brianstorms

I read every book written by Robert Caro—now there was an author who loved em-dashes!

I enjoyed his use of them so much in his writing that I started using them in my own book that came out in 2017. I freely admit—without hesitation—that my own use of em-dashes is due to author Robert Caro's influence.

There is much amusement at the idea that tech-weenies today are freaking out that the appearance of em-dashes in text is a surefire tell that so-called "AI" generated said text.

Read some books, get away from the computer, eh?

this.

Yes I fucking am. Thank you for your concern.

Who fucking said my "book flopped financially" -- please, point that out. Oh, wait, you can't, because you just made that up. Fucking hell. This place sucks.

LOL, whatever.

What an asshole.

Fuck that site. Offers people links to free PDF downloads of my book that I worked on for 32 years and finally got published by Pantheon Books in 2017. I didn't work all that fucking time for criminals like these to just break copyright law and make the book available for free. Fuck Anna's Archive, and I hope they go down in legal flames ASAP.

I love, no luuuurrve, this article. Just fantastic research and fantastically useful for a music project I'm workin' on.

Why is this flagged!?

20 years ago?

Nah, the golden era of online community was 40-50 years ago, on the PLATO system.

Bitzer was on Donahue twice. This is the second show. A couple years earlier he was on as well.

Well Wizardry was written by two PLATO gamers at Cornell, a university that had a PLATO terminal or two connected to the U of I system. Very much inspired by PLATO games like Oubliette and Avatar.

Ah, they broke the mold when they made Don Bitzer. Nobody can ever fill those shoes.

Sadly this article is, per the tradition over at Ars Technica, quite misleading.

Bottom line: if you want to understand the actual history of the online world, don't read Ars Technica. They don't get it, they've never gotten it, and you're just being fed mythology and selective history in the same mold as WIRED before it.

They should know better. The author of the article absolutely has no excuse. But still, they actually public "architect of our online age" when that is NOT what Ward was at all. He was a latecomer. The online world was already booming in 1978.

Fast Company's been on a much longer journey than that, and they still haven't found theirs, so maybe...

Used to run ads in 1988-90 in ComputorEdge for my first startup (Coconut Computing; we ran the COCONET online service in San Diego then). Didn't they change their name to ByteBuyer? We used to call them ByteBuyor to pay homage to the original name.

Nah the original assessment was too many San Diego tech workers would rather go surfing or play networked first-person shooter games than get something momentous done. There was always something more important to do than do the work and build the thing and make a difference in the world. I did the San Diego startup scene for 25 years. I worked at MP3.com; employee 12 I think. I also started 3 companies in La Jolla, was very active in the SD startup scene for many years. There are great engineers there, don't get me wrong. But the work ethic is simply different than SV, which is just the way it is, not gonna change. I don't think I'll ever do another startup in San Diego though. Elsewhere, sure, but not there.

After getting to know the Boulder-area TechStars people, I tried to get a TechStars "chapter" going in San Diego back in 2010 and like so many things about the startup world in San Diego, it just wasn't going to happen. The San Diego M-F 9-5 lifestyle always was more important than taking over the world. Plus, in general I found mentoring San Diego tech startups to be essentially pointless: nobody listened, nobody cared, so why even bother. Finally I found the core TechStars organization to be a bunch of cats, un-herdable, no "there" there. I never liked the whole "star" thing as it reeked of "rock stars" and was a little too "bro" for me. Bottom line, it was screamingly clear TechStars was never going to compete with YC (which I've never been a fan of either, but at least they're organized and determined and focused), so no surprise when it never did.

Yes, so true! The inconsistencies and non-standardization continues in Tesla's mobile app. There are many other examples there too.

Any Tesla owner can relate to this, given the wide variety (read: no consistency, no standards) of toggle buttons the car's UI utilizes.

