimension of merely “working” or “not working” into some other space. We’re never going to bust out of the prison of the mobile-optimized, single-column scroll if we don’t try stuff like this. 

I’m so glad Robin linked to this site, which seems to have been made by people who never noticed that the World Wide Web has been taken over by malicious greedy parasite-platforms, but instead just kept experimenting with HTML and CSS in much the same spirit that drove people to customize their MySpace pages back in the day. Maybe in my retirement I’ll become a CSS ninja and obsess over the designs of the ayjay.org world, the way some dudes my age obsessively build scale models of World War 2 fighter planes. 

The USMNT completely unready for this game. I haven’t seen them like this the whole tournament. They are lethargic and confused. How is this possible?

Second half update: I could understand nerves, but this listlessness is inexplicable to me. I’m not sure these guys are even breaking a sweat. Belgium came ready to play, the USMNT came unready to do anything. It’s been a shocker. ⚽️

The current location of Penguin Random House: 

Where Random House’s offices were located before a simple publishing house became a vast conglomerate: 

Daring Fireball:

It’s one thing for Apple to force all of its own app icons into the same identical shape. That would be bad enough, because Apple’s own Mac apps are numerous and popular, and as the platform owner Apple necessarily sets the direction that many third-party apps follow. But it’s just downright spiteful to enforce it platform-wide. Apple decided they’re no longer going to create nice icons with unique, interesting, and most importantly, distinctive shapes — but they’re no longer allow third-party apps to either. It’s like Apple decided every single one of its own apps must wear a stupid-looking hat, and they put those stupid-looking hats on third-party apps too, whether the developers of those apps want them or not. Scratch that. Not hats but helmets. The mandatory squircle makes identifying apps at a glance harder in the same way that it’s difficult to identify individual people if they’re all wearing same-shaped helmets. Real helmets at least serve an important safety purpose. The squircles are like stupid unnecessary helmets. 

This is a great rant because it’s true. It used to be much easier for me to find apps in my Dock when they were allowed to have distinctive shapes — indeed when Apple’s own apps had distinctive shapes. All of Apple’s UI design changes in the past few years have imposed a greater cognitive burden on users: the entire experience has become less legible. Using a Mac used to be fun; now it’s unpaid labor. 

WSJ:

American allies have begun pushing the gas pedal on an unprecedented experiment in de-Americanization. Authorities from France to the Netherlands are quietly removing American tech from their systems, adopting European open-source software and urging civil servants to no longer use Microsoft Teams or Office. Belatedly, they are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to try to boost Europe’s own private space firms, AI companies, and data centers, to avoid leaning on U.S. juggernauts.

I’m not sure Europe/Canada/etc. have the determination required to become a third nexus of technological power, but I am hoping that they get there. It will be better for all concerned. 

I asked for a latte from Starbucks but when I got home discovered that they had given me a mocha. So with every sip I taste not the sweetness of chocolate syrup but the bitterness of thwarted desire.