On this day (1609): William Shakespeare’s Sonnets are first published in London, perhaps illicitly, by publisher Thomas Thorpe (summary of the scholarship). Here’s a list of them by first lines — all bangers! XXV, one of the milder ones!
Let those who are in favour with their stars
Of public honour and proud titles boast,
Whilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars,
Unlook’d for joy in that I honour most.
Duty. From my OED app: /ˈdjuːti / ▸ noun (plural duties) 1 a moral or legal obligation; a responsibility: it’s my duty to uphold the law, she was determined to do her duty as a citizen [mass noun] a strong sense of duty. ▪ [as modifier] (of a visit or other undertaking) done from a sense of moral obligation rather than for pleasure: a fifteen-minute duty visit. 2 (duties) a task or action that one is required to perform as part of one’s job: the queen’s official duties, your duties will include operating the switchboard [mass noun] Juliet reported for duty. ▪ [with modifier] a person’s responsibility for a specified task, usually one involving supervising someone or supplying something: when he’s on baby duty he usually lets his wife sleep in, we’ve got a small gathering coming up and I’m on beer duty. ▪ [mass noun] military service: combat duty in the army. ▪ [as modifier] (of a person) engaged in their regular work: a duty nurse. ▪ [mass noun] (also duties) performance of prescribed church services by a priest or minister: he was willing to take Sunday duties. 3 a payment levied on the import, export, manufacture, or sale of goods: a 6 per cent duty on imports [mass noun] goods subject to excise duty. ▪ British English a payment levied on the transfer of property, for licences, and for the legal recognition of documents. 4 technical the measure of an engine’s effectiveness in units of work done per unit of fuel.
From Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance, or, The Slave of Duty”
“Volvo to pay $197 million after hidden pollution device found in California truck engines” [Los Angeles Times]. “Volvo Group North America has agreed to pay nearly $197 million to resolve allegations from California regulators that company’s heavy-duty truck engines violated California emissions standards and certification requirements. About 10,000 diesel truck engines manufactured by Volvo were equipped with an undisclosed device, causing them to release excessive levels of smog-forming pollution across California, according to the California Air Resources Board, the state agency that regulates air pollution and greenhouse gases.” • “Heavy duty” seems redundant (but see sense 4). Apparently not—
“The Best Off-Duty Looks From the 2026 Cannes Film Festival” [Vogue]. “There is no such thing as an off-duty moment—at least not during the Cannes Film Festival, where paparazzi are stationed in airport arrivals, hotel foyers, beachfronts, and anywhere else a celebrity might reasonably appear during the event’s two-week stint.”
“The Four Secret Words That Allow Your Employer to Make You Do Anything They Want” [Slate]. “Tucked at the bottom of countless job descriptions is a line so familiar it may barely register: ‘other duties as assigned.’… If you know anything about how a small amount of power can go straight to some managers’ heads, it might not be surprising that ‘other duties as assigned’ can also get used to turn employees into their boss’s personal assistant, even when that’s very much not the job they were hired for.” • Well, that’s the baseline toward which all wage work tends, so….
Dad Joke of the Day: What do you call a reluctant potato? A hesitater.
Window. From my OED app: “/ˈwɪndəʊ / ▸ noun 1 an opening in the wall or roof of a building or vehicle, fitted with glass in a frame to admit light or air and allow people to see out. ▪ a pane of glass filling a window: thieves smashed a window and took £600. ▪ an opening in a wall or screen through which customers are served in a bank, ticket office, or similar building. ▪ a space behind the window of a shop where goods are displayed for sale: [as modifier] beautiful window displays. ▪ a means of observing and learning about something: television is a window on the world. 2 a transparent panel on an envelope to show an address. 3 Computing a framed area on a display screen for viewing information. 4 an interval or opportunity for action: the parliamentary recess offers a good window for a bid>. ▪ an interval during which atmospheric and astronomical circumstances are suitable for the launch of a spacecraft. 5 Physics a range of electromagnetic wavelengths for which a medium (especially the atmosphere) is transparent. 6 [mass noun] strips of metal foil dispersed in the air to obstruct radar detection. [military code word] – ORIGIN Middle English: from Old Norse vindauga, from vindr ‘wind’ + auga ‘eye’.” • ”Wind”+ “eye” is a strikingly beautiful etymology.
