The AI Con by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna

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Book 19 of 2026: The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Okay, yes — it could be argued that this book is simply reinforcing my existing biases. But it does a damn good job of that! For anyone less than enthusiastic about the AI invasion, and for some who are too enthusiastic but could perhaps be convinced to question their stance, this is an excellent and accessible takedown of the overhyped and existentially problematic push for “AI”.

I only had two issues:

One, that the this area is simply moving so fast that even though the book was just published within the past year (and so written probably mostly in 2024, so even the most current research available while writing would have been from 2023 or 2024), parts of it already feel out of date. Of particular note to me as someone working in education was the “Listen Up, Class” section (in chapter 4, starting on page 93), which begins with a couple paragraphs citing 2023 research claiming that ChatGPT hadn’t made many inroads into student cheating. In 2026 — anecdotally, at least, from what I see and hear about at the college where I work — that is definitely not the current state of things. Students submitting content created by ChatGPT and other genAI systems is a constant battle that teachers are trying to fight and causing serious problems in nearly, if not entirely, every academic department.

Two, that for some reason (apparently a publisher’s requirement, according to a LinkedIn post from Ms. Bender I found), none of the copious endnote references are numbered in the text. The endnotes include notes so that they can be connected back to the main text, but it’s a very odd choice for the publisher to have made. If, as suspected, this was done to make the book more accessible to a mass audience, I kind of wish there was a second edition available for readers not turned off by footnote/endnote notations.

Me holding The AI Con

Zombies of the Gene Pool by Sharyn McCrumb

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Book 18 of 2026: Zombies of the Gene Pool by Sharyn McCrumb.

⭐️⭐️⭐️: Apparently I’d read this one 15 years ago and entirely forgotten. A sequel to the somewhat notorious Bimbos of the Death Sun, it’s a bit more reserved, swapping snarking on ‘80s SF fandom to looking back on ‘50s Golden Age fandom. It has much of the same obvious mix of affection for and exasperation with the SF scene, but also has many of the same drawbacks as Bimbos, particularly where women characters are concerned. As with Bimbos, it’s an enjoyable but definitely flawed bit of fluff that would be better if it spent more time laughing with its subjects (as Galaxy Quest does for Star Trek) instead of at them.

Me holding Zombies of the Gene Pool.

Weekly Notes: May 25–31, 2026

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  • Monday was Memorial Day, which we spent here at home, relaxing after our Portland jaunt of the prior few days.

  • ♿️ Work continues to be busy with end-of-the quarter business. The big thing for us this week was Wednesday evening, when Highline’s Legacy Awards recognized student leaders on campus, including some students from Access Services and some whom my wife had nominated. It’s always nice to see the students have their accomplishments celebrated.

  • 🌏 Saturday morning we went to Kent’s International Festival. We try to stop by every year, and it’s fun to see the various communities in our city highlight their cultures through music, dance, and other performances. Plus, the food truck selection is always really good.

  • 🦇 Saturday night I headed out to the Mercury for some gothclubbing with friends. This weekend was the club’s 27th birthday celebration, plus a friend’s birthday kicked in at midnight, and it was a really good night all around. Lots of good music, dancing, and socializing. I’m always tired the next day, but it’s always worth it.

📸 Photos

Me lit all in reds and purples, wearing a black shirt with a lot of straight white lines across it, with text above and below that says, 'Dammit I ironed my Joy Division shirt'.
I just got this shirt, and it got a lot of laughs and compliments during the evening, both at the Mercury and from people I passed while wandering around Capitol Hill before the club opened. Amusing side note: I now have six or seven (I think) shirts parodying or playing off of the classic Joy Division shirt…but don’t have the actual Joy Division shirt. Maybe I should pick that up one of these days….
On a dark table surrounded by drinks and water bottles, a small LED centerpiece with fiber optic strands glowing in green, slightly blurred as the fiber optic strands move slightly.One of the table centerpieces from Norwescon got brought along and used for our table.

