Fortnightly Notes: June 30–July 13, 2025

As there have been Things Going On lately, I missed last Sunday’s “Weekly Notes” post, so this becomes a “Fortnightly Notes” post instead, partly because “biweekly” is vague, and “fortnight” is a term should be used more often (outside of a gaming context).

  • 🏥 The major part of the Things Going On has been that two weeks ago, my wife had a (planned and necessary) hysterectomy, and I’ve been on caretaker duty. She had two nights in the hospital following the surgery, and then came home and has been recuperating here. She’s healing well, and had a good post-op checkup a few days ago, so things are going well! This does mean that our summer is going to be mostly uneventful, but that’s obviously quite okay under the circumstances.

  • ♿️ Due to the aforementioned Things Going On, I’ve spent the past two weeks working remotely. I’m incredibly fortunate to have a job that lets me do that when it’s necessary, and I wish more people had the ability to do this.

  • 🚀 On the convention front, the Seattle Worldcon schedule was released this past week. Since I’m our website admin, I’m quite happy with the technical side of things, as I was able to present the full 5-day schedule on a single page, filterable by day, track, or both, and with clean (for WordPress), semantic, and accessible (to the best of my ability to verify) code.

    A bit of geekery:

    The Javascript code that does the filtering could quite probably be improved and optimized, as it’s just a result of me digging through the web and hacking things together until it did what I wanted, and my JavaScript knowledge is just barely at the level that allowed me to figure this out. But hey, it works, and that was the most important part.

    Each panel is wrapped in an article tag, each panel title is a heading, and start and end times are wrapped in proper time tags. Panel titles are linked self-anchors so that it’s easy to link directly to individual panels, which is discoverable either by tabbing to the title or by mousing over them. Here’s a sample of the code for one (totally randomly chosen) panel:

    <article class="track dan eve">
        <h4 id="EVE03"><a href="#EVE03">Wednesday Night Dance with DJ Wüdi</a></h4>
        <div class="sched">Events; Dance/Movement<br>Sheraton: Metropolitan Ballroom, <time datetime="2025-08-13T20:00-07:00">Wed. 8 p.m.</time>–<time datetime="2025-08-14T02:00-07:00">2 a.m.</time></div>
        <p class="desc">From dance clubs in Alaska in the '90s to being a recent regular DJ at Norwescon, DJ Wüdi spins an eclectic mix of dance tracks from across the decades. Pop, electronica/dance, wave, disco, goth/EBM/industrial, convention classics, mashups… (almost) anything goes! Already know there's something that'll get you out on the floor? <a href="https://app.limedj.com/shows/djwudi/9NWMHW">Send in your requests ahead of time!</a></p>
        <p class="pros">DJ Wüdi</p>
    </article>
    

    Keyboard navigation for the page works fine, checking it with WAVE comes up with zero errors (and 400-some “alerts”, but that’s because WAVE incorrectly thinks the panelist listings should be headers), checking with ANDI also looks good, and I was able to navigate and interact (at least as well as a non-regular screen reader user can) with VoiceOver and NVDA. This certainly doesn’t mean that there aren’t things that could be improved, but I’m pretty happy with where I got things to be.

📸 Photos

Me stretched out in a grey recliner in our living room.
Our old recliner broke, so we got a new one. Of course, once assembled, I had to give it a good test. It works! Which is good, since this is my wife’s primary recuperation spot.
Me sitting at a small table in a hospital room, wearing a face mask while working on my computer.
Working from a hospital room isn’t quite as comfortable as from home or at the office, but at least I could do it!

📝 Writing

📚 Reading

Read Terry Pratchett’s Pyramids and issue 65 of Uncanny Magazine.

📺 Watching

I found time for four movies, mostly in the first few post-surgery days when my wife was doing a lot of sleeping:

  • The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother: ⭐️⭐️ — Not as amusing as I hoped, given the cast.
  • Bugsy Malone: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ – I’d had vague memories of kids shooting marshmallows out of tommy guns in a ’20s gangster film, and finally tracked down that memory. Odd, but entertaining!
  • Johnny Dangerously: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ — Another ’20s gangster parody I vaguely remembered watching as a kid; this one is still really funny, and I realized while watching it that some old jokes I’ve had in my head for years came from this film. “You shouldn’t grab me, Johnny. My mother grabbed me once. Once.
  • KPop Demon Hunters: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ — Somehow this one popped into conversations around me, I gave it a shot, and was entertained…and suspect that it would be a good idea to make sure the soundtrack ends up in my convention DJing playlist.

🔗 Linking

  • Patrick Clark in Businessweek: American Mid: Hampton Inn’s Good-Enough Formula for World Domination: I’ve occasionally wondered about how the mid-range hotel breakfast buffet got started; this was a surprisingly interesting look at how strategically aiming for the middle of the road made Hampton Inn the US’s largest hotel chain (which I wouldn’t have guessed).

  • Lynda V. Mapes in The Seattle Times: These orcas have been trying to feed people, new research shows: “So just what are the orcas doing, offering food to people? ¶ Researchers ruled out play, because the incidents were short, lasting only about 30 seconds. And it’s mostly young orcas that play, and orcas of every age offered food. So it seems what is going on is exploration, the scientists surmised: The orcas are curious to see what happens if they offer us food.”

  • Gaurav Sood at Yanko Design: World’s Narrowest Fiat Panda is One Anorexic 19-Inch-Wide EV Destined for the Record Books: “Italian mechanic Andrea Marazzi has transformed a 1993 Fiat Panda into what is now being described as the world’s narrowest functioning car. At just 19.6 inches wide, the one-seater electric vehicle looks more like a cartoon sketch brought to life than a road-ready hatchback. Yet it can move, steer, stop, and drive like any other car.”