For one, the HVAC. One button, showing temperature, which upon touched the system will react differently to depending on how you touch it and for how long. Touch it briefly, you get a little popup. Touch it slightly longer, and (hopefully, not guaranteed though) you get a bigger panel with full HVAC controls. Touch and hold for a couple seconds, and (hopefully, not guaranteed though) you turn off the HVAC if it's on. ALL WHILE YOU ARE DRIVING AND SUPPOSED TO WATCH THE ROAD. And if your hand/eye coordination is slightly off (and hey, when you're driving, going over bumps, etc, it very likely is) if you mis-aim by even a millimeter, you may touch another button and not realize it and do something unintended.

Another disaster: Tesla's entire connect-a-Bluetooth-device UX is one of the worst mishmashes of disastrous UI design I have ever seen in a shipping product, at least the 2012-2022 Model S implementation. Just one example, a button label down at the bottom right that still says "Connect" long after the device is already connected, but meanwhile elsewhere on the opposite side of screen, up top at the left, that says "Connecting..." then indicates the connection is made. All this in a UI that you only have a split second to glance at because it's in a CAR and you very well might be DRIVING. The Tesla Bluetooth UI could fill an entire chapter of a book on UI, it is so magnificently bad. Maybe I should write it.

It's a shame when a documentary series like this is made by someone with . . . issues.

I still have the DVDs in shrink-wrap. Have never watched. The documentary has a glaring omission, not covering COCONET from Coconut Computing.

"garbage in, garbage out" is alive and well

Recently was at Baltimore Washington Airport and rented a Tesla Model Y from Hertz.

The ordeals began long before we arrived at BWI.

I forget the reason now, but I didn't trust Hertz with the reservation for the Y. Even though the site said yes we have them and your Y reservation is GUARANTEED! It was weird because the Y was cheaper than renting a 3. And something just didn't seem right. So I was determined to call. I didn't know their number so I went to their website.

Hertz's website was full of problems, like, no way to find out the phone number for customer service. If you clicked on the Contact Us page, it led to some customer-avoidance links like most companies nowadays have, where, here, talk to our useless bot, or here, peruse our Knowledge Base, or here, read our FAQ, but no phone number. And when you finally found a link to a phone number and clicked it, you wound up at a 404 Not Found page. (I finally got the number from Google.)

When I talked to a human at Hertz I asked to double-check on the Y reservation. They said oh yes, all is good, you're all set, yadda yadda.

Day we arrive, big long line at the Hertz counter. One employee behind the counter (this counter is like a football field's width wide, with workstations every few feet, so they could easily fit 25 employees each taking a customer. But no. One.) We eventually get to the employee. I give my name, tell them I'm here to pick up the Y.

Sorry sir, there's no reservation here for a Y. Let me check something. She then walks away. A minute goes by. Two minutes. Five. Ten. Suddenly some dude in a Hertz uniform comes out. Obviously the bearer of bad news.

Sorry sir, we have no Model Ys. Well we have 25 of them but none of them are available, they're all at the Tesla shop and we don't know when they will be available.

But, you guys said yesterday on the phone that yes my Y was guaranteed, reservation is all set, all is good, etc.

Sorry sir, no Ys. We have plenty of 3s though.

Crap, I didn't want a 3, but we decided to take the 3. That took the employee 15 more minutes to process at the computer. HUGE LINE now backed up behind us, while this guy takes his sweet old time finishing what should have been a 30-second task. Finally we're told where to go in the epically vast parking garage for the car. It's in spot number 325 or something. We look on the ground . . . we're at like spot number 1, 2, 3 . . . we keep walking, we cannot find the car.

I ask a Hertz employee, where would spot 325 be? He looks at me like I'm an idiot, and responds in a tone he reserves for people he thinks are idiots: it's next to 324, right over there, and I'm looking and I only see spots in the 200s. Employee mutters "what an idiot" or something and walks away.

We eventually find the 3, among many 3s, at the extreme far end of this garage that is easily the size of an airport hangar that could fit a dozen 747s.

We get in, and it's the first time I've driven a 3... even though I'd driven an S for ten years. Tiny car in comparison, everything on this little toy screen (compared to the mighty S's) and in a different place.

We thought, we've had a Tesla for ten years, and we're not quite sure where all the settings are. What about brand-new customers who've never driven a Tesla or even an EV before?

