The Democrats have a shot at taking the House and Senate this year. Will they have the courage to launch hearings and pursue criminal prosecution to its end-point — even if that means throwing DJT in prison?

Or will they wimp out, as the US has done since the Reconstruction after the Civil War, and give oligarchs a pass?

In the United States today there is no penalty for flagrant corruption and attempting the overthrow of the US government — if you’re a billionaire.

If you steal $1,000, they throw you in prison, but if you take hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes, they put you in the White House.

Infrastructure AI stalls before ROI, research finds — Separate research from Gartner and IDC finds AI adoption in infrastructure and networking isn’t meeting expectations. My latest on Fierce Network.

No email containing the phrase “bumping this to the top of your inbox” is worth reading.

A grandmother of ten went to work for Doordash after burning through her life savings to pay for her husband’s cancer treatments and Trump thinks this is a flex.

T-Mobile’s Ankur Kapoor: Here’s why 5G-Advanced matters to consumers and businesses. T-Mobile’s chief network officer, details how 5G-Advanced delivers faster, more consistent performance today, and is “training wheels” for AI-native 6G. My latest on Fierce Network.

I enjoy delicious schadenfreude watching Trump and his MAGA clowns set their house on fire, notwithstanding that we’re all in the house with them and the doors are locked.

While walking the dog this morning I spontaneously thought of the ending to last night’s episode of “Rooster” and I burst out laughing out loud.

When I make a doctor’s appointment, the doctor sends a notification asking me to arrive ten minutes early. That’s not how appointments work.

This is possibly the least annoying thing in my life that is, nonetheless, still annoying.

“Bikeshedding” is the futile expenditure of time and resources on marginal elements of an important technical decision. It’s based on a hypothetical story about a local planning organization tasked with reviewing plans for a nuclear power plant. They are overwhelmed by the cost and engineering of this advanced technological project, and instead focus on details of the bike shed proposed for plant employees.

Historian C. Northcote Parkinson noted the phenomenon in 1957. “The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum [of money] involved,” Parkinson said.

The idea of bikeshedding became popular in the open source community, which is where I encountered it.

I have been lately overwhelmed by organizing retirement, our estates, finances, decluttering the house and so on. Also, I’ve been dissatisfied with the dental floss I’ve been using. However, I have researched options thoroughly and I believe I’ve arrived at a satisfactory alternative floss.

I was thinking about “The Expanse” the other day, and I abruptly remembered the name of the technology that powered the spaceship engines: The Epstein Drive. That’s unfortunate

A friend shared rumors of poor ratings for Starfleet Academy, undercutting my theory that it was taken off the air because the network had gone anti-woke.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can see where Starfleet Academy might have been doomed by its premise. Young people might consider Trek to be an old people’s show, and say “Pass.” Old people look at a show about teenagers and say, “Pass.”

Plus the show did too much fanservice. I loved Starfleet Academy, but the fanservice coiuld get annoying. An entire episode about the mystery of what happened to Ben Sisko. It was a good episode, but I never was that big a DS9 fan so I did not get so much from it as other fans might have.

Maybe Trek just needs to take a 10-20 year time-out, like Doctor Who did before 2005.

I have been using RSS daily for more than 20 years and I have no clue what the difference is between RSS and a JSON feed, and whether or why I should pick one over the other. This kind of thing is why more people do not use RSS.

I have been thinking for a long time that Mastodon was dying, that fewer and fewer people were posting less and less and that what they were posting was less interesting.

Then yesterday, I followed @lisamelton@mastodon.social. Boy, was I wrong!

Lisa doesn’t post much, but she is a fiend for boosting other peoples posts.

So many interesting posts! So many interesting people to follow!

Mastodon nowadays has a Tumblr vibe. If you want to build your business or brand or get your political message out to the broadest possible audience, you should use YouTube, Twitter, a newsletter, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, LinkedIn and maybe TikTok (though I hear TikTok is fading).

Like Tumblr, Mastodon is just a place to hang out and read fun and maybe informative posts. It has no practical value. I like it.

And unlike Tumblr, Mastodon is not perpetually at risk of money people pulling the plug. As long as a few people are interested in keeping it going, it will keep going.

I just sent this email to @manton: You asked for an update on my experiment using Micro.blog as my sole outpost on the fediverse. It didn’t work for me.

I’ve mentioned before that I’d love it if you’d make Micro.blog into a superset of Mastodon. Today, I’d add Bluesky to that wish. Support boosts/reposts, likes/favorites, quote posts, display names, link previews and the rest. I think based on prior discussions that this is downright antithetical to your philosophy of Micro.blog and I respect and appreciate that — but it frustrates me. I think you ike the peace and quiet of MIcro.blog, whereas I like the noise. On the other hand, It’s been many years since I’ve been the subject of a social media pile-on.

I want one place to post and have it automatically go everywhere. Micro.blog almost gets me there — but then it stops a few feet short of the destination!

