Roundup: Eric Schmidt says the quiet part out loud

if nobody uses your product, it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content.

Your digital ethics can’t be good if your business ethics are bad.

Someone just unironically asked me:

Is the pope Catholic?

Happy 100th Birthday, Brother Alberic!

When asked about what drew him to monastic life he answered, “Nothing. It wasn’t attractive at all.” It just got into his head that it was something he ought to do, he said, and the idea wouldn’t go away.

I love this response so much! Vocations are mysterious.

Turd, turd, turd. Turd is a word.

Screenshot of NYT's Spelling Bee game, indicating that the word "turd" is "not in word list."&10;&10;That's crap.

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.