  • Sarah Perez at TechCrunch: Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos in your camera roll you haven’t yet shared: “Facebook is asking users for access to their phone’s camera roll to automatically suggest AI-edited versions of their photos — including ones that haven’t been uploaded to Facebook yet. […] To work, Facebook says it will upload media from your camera roll to its cloud (meaning its servers) on an “ongoing basis”….

  • Sitara at Sitara’s Garden: How Fantasy Fuelled 60s Counterculture: “That pirated Tolkien paperbacks hit like a bomb in 60s campuses. The bootleg copy was printed due to a loophole in copyright law and quickly became a cult phenomenon, selling over 100,000 copies in 1965 alone. The biggest fans of the book seemed to be hippies, protesters and rockstars. It makes sense when you look at the context.”

  • Laura Michet: Touching the back wall of the Apple store: “When I was in high school, my friends and I had a game we used to play at the mall: we would go into the Apple store and try to make it to the back wall of the store, touch it, and exit out the front without an Apple staff person talking to us.”

  • Elizabeth Lopatto and Sarah Jeong at The Verge: The American system of democracy has crashed: “The declaration pronounces these rights to be so important that it’s worth overthrowing a government over them. But one should not undertake revolution against a tyrannical government lightly, the declaration says, going on to provide a massive litany of complaints as justification. In modern times, the full list was considered to be the boring part of this document, lacking the vim and vigor of ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident’ and other such bars from the preamble. But this year, it’s become a… bracing read.”

  • Jason Kottke: There’s No Undo Button For Our Fallen Democracy: “America’s democratic collapse has been coming for years, always just over the horizon. But when everything that happened during Trump’s first three months in office happened and (here’s the important part) shockingly little was done by the few groups (Congress, the Supreme Court, the Democratic Party, American corporations & other large institutions, media companies) who had the power to counter it, I knew it was over. And over in a way that is irreversible, for a good long while at least.”

  • Sarah Taber on Mastodon (as a nice chaser to Kottke’s link above): “Hello Americans on Mastodon, I know we don’t feel like there’s much to celebrate this July 4th. It’s been a rough several years. ¶ So I want to talk about how we’re making history right now.”

  • Marcus Medford-Kerr at CBC Radio: These sea spiders use the bacteria on their bodies to turn methane into food: “Most sea spiders are hunters. They tend to eat anemones, worms, sponges and soft corals, getting their nutrients by piercing their prey and sucking up their internal fluids. ¶ The Sericosura spiders, on the other hand, are more like intergenerational farmers.”

  • Catherynne M. Valente in Uncanny Magazine Issue 65: When He Calls Your Name: So good, and a wonderful homage to…well, that would just be giving it away, wouldn’t it?

  • Dr David Musgrove at History Extra: “I counted the penises in the Bayeux Tapestry and I have no regrets”: what one Oxford professor found when he studied the rudest bits of the embroidery: “It’s not too often that medieval historians grab national headlines, but when you get an Oxford academic counting penises in a world-famous embroidery, you’re sure to arouse media attention.”

  • Randee Dawn: 7.07.25 Why most SFF cons need fixing, and how CONvergence can show the way: I’m actually pleased to see that Norwescon is already doing or working on several of the suggestions in this post. That said, there’s more we can do to ensure that we’re around for our 50th year (not too far away!) and beyond.

  • Daniel Villarreal at LGBTQNation: GOP erases all mentions of bisexuals from Stonewall Monument webpages: “Transgender journalist Erin Reed noted that the Stonewall National Monument page once said, ‘Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ+) person was illegal.’ The newly revised version says, ‘Before the 1960s, almost everything about living authentically as a gay or lesbian person was illegal.'”

  • Marcin Wichary: Frame of preference: A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004: “Join me on a journey through the first twenty years of Mac’s control panels.”

An Alt Text Experiment

I’m the website administrator for Seattle Worldcon 2025, and I decided to run a bit of an experiment with the site, playing with an idea I’d been toying with for next year’s Norwescon website.

As I’ve been learning more about accessibility over the past few years, I’ve been working on transferring what I learn over to both the Norwescon and Worldcon websites as I’ve been working on them. Since alt text on images is one of the baseline requirements for good accessibility, I’ve been making sure that we have decent alt text for any images added to either site.

Of course, when working with other people’s art and images, there’s always a little question of whether the alt text I come up with would be satisfactory for the artist creating the image. So, I figured, why not see if I could more directly involve them?

When we were collecting signups for the fan tables, art show, and dealers’ room, as I was building the registration forms, whenever we asked for a logo or image to be uploaded, I added an optional field to allow the user to include alt text for the image they were uploading. I didn’t expect everyone using the form would take advantage of this — not everyone is familiar with alt text, some might not entirely understand what the field was for, and some might just find the extra field confusing — but I figured it would be worth a shot to see what happened.

Screenshot of a section of a website form. On the left is an option to upload a logo image, on the right is a text box asking for alt text. The prompt reads, 'A brief description of the image to support our Blind and low vision members. If no alt text is provided, '[display name] logo' will be used.' The field is limited to 1000 characters.
The logo upload field and associated alt text entry field for the art show application. The fan table and dealers’ room applications used very similar language.

Without showing how many of each type of application Worldcon received (because I don’t know if our Exhibits department would want that publicized beyond the “more than we have spots for” for each category that they’ve already said), here’s a breakdown of the percentages of each application type that included a logo image, and how many of those included alt text.