I have resumed reading Mastodon and posting directly to it.

I experimented for a while with relying on ActivityPub federation from my blog on Micro.blog and reading Mastodon from the Micro.blog timeline.

But Micro.blog doesn’t support boosts, favorites or display names (it only shows Fediverse addresses). I want to see all those things. So I decided to reactivate my favorite Mastodon account (@mitch@hachyderm.io) and read Mastodon from there.

And then I figured why not reactivate cross-posting from Micro.blog to Mastodon?

Eventually, I suppose I’ll migrate my Micro.blog followers to Mastodon. But I’m in no rush.

I’m still looking for one place to post where everybody who wants to read me can just follow me. In theory, that’s the web, but in reality everybody likes to go off in their own little services — Facebook, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Tumblr, whatever — and not talk to people elsewhere. I have communities on Facebook, Bluesky, Mastodon, my blog and newsletter and Tumblr, and I don’t want to give them up. I have a few automation tools and other tricks for minimizing manual cross-posting, but it also involves too much cutting and pasting. Frustrating!

Ladies and gentlemen: The President of the United States.

Is Anthropic’s Mythos a cybersecurity breakthrough, or just ‘criti-hype’? Anthropic claims its Mythos AI model is too dangerous to release widely — but telcos should focus on security fundamentals, not the hype. My latest on Fierce Network.

Science fiction assumes the universe is impersonal and knowable. Fantasy assumes the universe is governed by gods and other supernatural entities and is fundamentally unknowable by humans.

Horror is like fantasy but it also assumes the supernatural entities are cruel.

I’m pretty sure Joe Haldeman gets credit for these distinctions. He noted that by these definitions, the genre closest to science fiction isn’t fantasy — it’s the procedural mystery.

This was more of a big deal in the 20th Century, but even then, the best writers shrugged it off and were happy to play across genres. Poul Anderson said the biggest fantasy is that our understanding of the laws of the universe would be valid in 1,000 years.

I love Star Trek but the science and technology of Trek is less plausible than Game of Thrones. The science and technology of Doctor Who is even more implausible than Trek, but I love Who too.

I prefer science fiction to fantasy but I don’t make a Thing about it, like Some People do (or did — I think perhaps this controversy died in the 90s, and good riddance to it). I literally have friends who are fantasy writers.

From an excellent Bluesky threadlaunched by John Scalzi.

Trump has been doing everything he can to distract the world away from the Epstein files, even starting a war, and Melania just put the spotlight back. That’s interesting.

No email is worth reading that contains the phrase “just wanted to follow up.”

Today I found myself thinking about a science fiction writer named Clifford D. Simak, popular in the 1930s-50s, although he continued publishing until his death in the 80s. He was best known for short stories.

Somebody said that the archetypal Simak story went like this: An old country coot is settin on his front porch, sippin moonshine and whittling a sharp stick. A flying saucer lands in the front yard and a scary purple alien comes out. The alien admires the old coot’s sharp stick and says he’ll give the old coot the design for an interstellar spaceship drive if the old coot will give the alien the stick in return. The old coot makes the trade and to seal the deal they set on the front porch and sip moonshine together.

To feed my RSS habit, I recent I recently switched from Inoreader to Newsblur, which turned out to be well-timed, because Samuel Clay, the developer who runs Newsblur, has had a sudden burst of activity implementing new features. Among these are daily AI-generated summaries that I find to be quite good, if a bit buggy — like news roundups delivered multiple times daily. He’s also implemented natural language filtering, which I haven’t been able to get working.

Fellow RSS addict Jason Snell has more thoughts. Like Jason, I want my newsletters and RSS feeds in the same place, which is a major reason I switched away from Inoreader, because Inoreader’s newsletter support just does not work for me. It’s otherwise a great app — worth trying for heavy RSS users.

Like other Founders, Thomas Jefferson was a contradiction on human rights: He dedicated his life to the United States and individual freedom, and often treated African-Americans with respect, while simultaneously owning 610 people as property. Historian Annette Gordon-Reed collected Jefferson’s own writings about race, both personal and public. “He wrote that all men are born free, but he also enslaved hundreds.”

Author Rachel Hartigan explores the life and disappearance of Amelia Earhart in a new book. “… the most likely thing to have happened, the simplest explanation that matches with most of what we know, it’s that she got lost, ran out of gas, and crashed.”

Here’s some of what I’ve been writing for Fierce Network lately:

Q-Day just got closer — you need to be ready by 2029, Cloudflare says.

Cisco is in the early stages of developing products for space data centers. “I wouldn’t bet against Elon," says CEO Chuck Robbins.

Akamai Technologies’s AI orchestrator puts inference at the network edge, where latency matters.

Telcos are picking up the pace to achieve Level 4 autonomous networks, according to a TM Forum study. Asian telcos are in the lead.