William Styron, The Art of Fiction, interviewed by George Plimpton in 1999
"I thought that by now [writing] would be a snap, but it’s every bit as hard as it was then, if not harder."

Lots of interesting stuff, worth the read.
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/987/the-art-of-fiction-no-156-william-styron

Starting out Monday with a coworker saying, essentially, “What you do is easy even though I have no experience doing it, or at least doing it well.”

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For the past three years voice assistant use has been falling and adoption continues to slow. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64371426

Cybersecurity books recommended by top security researchers
by @yaelwrites from back in 2018 https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/cybersecurity-books-recommended-by-top-security-researchers-1812.html

Depending on which mutation rate was used, the genetic evidence suggested a last common ancestor for Native Americans anywhere from 15,000 to 30,000 years ago, or 2,000 to 17,000 years earlier than accounted for by the Clovis First model. https://aeon.co/essays/the-first-americans-a-story-of-wonderful-uncertain-science

A nurse is on her way home. She and pulls a thermometer out of her pocket, looks at it for a second, and says, “Great, now some asshole’s got my pen.”

Elon Musk said that due to feedback Twitter will provide a write-only API for "bots providing good content that is free." https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/04/elon-musk-says-twitter-will-provide-a-free-write-only-api-to-bots-providing-good-content/

"I’ve written before about the lack of progress in kitchen appliances in the last 50 years. The last great kitchen appliance was the microwave—introduced in 1967—and they haven’t changed much since. But the home espresso machine is an exception." https://worksinprogress.substack.com/p/in-pursuit-of-decent-coffee

The year’s biggest art shows https://www.timeout.com/art/worlds-best-exhibitions-to-see-this-year

In 1986, Susan Lammers did a series of interviews with 19 prominent programmers in a Microsoft Press book, Programmers at Work. In 2010, I wrote a "where are they now?" article, tracing what had happened to those developers. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2826737/programmers-who-defined-the-technology-industry--where-are-they-now-.html

A cat dataset! From 2013-2017, hundreds of volunteers in the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand strapped GPS sensors on their pet cats. The datasets include each cat’s characteristics and timestamped GPS pings Check out the cat-track browser. http://cattracker.org

Why Did the Beatles Get So Many Bad Reviews? An inquiry into how critics stumble.
"The sad truth is the critics typically operate by looking in the rearview mirror. Like generals, they fail on the battlefield because their strategy is built on the last war."
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/why-did-the-beatles-get-so-many-bad

Collette's work – mostly at novella length, short and sharp – survives because her chief subject is one that never goes out of fashion. "Love, the bread and butter of my pen," she wrote. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230125-colette-the-most-beloved-french-writer-of-all-time

"Here are the recurring ideas, distilled from dozens of conversations, that I think will most help you—no matter how unorthodox your process, how singular your vision." https://lithub.com/i-talked-to-150-writers-and-heres-the-best-advice-they-had/

"If anything, the passage of time and our shifting political and historical vantage points have only confirmed Mad Men’s staying power as a seminal series in television history."
https://theamericanscholar.org/a-midcentury-bender/

Recent security reports identified the risk of attacks on misconfigured Redis databases. Here are five basic steps to secure your #Redis deployments.

https://redis.com/blog/5-basic-steps-to-secure-redis-deployments/

The pump has been replaced, and the pool has been emptied, acid-washed, and refilled. We are ready.

Researchers found that the brain's multiple demand and language systems — which are responsible for very different cognitive tasks — encode specific code properties and uniquely align with machine-learned representations of code. https://news.mit.edu/2022/your-brain-your-brain-code-1221