Clive Thompson

Clive Thompson's avatar
Clive Thompson
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Writer, musician/songwriter, hobbyist coder. Contributing writer to New York Times Magazine and Wired. Author of "Coders". Blogging at clivethompson.medium.com, archive of writing at www.authory.com/clivethompson -- email: clive@clivethompson.net; Signal: @clivethompson.98 -- #science #technology #coding #software #writing #literature #poetry clive@clivethompson.net Blogging: https://medium.com/@clivethompson Music: https://lipstickdriver.bandcamp.com Writing archive: https://authory.com/clivethompson Newsletter: https://buttondown.email/clivethompson
What's it like applying for a job for ICE? Over at Slate, a writer -- who's both a US veteran and has a long record of being very vocally anti-ICE online -- went to an ICE recruitment expo Link if you subscribe to Slate: Free link, if you don't: https://archive.is/791rH the tl;dr is ... ... they offered her a job, in a process that seemed so haphazard and sloppy that she concludes they're not doing serious background checks as she puts it ... image
I’m having dinner at a ramen restaurant and there are three or four incredibly bland R&B ballads playing on infinite loop, over and over again they have that olestra-like feeling of being genAI music So I try using shazam to recognize it — nothing I google some snippets of the lyrics — zero hits yeah, this is a mix of genAI music bleah
Casio just celebrated its 50th anniversary by producing a huge gallery of dozens of its digital watches, from the 70s to today they are gorgeous beasts here are are three, including the "tv remote" one from 1993 item #8 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free to read/subscribe to here:
behold the gorgeous "aerial embroidery" of Victoria Rose Richards it's the landscape as seen from a plane, except as stitchwork Item #1 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free to read/subscribe to here: image
okay people, it's time ⏰ once again for "the opposite of doomscrolling" 😎 the latest issue of my "Linkfest" newsletter just dropped 📬 free to read/subscribe here here here ☘️ : Includes: 🌋 the "Chthulucene" 🎲 crosswords mixed with Tetris 🐦 a global birdsong map 🧠 "mind captioning" ✍️ making a font of your handwriting 📡 Doom running on a satellite 🍸 the evolutionary value of getting drunk 👻 the ethics of selling a haunted house and SO MUCH MORE image
it turns out that if you video-tape mathematicians working on really hard problems at the chalkboard ... ... their bodies give out a physical "tell" just before they have an "aha" breakthrough which is to say, you could observe and predict a breakthrough slightly before the mathematicians themselves are aware it's about to happen super cool research item #7 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free here: image
Trump's government has been arguing that if they claim that someone in the US isn't a citizen, they're not entitled to due process this is clearly unconstitutional in March, Timothy Snyder noted the logical endpoint: This means even *citizens* do not reliably have due process, because all the feds have to do is *say* you're not a citizen and ... you can't go to court to prove it Screenshot below: a federal judge just agreed (gift link):