Eclecticism

Another two-week update!

• ♿️ Work has been really busy for a few weeks now, but I think that going forward, it will be just normal levels of busy. Three weeks ago was our “opening week”, the week before classes start when there’s a lot of faculty- and staff-centric training and professional development; the next two weeks were the first two weeks of classes for the year, which is always a busy time; this Friday was an “in-service” Professional Development Day. There’s one committee that organizes both Opening Week and PDD, and I was on that committee, so that was a lot of work, and for PDD I did a two-and-a-half-hour session on digital accessibility. And on top of all that, I’m kicking off a “Strive for 85” campaign to encourage staff to raise the accessibility of their courses, and I had to scramble to get it ready to announce just before and at PDD day. It’s been a lot! But now all that’s done, so — fingers crossed — things will be a bit more manageable now.

• 🕺🏻 Last weekend I went out to the Mercury for their annual open membership night and welcomed a co-worker and their spouse in as new members. The music was really good, but the open membership nights are (unsurprisingly) very crowded, and it was a mix of enjoying seeing the club that full and wishing there were a few less people on the dance floor. Not a bad thing, of course! Just most of my dancing was more towards the beginning of the evening as people were still filtering in.

• 🚀 Yesterday was the October Norwescon planning meeting. Lots of good conversations and planning, from helping to film a bit for our social media that will get posted sometime later on, to discussing our historical archives and getting another bag full of things to scan and upload, to talking about the Philip K. Dick award with one of the award administrators, and a whole host of side conversations, as usual. Five months to go!

• 🇺🇸 Because of the Norwescon meeting, we didn’t go to Saturday’s No Kings events, but we did fill out our ballots and drop them off out our local ballot drop box, wearing No Kings shirts. We participated as we could!

📸 Photos

More vacation trip photos are up, covering Amsterdam and Brussels.

📝 Writing

• Daring Fireball‘s John Gruber posted a ridiculous and disappointing (but not surprising) “actually, X/Twitter’s a great place that you all should come back to” bit of drivel that finally got me to drop him from my reading list.

📚 Reading

Three books finished over the past two weeks:

• David Mack’s More Beautiful Than Death, a Trek novel set in the Kelvinverse alternate reality.

• Nandita Gupta and Rachel Grossman-Kahn’s Accessibility: The Illustrated Guide, an excellent entry-level guide to digital accessibility.

• Joan Winston’s The Making of the Trek Conventions, a non-fiction memoir covering the early days of Star Trek fan conventions in the mid- to late-1970s.

📺 Watching

We’re still working our way through season 4 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and are still enjoying it. It’s definitely a full season of what would be off-kilter filler episodes back when we got 22+ episode seasons, so I can absolutely understand why a lot of people are dissatisfied with this season. Still, we’re having fun with it.

🔗 Linking

• Anil Dash: We are going to kill “unalive”: “Your free speech was taken away from you, and the people who did it are the same ones who spent years pretending to care about “free expression”. They contrived examples of lack of free speech on college campuses while squashing protests, and cried crocodile tears about “cancel culture” while getting people fired for political criticism. Now they have no problem with billionaires deciding exactly what words everyone is allowed to say.

• Scharon Harding at Ars Technica: Command-line tool quickly removes Apple Intelligence from macOS 27: “Unlike with previous versions of macOS, macOS 27 Golden Gate doesn’t have a toggle for turning off Apple Intelligence. That makes disabling AI features that you may not want more difficult. It also means that the AI models necessary for running Apple Intelligence will take up space on your disk, even if you don’t use them or if you go through your settings to individually find and disable AI capabilities.”