Area Submitted Logo Submitted Alt Text for Logo
Fan Tables 77.55% 63.16%
Dealers’ Room 99.60% 72.98%
Art Show 79.89% 87.05%
“Submitted Logo” is the percentage of applications that included a logo image. “Submitted Alt Text” is the percentage of submitted logos that included alt text.

As far as this goes, I’d say it was a pretty successful experiment, with between 63% and 87% of submitted images including alt text that we could then copy and paste into the website backend and code as we built the pages that used them, both saving us time and effort and ensuring that the alt text was what the people filling out the form would want it to be. Not bad at all!

Of course, simply having alt text is only part of the equation. The next question is how good is the submitted alt text?

Not surprisingly, it’s a bit all over the place. Some were very simple and straightforward, with just a business name, or the name with “logo” appended. Some described the logo in varying levels of detail. And some went far beyond just describing the logo, occasionally including information better suited other fields on the form that asked for a promotional description of the business, organization, or artist. That said, there were very few instances where I considered the submitted text to be unusable for its intended purpose.

Later on when I have more time, I might dive a bit more into the submissions to do a more detailed analysis of the quality of the submitted alt text. But for now, I’m quite satisfied with how this worked out. I fully intend on doing this for Norwescon’s website next year and onward, and would recommend that other conventions (and other organizations or businesses) that accept user image uploads to also allow users to provide their own alt text.

In the meantime, feel free to check out the final results of this experiment on Worldcon’s Art Show, Dealers’ Room, and Fan Table pages…and if any of this inspires you to come to Worldcon (if you’re not already planning to), stop by my presentation on digital accessibility for conventions (currently scheduled for )!

Weekly Notes: May 26–June 1, 2025

  • ♿️ Officially launched the Accessibility Liaisons project at work on Tuesday, to help train more people and distribute the work of improving digital accessibility across the college. This was just a “soft” launch to introduce the program, with things kicking off more comprehensively in the fall, but it was good to get it started.
  • 🌏 Yesterday we went to Kent’s annual International Festival. Got some good food from food trucks, learned a little bit about some of the many cultures represented in Kent’s population, and saw some good music and dance performances. My favorites were a kids group doing traditional Sri Lankan dance, and kids from the local School of Rock.
  • 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ Happy Pride Month, all. Or if not that, have a well-focused Wrath month. Stonewall was a riot of queer and trans people, after all. And my occasional reminder that I describe myself as “statistically straight“, which allows for some variations in the trend line.

📸 Photos

A rock group of seven teens and pre-teens performing on an outdoor stage as people watch.
The School of Rock kids performing; I think here they were doing Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”.

Social media post by Claire Willett saying, "for pride month this year can straight people focus less on 'love is love' and more on 'queer and trans people are in danger'".

A rainbow-colored unicorn with a skull face striding through a black and grey landsdape with flames at its hooves, trailing a banner that says, "we called off pride, now it's gay wrath month".

📚 Reading

📺 Watching

Finished Andor. That was really good. Easily among the best of the modern Star Wars shows and films (that I’ve seen, at least, not having seen them all).

🔗 Linking

  • Eric Wilkinson at King 5: AI stepping up as backup for short-staffed PenCom dispatchers (which was headlined “AI now takes some calls for help on Olympic Peninsula” when I bookmarked this): “AI listens for keywords that may indicate crime or violence. It even picks up inflections in the caller’s voice to sense trouble. If any of those criteria are met, the call goes directly to a real person.” Yeah, I can see no way in which this could go wrong…

  • Helen Smith at King 5: The Cascadia Subduction Zone looks a little different than researchers thought. Here’s what that means for ‘The Big One’ (which was headlined “New research reshapes ‘The Big One’ tsunami risk” when I bookmarked it…what’s with King 5 renaming headlines?): “New findings show that tsunami risk may be different, though not less, in places along the subduction zone. This is due to the absence of a ‘megasplay fault,’ which was previously believed to run from Vancouver Island down to the Oregon-California border.”

  • David Friedman at Ironic Sans: Proof that Patrick Stewart exists in the Star Trek universe: Fun interview with Star Trek fan and researcher Jörg Hillebrand.

  • Technology Connections on YouTube: Closed captions on DVDs are getting left behind. Half an hour, but a fascinating look at how closed captions are encoded into analog video, how it works with the digital video of DVDs, and why modern players and Blu-ray disks are falling over with their closed caption support. Some of the basics here I knew from my subtitle projects, but a lot of the technical details were new to me and neat to learn about.

  • Ben Cohen in The Wall Street Journal: They Were Every Student’s Worst Nightmare. Now Blue Books Are Back. (archive.is link): “Students outsourcing their assignments to AI and cheating their way through college has become so rampant, so quickly, that it has created a market for a product that helps professors ChatGPT-proof school. As it turns out, that product already exists. In fact, you’ve probably used it. You might even dread it. ¶ It’s called a blue book.”

  • Nadira Goffe in Slate: The Controversy Surrounding Disney’s Remake of Lilo & Stitch, Explained: I don’t have any interest in watching the remake (big fan of the original, though), but as a non-Hawaiian white guy, reading about the political undertones in the original that have been stripped out of the remake was really interesting, as it was a lot of stuff that I didn’t know.

  • Anil Dash: The Internet of Consent: “The growing frustration around “enshittification” is, in no small part, grounded in a huge frustration around having a constant feeling of being forced to use features and tools that don’t respect our choices. We’re constantly wrestling with platforms that don’t respect our boundaries. And we have an uncanny sense that the giant tech companies are going behind our backs and into our lives in ways that we don’t know about and certainly wouldn’t agree to if we did.”