“Gemini is in danger of going full Copilot” [The Verge]. ‘The AI-everywhere fatigue is familiar to anyone who has ever used Windows 11. Microsoft went absolutely bananas putting Copilot shortcuts onto every surface it could find, to the extreme irritation of many users. Likewise, we will doubtlessly hear about all kinds of new Gemini features at this week’s Google I/O conference, and I’m praying that Google has learned from Microsoft’s mistakes as it unleashes them on our Workspace apps. Nobody likes a creep. everyone has their limit, and I think the newest Gemini intrusion into Google Docs is when I reached mine. It’s a persistent sparkle icon at the bottom of the window, and if you make the mistake of mousing over it, you’ll get a full-on toolbar with suggested prompts to get Gemini to write for you. Blogging is my craft, thank you very much, so I shut that shit right down.” • Stop trying the “Help” me! Get out of my way!
“Why It’s Difficult to Resize Windows on MacOS 26 Dyehoe” [Daring Fireball]. Quoting Norbert Heger: “Since upgrading to macOS Tahoe, I’ve noticed that quite often my attempts to resize a window are failing. This never happened to me before in almost 40 years of using computers. So why all of a sudden? It turns out that my initial click in the window corner instinctively happens in an area where the window doesn’t respond to it. The window expects this click to happen in an area of 19 × 19 pixels, located near the window corner. If the window had no rounded corners at all, 62% of that area would lie inside the window. But due to the huge corner radius in Tahoe, most of it — about 75% — now lies outside the window.” And: “Until MacOS 26, most of the hit target to initiate the resizing of a window was inside the window. Because, of course, right? …. You pick up a thing to move it or stretch it by grabbing the thing. Not by grabbing next to the thing…. The windows on MacOS 26 Tahoe don’t really have comically large, childish corner radiuses. They just look like they do because some jackasses at Apple — all of whom, I pray, are now at Meta — thought they looked better that way. It’s a straight-up inversion of Steve Jobs’s maxim that design is about how things work, not how they look. I can think of no better example to prove that the new UI in MacOS 26 Tahoe was designed by people who do not understand or care about the most basic fundamental principles of good design. The good news is, I have a solution. Do not upgrade to MacOS 26 Tahoe.” • Still resisting Liquid Glass slop here….
“These Are The Long-Gone Car Features You Wish Automakers Still Had Today” [Jalopnik]. “The little triangle windows sometimes known as vents: ‘Front quarter windows. The single best thing about old cars [besides the lack of telemetry] is being able to open them. They look beautiful but are also insanely functional. You can have a tiny amount of fresh air, you can pump air out of the car, you can blast it like it’s AC, you can just crack it to smell the rain. Bring them back!” • Indeed. Along with tactile affordances like buttons and knobs, instead of screens.
“On the Run and Underground: When Your Mom’s on the FBI’s Most Wanted List” [Literary Hub]. Worth reading in full, especially to see what surveillance was like the the mid-twentieth century, compared with today. “I lay back and looked out the window instead, the yellow lane markers swallowed up behind us, the tree line blurring over by the edge of the road, while my parents whispered to each other across the dark front seat of our car: ‘Who should we call? Who’s going to meet us there?’ ‘They know where we’re headed now.’ ‘They don’t know where we are.’ The hum of the engine, the hiss of tires on asphalt, the warm air inside, and the constant sense of forward momentum made me feel like we were our own little world, sealed off from the outside—and if we just kept going, kept driving, no one would ever catch us.” And: “Ten years earlier, and seven years before my birth, a dynamite bomb exploded in a women’s restroom at New York Police Department headquarters in Manhattan, crushing the three-foot cinderblock walls on both sides, blowing a tunnel through an empty elevator shaft, shattering windows for blocks around, and hurling sinks, toilets, and chunks of concrete across the street.” And: “I knew, the way all kids ‘know,’ that my parents were heroes. We were the good guys. And if we were also criminals and fugitives—if my mom and dad had done things in the past that were dangerous and illegal—I knew they had done them for the right reasons. To help people. To make the world a better place. And I trusted that they had stopped taking those terrifying risks after I was born. Because they always told me—and I believed, as one of the first tenets of my childhood faith—that my brother and I were their first priority, the center of their hopes and dreams for the future. And I was sure they would always protect us, no matter what.” • Maybe.