  • RemoveMacAI: “Debloat macOS: turn off Apple Intelligence, analytics, ads and pop-ups. A native app and CLI, and every change can be undone.”
• Lex Friedman: Claude writes code; I author the apps: “The question, to me, isn’t how much code was written by a human. It’s how much the app was authored by a human, which I think is a more nuanced question. How much care, thought, and humanity went into the app matters far more than tabs vs. spaces or a manually-vs.-machine-built HStack.”
  • Overall, this is as close as I’ve seen to a defense of AI-assisted programming that comes close to being reasonable. But it still avoids the ethical questions about how the AI tools were trained, and still seems to me to create output that the human “author” has an imperfect understanding of and may not ever be able to really understand or troubleshoot. I’m not convinced, but this was worth reading.
• Al Jazeera: Can the KKK find a new foothold in the US?: “What Lavelle found was a group seemingly eager to rebrand. The group had shortened its title to The Knights Party, and members told Lavelle they were trying to re-centre their message around family and faith. ¶ But when Lavelle asked if a Black person would be welcome at the group’s church, Robb’s answer was simple. ¶ ‘No,’ Robb responded. ‘Because this is a white nationalist church.'”

• Janine Liberty at MIT News: Margaret Hamilton, computing pioneer who led software development for the Apollo program, dies at 90: “A computing pioneer who authored over 130 publications, Hamilton helped to establish software engineering as a dedicated discipline. She worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s, after which she became a successful computing entrepreneur and CEO.”

• Jake Goldstein-Street at the Kent Reporter: ELECTION 2026: State Supreme Court candidates make their case: “Two new justices will join the nine-member high court, and two new justices appointed by Gov. Bob Ferguson with no prior judicial experience face their first tests at the ballot box. The chief justice is also seeking another term.”

• Jason Pohl at UC Berkeley News: Study explores how AI use affects performance on math and reasoning tasks: “…a landmark study…found that spending just 10 minutes relying on an AI tool significantly impairs our ability to focus and persist with difficult tasks. […] The findings backed up what anecdotes and surveys have increasingly found in recent years: An overreliance on AI for answers erodes our cognitive fitness. When AI produces answers in seconds, we get used to that speed; anything that takes longer feels inefficient. And relying on AI also removes what the team called ‘productive struggle,’ which can lead people to find their research strengths and passions.”

• Lindsey Galloway at the BBC: The world’s top cities for 2026 – and why they stand out: “Looking across the leaders and standout performers, four qualities stand out – and they help explain why some cities remain so compelling to live and visit.”

  • Of the top five cities, we live in one (Seattle, number four) and have visited the other four within the past few months (New York, London, Paris, and San Francisco). Not bad!
• Tyler Gooch at McSweeneys: Crossword Clues Where It’s Clear the Puzzle’s Creator Got Themselves Into a Jam Letter-Wise: “What 14-Across and 28-Down might sound like if you tried to say both of them at the same time”

• Jason Barlow at BBC TopGear: The deux chevaux is back! Welcome to the new Citroen 2CV… yours for £12k+: “Although the 2CV concept is clearly inspired by the original, it doesn’t replicate the car so much as the spirit that infused it. The silhouette is familiar and cuddly, the execution fastidiously detail-focused.”

  • This thing is adorable. I do wish they’d used more actual buttons and knobs for the controls, though.
• The Associated Press via NPR: DNA and vehicle-tracking help French investigators recover stolen Renoirs: “One painting, ‘Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano,’ suffered a tear. The other, ‘Young Woman at the Well,’ had slight damage to its frame, Bessone said. He estimated their combined value at 4.2 million euros ($4.7 million).”

• sheets.works (the only credit I could find): The people holding up the internet: “Your alarm, a boarding pass, a meeting in another country, the day your salary lands: anything on your phone that shows a time has to know where you are. Underneath sit every Android phone, every iPhone and most of the servers on the internet. ¶ They all get local time from one text file, the time zone database, which holds every clock rule a government has ever announced. Paul Eggert, a lecturer at UCLA, keeps that file up to date in his spare time.”

• Jacob Aron at NewScientist: Self-replicating AIs are a great digital horror story – here’s the reality: “As I said at the top of this article, a self-replicating AI that takes over your smart oven is a great story, and I can see why it has spread so rapidly. But stories like this are a cognitive worm, hacking your critical thinking abilities by going straight for your fear response. Could this someday be a concern? Perhaps, although this article has hopefully poked holes in some of the storytelling logic behind the idea. Is it something we need to worry about in the next few months? Absolutely not.”

