Calendar interoperability is underappreciated. I use iCloud for home, Google for the University and Office365 for work, all from a single app, which also handles invites and scheduling. Other people can see my various calendars in their own software, seamlessly. We should make everything a calendar.

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate!

“Typically the most important thing is not how you do the optimization but rather what you decide to optimize." This is in regards to a school bus route optimization disaster:

The program — developed by graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — uses artificial intelligence to generate the routes with the intent of reducing the number of routes. Last year, JCPS had 730 routes last year, and that was cut to 600 beginning this year…

So, people thought you could eliminate — pardon, optimize — 20% of the routes without consequence. Don’t blame AI, which is nothing but an incantation used to make someone’s magical thinking a reality.

Three pieces from last week about the long-gone, the recently deceased, and the actively dying:

• Pipe Dreams: The life and times of Yahoo Pipes
• The Year Twitter Died
• Facebook is being overrun with stolen, AI-generated images people think are real

What a great year for the Internet!

(ᔥWaxy.org)

I wish there was a way to see what a post would look like in the micro.blog timeline when posting from MarsEdit. The Title field popping up is a hint that the post may or may not be truncated, but it’s not fool-proof. My first post for today was an example of a fool messing it up!

And while we are at it: being able to see the word count ± choose categories in the MarsEdit micropost window would be wonderful. This very post, which started in the micropost window, is the case study for why.

For Malaysia Airlines, 2014 was a devastating year. I remember flight MH17, which was shot down on July 17 while flying over eastern Ukraine. But months before, another flight — MH370 — disappeared from the radar never to be seen again (well, not intact). A friend directed me to this video, and the story is as engrossing as anything you’ll see on the big screen, only done with flight simulator software and stock footage. Make sure you can spare the full hour before you start watching!

Side note: it’s a good documentary, but Good lord how I hate YouTube’s aesthetics of catchy titles and eye-grabbing thumbnail videos. At least they’ve fixed the comments.

The original World of Goo was one of the first games in my ever-expanding Steam library. I can’t wait to play the sequel on the Apple Vision Pro! (ᔥWaxy.org)

Seeing the news about a woman, two mirrors, and an iPhone photo, the first word that comes to mind — rightly or wrongly — is fabulist. When an attention-seeking person wants to engage a scandal-seeking public, of course that they will target Apple. I am old enough to remember people making a show out of the whole thing. (↬Matt Birchler)

The word of the day (and it’s 11:45pm where I am, so it is the Word of the Day) is fecosystem, courtesy of Doc Searls:

Click on that link, wait for that whole graphic to load, and look around. You won’t recognize most of the names in that vast data river delta, but all of them play parts in a fecosystem that relies entirely on absent personal privacy online.

Minority Report takes place in 2054, but 30 years is way too long for us to reach those levels of privacy invasion when we are already nearly there.

The winner of this year’s Interactive Fiction Comp is the delightful Dr. Ludwig and the Devil. Browsing the winners of years past gave me a few flashbacks from the early 2000s, my peak years of IF gaming; these two in particular. (ᔥwaxy.org)