What’s interesting today

‘IDK what to do’: Thousands of teen boys are being extorted in sexting scams. From the Washington Post: An unprecedented number of cases is leaving families devastated.

Michael had fallen prey to what online safety and law enforcement experts call financial sextortion, in which predators befriend victims online under false pretenses, entice them to send incriminating photos and then demand payment under threat that they’ll expose the photos to family and friends.

Driving Is The Nemesis Of All Parents. I enjoyed the lede of Drew Magary’s weekly football column.

Pick-up was well after dinner, when daddy would have preferred to be drunk at home than sitting in a darkened parking lot waiting for the girl to saunter out.

The Philips Hue ecosystem is collapsing into stupidity. I’m glad I never got into home automation. This may all work at some point, but I’m going to be late majority on this.

We try out the first legal level 3 automated driving system in the US. This is the first driver assist to allow you to take your eyes off the road.

Is Tesla liable if a driver dies on Autopilot? Juries will now decide. “Tesla faced a jury Thursday over the role its Autopilot features may have played in a calamitous 2019 crash. ”

Why furniture got so bad. Furniture used to last generations. Now it barely survives a move.

Is a Revolt Finally Brewing in US Against Exorbitant Credit and Debit Card Swipe Fees?

Inside Project Nile: Amazon’s secret AI-powered plan to change the way you shop online. Codenamed Project Nile, the initiative aims to add a layer of artificial intelligence on top of the existing search bar on Amazon, enabling instant product comparisons, requests for more details and reviews, as well as recommendations based on search context and personal shopping data.

Lots going on. I’m launching a new set of features this afternoon on Serendeputy.

Also, this week is the 20th anniversary of when I met my wife. Doesn’t feel like it was that long ago.

The wayback machine says I was on fire about the Red Sox that week. Aaron Boone was still a little ways in the future. (And, yes, a) I’m old, and b) I’ve been blogging for a long time.)

What’s interesting today

The Agony of the School Car Line. Thank God this is no longer my problem. I did have a couple of Covid years driving across town to the middle school twice a day.

Build Great Software By Repeatedly Encountering It.

Vintage Nirvana. “The most iconic band of the 1990s—one that openly rejected the commodification of rock—is now one of the biggest brands in the vintage industry.”

Also, Happy 30th Birthday to Nirvana’s In Utero, King of the Toxic Follow-Ups

ChatGPT & Friends: The Cool Kids boosting my productivity. Om Malik on how he’s integrating some of the new generation of tools.

Being 13.

At the root of these conflicts are issues teenage girls have always faced: insecurity, figuring out their place in the social hierarchy, puberty, hormones, trying on different identities. But the stakes feel higher now, because there’s an audience, or the risk of one, at all times: “Receipts” for everything; hurtful messages to stare at again and again (unless you delete them, which Anna said she sometimes does). That, and there is a unique awkwardness to this cohort of teenagers, the counselor noted — in that they spent years of middle school behind screens.

Happy Kicks for Cancer weekend.

What’s interesting today

Long Covid is a new name for an old syndrome. Still not enough progress here. I hope we see some breakthroughs soon.

We Can’t Compete With AI Girlfriends. I’m going to leave the Hacker News comments alone on this one.

Generative AI is a Black Mirror for Educators. How do you tell if your students are learning when essay questions don’t exist anymore?

First Google Search Result for Tiananmen Square “Tank Man” Is AI Generated Selfie. Google cannot keep up with the flood of AI-generated trash.

Airlines Are Just Banks Now. Fascinating analysis of how airlines aren’t in the business of flying planes anymore, and he we all pay higher prices due to higher “swipe fees” on our credit cards.

Why Scalpers Can Get Olivia Rodrigo Tickets and You Can’t. Fascinating deep dive into the underbelly of this world. Surprising (to me, anyway) gambit: instead of selling you the ticket, the brokers will sell you the TickerMaster account that has rights to the ticket.

How old is too old?. Robert Reich on aging.

What do we do with the Twitter-shaped hole in the internet?

Fan mail of the day

The Bear. This is an outstanding show on Hulu about chefs, restaurants and family. Two seasons, both eminently watchable.

Happy Monday.

What’s interesting today

Streaming Is Changing the Sound of Music. To succeed on Spotify and other services, songs are getting shorter, albums are getting longer, and artists are collaborating across genres.

Wage theft is a serious crime. We’re finally treating it that way. New York is starting to get serious about wage theft.

The tyranny of the marginal user. It is always thus. Hacker News discussion.

Fan mail of the day

Defector is one of my favorite daily sports sites, and one of the media sites I pay for.

They are an employee-owned co-op, and therefore, they are completely free to write about whatever they want. Mostly sports. Occasionally, crazy houses that show up on Zillow.

They also host one of our family’s favorite podcasts: Normal Gossip.

Kicks for Cancer is coming up next weekend. I went to the high school and got a snazzy sweatshirt this morning. You’re going to see a lot of pink around town over the next ten days or so.

What’s interesting today

Can Affluence and Affordable Housing Coexist in Colorado’s Rockies?

For a payout of tens of thousands of dollars from the local government, he recently signed onto a hefty “deed restriction” for his property, banning its use for Airbnb stays, limiting any potential renter or buyer to the work force of Summit, and limiting any potential resale price. And he did it with pride.

What Happens When Wall Street Buys Most of the Homes on Your Block?

Bad idea, right?. I try to dip in to what my high-schoolers are listening to. This is actually a pretty good song…

The Promise and Folly of Self-Driving Cars. I’m keeping half an eye on this space. It may always be five years away. See also: Car Hackers Are Out for Blood

Fan mail of the day

The Flux Review. A systems-thinking newsletter, seeking new ways to make sense of our complex world.