• ClassicPress: “A lightweight, stable, instantly familiar free open-source content management system. Forked from WordPress without the block editor (Gutenberg).”

  • Maybe this will finally get me off of WordPress.
• Staff at the Kent Reporter: Kent Reporter joins regional print edition, expanding coverage for readers and advertisers: “Beginning Friday, Nov. 6, 2026, the Kent Reporter will join the Renton Reporter, Auburn Reporter and Federal Way Mirror in a unified regional print publication called the South King Reporter. ¶ The change brings the four publications together in one print product while preserving their individual websites and continued focus on the communities they serve.”

• Jason Snell at Six Colors: A $299 Apple TV: Is that all there is?: “When you could get an Apple TV starting at $199, you could spot Apple playing its usual game—not the low-price leader, but in the ballpark. At $299, though, it becomes a lot harder for me to convince my relative who is complaining about how slow and terrible their streaming interface is to spring for the Apple one and solve their problems.”

• Subvert.fm AI Policy: “This policy was shaped by an extended, participatory deliberation among Subvert’s membership. Between May 2025 and March 2026, 68 members contributed 352 posts to the forum thread “Help Craft Subvert’s AI Policy,” making it one of the most engaged governance discussions our forum. At its core, this policy aims to be a reflection of our members’ sentiment on how our platform should define an AI policy. Our Artist representatives on the board of directors (Iz and Hannah Lee Benson) have distilled this large wide-ranging discussion into a workable policy. This document is the result.”

  • This is really, really good. As expected with the platform it comes from, focuses primarily on audio and music production, but is an excellent example of what a site’s modern AI policy should be. The recognition that “AI” is becoming a meaningless marketing term, the separation between genAI and machine learning aspects of tools, and the emphasis on honesty between the artist and the audience…it’s a great model policy.

  • Via John Scalzi: What a Good “AI” Policy Looks Like: “…it firmly makes the case for human creation while acknowledging the reality of modern creative processes — in this case music production, where so many of the tools have ‘AI’ baked in but are doing things of a technical nature: ‘mastering, mixing, equalization, pitch correction, beat detection, noise reduction, and loudness optimization’ are examples the policy gives of such tools. These tools handle backend processes but not creative processes, which are the ones Subvert is primarily concerned about. One can argue whether the lines they draw are the right lines, but in these cases the lines come with the knowledge of, and familiarity with, both the field of ‘AI’ and of music composition and production.”

• ♿️ Another busy week with the start of the quarter, but not at all a bad week. A particular moment of personal triumph: As part of our Opening Week committee, I’d pushed for a hybrid (both in-person and online) approach, rather than just requiring everyone to show up on campus in person (and therefore excluding those who live and work remotely, have disabilities that make coming to campus and/or participating in big, crowded, group things more difficult, etc.), and we ended up going that way. In our post-event discussion meeting, two people said the they weren’t on board with the hybrid approach but went with the group decision, but after seeing how the week went and reading the positive feedback from participants, are now on board with the hybrid approach. I’m quite pleased about this! Which isn’t to say it was perfect, we definitely picked up on areas that need to be adjusted as we go forward, but overall, we did a good job.

• ♿️🚊 Also at work this week, a small group of us went up to see a piece of artwork that Sound Transit has recently installed at the Kent-Des Moines light rail station. The art is designed to be tactile, and was created in consultation with several visually disabled Highline students. While I wasn’t directly involved with the project, I’d known about it and had been enjoying hearing about it as the project proceeded, and it was really neat to see the final installation.

• 🎭 This afternoon we went out to see the Renton Civic Theatre’s production of Noises Off. Noises Off has been a long-time favorite of ours (really, how can it not be?), and RCT did a good job with it. I was particularly amused by Rachael Spencer’s Brooke Ashton; her bits of business when she wasn’t directly part of the dialogue or action were consistently entertaining. Also, this was the first production of Noises Off I’ve been to where the stage reset between acts was done with the curtains open, and it was a lot of fun to watch the tech crew strike, rotate, and reset the set. It was also a blast listening to the audience, and identifying both people who were laughing because they were familiar with the show, and those who were laughing because it was their first time seeing it. Well worth seeing, and if you’re local, is running through October 18th.

