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.”

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