  • Kelly Hayes: From Aspiration to Action: Organizing Through Exhaustion, Grief, and Uncertainty: “As an organizer, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the gulf between what many people believed they would do in moments of extremity, and what they are actually doing now, as fascism rises, the genocide in Palestine continues, and climate chaos threatens the survival of living beings around the world.”

  • Chelsey Coombs at The Intercept: “Andor” Has a Message for the Left: Act Now: “‘Andor,’ the new series set in the universe, doubles down on its anti-authoritarian roots, focusing on the creation of the revolutionary Rebel Alliance. In the process, it gives us a glimpse into the messiness and conflict that often accompanies building a movement on the left, as activists fight over which political philosophies and strategies work best.”

  • Yona T. Sperling-Milner at The Harvard Crimson: Come At Me, Bro: “I propose an alternate strategy: I shall fight Secretary of Education Linda E. McMahon in a televised cage match, the winner of which gets $2.7 billion in federal grants and the power to uphold or destroy America’s continued technological and economic success.”

  • Suyi Davies Okungbowa: I Call Bullshit: Writing lessons from my toddler in the age of generative AI: “Software is as limited as the individuals, systems and institutions that define and prompt it, and as of today, mimicry is its highest form. But as you can see above, mimicry is not a significant endeavour. A human baby can mimic. A chameleon can mimic. Mimicry is basic.”

(Bi-)Weekly Notes: May 12–25, 2025

I didn’t get to this last weekend, and this week was too busy to sneak it in and backdate it, so I’m just going for a two-week catch-up this time. Good enough!

  • ♿️ The big thing for me at work last week was Global Accessibility Awareness Day. As one of the co-chairs of SBCTC’s CATO (Committee for Accessible Technology Oversight), I’d written a letter of support and call to action that, after editing and input from the rest of the committee, we sent out to several of the high-level committees within SBCTC, and it’s being passed on from there.
  • 🚀 Last weekend was the final committee meeting for Norwescon 47, where the staff gathers for the post-con wrap-up and “onions and roses” session where we discuss what went well and what we can improve on from a staff point of view. Lots of good comments, followed by a social at a local home. And that wraps up this year’s con…on to the next! (Speaking of, I do need to find time to get our website transition process started soon….)

This past week, in addition to the usual work duties, had several evening events that were fun to do, but definitely threw our weekly routine off.

  • 🎫 On Tuesday night, I went out to my first live concert in years and saw Underworld. They’ve been a favorite artist and “bucket list” concert for decades, so even though this was on a Tuesday night, I decided (a few months ago when tickets went on sale) that it was worth it and a good birthday present to myself. Glad I did, too — the show was really, really good. They started precisely at 8 p.m. (the most prompt concert I think I’ve ever been to), played an hour-long set, took a half-hour break, and then played a 90-minute set, wrapping up right at 11 p.m. I didn’t memorize the track list, but it was a good selection from across their catalog, from the Dubnobasswithmyheadman-era with “Dirty Epic” and “Cowgirl” (a really nice version that I hope gets released), to more recent tracks like “S T A R” off of Drift and “And the Colour Red” off of Strawberry Hotel, wrapping up (of course) with “Born Slippy .NUXX“. Great show, and I’m so glad I finally to a chance to see them live. Sure, as an electronic duo, the show is mostly the lights and video as Karl Hyde performs the vocals and Rick Smith plays with the computers — but there’s something about the experience, being in a venue with lots of other fans dancing and enjoying the music, being able to feel the bass and rhythms wash over and through you, and feeling the energy of the crowd, the artists, and the whole thing, that’s so much more than the sum of its parts.
  • 🎓 Wednesday ended the workday with an end-of-the-year celebration of student leaders. Both my wife and I knew several of the students being honored (she had nominated two of them), and it’s always nice to do this celebration during spring quarter.
  • 🍻 Thursday was a get-together with other coworkers at a local bar, something which I don’t do terribly often (between not being much of a barfly if there isn’t a dance floor, not being much of a drinker, and usually just heading home to relax after work instead of socializing), but is fun to do occasionally.
  • 🪕 And then on Saturday we decided to go to this year’s Folklife festival, which we hadn’t done for years. It ended up being a perfect day for it — sunny and mid-70°s — and we spent a nice few hours wandering around, listening to neat music, watching a performance of a 1950s radio show by American Radio Theater, munching on fair food, and running into a few friends.

📸 Photos

Underworld performing, with Karl Hyde singing and pointing to the sky, lit all in reds.

Underworld performing, list all in purples, blues, and magentas.

Underworld performing, lit yellows, greens, and oranges, in front of a crowded floor.

Three shots from the Underworld show. Plus a bonus shot…

A camera person using a large professional camera during the Underworld concert, with everything lit in green.

This cameraperson was a real MVP of the evening, having to keep the camera trained on the stage…and keep it steady. There is no way I could do that job; the camera would be bouncing all over the place in time with the music. I was really impressed!

People sit on a lawn in front of an outdoor stage with the Space Needle stretching up into a cloudless blue summer sky.

Live music under the Space Needle on a gorgeous early summer day.

📝 Writing

A question on a work mailing list got me rambling about my frustrations with the popular confusion of machine learning with “artificial intelligence”.

📚 Reading

  • Finished Greg Cox’s Star Trek TOS novella Miasma.
  • Read Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga book Cryoburn.
  • Started James Swallow’s just-released Star Trek SNW book Toward the Night.

📺 Watching

  • Together, we wrapped up a season of Hell’s Kitchen, hopped into an older season of Drag Race All Stars, and supplemented that with our ongoing binge through the three Chicago shows.
  • I’ve made it through ten episodes of season two of Andor (hoping to get through the last two tomorrow, and maybe rewatch Rogue One afterwards), and on a whim started watching Max Headroom. Honestly, I don’t think it would be terribly difficult to update Max Headroom for the modern world, especially with AI-generated everything all around us.

🎧 Listening

I’ve added a few albums over the past two weeks that I’m enjoying:

  • Synthetic. Facts. Seven., Infacted Recording’s latest sampler of EBM/futurepop/however you want to categorize this kind of stuff. Quite a few tracks I’m enjoying, particularly Alex Braun + Rob Dust’s take on “25 Years“, originally by The Catch in 1983.
  • Peter Murphy’s Silver Shade came out, and is really strong. He’s still going really strong, and this album shows it.
  • Orbital’s expanded re-release of Orbital 2 (The Brown Album Expanded) also just came out. Orbital’s also been high on my list of long-time favorite electronic artists, and I’m really enjoying the string of expanded album releases that both Orbital and Underworld have done in the past few years. Alternate takes, remixes, and other stuff that might not be critical for a new or casual listener, but for fans, there’s a lot of gold in these reissues.

🔗 Linking

Particularly interesting reads from across the web.

  • Apparently IBM offers accessibility checking tools, which someone said may be good? I need to take some time to investigate these.
  • This is a motherfucking website: “I’m not actually saying your shitty site should look like this. What I’m saying is that all the problems we have with websites are ones we create ourselves. Websites aren’t broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. You break them. You son-of-a-bitch.”
  • Apple unveils powerful accessibility features coming later this year: “New features include Accessibility Nutrition Labels on the App Store, Magnifier for Mac, Braille Access, and Accessibility Reader; plus innovative updates to Live Listen, visionOS, Personal Voice, and more.”
  • Andrew Liszewski at The Verge: This modern cassette boombox will lure you in with glowing VU meters: I certainly don’t need a $500 cassette deck, no matter how pretty. But I’ll admit, it is pretty….
  • Shoreline Area News: Disabled Hiker’s Guide to 5 Washington State Parks is now available: “Each park guide includes an overview of the park, suggested activities, and information on the accessibility of many features in the park. Features are broken out into sections, and include parking, restrooms and facilities, picnic areas and shelters, trails, campgrounds, and more, with detailed information and directions.”
  • Grimoire: A Grim Oak Press Anthology For Seattle Worldcon 2025: Pre-order now, pick up at Worldcon, and get it signed by as many of the authors as you can track down!
  • Neal Stephenson: Remarks on AI from NZ: “Speaking of the effects of technology on individuals and society as a whole, Marshall McLuhan wrote that every augmentation is also an amputation. […] Today, quite suddenly, billions of people have access to AI systems that provide augmentations, and inflict amputations, far more substantial than anything McLuhan could have imagined. This is the main thing I worry about currently as far as AI is concerned.”
  • James Reffell at DesignCult: The secret origin of “log in”: “‘Log in’ is one of those phrases that sounds weirder the more you say it. It’s ubiquitous in online life, though it does seem like it’s being slowly overtaken by ‘sign in’. But where does the phrase come from in the first place?”
  • Constance Grady at Vox: Why does Elon Musk love this socialist sci-fi series?: “The politics of these books are not subtle, and they are also not compatible with the existence of billionaires. So it’s worth thinking about why the broligarchs have so consistently cited a socialist author as an inspiration. What do they find tantalizing about Banks’ work? Are they missing the point altogether?”
  • Georgia Jackson at the University of South Florida’s College of Arts and Sciences profiles faculty member and this year’s Philip K. Dick Award winner Brenda Peynado: In ‘Time’s Agent,’ pocket worlds reveal deep truths — and earn USF faculty a Philip K. Dick award.
  • Christian Balderas at King 5: Kent grapples with repeat internet outages caused by vandalism: We got hit by both of these outages; twice in two days. And there was another only a few weeks ago. It’s really frustrating.
  • Nora Claire Miller at The Paris Review: Recurring Screens: “The world’s first screen saver was not like a dream at all. It was a blank screen. It was called SCRNSAVE, and when it was released in 1983 it was very exciting to a niche audience. It was like John Cage’s 4’33″ but for computers—a score for meted-out doses of silence.” This is either a history of screensavers or a poetry review. Or both?
  • Alexander Hurst at The Guardian: Volodymyr Zelenskyy has courage. Pope Francis had it too. Why are there so many cowards?: “What is just? Who is acting with honour? With courage? When did we stop thinking it normal to consider such questions – and to demand those things from the people who lead us? To demand that they, well, lead?”
  • Ed Pilkington at The Guardian: Meet the new American refugees fleeing across state lines for safety: “America is on the move. Hundreds of thousands of people are packing up boxes, loading U-Hauls, and shipping out of state in an urgent flight towards safety. ¶ They’re being propelled by hostile political forces bearing down on them because of who they are, what they believe, or for their medical needs. ¶ All are displaced within their own country for reasons they did not choose. They are the new generation of America’s internal refugees – and their ranks are growing by the day.”
  • Sarah Kuta at Smithsonian Magazine: A Young Cooper’s Hawk Learned to Use a Crosswalk Signal to Launch Surprise Attacks on Other Birds: “Researcher Vladimir Dinets watched the bird repeatedly sneak behind a row of cars to ambush its unsuspecting prey.”

Good vs Bad AI (or ML vs AI)

The following is a (lightly edited) response I gave to a recent accessibility mailing list question from Jane Jarrow, coming out of a question around concerns around the use of various AI or AI-like tools for accessibility in higher education:

Folks responded by noting that they didn’t consider things like spell check, screen readers, voice-to-text, text-to-voice, or grammar checkers to be AI – at least, not the AI that is raising eyebrows on campus. That may be true… but do we have a clean way of sorting that out? Here is my “identity crisis”:

What is the difference between “assistive technology” and “artificial intelligence” (AI)?

This is me speaking personally, not officially, and also as a long-time geek, but not an AI specialist.

I think a big issue here is the genericization of the term “AI” and how it’s now being applied to all sorts of technologies that may share some similarities, but also have some distinct differences.

Broadly, I see two very different technologies at play: “traditional”/“iterative” AI (in the past, and more accurately, termed “machine learning” or “ML”), and “generative” AI (what we’re seeing now with ChatGPT, Claude, etc.).

Spell check, grammar check, text-to-speech, and even speech-to-text (including automated captioning systems) are all great examples of the traditional iterative ML systems: they use sophisticated pattern matching to identify common patterns and translate them into another form. For simpler things like spelling and grammar, I’d question whether that’s really even ML (though modern systems may well be). Text-to-speech is kind of an “in between” state, where the computer is simply converting text strings into audio, though these days, the use of generative AI to produce more natural-sounding voices (even to the point of mimicking real people) is blurring the line a little bit.

Speech-to-text (and automated captioning) is more advanced and is certainly benefitting from the use of large language models (LLM) on the backend, but it still falls more on the side of iterative ML, in much the same way that scientific systems are using these technologies to scan through things like medical or deep-space imagery to identify cancers and exoplanets far faster than human review can manage. They’re using the models to analyze data, identify patterns that match existing patterns in their data set, and then producing output. For scientific fields, that output is then reviewed by researchers to verify it; for speech-to-text systems, the output is the text or captions (which are presented without human review…hence the errors that creep in; manual review and correction of auto-generated captions before posting a video to a sharing site is the equivalent step to scientists reviewing the output of their systems before making decisions based on that output).

Where we’re struggling (both within education and far more broadly) is with the newer, generative “AI”. These systems are essentially souped-up, very fancy statistical modeling — there’s no actual “intelligence” behind it at all, just (though I’ll admit the word “just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here) a very complex set of algorithms deciding that given this input, when producing output, these words are more likely to go together. Because there’s no real intelligence behind it, there’s no way for these systems to know, judge, or understand when the statistically generated output is nonsensical (or, worse, makes sense but is simply wrong). Unfortunately, they’re just so good at producing output that sounds right, especially when output as very professional/academic-sounding writing (easy to do, as so many of the LLMs have been unethically and (possibly arguably, but I agree with this) illegally trained on professional and academic writing), that they immediately satisfy our need for “truthiness”. If it sounds true, and I got it from a computer, well then, it must be true, right?

(The best and most amusing summary I’ve seen of modern “AI” systems is from Christine Lemmer-Webber by way of Andrew Feeney, who described it as “Mansplaining as a Service: A service that instantly generates vaguely plausible sounding yet totally fabricated and baseless lectures in an instant with unflagging confidence in its own correctness on any topic, without concern, regard or even awareness of the level of expertise of its audience.”)

Getting students (and, really, everyone, including faculty, staff, the public at large, etc.) to understand the distinction between the types of “AI”, when they work well, and when they prove problematic, is proving to be an incredibly difficult thing, of course.

For myself, I’m fine with using traditional/iterative ML systems. I’m generally pretty good with my spelling and grammar, but don’t mind the hints (though I do sometimes ignore them when I find it appropriate to do so), and I find auto-captioning to be incredibly useful, both in situations like Zoom sessions and to quickly create a first pass at captioning a video (though I always do manual corrections before finalizing the captions on a video to be shared). But I draw the line at generative AI systems and steadfastly refuse to use ChatGPT, AI image generators, or other such tools. I have decades of experience in creating artisanally hand-crafted typos and errors and have no interest in statistically generating my mistakes!

I’m afraid I don’t have good suggestions on how to solve the issues. But there’s one (rather long-winded) response to the question you posed about the difference between assistive technology and “artificial intelligence”.

20 Minute Tesla Model Y Review

Entirely unintentionally and much to my chagrin, I had my first ride in a Tesla today; one of the newest Model Ys, in fact. I’d never have done this voluntarily, but I was taking a Lyft from a work conference at a school about 20 minutes away from my home, and didn’t realize it was a swasticar until it pulled up.

What an absolutely foolish design.

The touchscreen display on a Tesla Model Y, showing the display as described in the rest of this post.

Virtually no physical controls. Nearly everything is on this display, mounted dead-center, so none of the critical info is directly in front of the driver; you have to look down and to the right to check anything. I think the only physical controls were the wheel, with a couple buttons, and the pedals. There was no stalk on the right side to control things like the wipers, I couldn’t see if there was a left-side stalk for turn signals or not.

The left third of the display is a live updating animation of whatever the car sees, which means there’s a large, constantly moving distraction just barely out of your eyeline, primed to pull your attention away from the road in front of you. Every car or pedestrian the car senses is shown on the display. It will even show whether a car is a sedan, pickup, or box truck, if it can figure that out (more likely when they’re crossing side-on rather than directly in front or behind). I’m a little surprised that it doesn’t distinguish other Teslas with some sort of special icon or coloring or something.

The right two thirds are all the controls, presented with a low-contrast dark grey on light grey color scheme, with small text and icons, all of which makes it difficult to distinguish any one control from another at a quick glance. And, of course, because it’s all a touch screen, you can’t do anything by feel, because it’s one flat pane of glass and you have to look at the screen to make sure you’re touching the right spot.

Even if the owner of the company wasn’t a raging monomaniacal ego-driven techno fascist doing everything he can to rip this country apart and grift as much money out of the process as he can (which, to be clear, he is, and if Republicans were actually at all serious about getting dangerous immigrants out of the country, he should be at the top of the list), I’d still be baffled that these cars are approved to be on the roads and that people are as enamored with them as they are. It’s like a master class in designing a user interface that’s as potentially dangerous for the driver as possible.

Weekly Notes: April 7-13, 2025

  • 🚀 Almost to Norwescon! So, lots of that when I’m not doing other things.
  • 🥚 While we’re not terribly religious, we do like the cuteness and spring celebration of Easter, so since Norwescon takes place over Easter weekend, we continued our annual tradition of celebrating spring a week early. It was a gorgeous day, so we took a nice walk in the morning, and then dyed eggs in the afternoon.

📸 Photos

Eighteen eggs dyed bright colors sitting in an egg carton in the sun.

Colors and speckles and eggs, oh my!

📚 Reading

📺 Watching

We got sucked into the reality tripe of Million Dollar Secret. It’s ridiculous, many of these people are horrible, and it’s keeping us entertained.

🔗 Linking

  • Online Markdown is a pretty impressive web-based Markdown editor. I’m starting to find some annoyances with Markdown (it focuses on presentational markup rather than structured markup — for example, _using underscores_ to add italics adds italics as <em> tags rather than <i> tags, but since I’m often marking up book titles, <em> is the incorrect tag to be using), but until/unless I decide to go another way, this looks like a good tool to know about.
  • Daniel Hunter at Waging Nonviolence: What to do if the Insurrection Act is invoked: “With the Insurrection Act looming, now is the time to learn how it might unfold and the strategic ways to respond — including the power of ridicule.” I’m hoping this is just paranoia, but afraid it isn’t.
  • Nicholas Barber at the BBC: ‘It was a magical chemical balance’: How Monty Python and the Holy Grail became a comedy legend: “An independent British comedy made on a shoestring by a television sketch troupe? It sounds like a film destined to be forgotten within weeks of leaving cinemas – assuming it reaches cinemas in the first place. But Monty Python and the Holy Grail is still revered as one of the greatest ever big-screen comedies, 50 years on from its release in April 1975.”
  • Nancy Friedman at Strong Language: “Smut”: “Although the lyrics reflected a set of social and legal circumstances specific to mid-1960s America, their sentiment has proved to be timeless. In honor of its 60th anniversary and Tom Lehrer’s long, remarkable life, here’s our salute to ‘Smut.'”
  • Ex Astris Scientia: Design Issues of the Original Enterprise: “The article discusses problems or uncertainties about the design of the original Enterprise by Matt Jefferies, as it appeared in TOS.”
  • Tim Hardiwck at MacRumors: How to Adjust Mac Volume and Brightness More Precisely: “Before you press the volume or brightness controls, hold down the Option and Shift keys together on your keyboard. Now go ahead and make your adjustments, and you should see the onscreen indicator move forwards and backwards in smaller increments (four over each segment).” I’ve been using macOS since it was Mac OS, and I never knew this trick.
  • Bauhaus Clock: “A Bauhaus clock screensaver for Mac, designed to be present even when you’re not.” Pretty! But apparently I should have downloaded it sooner; the page is now saying “currently unavailable”. Oh dear….

Weekly Notes: March 31–April 6, 2025

  • 🚀 This weekend was a little bit of convention conflict, as Saturday we had the final Norwescon 47 planning meeting before the con, and Sunday was Seattle Worldcon‘s announcement of this year’s Hugo finalists. Got everything done, but it did make me glad there aren’t many weekends where I’m trying to do stuff for two conventions at the same time.

📸 Photos

Single-panel comic of two men sitting on a park bench, one is about eight inches tall. The small one is saying, "You think you've got problems! Not only am I the incredible shrinking man, but I've also been bitten by a werewolf so every full moon I turn into a gerbil!"

From a conversation with a friend, one of my all-time favorite Bizarro comics, clipped and saved back when I was in high school.

📝 Writing

📚 Reading

🔗 Linking

  • Guillaume Lethuillier: The Myst Graph: A New Perspective on Myst: “Upon reflection, Myst has long been more analogous to a graph than a traditional linear game, owing to the relative freedom it affords players. This is particularly evident in its first release (Macintosh, 1993), which was composed of interconnected HyperCard cards. It is now literally one. Here is Myst as a graph.”

  • Jessica Bennett at The Cut: If Hetero Relationships Are So Bad, Why Do Women Go Back for More? A new straight-studies course treats male-female partnerships as the real deviance.: “‘In this class, we’re going to flip the script,’ she went on. ‘It’s going to be a place where we worry about straight people. Where we feel sympathy for straight people. We are going to be allies to straight people.'”

  • Nilay Patel at The Verge: Best printer 2025: just buy a Brother laser printer, the winner is clear, middle finger in the air: “This is the third year in a row that I’ve published a story recommending you just stop thinking about printers and buy whatever random Brother laser printer is on sale, and nothing has happened in the miserably user-hostile printer industry to change my recommendation in that time.”

  • Sarah Jones at the Intelligencer: Then They Came for People With Disabilities The right-wing effort to roll back civil rights finds a new target.: “Though the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans With Disabilities Act had bipartisan support and were signed by Republican presidents, it’s hard to imagine Trump signing either piece of legislation. A more ruthless strain of conservatism always percolated within the party, and now it dominates and threatens the protections that Cone, and Lomax, and so many others once fought to win. At risk is the concept of civil rights itself.”

