Notices by Clive Thompson (clive@saturation.social)

You know about disposable vapes?

many brands are powered by the same lithium-ion cells that are used to make huge battery packs for electric cars or ebikes

but with vapes, they're just ... thrown out

Chris Doel got 130 dead vapes, took the batteries out, and used them to create a new rechargeable battery pack for his ebike

It worked *great*

His question: "Why they hell are they being thrown away after one use?"

Item #6 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-28-neolithic-octopuses-weeping-trees-and/

Remember all the right wing folks were fulminating about collusion between social media and the government?

you know, the horrors of the "twitter files"?

how it's *incredibly dangerous* for social-media executives to be in close communication with the federal government?

the primrose path to censorship, and all that?

As @mmasnick notes, these folks are all *quite* silent about Musk being *completely in bed with the incoming Trump administration* https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-musk-partnership-x-twitter-files-rcna180427

a *banger* of a piece

Navy SEALs have disproportionately been dying by suicide …

.. with a similar pattern: Each seemed healthy until their early 40s, when — abruptly — a host of severe mental health issues arose

One wife suspected brain damage, and had her husband’s brain quickly frozen

She unlocked it all

It’s a new form of brain damage

You can read about her story in this superb investigation by Dave Phillips in the New York Times;
gift link here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/30/us/navy-seals-brain-damage-suicide.html?unlocked_article_code=1.3k0.DGwe.i3OzX90az7c6&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb

A terrific investigation at @WIRED finds that Perplexity scrapes and (sometimes with bullshit added) summarizes web sites that it has been explicitly told, by those web site owners, not to visit

https://www.wired.com/story/perplexity-is-a-bullshit-machine/

Excellent work by @dmehro and @timmarchman

Another Boeing plane catches fire: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/09/defective-boeing-flight-catches-fire-hospitalizing-10-victims-on-board-video.html

holy crap this company is unRAVeling

"ALICE" is the acronym for "asset limited, income constrained, employed" -- basically, folks who have jobs but ones that don't pay terribly well, and possess little wealth

Research shows this cohort of the American population is growing ...

... and they're stuck in a bad spot, policy-wise: They earn too much to quality for low-income government support, but too little to be comfortable amidst the big soaring costs of housing, health care, education and transportation

https://archive.is/UD8q2

“A death certificate would say he died of sepsis from a bone infection, but my friend and I have a term for the illness that killed him: end-stage poverty. We needed to coin a phrase because so many of our patients die of the same thing.”

Excellent essay by a US doctor describing how many of her patients suffer (and die) not from their illnesses but from the wildly precarious economics of their lives

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/11/opinion/doctor-safety-net-hospital.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jk0.4z6-.Jp89JtFlvuyi&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb

Reddit's CEO is attacking Reddit moderators, calling them spoiled "landed gentry" who are messing up his service ...

... when in reality Reddit mods do over $3.4 million in free labor annually, as per a recent scholarly estimate

And that's a lowballed, conservative estimate

My essay on it here: https://clivethompson.medium.com/reddit-moderators-do-over-3-4-million-in-free-labor-every-year-d3571235c32c

A "friend" link in case you're not a Medium subscriber: https://clivethompson.medium.com/reddit-moderators-do-over-3-4-million-in-free-labor-every-year-d3571235c32c?sk=8526a9c3671885cce45a2bd3d1e36b82

@jdp23

It’s an interesting paper, very readable!

@jdp23

Indeed!

@aparrish @samplereality

I asked ChatGTP for "What are some of Clive Thompson's most popular articles historically?" and it gave me these five

1, 3 and 4 do not exist

Hey book folk OF THE FEDIVERSE

@pluralistic has a new book coming out -- "Red Team Blues", a cryptocurrency anti-finance thriller

He produces does his own ebooks because he refuses to put DRM on 'em, which means Audible won't carry them

So: He's doing a Kickstarter campaign for this one!

I just backed it (got the audio, ebook and hardcover): Go check it out yourself! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell

Behold "Glaze", a software tool that subtly alters the pixels in a piece of art online 🎨 ...

... in a way that isn't detectable by the human eye 👀 ...

... but renders the image useless for training a visual AI. The AI can't detect the artists' style, and thus can't mimic it and copy it. 🤖 ✖️

It's item #1 in my weekly "Linkfest" newsletter here 📫 : https://buttondown.email/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-6-gps-on-the-moon-8-bit-jane-austen-and/

(Subscribe here! https://buttondown.email/clivethompson)

One thing I'll say for the wave of Republican book-banning that's going on right now -- it's certainly making books seem powerful and *significant*

Book-banning is of course a terrible way to have the public re-realize the catalytic effect a good book can have on its readers

Nonetheless, here we are: https://boingboing.net/2023/01/31/unable-to-burn-digital-books-orange-unified-school-district-bans-the-whole-virtual-library.html

People write about TikTok's "for you" recommendations as "eerily good", "mind reading", "spooky" -- and it does seem considerably better than its social-media rivals

But odds are there's nothing remarkable about the algorithm itself

Recommender systems are pretty mature -- it's unlikely (though not impossible) Bytedance found some new concept nobody else knows

No, the secret ingredient is more likely ...

... the UI:

My essay: https://medium.com/@clivethompson/maybe-tiktoks-algorithm-isn-t-particularly-remarkable-after-all-712a5d2bae40

"Friend" link: https://clivethompson.medium.com/maybe-tiktoks-algorithm-isn-t-particularly-remarkable-after-all-712a5d2bae40?sk=3ffbf858464e3462fb3d5a84259d27de