The entire customer experience at Hertz was F-A-I-L. Just terrible. It's like the workers hate the cars. And I can imagine Tesla's service is a total nightmare for Hertz as a fleet owner.

Tesla doesn't get customer experience either. Hertz has become so awful (at least the BWI Hertz) we can't imagine renting from them again.

I think there's blame all around.

Do better Enterprise, Budget, Avis, etc. Somebody, do better.

Well I started traveling and doing interviews in 1985. That took years. Decades. (I had to type 7 million words of transcripts, for one thing.)

In 1987 I sent in a pitch to Knopf/Doubleday's managing editor, and she wrote back and said "We are interested; please send the manuscript at your convenience" and I did . . . in 2015. And the same managing editor was there, and she took it the right way, and was amused, and shared it with editors, and Pantheon, an imprint of Knopf/Doubleday, said yes. I delivered the final final manuscript in 2016 and the book came out in 2017.

Is Ethan Diamond still there?

I also worry about enshittification of Bandcamp. And I'm an artist with music on the site. I was very nervous about the Epic deal when it happened (figured it was a way to get the founders and the A-round VCs some money in a cash-out after an incredibly long period of time, similar to what happened to Meetup).

But now? Songtradr smells like an investment bank, one that looks at music as "content" or "IP" and wants to license the hell out of it -- and ultimately, own as much of the rights as possible.

They do not strike me as aligned with artist interests, or with the spirit of Bandcamp, which, admittedly, at this late date is mostly a fantasy.

Bandcamp represents the last, best refuge for artists in a world where most companies offer you "exposure," what else would you want, stop whining about being paid, etc. Bandcamp means payment. Which means livelihoods.

I don't trust SongTraitor.

Do you think some other seller falsely "reported" me, claiming my copies my be counterfeit, for surely there was no way I could offer them so cheaply to beat out the next cheapest seller by, what, 50 cents?

I signed up as a Seller on Amazon a while back, with one primary goal: sell extra copies of my book, published by Pantheon Books in 2017. The publisher offered me boxes of them at dirt-cheap prices and I took them up on their offer. So I started selling on Amazon, and I set my price as the lowest possible for "New" condition hardcover.

For a while my price got listed on the main book product page. Only briefly though. Then it disappeared, and another seller got the glory of the link for a "New" 3rd party seller, and their price was HIGHER than mine.

Amazon does not want to advertise your price if you are too low for their liking...

Suddenly, in July, my mom dies. I have to travel to the east coast for the funeral, etc., so I put a hold on the one and only item in my inventory -- my book. Effectively this takes me offline temporarily as an Amazon Seller which was fine.

BUT . . . when i get back home, I try to re-activate the account and find I cannot. INSTEAD, I get this notice from Amazon that my account is suspended, and that it's mandatory I go watch all these training videos about COUNTERFEIT products, how to spot them, why not to sell them, why it's illegal, etc, and that I do not have permission to sell counterfeit "Pantheon products." And I'm like, WTF? I'm selling the real deal, from Pantheon, and I AM THE EFFING AUTHOR AND THESE ARE MY OWN BOOKS.

I try to communicate with Amazon Seller Program and get nowhere (I think they deliberately hire only people who don't understand English). They refuse to explain anything about this absurd counterfeit stuff.

So I contact Pantheon. They just laugh. They had nothing to do with it, but weren't surprised -- they kind of hate Amazon.

THEN I get a new notice from Amazon that my account is disabled permanently due to lack of use.

WTF!?

So: here is my theory. They were pissed I had a super-low price, and when they saw me temporarily disable my inventory as I'd be away for a week for a funeral, they swept in and shut me down, with some kind of made-up lie about COUNTERFEIT (I mean, can you believe these guys!?). And nothing is resolved, and we're on the verge of October.

Amazon sucks.

I figure the day's coming when cops will be able to remotely activate the inside camera and microphone in a Tesla, or remotely disable the car and/or have it pull over, etc. Perhaps first in China, but probably everywhere eventually.