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I jumped out of the car & said, "Did you find a phone?"
"Yes! Yes! I have it! I couldn't answer because no Face ID," he said. He was so kind!
The reason the phone kept moving was because he was working. He had to keep driving his fares. His tuk-tuk is electric, which is good given the fuel shortages, & very in-demand on the weekends
It all worked out but was a heart-pumping hour! And in the end, we ended up wasting more fuel than if we had just driven to the store in the first place 4/4
Adrenaline is building—what if we have to argue w someone? We follow the signal to a pharmacy, remotely ring it, but find nothing. Find My iPhone updates to show the phone on the move again! Back in the car!
On the map, the phone goes to a neighborhood & stops. We drive faster, hoping to see someone outside. We're a quarter mile away when the phone start moving again, this time TOWARD US!
We see it at an intersection. We're there too! I ring the phone & hear it! A tuk-tuk driver has it! 3/4
He started to panic. I was making pottery & was totally covered in clay. I said, "Go retrace your steps on the bike. That way you'll be able to see easily all the places you went." So he left again on the bike
Mind you, the feels-like temperatures here have been about 110F/44C lately
I washed up so I could help
He came back empty-handed. We turned to Find My iPhone
We could see the phone not far away but it was on the move! We called it, no answer. So then we got in the car 2/4...
Last weekend I went on a car chase in Laos.
Here's what happened.
Laos has been having fuel shortages, so when my partner and I decided that when possible, we would ride our bikes to places instead of driving. So he went out that day for a few groceries about a mile away. When he got home, he realized he didn't have his phone with him. 1/4...
Before there was Reddit, there was a little something called Yahoo! Answers, where I saw my favorite question ever asked on the internet:
"When is Truck Month historically celebrated?"
When 404media skewers a company, you know it's well deserved. There's a little more grandstanding and "told you so" in this piece than necessary, but it's still great.
https://www.404media.co/rip-metaverse-an-80-billion-dumpster-fire-nobody-wanted/
AI SLOP WEB PAGES ARE TRAINING AI
It is a circle of slop
Was the internet a mistake?
In media, we have all been talking about the problem of search for many years, at least starting in 2022 or 2023 when Google made a huge change to how it returns results and all the media outlets saw huge dips in traffic
With AI summaries showing up in search results for people who have not opted out of them, the traffic loss continues. It's a major issue for anyone who runs an online business or is in media. But I haven't heard in my daily life of non-media people discussing it
More and more AI slop pages are turning up in my basic search results. I use Duck Duck Go, and I have AI assistance disable. Yet, when I click through to the top websites in any search results, I'm landing on more and more pages that are clearly written by AI with AI-generated images and so forth.
I won't link to them bc I don't want to give them traffic but here's an image. Just look at the arms. We are so overdue for a major correction in how search works...
As someone who knows nothing about fashion, I found this essay on the trend of hats in context with female identity to be deeply reflective and approachable
"we’re all just tired of looking at our own foreheads on screen. A giant hat is the ultimate IRL filter. It’s “delusion-core” at its finest: if I can’t see the ceiling, the ceiling doesn’t exist"
