Please, world, let Facebook die. I’m a bit biased here, since I cut all my ties to Facebook earlier this year, but really, it has become a major source of evil on the internet. While it’s still absurdly rich and influential, there are signs that it might go the way of MySpace. Remember MySpace? For a while, you had to have a MySpace page if you wanted to be a cool kid, but now it’s an afterthought, it’s so 2009, hardly anyone cares about it.

It could happen to Facebook, too. Look at how the value of the company has been plummeting lately.

It’s also not the cool place for the kids to be anymore. When I was last on it, it felt like going down to the local legion hall for a high school reunion: lots of old people (in part, my fault for selecting who I wanted to talk to), lots of fringe kooks, a lost cause if you wanted contemporary ideas, but fine for reminiscing. It had lots of moldy corners where horrible people would sit and reinforce each other’s lunacy.

Facebook/Meta tried to put on a brave show at a recent Netroots Nation conference. It did not go well for them. Attendees picketed and protested their appearance, and they had to pack up and leave. There’s a reason for that: Facebook represents the conservative establishment.

A 2021 analysis by The Washington Post revealed that the site gives an advantage to conservatives on the platform. Facebook says that the right-wing is just better at stoking fears and responses than progressives. The reality is that Facebook has allowed false information to stand from conservative sources. While there are supposed to be protections in place to stop fake news, it typically takes so long for the review and removal that the story has already spread across the platform. As a result, the top 25 posts on Facebook are very rarely from Democratic sources.

Now Facebook is betting big on the “Metaverse” and virtual reality, and the seams are showing. Facebook is not an innovative company; they just buy stuff, they’re not big on actually engineering and creating new stuff. So they slapped together this thing called Horizon Worlds, but no one knows quite what to do with it. Also, in a fit of major incompetence, they premiered the service in Spain and France, and all of the content was in English.

“Keep on explaining things to me in English,” an annoyed member of the local outlet Real o Virtual said in a YouTube review of Horizon Worlds on Tuesday. “I’m not going to fucking listen to you.”

When asked about the lack of Spanish and bad Spanish in Horizon Worlds, a Facebook spokesperson told Gizmodo that the game was launching in Spain in an English-only capacity first.

“We want to enable more people to experience and connect with others in Horizon Worlds as soon as possible, and this means opening to more regions first in an English-only capacity,” Facebook spokeswoman Amy White told Gizmodo in an emailed statement on Friday. “We look forward to building a more localized experience soon.”

Yeah, that’s the way to market. Slap your customers in the face and shout “ENGLISH ONLY!”

The only thing Facebook really knows how to do is to market the hell out of anything — so many ads everywhere — and use it to steal your personal info to sell to the highest bidder. They’re a money vacuum. It is peak capitalism.

If Facebook wants to recover, one of the things they must do is get rid of Mark Zuckerberg. Oh my god, the man is a charisma black hole — he’s a creepy dead-eyed mannequin, with the weird lack of style I associate with frat boy business majors. This is the face of Facebook? Sheesh. Steve Jobs may have been an asshole, but he did have buckets of charisma and forged a distinctive image, and people copied him (bad people, usually). Has anyone gone down to their local barber and said, “give me the Zuckerberg”? No. No one. OK, maybe a few sociopaths.

No, really. This is brilliant, a real out-of-the-box, Kobayashi Maru-type of solution to a real world engineering problem.

Initially the probe started last year in response to Tesla vehicles mysteriously plowing into the scene of an existing accident where first responders were already present.

On Thursday, NHTSA said it had discovered in 16 separate instances when this occurred that Autopilot “aborted vehicle control less than one second prior to the first impact,” suggesting the driver was not prepared to assume full control over the vehicle.

CEO Elon Musk has often claimed that accidents cannot be the fault of the company, as data it extracted invariably showed Autopilot was not active in the moment of the collision.

