In 1994, after a series of mass shootings, Congress banned many assault weapons. A decade later, the ban expired, and these firearms flooded the market. According to the Wall Street Journal, before 1994 there were an estimated four hundred thousand AR-15s in the U.S.; today, there are twenty million AR-15s or similar weapons.
The New Yorker does a deep dive into the Kyle Rittenhouse shooting and how a troubled, bullied kid made a colossal series of mistakes and was co-opted by a whole slew of opportunists eager to exploit his situation. Nobody comes out OK in this story.
Testimony and evidence showed that Reffitt brought an AR-15 rifle and a pistol with him on the trip. He took that pistol with him to Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, along with zip-tie style flex cuffs, a helmet, and body armor.
Excellent news: the first Capitol rioter to stand trial was found guilty on all counts after less than four hours of deliberation. Let’s get the rest of these idiots lined up and sent away ASAP.
I haven’t bought any photo gear in years, and my shooting has slowed way down, but I just read about a new 56mm f1/4 portrait lens for the Fuji X-mount from Sigma, which is half the cost of the equivalent Fuji lens. If I was to buy new glass, this is probably what I’d go for. I think I’ll have to try renting one to see how I like it.
I don’t know that I’m currently in the market for a $40K vehicle anytime soon, but this review of the base-spec Ford Bronco really has my curiosity piqued. a 4-cylinder turbo with a 6-speed manual and basic car functionality sounds very nice. I could get used to a modern 4-door Scout-type vehicle.
Via the Why Is This Interesting newsletter, here’s a link to an interview with DJ Shadow in 1997, right after he’d released Endtroducing… and while he was working on the first UNKLE album. It’s very focused on his technique with the MPC-60, an early sampler and drum machine from the late 80’s and how he got the machine to do what he wanted it to do; it sounds like creating an album with a Speak ‘N’ Spell.
So there’s a part in that song where I wanted to use a trumpet solo from one of the versions, but it was wildly out of time, even though it was in tune. So I had to chop out the pieces of it, every third of a second or so, and put each piece on its own pad in the MPC. Then, using the fade in/fade out function at the beginning and end of the samples, I had to morph them all together.
Oh good. The U.S. government will not be handing user authentication on all of its sites over to a closed-source private company relying on facial recognition software, but a platform based on open-source technology stack. Whether or not this second vendor is powered by the blood of infants or planning to sell our DNA records to the aliens remains unknown.
I read an interesting article from Nick Heer about how people are appending Reddit to Google queries for more organic search results, as a reaction to Google’s own bloated and gamed results. Reddit is…Reddit, but I guess I have to agree that there’s a better chance of finding an honest result there than there has been on Google for the last couple of years. I’ll have to try this today. Another alternative has been Duck Duck Go, which I’ve used as my default search engine for the past few months, and which does a decent job.
I’ll try adding site:reddit.com to the end of my Google queries today and see what happens.
At the Drift, Oscar Schwartz looks back at the TED talk and wonders what it was originally for and what it means now.
TED is probably best understood as the propaganda arm of an ascendant technocracy. It helped refine prediction into a rhetorical art well-suited to these aspiring world conquerors — even the ones who fail.
Having just been asked to produce a TED-like talk, this hit close to home. How have these talks changed the world? What real fruit have they borne?
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I cannot remember what convoluted pathway brought me to this site, but Objective-See offers a suite of Mac malware-sniffing tools, things that remind me of the Old Days with Little Snitch and other handy utilities. Definitely worth checking out.
The problem is that certain kinds of stuff simply attract more stuff. The home is an obvious one: It craves sofas, sweaters, buffet cabinets, chandeliers. Computers are another; they grow USB tendrils.
I saw this being linked to a few days ago and meant to post it, but it was stuck behind WIRED’s paywall: Paul Ford writes about a Grand Unified Theory of Stuff. Having just gone through my computer collection and resisted the urge to buy things to fix them, this hits close to home. Having multiple hobbies does not help.