I recommend this article in The Atlantic, What Happened to Empathy? From it this question, “How emotionally healthy are we, as a people, when, in moments of profound and painful tragedy, we feel compelled to insert our political opinions or policy positions?”
Morality cannot coexist in a world in which the ends justify the means. A world void of morality is barbaric. This article by Zack Beauchamp of Vox is worth reading.
I’ve read some common themes regarding Google’s change to seven years of full support for Android on the Pixel 8 phones. The comments boil down to whether the hardware performance will keep up or whether people really use a phone for that long. (Others are skeptical that Google will live up the promise, but I think if they don’t they will face lawsuits.) I think both are examples of missing the point. For me there is a difference between having the ability to use a phone that runs current software for more than three years and a circumstance where I must replace the phone after three years if I want current software. Most likely there will be new features in the Pixel 10 or 11 that make buying a new phone desirable but there is a big difference between wanting to buy a new phone and having to buy a new phone. I would be very surprised to find many people still using the Pixel 8 seven years from now, but it’s nice to know they can if they want to.
Personal computing is a tool used by humans for good or bad, as is the case for every tool ever invented. The problem then is not with the tools, but with the humans. The ability to alter photos has existed since the beginning of photography, as has been the ability to ghost write or impersonate authors. As I see it, the real problem is with the increase in incentives, like how “influencers” make money, to use computing for bad. (Computational photography and Large Language Models are recent iterations of computing.) We need to strongly enforce norms and laws regarding fraud, and reinforce that a right to free speech does not give one the right to intentionally commit fraud by lying.
The temperature outdoors dropped to the low forties over night and it got down to the low sixties in our house, so my wife turned on the furnace. I think this is a couple of weeks later than last year.
Google announced the Pixel Watch 2 during the Pixel event earlier this week. I’ve been wearing the original Pixel Watch and the sports band it came with, for about a year. I am not planning to buy the Pixel Watch 2 so when I learned about the Spigen Lite Fit band I decided to buy it to change the appearance of what I have been wearing. The band is elastic nylon in a single loop with size adjusted by a buckle. I find the band is very comfortable to wear. One thing I have found is that charging the watch is now a bit more cumbersome because I can’t just place the watch on top of the charging puck and let it magnetically snap in to place, instead I have to slide the puck underneath the watch and some times the alignment isn’t perfect. Not sure whether the pins on the Pixel Watch 2 charger will make this alignment easier.
If you think you are not religious then you don’t know what is religion. I think Americans are more religious today than ever before, but don’t recognize it because we equate religion with a specific association to specific organizations or specific beliefs in deities.
Religion is much more fundamental to who we are as humans. For example, if you identify yourself with an NFL team, like I say I am a Packers fan, you are religious. The religion, which is that to which you connect or bind yourself (re-ligio) is professional U.S. football. Republicans? Democrat? Conservative? Liberal? Progressive? All religions. Yes, even atheism is a religion. Religion is an aspect of our ego.
The problem in all of this is we have no understanding of our true selves, and the decisions we make are to maintain all these false selves that don’t really add value to who we are and what we truly need. It is the stranglehold of our religions that is driving decisions that we make against our own best interests.
All of the MLB wild card series games of both leagues are done with sweeps of each. The NL wildcards that I preferred to advance won. The Diamondbacks play the Dodgers and the Phillies play the Braves, and I look forward to watching both series. The Brewers, who finished the regular season nine games ahead of the Cubs to win the NL Central division, were swept in two both games by wide margins. Had the Cubs hung on to the third wild card they would have played the Brewers, who I am sure wish that had happened.
We have had temperatures well above average the last few days, and today could be the last one in the 80s so I’ve tried to get outside often. Perhaps one of the last days of shorts and tshirts.
I had an early meeting this morning so that enabled me to take my morning walk earlier than normal. The morning sun is glorious in what might be one of the last hot weather days of the year.
My 2023 MLB Playoff Preferences
I am not as crazy as to pretend that I can predict what will happen in this year’s Major League Baseball playoffs, but I did want to go down on record about what are my preferences given that the Chicago Cubs are not in the tournament.