📸 Photos

📚 Reading

Finished two books this week: John and Maria Jose Tenuto’s Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: The Making of the Classic Film, which I enjoyed, and Mark Henry’s Happy Hour of the Damned, which I did not.

📺 Watching

We finally started watching season four of Star Trek: Strange News Worlds. Since our summer vacation was right during its broadcast, we’d decided to wait until we got home to start watching it. (Plus, since I cancelled our Paramount+ subscription last year when it was taken over by the Ellison’s, I had to find…other methods to watch it. Oh, wait, is it not talk like a pirate day anymore?) So far we’ve watched the first three episodes, and while they’re certainly leaning into the “wild swings” and genre games rather than thoughtful sci-fi, we’ve been entertained. Time travel and dinosaurs, creepy horror, and “Dude, Where’s My Shuttlecraft”. Apparently, this is the “what if we did a full season of TOS glowing green hands and Abe Lincoln in space episodes?” season.

🔗 Linking

• This is a modern motherfucking website.: “View source. Seriously, right‐click, do it. Everything I just described is sitting right there in plain text, readable top to bottom by a human being, the way the web was meant to be.”

• Joseph Cox at 404 Media: Humans Are Reading Copilot Prompts — And They’re Horrified (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “When a Copilot user uploads a picture of themselves or someone else, they probably expect that image to remain private between just them and the AI tool. In reality, a workforce of at least hundreds of human reviewers are sometimes looking at that prompt and whatever images they upload. And in many cases, those contractors are inundated with requests to make foot fetish images of children’s cartoon characters, shorten a real woman’s skirt, or put people into sexual positions.”

• Sancho Panza: When did Google get so f-ing weird?: “Google, a search engine which does not have human emotions, assumed that I had been spurned by a man in my life named Dario and decided what I wanted was an empathetic digital friend. What I wanted was some links, but that’s not what Google does in 2026.”

• Bastardica: “A foundry for bastard web fonts. Mix, stretch and / or squish them.”

• Mat​hias S​chäfer: The death of web development education: “The web is a radical democratic medium. Right now, tech oligarchs and fascist movements are trying to dismantle its radical potential. We must ensure that everyone can shape the web. ¶ Participating in independent learning communities, using open technologies based on ethical principles, and building a shared and inclusive digital infrastructure is an act of self-empowerment and emancipation.”

• Ilan Kelman and Matthew Blackett at Phys.org: End of humanity? Blow‑by‑blow account of what would happen if the Yellowstone supervolcano erupted now: “We already know that a super-eruption on this scale would threaten civilization as we know it. So what exactly would we experience if Yellowstone erupted? We are experts in disasters and volcanoes, and what follows is a thought experiment into what might happen in the worst-case scenario. We’ve based our hypothesis on research and an examination of how countries have dealt with disasters in recent years.”

• Lighthouses of the World: “Every charted light on the planet, on its real cycle.”

• Magda Patynska at Discover Wildlife: Amazing new penguin discovered for first time in over 100 years: “Until recently, the gentoo penguin (Pygoscelis papua) was thought to be a single, wide-spread species, but researchers now have evidence that it consists of four separate species, one of them previously unknown to science.”

• ♿️ Been a very busy couple weeks of work as we’ve been approaching the start of classes for the fall quarter. In addition to the usual preparations and appointments with students, I’ve been part of our Opening Week planning committee. Part of that was helping to make sure that accessibility was kept in mind as we were planning the week’s activities, and part was serving on a subcommittee to come up with a “community engagement” activity.

  We tried to come up with a pub quiz-inspired trivia activity (created by people who’d never done pub trivia) that would work both for people there in person and those who were attending via Zoom, with questions drawn from the college’s history. While there were definitely still some bumps, overall I think we did okay; we’ll see what people say as evaluations of the week come in. (A few have come in already, and so far…well, responses are definitely mixed. So it goes!)

• 🎭 Last Sunday we went to the Union Arts Center’s production of Hamlet with a friend from work, and really enjoyed it. Done in a nice small theater in the round, with a minimalist set, and some very strong performances. If you’re local to Seattle, it runs through Oct. 11.

