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JJ
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worth reading: may 29-june 7, 2024

JJ
two recommendations related to Google deciding to jam "AI overviews" into search results: 
  • The Ten Blue Links Chrome extension
    • cleans up the Google search results page.
  • UDM-14
    • does the exact same thing as Ten Blue Links, only without having to install an extension. automatically adds the "udm=14" query string to every query in order to kill the AI overview feature. 
three articles about animals: 
  • “Big crab with mussel hair-do fascinates beachgoers” by Rosie Mercer 
    • exactly what it says on the tin. 
  • “What My Dog Taught Me About Mortality” by Sam Andersen (unpaywalled, text only)
    • this is partially about the author's dog Walnut. Walnut sounded so familiar to me...until I realized that he's the subject of one of my favorite passages in recent memory, from: 
  • “Why We Take Animal Voyages” by Sam Andersen (unpaywalled)
    • here's the iconic passage: "The most annoying thing Walnut does, even worse than barking at the mailman, is the ritual of his “evening drink.” Every night, when I am settled in bed, when I am on the brink of sleep, Walnut will suddenly get very thirsty. If I go to bed at 10:30, Walnut will get thirsty at 11. If I go to bed at midnight, he’ll wake me up at 1. I’ve found that the only way I cannot be mad about this is to treat this ritual as its own special kind of voyage — to try to experience it as if for the first time. If I am open to it, my upstairs hallway contains an astonishing amount of life. 

      The evening drink goes something like this: First, Walnut will stand on the edge of the bed, in a muscular, stout little stance, and he will wave his big ridiculous fan tail in my face, creating enough of a breeze that I can’t ignore it. I will roll over and try to go back to sleep, but he won’t let me: He’ll stamp his hairy front paws and wag harder, then add expressive noises from his snout — half-whine, half-breath, hardly audible except to me. And so I give up. I sit up and pivot and plant my feet on the floor — I am hardly even awake yet — and I make a little basket of my arms, like a running back preparing to take a handoff, and Walnut pops his body right into that pocket, entrusting the long length of his vulnerable spine (a hazard of the dachshund breed) to the stretch of my right arm, and then he hangs his furry front legs over my left. From this point on we function as a unit, a fusion of man and dog. As I lift my weight from the bed Walnut does a little hop, just to help me with gravity, and we set off down the narrow hall. We are Odysseus on the wine-dark sea. (Walnut is Odysseus; I am the ship.)"
and the rest of them: