Eclecticism

• ♿️ A more normal work week, though with three mornings dedicated to the WAPED fall conference. As always, good conversation and connections with people in the field across the state.

• 🥱 Since it’s been a pretty busy month, and we had nothing planned this weekend, we enjoyed having nothing planned, and spent our weekend at home, with a lot of napping and TV binging (sometimes at the same time).

📝 Writing

Actually posted twice this week! One was a wish for better semantic text markup tools, and the other was noting that after almost 20 years on WordPress, this blog is now running on ClassicPress.

📚 Reading

• Travis Bagwell’s Catharsis, the first book in a LitRPG series. I’ll be keeping an eye out for more from this series in used bookstores.

• Diane Duane’s Intellivore, an interesting but somewhat slow Next Gen novel.

📺 Watching

We finished season four of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds this week. Overall, I get why a lot of fans weren’t thrilled with the season, but I’ll admit to (for the most part) enjoying it. While it’s a little weird to have a full season of what in the past would have been mid-season one-off filler episodes, they at least went whole-hog and had fun with what they were doing. I’d rank this season better than season three, and hopefully that trend continues and they are able to wrap things up well with the final short season.

🔗 Linking

• Rae Morey at The Repository: Matt Mullenweg Orders Accessibility Revert, Tells Core Committer to “Contribute Your Talents to Another Project”: “Andrea Fercia has spent more than a decade making WordPress more accessible. But on Tuesday, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg told the long-time core committer to take his talents elsewhere.”

• Lex Friedman: I can’t believe we’re still arguing over whether X is for jerks: “John [Gruber]’s taking the most extreme reactions he can find and presenting them as representative of everyone who objects to X. It’s an easy argument to win when you get to pick the stupidest possible version of the opposing position.”

• Matthew Belter at The Vinyl District: Praga Khan of Lords of Acid, The TVD Interview: “I started making records myself in 1987, when Atari came out with its sequencing software. Before that I’d been working with a Commodore sequencing system. I’ve always been in love with technology and in love with music, so combining the two was the perfect thing for me. The very first record I made was a song called ‘Blow Job,’ and I honestly didn’t know what the word meant. I thought a blow job was a bad job, when somebody does something wrong. Only later did I find out what it really was.”

• Owen Lacey at The Pudding: The Real Kevin Bacon: “The conventional wisdom is that Kevin Bacon is the all-encompassing center of Hollywood, so prolific that the game is a lot easier than if it were called the ‘Six Degrees of John Doe’. ¶ However, Kevin Bacon is not the center of Hollywood. In fact, he never has been, and almost certainly never will be.”

• Local Wikipedia: “Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you. (If there are fewer than 25 things close to you, it takes the closest 25 things within about 6 miles. If there are more than 500 things only the closest 500 will be included.)”

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.”