Finnucane

As a production editor at a uni press, who has to occasionally translate jargon into English, I find Orwell's essay to still be entirely relevant. The kinds of writing Orwell warned about still flourishes in the pablum emails we get from HR, the management reports with roundabout justifications for more layoffs, the political speeches that use a lot of words to say nothing. I just had a manuscript where the author was very fond of using trite filler phrases that added very little. It kind of made me miss the days of red pencils, a somewhat more satisfying way of cutting.

Strunk & White, I have to agree, is mostly not very useful.

So robots: yes. Water: no.

There's some older stuff, but it seems kinda random. I see also two cameras in their collection (a Speed Graphic Pacemaker, and a Fuji GW690ii) that I have in my cabinet. I will refrain from telling them they are 'extinct' (at least until I run out of film for them).

Quartz watch movements are reliable, accurate, and consistent.

He arrived just in time for the 'Snowmagedden' winter--four blizzards in the space of a month, dropping a record snowfall. That's going to leave a mark.

Get rid of cars and they'd take down all the lights.

Also "histrionics".

Or slowly boiling a human. The frog is actually smart enough to not fall for that.

They're not anywhere close to how bad the software business is.

Because software producers don't have to give a shit if their product actually works or solves a problem? Programmers moved fast, broke things, but didn't fix anything they broke.

Rich people are screwing over the slightly less rich, get out the silver pitchforks.

I guess they got over it.

AOL is still a thing?

Yes, but music notation is not simple text. Markdown was made for simple text. If you try to represent more complex text, it turns into Asciidoc or Rst.

Isn't that what LilyPond does, more or less?

Or even just using a plain old light meter. I use a Gossen Luna Pro (with 'spot' attachment) with my meterless cameras (which is most of them). It's reliable.

Lileks is still going. What else matters?

Mostly spending time on Mastodon these days, which is only made tolerable by its lack of capabilities.

Ray wrote a later story ("I Don't Care Who Keeps the Cows") in which there becomes a trend of different kinds of brain-enhancement technologies to make everyone super-intelligent. Of course, the enhancements are sold by hucksters who are using the enhancements to control the enhanced.

This has always been true. I never fixed my car. I knew how it worked well enough to know, hey, that sounds like its coming from the exhaust pipe. Then I took it to the mechanic. I can do basic maintenance on my bike, but I still take it to the bike shop. I have a small collection of vintage cameras, which means tracking down the few people left who know how some particular model works, might have parts. If your Synchro-Compur shutter needs parts, forget it. For most people, most of the time, the assumption has always been that someone else knows how to do that.

Some of them have gotten out of jail.

Because they're not as much 'freedom loving' as they are 'selfish dicks.'

everything degrades. We live in a world ruled by entropy. Even digital stuff degrades. It has to be stored somewhere, in some form, and there is always a risk of loss. No matter what.

I recall reading some years ago about a study of tornado warnings that showed that every additional minute of warning time had significant value in terms of preventable damage and casualties. Presumably it would be similar for earthquakes, but early detection is a much harder problem.

Then why even bother with using AI? Just pull random results from Heritage and Sotheby's and stick them in a template.

That must be why it asked what David Gilmour's Strat cost in 1969 but the answer was what it sold for at recent auction.

Also, random stuff sold at auctions is a weird basis for a price-is-right game. I mean, who keeps track of this stuff?

You think Brendan Carr gives a shit about terrorists? He thinks we're all terrorists.

Editors do try to get and use _relevant_ blurbers. And a weak blurb probably wouldn't get used unless they really had nothing else. Also, the first readers of blurbs are booksellers and reviewers, not readers, who may pass over a title if no one is willing to vouch for it. If you present a title to your sales team with no blurbs, they will make frowny faces at you.

Inside publishing offices, people who give a lot of blurbs for books are known as "quote whores." It's very much a game of who you know, who your editor knows, who your agent knows, etc. It's not to say a blurb is worthless, but a blurb from someone who doesn't give a lot of them may be worth more.

Could be? Isn't that the whole point?