In our increasingly algorithmic society, we should look to wisdom like this, from the James Beard Award-Winning Hansen’s Sno-Bliz:

The wall of Hansen's Sno-Bliz on Tchopitoulas St. in New Orleans, LA. It is a mosaic of various signs and framed images, including: a menu, black & white photographs, a framed James Beard Award, and a sign that reads,

There are no short-cuts to quality.

Anthropic AI Scraper Hits iFixit’s Website a Million Times in a Day

“As per industry standard, Anthropic uses a variety of data sources for model development, such as publicly available data from the internet gathered via a web crawler…”

“as per industry standard” = “because our industry has no standards”

Counterpoint: The U.S. cannot be shocked.

  • Gun violence has been a part of the U.S. landscape for decades.1
  • The former president, who thankfully escaped significant injury, has been normalizing violent rhetoric for years.2
  1. From America’s finest news source: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens [return]
  2. See this explainer from Vox: Donald Trump is the accelerant: A comprehensive timeline of Trump encouraging hate groups and political violence [return]

Caprese salad is my favorite salad.

A bowl full of cut tomatoes, arranged around a chunk of burrata cheese, and sprinkled with chopped basil. Yum...

Finished reading: The Contagion of Liberty by Andrew M. Wehrman 📚

This was a great read! Wehrman helped me understand how the defense against smallpox was so intertwined with the American Revolution.

Unfortunately, we’ve largely forgotten how important inoculation is to our independence.

Viganò Excommunicated

Quite a fall from grace for this former apostolic nuncio. Good riddance.

Safe and Sane 4th of July

I cannot believe that the NYT published this opinion piece on the birthday of the United States. Why I Don’t Vote In this flippant article, Matthew Walther writes off the concept of civic duty as relativism and argues that not voting is okay because abstaining is just as expressive as casting a ballot. WHAT? All this just days after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a former president’s quest for immunity!

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Top five sodas

In no particular order. ginger ale coca-cola classic (from McDonald’s fountain) orange soda root beer cherry coke

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I might have been glamping today.

A green and white striped tent, with four spindly chandeliers hanging in the center.

My latest UX challenge: unsubscribing from a newsletter and accidentially finding the hidden submit button.

A short video showing a user interface - selecting a checkbox to unsubscribe from all mailings, but then "accidentially" finding the hidden submit button.