The Dice — 019

This week it was reported that residents in the state of North Carolina found their voter elidgebilty was removed because they moved to a different county. Not a different state—which is understandable—but, you know, the next county over. I couldn’t find an exact number but clearly, these folks deserve to hear their voice heard in November. I’m not judging what North Carolina does, but I will judge you if you haven’t checked if you can vote. And if you don’t vote then we can’t be friends.

Now—tough love over—let’s get into this weeks rolls.

My inaugural issue of The Onion newspaper arrived in the mail and it’s exactly as advertised. Despite Trump’s efforts, the newspaper is just as good as the original—if not better. I’m already looking forward to the next month’s issue. Upon opening my brain went back to college newspaper days and I was only slightly disappointed that I couldn’t find a Zippy the Pinhead strip. Otherwise, it’s perfect. If you haven’t joined yet, stop putting it off and become a member.

Speaking of finding Zippy, check out Independent Voices, “an open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines, and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries.”

The 50th season of Saturday Night Live began last night with the season premiere hosted by actor Jean Smart and a singer who I’m going to nickname Diabetes Post Malone. SNL now joins a unique roster of television programs to reach the fifty year milestone that includes Sesame Street and four soap operas. Wow, that is so many children and sands in the hourglass.

A movie about the debut episode in 1975 is on its way to theatres and the retrospectives are just beginning, starting with this piece of recollections by the cast and another by the critics. While there are better casts than others I hope SNL will live on and make it to 100. I can’t imagine television without “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!”

While we’re on a nostalgia vibe, who remembers watching the Computer Chronicles on PBS? Growing up the show was broadcast as Saturday morning cartoons were winding down. Not exactly gripping television, but in the 80s this was the only way for some of us to see new technology in action. The best episode, hands down, was the demonstration of the brand-new Apple Macintosh by designer Susan Kare. The second best episode has to be the “Battle of the Balls” with dueling introductions to the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST.

Also, check out Bill Gates promoting the Macintosh as a platform for Microsoft products.

Gedeon, this is for you, buddy. Celebrate Disco is a zine dedicated to the world of Star Trek Discovery. It’s free, low-fi, wonderful, and contains a story submitted for a “writing challenge to combine a Taylor Swift song with a Star Trek story.” As part of this rabbit hole, I stumbled across a Mastodon instance dedicated to Star Trek called Ten Forward (personally I would have gone with Quarks).

While on a nerd topic, here’s a handy guide to Hoopla, “an excellent app that you can access from your local public library for free.” With Hoopla you can borrow books, comics, audiobooks, music, movies, and television programs. It doesn’t have, like, everything, but there is a lot there and all it requires is a membership to your local library.

So here we are, AI robots have replaced humans in early-stage job interviews. Jack Ryan shared a clip of his recent job interview with an avatar that is clearly out of sync with the audio. There’s only one way to describe this, creepy AF. Jack had this to say about the experience and use of robots for this process: “As someone who has interviewed upwards of 50 candidates for prior roles, human connection, and interaction is the single most important indicator of how a team will mesh and jive together. If an AI is running the early stage process, it eliminates potential candidates because of its algorithmic design,” he said.”

Though I don’t like the idea—at all—of AI replacing people, I’ve been through enough shitty job interviews to know that there are a lot of humans with their own form of cognitive dysfunction. When it comes to job interviews, no matter who’s on the other side, it’s a total crap shoot.

This week a new organization called the Social Web Foundation opened to the world to support "a growing, healthy, financially viable and multi-polar Fediverse.” The organization’s director, Evan Prodromou is the chair of the W3C’s Social Web Working Group and the author of a brand new book called ActivityPub: Programming for the Social Web. “With this book, you'll learn how to assemble ActivityPub-enabled clients for making new kinds of social apps on top of existing networks and build ActivityPub servers that create new human or automated accounts on the social web.” It’s good to see this side of the Internet mature and provide hope that all is not lost in Cyberspace.

Also, here's a talk by Evan called A Bigger, Better Fediverse on “what has been happening on the Fediverse in terms of growth, but also what’s been improving in terms of trust and safety.”

Published in Tacoma, Washington on the patio with Phantogram on eleven.