Log in
A printable zine: 50 Ways To Meet Your Neighbor. “32. Picking up trash, generally, is a good way to meet neighbors. People notice. 33. Winter: Shovel someone’s sidewalk. It’s also great cardio.”
reply
TIL about burping your house, aka lüften (in Germany), aka opening up the windows in your house daily to air it out, even in winter.
The crews of two AH-64 Apache helicopters that hovered next to Kid Rock's swimming pool while he clapped and saluted on Saturday have been suspended from flying pending a investigation of their actions, a U.S. Army spokesperson said on Tuesday.
Rewarding sci-fi book
This collection of AI-related science-fiction short stories by Richard Ngo reminds me of the classic anthologies I read growing up during the golden age of science fiction. They are hard sci-fi, with technically plausible scenarios, played out many levels deep in very consistent worlds, explored by a very fertile imagination. I found more insights per page in Ngo’s The Gentle Romance than in any other book I’ve read for a long while. — KK
Career Dreamer career map
Google’s Career Dreamer tool has been around for a bit, but it’s recently been updated with more AI support and feels worth returning to if you’re in a career‑questioning season. It asks for your past roles, skills, and interests, and then reflects back possible career paths, related titles, and a “career identity statement” you can lift language from for your resume or LinkedIn. I like using it as a way to see how my existing experience could stretch into adjacent roles I hadn’t named yet. If you land on a path that involves freelancing or consulting, this hourly rate calculator is a good tool for discovering what people in similar roles are actually charging. — CD
Fun bluffing game
My daughter introduced me to Skull, a fun, fast-paced tabletop bluffing game for 3-6 people. Each player gets three rose cards and one skull card. Players take turns laying cards face down until one player announces they can turn over a specified number of flower cards from their own and the other players’ cards. Bidding continues until the others pass. If the high bidder turns over a skull, they lose the round; otherwise, they win. It takes about two minutes to learn, but the bluffing gets deviously deep. The coaster-like cardboard pieces feel great in your hands, and the artwork is beautiful. — MF
Other Mona Lisas
I like this fun list of what different places call “our Mona Lisa.” It’s not just museums or galleries. It includes single objects treated like sacred centerpieces by retail brands, jewelers, and more. I love the idea that any household can have its own Mona Lisa—something everything else seems to orbit around. — CD
Phone ring hack
Like many people I keep my phone ringer on vibrate, but I don’t usually carry my phone on me – I may leave it on a desk – so I often miss calls. I’ve greatly reduced missed calls by setting the phone to flash its flashlight and flash its screen while it vibrates. That flashing light is enough to notice from a distance. It is easy to program on the iPhone. Go Settings > Accessibility > Audio Visual > Flash for Alerts. For Android: Settings > Accessibility > Audio & Screen Text > Flash Notifications. — KK
Free encyclopedia of ancient design patterns
In 1930, pioneering archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie published Decorative Patterns of the Ancient World, cataloging over 3,000 ornamental motifs — spirals, animals, rosettes, braids, crosses, and more — drawn from ancient civilizations across Europe and the Near East up to about 1000 AD. The entire book is free to browse and download on the Internet Archive, making it an incredible reference for artists, designers, crafters, and anyone looking for authentic, copyright‑free historical patterns to use in their work. The simple black‑and‑white line drawings make the motifs easy to trace, digitize, or adapt. Used copies of an out-of-print Dover paperback are also available. — MF
Sign up here to get Recomendo a week early in your inbox.
ML systems decay gradually instead of breaking suddenly, so we need error budgets for model accuracy, data freshness, and fairness — not just uptime.
Varun Kumar Reddy Gajjala — DZone
Enterprises rarely fail because they don’t care about reliability.
They fail because:
- failure is loud,
- prevention is quiet,
- and budgeting systems are wired to respond to noise.
Florian Hoeppner
They had hundreds of databases to migrate, so they built a tested, self-service migration workflow.
Ram Srivasta Kannan, Wale Akintayo, Jay Bharadwaj, John Crimmins, Shengwei Wang, and Zhitao Zhu — Netflix
I love the technical description of socket juggling to achieve a graceful restart. I could swear that this technique has been around for decades though, for example in TinyMUX et al…
Manuel Olguín Muñoz — Cloudflare
Lorin goes into what an AI incident manager might look like, since no tools of the sort exist yet.
Lorin Hochstein
By default, Kubernetes keeps a pretty short event history. This article argues that what we really need is the ability to know the state of the system at a specific time.
Shamsher Khan — DZone
They built a platform for safely rolling out configuration changes. I like that it has a special mode for use in incident response.
Cosmo W. Q — Airbnb
This is a cool debugging story, and I love the emphasis on mental models. The bit about simulating different paths through the software is quite intriguing.
Michael Victor Zink — Readyset (via Antithesis)
I am going to assume you’ve already titrated your exposure to the Lindy West / polyamory discourse at whatever level you find most effective and desirable in your own life, so I won’t try to recap the entire thing. But after three weeks of critiques, profiles, reviews, takes, counter-takes, and nasty emails, there are a few questions that you might still have which I feel qualified to answer. So let’s just do that real quick. [Ed.: It will not be quick.]
Q: Is the book, Adult Braces, any good?
I haven’t read it, but a few people whose taste I trust say that it is good! This isn’t surprising, since Lindy West is a charming and funny writer and a sharp observer of detail, and most of the book consists of a cross-country van trip which is the perfect stage on which to showcase her talents. Tabs Senior Managing Editor for Graphics Alison Headley reports that it is “really good at describing the lived experience of larger bodied people and how that experience colors everything else that happens to you.” West’s writing is apparently still a bit infected with a 2010-era The Stranger vibe, but since she is the person who largely invented that voice, if she wants to keep using it who am I to say she shouldn’t. Overall, this isn’t an American Canto situation, which is sort of a relief. If we’re going to have weeks of discourse over a book, at least it should be a reasonably good book.
