Rob Pegoraro

@robpegoraro.com

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D.C.-based freelance technology journalist covering, and often vexed by, computers, gadgets, and other things that beep. May or may not be notable. He/him. Read: PCMag, Fast Company, etc. Write: [email protected]

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I still haven't seen any AI-extruded shrimp-Jesus images on Facebook, but I did just get treated to a ridiculous image of a truck hauling a mile-long series of trailers filled with American flags. The truck is going the wrong way, and the highway signs seem to be in some foreign character set.

Bien joué, citoyens!

JUST IN: Polls closed in France. Exit polls show surprise: —Left coalition (New Popular Front) projected first. (!) —Far-right (RN) has lost its bid to take power. Anti-RN front appears to have worked very well. —No bloc close to majority. Follow this 🧵 for results and more:

Unsolicited plug: Once again (see the 2019 post below), the trip-delay coverage on my Chase biz card not only paid for a good hotel--YYZ's Sheraton Gateway--after a weather-driven flight cancellation but did so quickly, landing the reimbursement in my bank account 11 days after I filed my claim.

It has been 🅾️ days since weather threw a cloud-sized wrench into my travel plans, forced an overnight stay, and left me appreciating the trip-delay coverage on my business credit card (assuming Chase comes though, which they did pleasantly easily the last time this happened).

A small consumer victory: exercising a Chase credit card’s trip-delay coveragerobpegoraro.com I got a giant financial firm to treat me to a nice dinner and a reasonably comfortable hotel room, and I only had to ask once. But that is what Chase promised with the trip-delay coverage on the credi...

The NYT editors who greenlit a "Why I don't vote" essay (no link deserved) by a fascism-jealous theocrat to run on July 4th should be fired. That piece, which I immediately felt stupider for having read, made no useful points and only flaunted a privileged author's indifference from circumstances.

🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (If you haven’t seen a naturalization ceremony, remedy that oversight ASAP.)

just watched 74 people speaking at least a dozen different languages become american citizens in a ceremony at monticello, where the speakers were themselves children of immigrants. inspiring stuff and a vivid illustration of what reactionaries want to snuff out

Notwithstanding everything else wrong in the world, those of us in D.C. and Arlington can safely put ice cubes in our drinks this heat-advisory-afflicted Fourth of July: "drinking water provided by the Washington Aqueduct never deviated from U.S. EPA established water quality standards."

UPDATE: DC Water Lifts Boil Water Advisory for All Affected Customers – Effective 7:30 AM July 4, 2024 | DC Waterwww.dcwater.com

DC Water: Boil-water advisory for D.C., Pentagon, Arlington Cemetery, DCA bc “drop in water supply” from its Washington Aqueduct. Arlington: Boil-water advisory for entire county bc Aqueduct “water clarity issues” Me: Clarity plz? www.dcwater.com/about-dc-wat... www.arlingtonva.us/Government/D...

Always fun (and unusual) to see somebody get to 1st on a dropped third strike. #nats

Even with only three days in The Show and one base hit in this game, Nats hot prospect and left fielder James Wood > veteran character actor turned creepy Trump cultist James Woods.

Cloudflare's post announcing this new AI bot-blocking option reports that the highest-volume bot it's seen is Bytespider, owned by TikTok's parent firm ByteDance, which it recorded crawling 40.4% of Cloudflare-protected sites. OpenAI's GPTBot came in second, at 35.46%.

Cloudflare launched a one-click option to block known AI bots, crawlers, and scrapers. blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-yo...

Declare your AIndependence: block AI bots, scrapers and crawlers with a single clickblog.cloudflare.com To help preserve a safe Internet for content creators, we’ve just launched a brand new “easy button” to block all AI bots. It’s available for all customers, including those on our free tier.

Two words to get the attention of most word-processor users of a certain age that don't appear in this WSJ obit: < Reveal Codes > I had missed how WordPerfect co-creator Bruce Bastian had his own profound self-reveal experience--coming out as gay in late-'80s Utah could not have been easy.

www.wsj.com

Enlightening thread from Dr. Hayhoe about engagement with the same post across three short-form platforms: Bluesky, Threads and X. If only we had link-click data here--the Bsky click-through rate can't possibly be worse than Xitter's CTR!

Yesterday, I shared this same Canada Day thread on Bluesky, Threads, and X. Here's what I found. 🧵

Facebook users: Could we please have slightly fewer ads and suggested pages and groups in our feeds so it's a little easier to keep up with actual friends and family? Facebook: How about we try stuffing the occasional ad in your notifications?