It’s a weekly newsletter that explores current issues from a system dynamics and forward-looking perspective. Well worth a half-hour of your attention each weekend.

Happy Friday!

It’s starting to look like Fall here in Massachusetts (even if there is a hurricane spinning off our shore right now).

What’s interesting today

Cracked Tooth. Bob Lefsetz talks about his tooth and the realities of budgeting when you’re on the older side.

Finishing with Twitter/X. “Enough wrestling with the pig. Time to go.”

This post will not go viral. Twitter suppresses sharing links now. Hacker News discussion. Not everyone agrees.

Related: When Twitter Died, So Did Independent Journalism.

How Shein beat Amazon at its own game — and reinvented fast fashion. Separately, Rest of World is a great site for getting ideas of what’s happening outside the US.

Airbnb has devastated Colorado’s resort towns and Short-Term Rentals Cause a Long-Term Mess. I’m not a huge fan of what short-term vacation rentals have done to housing markets. I’m not sure what the answer is, though.

What I’m reading today

Innovator’s Toolkit. I’m working on a couple of thorny issues right now. It’s always good to dip into this book for ideas.

Style and Pyramid Principle. Now that I’m trying to write more, I need to get back to basics. These are the two best books I’ve ever found on writing.

Fan mail of the day

We get up early every morning, a habit of twenty years or so.

In the 5am Sunday hour on WCRB, they play Pipedreams, an hour of pipe organ music. It’s amazing (especially if you have a good stereo and are ok playing music loud at the time of the morning…)

I ended up buying the CDs, and it’s now what I play in my headphones when I’m programming.

A surprisingly delightful discovery.

And, if you don’t change the channel, you get the Bach hour at 6. Also delightful.

I’m going to try this format for a little while and see how it goes.

I’m trying to help build the future of the open web, so I want to try to do more here, and less in various silos.

What’s interesting today

The MetaFilter thread from September 11th. I remember refreshing this thread all day as we were all trying to figure out what was going on.

The Specter of AI-Generated ‘Leaked Songs’ Is Tearing the Harry Styles Fandom Apart. Middlemen scammers are taking advantage of fans. AI only accelerates it. Hacker News discussion.

Federation vs. Small Pieces Loosely Joined. More on the future of the open web from Dave Winer.

404 media is an outstanding new news site. They’ve had a lot of scoops in their first couple of weeks.

The junk fees aren’t going away. I think it’s better that you’re seeing the all-in price upfront.

I see this through the day job: there are lots of new sites that are generating thousands of AI-generated and spun articles. I play a depressing game of cat and mouse to keep them out of my index. I’ve evolved my librarian tools enough over the years to catch them almost instantly, but it’s not fun.

Also, if your domain is one character off of a popular domain and you’ve posted 3000 blog posts today, I’m probably going to notice.

And wield the mallet of loving correction.

When I’m weeding my index, I’m usually listening to the local high-school radio station. Right now, they’re playing Be Good Johnny. Which I most have associated with the Fenway music guy playing it for Johnny Damon in 2004. Of course, I also remember when it was a hit on the radio in the early ’80s. I’m old in many dimensions.

What I’m reading

I have the (I’m told) bad habit of flipping among several books at a time. I’m ok with it. And, the Kindle takes up less space on the nightstand than several hardcovers…

Here’s what’s open on the virtual bookshelf right now.

Survival of the Richest: Escape fantasies of the tech billionaires. Douglas Rushkoff has a new book out, and I’m enjoying it so far. It turns out that building your own post-apocalypse bunker has problems on the physics level, along with the biology, the sociology and the psychology levels.

Founder vs. Investor. I’m not in this wing of the tech world anymore, but it’s interesting to see how the dynamics have changed since the late nineties.

Master of Change. Brad Stulberg writes about how to handle things that come up in life. His term for it is “rugged flexibility.”

Fan mail of the day

I’m going to try to shout people out more often.

Today: Heather Cox Richardson.

Each day, she writes an essay on the most important news of the day, with the perspective of an historian. It’s usually one of my favorite 10-minutes reads of the day.

Alright, I’m really bad at this. Lots going on.

One of the advantages of running a newsfeed engine is that I’m always coming across really interesting new sites to check out and follow.

The Substack economy has been a boon to readers. The ecosystem is the richest it’s been since the golden age of blogging in the mid-2000s. I love it when I come across some new longer-form writers.

Here are some of my new favorites that you should probably try out:

• Culture Study, by Anne Helen Petersen
• The Snap Forward, by Alex Steffen
• After School, by Casey Lewis which is making me far more in touch with my teenaged daughters.
• Evil Witches by Claire Zulkey
• Men Yell at Me, by Lyz Lenz
• Burnt Toast by Virginia Sole-Smith
• CyberDisobedience by John Aravosis
• Mothers Under the Influence by Kathryn Jezer-Morton
• Is My Kid the *******? By Melinda Wenner Moyer
• The AP by Alex Pareene
• Diplomatic by Laura Rozen

I hope to be able to do more “linky goodness” posts this year. I’m just heads-down in launch mode, so it’s harder to carve out the fifteen minutes or so each day. I need to get back at it.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for some more sites I’m paying attention to, you can check out what I’m following on Serendeputy, or just look over my deputy’s shoulder.

(I’d also be fascinated to know what you think of it…)

Or, I share a lot of links on Twitter, so there’s that, too.

I’ll be back sometime between tomorrow and eventually.

I’m still media-adjacent, so I follow the comings and goings and new business models…

Who wants to be a chickenaire? in which the author lays out his paywall strategies.

Meanwhile, Charlie Warzel and many others are migrating their newsletters to The Atlantic.

I’m still working on the pro offering for Serendeputy, so I know the temptation. It’s more fun to build stuff than to do the daily operational grind.