Q: Where can I get a little taste without reading it reading it, if you know what I mean?
Yeah I gotchu. @clapifyoulikeme is posting selected passages in a Bluesky thread.
Q: So the whole thing is about Lindy and her husband Aham, and Aham’s non-monogamy which Lindy sort of agreed to and sort of also didn’t want to think about, but then Aham started a serious relationship with Roya and all of them had to figure out how to live with all this, and whether they wanted to be together or, like, I don’t exactly know how to put it…
I feel like you’re summarizing the book in order to avoid asking a question. Please just ask it.
Q: Ok, fine. What do all these people look like?
Wow, that’s pretty shallow don’t you think?
Q: Fuck off dude, you wondered too.
I mean, I am writing these questions myself. Normally I would say that is none of our business but luckily (?) for us in 2022, Lindy, Aham, and Roya hard-launched their polycule with a twenty-eight minute YouTube video for StyleLikeU (sponsored by “DAME - a leading sexual wellness brand creating game-changing pleasure products for people with vulvas, and DIPSEA – an app where storytelling meets sexual wellness”) in which they perch on uncomfortable looking stools under freezing cold lighting in some kind of Eli Roth raw concrete interrogation room and answer questions from offscreen about their relationship while removing an article of clothing between each question in a manner that is less “sexy striptease” and more “the proctologist will be in as soon as you’re ready.”
[citation needed]
Q: Uh wait can I see the book’s cover again?
Q: This is a war crime.
That isn’t a question, but I agree.
Q: So critics generally say that Aham doesn’t come off great in the book. How are they handling the launch?
Not very well, I’m afraid! The best piece about the book that I’ve read is Scaachi Koul’s in Slate. Scaachi traveled all the way to Bainbridge Island, Washington1 to interview Lindy about the book and her life, and while Scaachi certainly knows how to be mean, this profile is not even slightly mean. In fact she openly cops to being a long-time Lindy West fan:
Nevertheless after it was published, Scaachi revealed on Slate’s ICYMI podcast, she received an email from Aham which read:
Q: ????????
Yeah, even if the piece had been exactly as Aham describes it here (which it isn’t at all), this is not how grownups act. This is an unacceptable way to speak to anyone. But ok, Aham had a tantrum, we’ve all had bad moments right? We’ve all written things we wish we hadn’t. I certainly have, anyway. But when the ICYMI podcast producers reached out to Aham before the show, they received this in response:
For me, this is the sort of thing that leads me to a permanent conclusion about someone. “Free Palestine” deployed as a snide dismissal of a nasty email you wrote to a journalist is pretty far beyond the pale for me. I’m not ok with that. I leave you to draw your own conclusions.
Roya also responded to Scaachi, in a more classic media mean-girl idiom:
Wow. 2013 called to say: “sick burn.” I guarantee everyone she knows read this story, though, and for whatever its worth this profile was what finally convinced me to get a Slate Plus subscription.
Q: Is there anything I probably haven’t already seen about this that you thought was good?
Yes! Artist and writer Torey Akers made a Tiktok that I think is very perceptive about the book and Lindy West’s overall place in the “2010s viral confessional essay industrial complex.” Akers says:
Q: Ok. Anything else?
Nope!
Q: Should I check out what Helen Lewis had to say about it in The Atlantic?
No, never.
Today in Scientists: Human brain cells on a chip learned to play Doom in a week. “Should we be worried?” asks The Guardian’s Rich Pelley in a rare anti-Betteridge. A Billionaire-Backed Startup Wants to Grow 'Organ Sacks' to Replace Animal Testing, reports Wired’s Emily Mullin. At last, we’ve created ChickieNobs from the famous Margaret Atwood novel “Don’t Create ChickieNobs.” “If we can create a nonsentient, headless bodyoid for a human being, that will be a great source of organs.” Should we be worried? Scientists put 792 ants in a particle accelerator. They found out ants are all full of even littler stuff inside them. I already believed that, but it was just a superstition. Now we know it’s true. Should we be worried? Robert Hart in The Verge: No, ChatGPT did not cure a dog’s cancer. Apparently it’s relatively easy to make a genetically customized mRNA vaccine that does not cure cancer. Who knew! Becky Ferreira in 404: Why It's Good to Jack Off Frequently, According to Science. Should we be worried (complimentary)?
Today in Headlines: “Quadruple amputee and cornhole pro accused of fatally shooting man while driving” is the craziest headline since “Charlie Kirk's Mentor Jeff Webb, the Father of Modern Cheerleading, Dies in Freak Pickleball Accident,” which itself was the craziest headline since “Vaginal weightlifter sex coach charged with assaulting census taker who knocked at door.”
Today’s Song: AJJ, “No Justice, No Peace, No Hope”
Today’s Tabs was brought to you by the letter G, which moves in silence like lasagna. You know who loves lasagna, and hates Mondays? Thats right: President James A. Garfield. Thanks to Senior Managing Editor for Graphics Alison Headley for the only original piece of reporting in here, and thanks to you for reading. Aham please don’t email me about this.
If I saved you any time following the Adult Braces discourse and/or exposed you to information you wish I had not, why not become a paid subscriber, and help me create more ASME award nominated magazine writing?
1 Actually a solid hour plus from the Bainbridge Island ferry landing, way down a spit of land that’s more properly part of the Olympic Peninsula, if you were confused by that part of the Slate story.
Next Page of Stories