📚 Reading

One more book on my Hugo Best Novel reading progress completed, with Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End.

📺 Watching

We had a bit of a movie binge this weekend:

🔗 Linking

  • Olivia Rosane at Common Dreams: ‘The Creep State Is Watching’: Guerilla Art Project Takes on Big Tech’s Power Grab​: “The Creep State is an anonymous guerilla art and protest project that debuted in Austin, Texas during South by Southwest earlier this year. It is designed to draw people’s attention to the threat posed by Big Tech billionaires and their increasing influence over both the US government and the daily lives of everyone who interacts with their products.” Some background info on some posters I spotted around Seattle at the last No Kings protests (one poster, another one).

  • David Smith at The Guardian: How Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury cartoons captured America: ‘One of our nation’s greatest journalists’: “‘If you want to understand Victorian England, reading a handful of Dickens novels can get you there,’ said Joshua Kendall, author of the first major biography of Trudeau. ‘In the same way about the late 20th and early 21st century, Trudeau has got all these different characters and they’re growing and changing. If you want to see how America evolved from 1970 to 2026 you could do worse than just go through a few Doonesbury collections.'”

  • Ed Zitron: Revenge of The Business Idiot: “We will win, long term. What they are doing is not working. The future will not be without pain, nor will it be easy, or pleasant, or something I relish in. But in the long term I think this is a moment where the greater Business Idiot incursion faces a reckoning with a reality it believed it could change through sheer force of will.”

  • Iris: “Iris is the native Mac photo library that helps you find, explore, and rediscover the people, places, and moments you love — privately, on your own computer, with the smarts of a cloud service and none of the cost.”

  • Sarah Perez at TechCrunch: Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions, with more to come, including AI plans: “Meta is doubling down on its subscription offerings. On Wednesday, the social networking giant announced it’s now rolling out its consumer subscription plans globally for its flagship apps, Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, and beginning tests of new subscriptions for businesses, creators, and Meta AI users.”

  • Is AI Profitable Yet?: No.

  • Science Daily: Forget LASIK: Safer, cheaper vision correction without lasers or surgery: “Researchers are developing a futuristic alternative to LASIK that reshapes the eye without lasers or incisions. Using mild electrical pulses and platinum contact lenses, they temporarily soften the cornea so it can be molded into a new shape. Early tests on rabbit eyes successfully corrected nearsightedness in about a minute while preserving the eye’s structure.”

  • Hanna at Tuta: Discord planned to introduce age verification worldwide – and it’s about to go live.: “According to Discord, starting in June users wanting to switch their account to adult status will have to choose between a facial scan for age estimation or uploading an ID document. In addition, an AI model will automatically assess in the background whether the user is an adult; based on existing account age, device, and activity data.”

  • Jason Kottke: The Backward Index: “How do dictionary makers keep track of similarly suffixed words, like those ending in -ism, -graphy, -ness, or -ology? With a computer, it’s simple, but how did they do it before the computing age? Starting in the 1950s, lexicographers at Merriam-Webster typed all of the words in the dictionary out backwards and organized them alphabetically into a collection called the Backward Index.”

  • Brian Phillips at The Ringer: The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech: “I say this with all due respect to the leader of the world’s largest religious organization: He missed some stuff. To truly teach big tech to put humanity first, it is necessary to catalog all the ways that big tech is currently putting humanity last. And because we are living in a time of historically unprecedented exasperation—a time in which many of us go through the day filled with a sort of half-repressed and unacknowledged fury that threatens to burst out every time the app we’re trying to use sends us to a website to log in, but the website won’t allow us to paste the password from our password manager, and clicking “forgot password” sends us back to the app, which immediately crashes—any account of tech’s antihuman tendencies must necessarily include a detailed breakdown of how its products are truly just a colossal goddamn pain in the ass.”