Given I closely follow the Cubs, I am more emotionally invested in the National League games, so I will start with the easy part, which is that my preference for the American League champion is any team other than Houston. Houston has won it recently, most of the others have not, and that is the bottom line. For some reason I find myself drawn to the Baltimore Orioles, so I will prefer they play in the Word Series for the American League.
Wild card teams seem to excel in the tournament and do so at the expense of the higher seeds who are division winners. I think the wild card teams have the advantage of actually having played under playoff pressure for weeks up to the tournament just to make it in to the postseason. Of the the wild card teams, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Arizona Diamondbacks made it to the NLCS, and I think a championship between them and Atlanta would be very fun to watch.
My emotional preference is for Philadelphia to represent the NL in the World Series because of Kyle Schwarber, but I expect Atlanta to make it to the World Series and win it all because they are the best team in all of baseball. A big part of me likes the idea of Schwarber having the most success of the former Cub players after the 2016 World Series given how the Cubs front office gave up on him waaaay too soon.
The mornings of sitting outside on the patio drinking coffee are numbered for this year. The leaves are falling.
The intoxicating drug of wealth and the power it affords is driving the human race toward extinction, it appears to only be a matter of when and how.
“The Trump campaign is very good at manipulating the media, because it understands that liberal ideological bias is not the primary factor in shaping media coverage. The press, instead, is biased toward having a spectacular or interesting story that people want to read or watch or hear about. If you�����re clever, you can manipulate the press into telling the story you want by making it seem fun and exciting, even if the story is incorrect or misleading. Given how easily the Trump campaign got the political press to take the bait here, there’s little question we’re in for a long campaign season in which it does it over and over again.” – The Atlantic, emphasis added. In other words, it’s not about reporting nor civic duty, it’s all about making money, as is every facet of United States society.
I’ve written before about how the then low cost Timex Sinclair 1000 personal computer was so influential on my life. Today’s equivalent to the Timex Sinclair is the Raspberry Pi, and I don’t think it’s coincident it also originates from England. In my opinion a Raspberry Pi should be provided to every young kid, particularly if they have any interest with computers. The newest model has just been announced and will start shipping at the end of October, you can pick up an 8 GB model with case and power supply for just over $102.
Much more of the moon was visible when I started to take this picture, but still I like it.
I found the site Georgia v. Trump, a curation of articles published about the Georgia 2020 election interference trial. Added the RSS feed to my subscriptions.
I use Drummer to write many of my posts for micro.blog. I wonder what happens when I delete a post way back in the past? As a test, I deleted a post originally in Drummer on October 23, 2021 and it wasn’t removed during the publish of this post. Still hope to understand how micro.blog processes the OPML file. I do know that I have to specify in my blog settings the public URL for the outline file, so it looks like the script in Drummer let’s micro.blog know a change has been made to the OPML file and then I assume micro.blog reads the file. As I can edit posts in Drummer and publish the edits back to micro.blog, there is the appearance of a mapping of outline nodes to blog posts. I have found that I can even edit posts that I wrote way back in October 2021. The key question is, what does it do to deletions of entire posts? Manton confirmed that micro.blog does not delete posts removed from an OPML file.
Now that the iPadOS lock screen supports widgets, I’ve started playing with focus modes to change what I see throughout the day. Two of the key modes are Work and Personal. I configured Work to be the focus mode from 9 AM to 5 PM, Personal to be from 5 PM to 11:30 PM, and then at 11:30 PM is Do Not Disturb. Problem is, the Work mode is not kicking in at 9 AM and I don’t know why. Does anyone have ideas?
Looking back at it, the last week of the MLB baseball season is often been filled with angst. I do agree with what I wrote back in 2019, I’d rather be in the position of being disappointed that a good team did not succeed than always rooting for bad teams who occasionally surprise. The Cubs lost last night after having a 6-0 lead. In many ways the game encapsulates their current state, some good pitching to gain a lead or stay close, but not enough pitching to sustain the lead through 9 innings. In that state all other facets of the game have to be played near flawlessly, so a fielding error can (and last night was) be fatal. Good news is that the one loss does not put them out of the playoff standings, but they cannot lose two games in a row now and when they do lose they are at the mercy of how other teams perform.