Facebook's Newest Monetization Experiment: Ads in Your Notificationswww.pcmag.com Meta's marketing test allows companies to buy a spot in the notifications list, but does not let users opt out. I’ve now seen at least four, and they all have several things in common.

E-mail just in from Alaska Airlines: "Enjoy low fares with AI flight recs!" (You type in a description of the place you want to visit, then it spits out airfares to matching destinations. What are the odds it suggests Seattle every time?)

Longtime reader's critique of Apple's Migration Assistant: It will only migrate a user's data to an internal drive, even though macOS lets you put that same folder on an external drive. So he had to move over one user at a time--old Mac to new Mac internal drive, then to new Mac's external drive.

Seeing yet another picture of a Cybertruck here (FYI, they look more ridiculous IRL next to vehicles with normal polygon counts) reminded me of hearing a fellow passenger on a Dulles Airport mobile lounge late Sunday night venting about those inter-terminal conveyances as "stupid Cybertrucks."

I finally set aside some time to read the Supreme Court's Trump-immunity opinion in full. And the highlighted text may be the most insultingly disingenuous sentence I've ever read in a SCOTUS opinion: This case exists *because* a president felt "empowered to violate federal criminal law."

Responding to a journalist's query with "Were you planning to write a story about this?" is one of the dumber possible PR responses. Why would I ask questions if not for the purpose of writing a story? (Especially as a freelancer: I don't get to invoice clients for unproductive banter with PR reps.)

IANAL, but is it bad if you're a judge and the Supreme Court says you don't understand how the First Amendment works?

Upshot: SCOTUS vacates and remands the NetChoice cases because of the facial challenge irregularity that came up at oral arguments, but the Court takes the time to explain how it views the First Amendment principles at issue, with a not-at-all-disguised swipe at the 5th Circuit.

Spending a few days in Southern California led to me watching Swingers for the first time in years--which led me to wonder if millennials and Gen Z types need to watch that flick with telecom-history captions to explain how landlines and answering machines worked three decades ago.

No, Netflix, removing the ability to watch downloaded TV shows and movies from the Windows app is not "OK."

If your travel schedule has a ballgame-sized hole in it that happens to overlap with a game nearby and you can cross another ballpark off the list--there's no question about that call, is there?

Just saw a Cybertruck pull up to a pump at a gas station. Am I watching some weird performance art?

My recap of yesterday's #VidCon session about the state of the platform that people at this event still call "Twitter." This post may not capture how the speaker most bullish on Twitter's continued potential made using that platform for marketing purposes sound like such a joyless exercise.

Twitter Influencers: The Money Is Terrible, But We're Not Going Anywherewww.pcmag.com At VidCon Anaheim, panelists vent about bots, toxic comments, and awful monetization but show no sign of heading for the exits. 'We will be playing the violins as the ship sinks,' says Ellie Schnitt.

Weirdest practical advice I've heard somebody say on a #VidCon stage: "Put in a trigger warning for mouth sounds," said with some seriousness by Sporked's Jordan Myrick in a panel about trends in food content.

Happy birthday to our Atomic Apocalypse Interstate Highway System!

Today in 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the consequential Federal Aid Highway Act, which created the 41,000-mile interstate highway system and was justified and promoted partly on the basis that it would enable the swift evacuation of US cities in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack.

Anybody at #VidCon reading this: Desiree Martinez is giving a great, info-dense talk about working the creator economy as a businessperson in room 202 now. Reminds me a lot of #XOXOfest talks that I've liked in the past.

$22. That's what Ellie Schnitt, who tweets as @holy_schnitt, said on a #VidCon panel that she made from X last month off 553k+ followers and what she estimated as 5m+ impressions. Her fellow panelists were no more bullish about monetization on the former Twitter.

Watched the most Washington panel at #VidCon: White House digital-strategy director Christian Tom on digital outreach. Interviewer Jessica Yellin: "Are you guys getting screwed by the algorithm too?" Tom: "Yes, we're dependent on it [...] the President's account doesn't have some special treatment."

And here I was worried that I'd have to cover some inane tech-policy banter from last night! That golf-handicap convo was probably the worst bit of any presidential debate that I've watched, not that the rest of that debacle was much better between Biden's rambling and Trump's lying.

never tell your bosses about your hobbies because if you do, two jabronies will rant about it during a presidential debate and you’ll have to write about golf handicaps and existential dread t.co/O4xfeBqWyY

Fore More Yearst.co Two presidential candidates argue about who’s better at hitting a ball. Nobody wins.