Fortune: “This cultural mystique surrounding the biological function — you realize humans are overly preoccupied with the subject.” —Kelinda the Kelvan, “By Any Other Name”, stardate 4658.9
Deepfake. From my OED app (and I’m surprised it’s already made it in): /ˈdiːpfeɪk / ▸ noun a video, image, etc. in which a person’s face, body, or voice has been digitally altered so that they appear to be someone else, typically used maliciously or to spread false information: the committee hearing on worldwide threats cited deepfakes as a growing concern [as modifier] he has been the one talking all along, putting words in his opponent’s mouth thanks to deepfake technology. ▸ verb [with object] digitally alter (a video, image, etc. of a person) so that they appear to be someone else, typically for malicious purposes or to spread false information: officials concluded that the videos and images were deepfaked (deepfaked as adjective) the guide offers pointers on how to spot a deepfaked video. – ORIGIN early 21st century.” • Yes, the 21st century has been great so far.
“The New Face of Fraud: Five Scams Costing Companies Millions” [Visual Capitalist]. “Criminals use AI-generated audio or video to impersonate executives or colleagues. As deepfake technology improves, traditional verification methods like phone calls or video meetings are becoming less reliable. UK engineering firm Arup lost $25 million when fraudsters posed as managers on a video call and convinced an employee to transfer money. People can only detect deepfakes 55% of the time on average.” • Yikes.
“Fear Of Political Underdogs Behind “Deepfake” AI Alarmism” [Michael Shellenberger, Public}. “AI-generated ‘deepfake’ photos and videos, like the ones being put out by supporters of Los Angeles Mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt, are a threat to democracy, say many. ‘These Pratt social videos are catchy but… they are also 100% deep fakes,’ said political consultant Mike Murphy. ‘In fact, Pratt for Mayor is the most AI deep fake-driven campaign I’ve ever seen…. There is no disclaimer on them. They’re not officially from his campaign… not sure who’s paying for this stuff.’” • Too bad I hit the PayWall before the argument in the headline is was made (Substack’s “Continue reading this post for free” is deceptive, in that you have to download the Substack app).
“Inside the wild fight to oust a top GOP Trump critic” [Axios]. “The fight between Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and President Trump-backed rival Ed Gallrein is now the most expensive U.S. House primary in history — and it’s one of the nastiest, too. The race has turned into an all-out war of inflammatory accusations, savage insults and AI deepfakes. One pro-Gallrein super PAC ad features an AI-generated Massie dining and holding hands with Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), accusing him of being in a ‘throuple’ and ‘cheating with ‘The Squad’ on the America First movement.‘ “Classy! More: “Pro-Massie groups have attempted to brutally undermine Gallrein’s MAGA credentials, labeling him ‘woke Eddie’ and depicting the retired Navy SEAL in one AI-generated ad as a soldier abandoning Trump on a battlefield. Both candidates have attacked each other as being insufficiently conservative on a wide range of social issues, including diversity, equity and inclusion, transgender rights, Black Lives Matter, and immigration. All of this is backed up by more than $25.6 million in ad spending, according to AdImpact, which makes the fight between Massie and Gallrein the most expensive U.S. House primary in history.” • Surely deepfakes aren’t all that expensive?