  • Max Rego at The Hill: ‘No Kings’ movement planning nationwide event on Trump 80th birthday: “A 90-minute concert in New York City has been planned to headline the event. The “Rise Up, Sing Out” concert is set to take place at The Town Hall in midtown Manhattan and is scheduled to feature performances and appearances by singers Sasha Allen, Bette Midler, Patti Smith and Rufus Wainwright, along with actor Jane Fonda and liberal commentator Joy Reid.”

  • Jody Amable at KQED: A Preteen Punk Band From Mill Valley Takes on AI: “Knights of Molino are a new punk band composed of middle schoolers Erik and Tommy Birmingham, 11 and 13, and Rowan Campbell, 12. They recently reached moderate viral fame for another track in which they didn’t shy away from speaking their minds. In October, their scathing takedown of generative AI, ‘Take Back Control,’ went spinning across Bay Area and punk-rock TikTok. It’s currently at 240,000 views and 2,500 comments: definitely not Mr. Beast numbers, but pretty impressive when you consider none of them even are allowed on TikTok yet.”

  • John Gruber at Daring Fireball: What Is a Dickover?: “dickover n. : a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of service, or anything else that the user couldn’t give two shits about.”

  • Rebecca Watson at Skepchick: Is Your Phone Spying on Your Conversations? No.: “Because I do so much work debunking conspiracy theories, people often ask me if there are any unproven conspiracy theories that I truly believe. It’s a tough question for me because there are some things, like Bigfoot, that I absolutely LOVE but do not sincerely believe. And there are others that I don’t believe per se but I find them plausible, in that I can’t dismiss them out of hand and I wouldn’t be very surprised if they turned out to be true. One of those is the extremely common belief that companies are using our cell phones to listen to us and serve us advertising or otherwise benefitting from our data.”

Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge

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Book 17 of 2026: Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (2007 Hugo Best Novel)

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Reading this for the first time in 2026, twenty years after it was published, when it’s set in 2025, it’s fascinating to see where we’re heading towards what Vinge envisioned and where we’re not. Similarities to Stephenson’s Snow Crash in the ubiquitous virtual worlds, but using augmented reality rather than full VR. Privacy and security are greater considerations as well. Overall, a pretty fascinating take on what’s now an alternate present day.

Me holding Rainbows End

Biweekly Notes: May 11–24, 2026

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Honestly, I don’t even remember why I didn’t get around to this last week. But here we are!

  • ♿️ Work has been busy, but pretty much just the “regular busy” sort of thing. Which is good, because as we approach the end of spring quarter, we’ll have all of the various end-of-quarter celebrations going on for the next few weeks. The busy time is coming!

  • ♿️ Thursday this week was Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). As part of that, I uploaded a video walkthrough of Canva’s new accessibility features — I’ve generally not been a big fan of Canva, but they have been making some notable improvements to their products, and that’s worth recognizing.

  • 🚶🏼‍➡️ This weekend my wife had a work conference in Portland, so I went along as her chauffeur. We drove down Thursday afternoon, and then while she was conferencing, I got to spend Friday and Saturday wandering around Portland with my camera. Friday was around the downtown area (including a stop by Powell’s, of course), and Saturday I took the Max up to Washington Park and spent a few hours wandering around the Hoyt Arboretum. “Real camera” photos will go up eventually, but some of my iPhone shots are below.