There was a time not that long ago when I thought the Tesla was a great idea, and would have loved to get one — I was held in check, though, because there was no way I could afford one. Now I’m relieved that I dodged that bullet.

You can’t even toast a marshmallow on that fire, thanks to all the toxic chemicals.

It’s a beauty…look at thing. Ominous, brooding, ready to rise up and destroy us if we don’t do its bidding. We’re glad to have it, though!

Would you believe that’s what a modern microscope looks like? The biology discipline just bought a Keyence BZ-X810, which is a light sheet fluorescence microscope that is intimidatingly automated. You don’t touch any of the microscope components directly, you just load up a holder with multiple slides or petri dishes or 24 well plates, put it in the guts of the box, and close it up. Everything is controlled with a computer. Push a button to select your fluorescence wave length. Push another button to select your microscope objective. Click on the screen to move your specimen under the objective. Focus with your mouse wheel. When an administrator stomps in demanding to know why you spent $100,000 on a strange gray box, click another button and it turns its elongate blue eye to the offender and disintegrates them. It’s perfect.

I am the imperfect one, because I’ve got to get a genetics lecture and exam together tonight, so I can’t snuggle up with our new machine and play. Spring break is coming soon, though, and then…then we will take over the world.

(By the way, this is not mine, it’s shared equipment for the whole biology discipline. I just look forward to mastering it.)

See that trivial little cable to the right? That’s Apple’s proprietary iPhone charging cable, and that’s the widget that’s going to drive me right out of the Apple ecosystem.

We already pay a premium for Apple products, which is kind of OK because they are very good, reliable devices. On top of that, though, Apple also wants to lock us into their cables — power cables, peripheral cables, you name it — and our devices can detect whether the cable we use to plug in our phones is an Official Approved Apple™ cable, and if they aren’t, they’ll refuse to connect. And sometimes, when you most need it, your phone will decide that the cable you are using is no longer up to its standards.

My wife and I are now down to ONE (1) functioning cable between us. I had to take it away because I need my phone to connect to any university services (that’s another gripe I’ll put off to another day), and I can’t trust it not to fail on me. I have bought so god-damn many phone cables because I’ve got maybe an 80% success rate in seeing a new cable work at all. All I could do is throw a fistful of unlikely cables at my wife as I was going out to work and suggest she try them and see if one magically works now.

My new requirement for my next phone is that it have a basic USB-C charging connector. Goodbye Apple, hello Android.

I had no idea that there was another epidemic here in the US: a food safety problem, the spread of a strain of multi-drug resistant salmonella through domestic poultry. I thought the combination of CDC and USDA oversight was effective in keeping our food safe, but I guess not.

With a public health threat unfolding across the country, you might have expected federal regulators to act swiftly and decisively to warn the public, recall the contaminated poultry and compel changes at chicken plants. Or that federal investigators would pursue the root cause of the outbreak wherever the evidence led.

None of that happened.

Instead, the team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention closed the outbreak investigation nine months later even though people were continuing to get sick. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees meat and poultry, was not only powerless to act but said nothing to consumers about the growing threat. So supermarkets and restaurants continued selling chicken tainted with drug-resistant infantis.

And they continue to do so today.

An eight-month ProPublica investigation into this once rare, but now pervasive form of salmonella found that its unchecked spread through the U.S. food supply was all but inevitable, the byproduct of a baffling and largely toothless food safety system that is ill-equipped to protect consumers or rebuff industry influence.

It’s a good if rather distressing article, but I have to warn you that even without thinking about salmonella, the graphics of commercial chicken processing are…well, um, graphic. Where I live, I’m surrounded by chicken and turkey farms that look rather innocuous as we drive by — long low sheds packed full of birds hidden from sight where, apparently horrors take place. It will definitely put you off chicken.

The other night I fixed chicken tikka masala, without the chicken. We used tofu instead. I think it was a wise choice.

We vegetarians are just totally safe, except for the lettuce and Listeria and E. coli. Yeah. No worries at all.