📸 Photos

Vacation photos continue to be worked on, and my photos from Frankfurt and from Berlin are now up.

📚 Reading

I finished China Miéville’s The City and The City, which I really enjoyed.

📺 Watching

Two films this weekend:

• Project Hail Mary (2026): Good, but didn’t “wow” me as much as it did many, I think. I’m not sure that it needed to be two and a half hours long, and while it’s possible it suffered in translation from page to film, but a lot of the science felt more like magic to me. I did really appreciate Rocky being a practical effect, though.

• Stop! That! Train! (2026): Honestly, better and funnier than I expected. Absolutely a ridiculous, low-brow, Drag Race-meets-Airplane disaster movie spoof with virtually non-stop rapid-fire jokes, not all of which land. But there were a lot of jokes that really made me laugh out loud.

🔗 Linking

• Alan Siegel at The Ringer: Keep Chasing That Bird: The Oral History of ‘Coyote vs. Acme’: “These days, battles between art and commerce don’t tend to end well for the artists. But every so often, the little guy manages to avoid the anvil—and win.”

• Ernie Smith at Tedium: alt.time-capsule.reopened: “I think what stands out to me about Usenet-Rewind is that it more or less captures all of it, warts and all. I did a search for my late ’90s email address, and found numerous entries under my name. I then did a search at my email addresses for the two colleges I went to and found a bunch more posts. And I’m not going to lie, most of those posts were not written with the assumption that they would be a part of the permanent record 25 years later.”

• Frederic J. Frommer at The Contrarian: Congress Moved Quickly to Name Kennedy Center in Wake of JFK Assassination (archive.is mirror of a Substack original): “Given Kennedy’s muscular support for the cultural center, many thought it a natural tribute to name it for him after his death.”

• Catalina Gaitán at The Seattle Times: Seattle bans discrimination against polyamorous, nonmonogamous people (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “The City Council voted unanimously on Tuesday to pass a law barring discrimination in employment, housing, business licensure, park usage, policing and public accommodation against adults in consensual relationships with more than one partner. ¶ The bill also expands such protections to nonbinary people in general by removing “male or female” from the city’s definition of sexual orientation, and broadens the protected category’s definition to include pansexuality — attraction to people regardless of gender identity — and asexuality — not experiencing sexual attraction while sometimes experiencing romantic or significant connection to other people.”

• Corinne Purtill at The L.A. Times: New evidence shows that you are only slightly hotter than a T. rex: Fun science, and a rather hilarious (rude!) headline.

• Mike Masnick and Dave Willner at TechDirt: The Apocalypse Will Not Be Sexy: “For all the talk of “AI Safety” risk these days, the most present real risks remain variations on the theme of “humans doing stupid shit”. Sometimes really smart humans. But stupid actions by humans are a lot less headline grabbing than the shiny sexy apocalypse. A human accidentally causing a radioactive chain reaction by carelessly using a screwdriver to separate things is stupid. Skynet turning everyone into paperclips… is kind of cool and fun. ¶ But, as anyone who works in risk mitigation (including one of the authors of this piece) can tell you, the overwhelming majority of actual disasters aren’t cool and fun. Instead, they’re usually more like the Demon Core: stupid, disappointing, and easily prevented if only a few common sense steps had been taken.”

• David Gutman and Jim Brunner at The Seattle Times: Judge dismisses DOJ lawsuit seeking WA voter records (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original: “It was the 25th loss in a row for the Trump Justice Department in its demands for similar voter data from states.”

• Ryan Epps at Polygon: Fahrenheit 451’s opening line still burns, 73 years later: “All he needed was six words. That’s all Bradbury required to introduce one of the most famous dystopian novels ever written. The sentence is almost comically straightforward, which makes its meaning all the more horrifying. Bradbury doesn’t begin by explaining why books are forbidden or by introducing the society that outlawed them. Instead, he puts us directly inside the head of the story’s protagonist, Guy Montag, a fireman whose very job is to burn said books. The pleasure isn’t metaphorical. Montag genuinely enjoys watching books of all kinds erupt into flames.”