📸 Photos

Me outside Powell's Books.
Always a highly recommended stop when you’re in the area.
A pile of eight books on a Star Trek blanket.
My haul from Powell’s this time. Filling in a few more gaps in my Star Trek collection, plus Ray Nayler’s The Mountain the Sea, which was recommended to me three times over the past few weeks, and Emily Bender and Alex Hanna’s The AI Con, which I’ve had my eye on for a while.
A Tempest arcade video game cabinet showing the post-game high score initial entry screen, with position number four highlighted with the letters W, D, and Y selected.
I stopped by the Ground Kontrol arcade and mostly played pinball (badly), but did take a shot at Tempest, an old favorite, and got fourth on the leaderboard!
In front of an office building, wires for a tram line go diagonally upwards across the shot. One set of wires has temporary netting and stairway platforms dangling from it as workers move along the suspended stairs.
I thought I’d ride the arial tram to see the view, but as it turns out, it was shut down for maintenance this week. A bit of a disappointment, but I’ll just have to try again on some other trip.
Wide angle view of an ornately decorated theater seen from the very rear of the uppermost balcony. The walls are white and beige, ornately carved, chandeliers with blue and white gland hang from the ceiling, and red and gold curtains frame the stage in the distance, with a symphony starting to take their seats on the stage.
As I was walking around on Friday, I happened to notice that the Oregon Symphony was performing a selection of music by John Williams on the weekend, so Saturday night after the conference we had dinner and then an outing to the symphony. Date night!

📚 Reading

🔗 Linking

  • Jeremy Hsu at ars technica: Influential study touting ChatGPT in education retracted over red flags: “Since its publication, the study has been cited 262 times in other papers published by Springer Nature’s peer-reviewed journals and received a total of 504 citations from both peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed sources. It also attracted nearly half a million readers and received enough online attention to rank in the 99th percentile for journal articles in terms of attention score.”

  • Subvert: A co-op music publishing marketplace, similar to Bandcamp but with a different backend structure.

  • Rose Horowitch at The Atlantic: How AI Killed a 133-Year-Old Princeton Tradition (archive.is version of a paywalled original): “[Princeton’s honor] code lasted through two world wars, the upheaval of the 1960s, the disillusionment of Watergate, and even the rise of search engines and SparkNotes. It finally met its match in generative AI. Yesterday, after the rise of AI-facilitated cheating became too obvious to ignore, Princeton’s faculty voted to begin proctoring exams again.”

  • Manda Factor at MyNorthwest: Five WA Supreme Court seats are on the ballot this fall, and the stakes have never been higher: “Under normal circumstances, three justices face voters every two years as part of their staggered six-year terms. But recent resignations led then-Governor Jay Inslee to appoint replacements to fill the vacancies, and those appointees must now stand for election. Additionally, two of the three justices whose terms are expiring could not seek reelection due to age.”

  • Gracchus at Build a Better Donkey: The VRA Was the Nice Version (archive.is version of a Substack original): “The question is whether this country holds or comes apart, and coming apart doesn’t mean a stern editorial in The Atlantic. It means what it has always meant, every time a society told a critical mass of its members that their participation was decoration. It means blood. It means whole regions of this country deciding that the social contract is a piece of paper the other side already burned, and they’re under no obligation to honor a corpse.”

  • Scott Schaefer at I Love Kent: REPORT: Gun violence homicides drop to single digits for first time in 9 years: “Both Seattle and South King County have experienced a continuous decline of shots fired in the last few years, with South King County experiencing a 61% decrease and the Seattle area experiencing a 47% decrease since their peak Q1 numbers in 2024, respectively.”

  • Hannah Seibold at the Portland Tribune: Every Portland easter egg we’ve spotted in Laika’s new ‘Wildwood’ teaser trailer: “Directed by Travis Knight, the film blends Laika’s signature stop-motion style with real-world Portland geography, transforming familiar neighborhoods, bridges and forested spaces into a layered fantasy setting. The trailer cuts between everyday city life and an increasingly surreal journey into Wildwood, a mythical extension of Forest Park.”

Apple: The First 50 Years by David Pogue

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Book 19 of 2026: Apple: The First 50 Years by David Pogue.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Excellent history of Apple, from its earliest days to today. Covers the ups and downs, with a ton of neat stories about the genesis of a whole slew of technologies, many of which I hadn’t really realized Apple’s involvement with. Admittedly, something of a niche subject (even if it’s a fairly large niche these days), but if you’re an Apple fan, it’s well worth the read. And as a long-time Apple user who got started with Apple IIs back in elementary school and got my first Mac (a Mac Classic) in 1990, it was a lot of fun to revisit and get more of the background behind the many things I remembered.

Me holding Apple: The First 50 Years

To Defy Fate by Dayton Ward

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Book 18 of 2026: To Defy Fate by Dayton Ward.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: Wesley Crusher, now an experienced Traveller, needs to work with several of his old friends to keep the timeline from fragmenting disastrously from a mysterious meddler’s machinations. Though released as part of the Picard continuity, the timeline jumping brings in characters and events from so much of the Trek universe that it feels (in a good way) like this was something of a stealth “60th anniversary celebration” novel. Some very fun deep cuts sprinkled in among the more obvious references, too.

Me holding To Defy Fate

Weekly Notes: May 4–10, 2026

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  • 😷 A fairly low-key week for the most part, as I was working as best as possible while getting over the cold I got last week.
  • 🚀 Saturday I did make it out to our final staff meeting for Norwescon, where we close out this year’s convention with going over our “onions and roses”; the things that could have gone better, and the things that went well. After that was the post-convention social. Nice way to wrap up the week.

📸 Photos

Me sitting on our couch with a wooden TV tray on my lap. On the TV tray is a partially completed Lego starship Enterprise; I'm in the midst of taking a photo of it with my iPhone.
I started working on assembling the LEGO USS Enterprise I got for my birthday. In-progress construction photos are being posted in this Mastodon thread as I go.
A wide aspect shot of a garden with a bronze sculpture of a young girl swinging on a rope swing.
A sculpture in the garden of the home where we had the Norwescon post-convention social.

📚 Reading

Finally got around to getting to the next book in my Hugo Best Novel reading project and finished Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin.

🎧 Listening

This week’s new album was Laibach’s just-released Musick, which I am very much enjoying. They’ve gone full-on electropop, while still being very Laibach, leaning into the “taking over the top goth-industrial seriousness to hilariously ridiculous extremes” aesthetic that they’re so good at. Definitely pushing my “perkygoth” buttons.

🔗 Linking

  • The M2x2: A neat 3D-printed enclosure for a Mac Mini, designed to look like a classic LEGO computer brick.

  • Alexander Hanff at That Privacy Guy: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.: “Google Chrome is reaching into users’ machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking. The file is named weights.bin. It lives in OptGuideOnDeviceModel. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google’s on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re-downloads it.”

  • Sergey Tkachenko at WinAero: Google Chrome Secretly Downloads Huge Local AI Models: Includes pointers for removing the 4 GB file, though you’ll need to figure out where to add the backslashes in the file path.

  • Kai Kupferschmidt at Science: Reality Check: “[Hany] Farid, a specialist at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, is one of the world’s leading experts in determining whether a photo or video has been manipulated. Since helping to found the field of digital forensics more than 20 years ago, he has kept pace with massive technological change.” Includes some good tips on using real-world geometry to spot some common errors in AI-generated images.

  • whatcable: “macOS menu bar app that tells you, in plain English, what each USB-C cable plugged into your Mac can actually do.”

  • Terry Godier: The Boring Internet: “Personal sites are coming back. RSS feeds are coming back. Webrings are coming back. Mastodon is, for all its quirks, a federated SMTP-shaped thing for short messages and not a platform in the old sense. Small internet radio stations still broadcast from servers with ugly URLs. Newsletters still arrive through SMTP. Software projects still publish changelogs through feeds. ¶ Communities still gather in places too small to be interesting to investors.”

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

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Book 17 of 2026: Spin by Robert Charles Wilson (2006 Hugo Best Novel)

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: It seems I read this 13 years ago; oddly, I have no memory of that, though I rated it four stars back then. High-concept SF (the Earth is suddenly enclosed in a bubble where time passes at a drastically reduced rate as the rest of the universe goes on) that allows for exploration of how we (as a species and as individuals) cope with impending Armageddon, cosmic mysteries, and relationships with each other.

Me holding Spin