  • Shelly Brisbin at Six Colors: Twenty Thousand Hertz Dives Deep Into Apple Accessibility History: “The latest episode of the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast takes a stab at telling Apple’s accessibility story through sound—not only the sound of a host and his interview subjects, but the way Macs and iPhones sound when they speak to people who use their accessibility features.”

  • Watts Martin: What makes an app feel “right” on the Mac?: “So it’s possible that the right question—at least for me—isn’t ‘is this app using a native UI toolkit,’ it’s ‘is this app a good Mac citizen.’ In other words, does it embrace long-standing Mac conventions?”

  • Seattle Worldcon 2025: 2025 Hugo Award Finalists: “Seattle Worldcon 2025, the 83rd World Science Fiction Convention, is delighted to announce the finalists for the 2025 Hugo Awards, Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and Astounding Award for Best New Writer.”

Weekly Notes: Feb 24–Mar 2, 2025

  • 🍃 Big storms hit the Seattle area on Monday and Tuesday, with lots of power outages. We didn’t lose power at home this time, which was nice. Work lost power early Tuesday morning, and though it was back by the time we got in, there were DNS issues that kept campus offline until almost 8:30. Not an auspicious start to the day.
  • 💸 Friday was the “don’t spend anything” economic blackout day. Honestly, this one was easy for me, as I rarely if ever buy anything on Fridays anyway (don’t get coffee or anything on the way to work, bring my own lunch, all household shopping is generally done on Saturday or Sunday, etc.). I have to admit, my cynical side doubts that enough people actually participated for any company to even notice, let alone for it to actually make an impression. But it’s a start, which is good, and hey, you never know — maybe my cynical side will be proven wrong?
  • 🚀 Saturday was this month’s Norwescon planning meeting, so I got to hang out with con friends for a while. This year, in addition to my usual behind-the-scenes duties (website admin, social media admin, Philip K. Dick Award ceremony coordinator, assistant historian) and visible duties (Thursday night DJ, Philip K. Dick Award ceremony emcee), I’ll also be paneling! I posted my tentative schedule earlier today.

📸 Photos

Panoramic view of trees and grass under a bright blue sunny sky with the Puget Sound and Olympic Mountains in the distance.

The view from the balcony outside my office at work on our first really good (false) spring day this year.

📚 Reading

📺 Watching

  • Finished S19 of Project Runway, and though some contestants left earlier than we would have liked, we were not disappointed with the winner.

🔗 Linking

  • NYT (non-NYT link), The Man Behind the ‘Economic Blackout’ Served Time for Sex-Related Offense: “In 2007, Mr. Schwarz was sentenced by a Connecticut judge to 90 days in jail and five years’ probation for disseminating voyeuristic material, according to a representative from the Middlesex County criminal court clerk’s office who reviewed court records while speaking with The New York Times earlier this week.”

  • Marlies on Mastodon: “The vatican needed a latin word for tweet, because the pope tweets. Or tweeted, I suppose, given the whole dead or dying situation. Anyway, they call them breviloquia (s breviloquium) which is honestly a great word even tho it’s not very brief itself. Given its nature and etymology I think we should be able to use it platform-independently and apply it to toots, skeets and even Truths as well. Anyway thank you for reading this breviloquium.”

  • Joan Westenberg, Why Personal Websites Matter More Than Ever:

    The Internet used to be a connected web of message boards and personal websites. I’m talking 1995 to 2005, when being online meant owning your piece of the web, carving it out yourself, maintaining it, giving a damn about it. It was the age of truly sovereign digital identity and content, built on a direct connection between creators and audiences, who found and fell in love with each other on their terms.

    HTML was an almost democratizing force, giving a generation of people the tools they needed to stake their claim and plant their flag in the ground. The personal website was a statement of intent, a manifesto, a portfolio, a piece of digital architecture you could be damn proud of.

    And then something changed.

  • Apple has its issues, but at least this isn’t one of them. Shareholders voted against removing DEI policies; the board had already recommended this decision.

  • If (like me) you’re still using Facebook (or, unlike me, Instagram/Whatsapp/Meta services), you should follow these simple steps to minimize the amount of data you give Meta. (Also, since this is from John Oliver, the URL is great.)

  • Trivial Einstein on Mastodon: “We have a whole classic parable on the subject of not crying wolf, to the point where ‘crying wolf’ is something of a dead cliché. In the English-speaking world, pretty much everyone knows what ‘to cry wolf’ means, even if they’ve never actually heard the parable. We don’t think about the story. We make the semantic leap from the phrase to ‘false positive.’ And we are taught over and over that crying wolf is always bad. Which is why we find ourselves in situations like the one in which we currently find ourselves.”

Minor Feedbin RSS Bug? (EDIT: Not a bug.)

I think I just uncovered a minor bug in Feedbin‘s RSS parsing.

Update: Not a bug! Feedbin support confirmed that they “aggressively” sanitize markup, for various reasons including security and ensuring that any CSS doesn’t break Feedbin’s rendering when viewed on the Feedbin site.

I used some inline CSS to flip an emoji upside-down in a recent blog post, but it’s displaying right side up in Feedbin (and therefore in NetNewsWire, so at first I thought it was a bug there, but if I let NNW read the RSS directly instead of pulling from Feedbin, it displays the inverted emoji properly).)

Screenshot showing the inverted emoji on my website on the left and right side up in Feedbin on the right.

I’ve confirmed that the inline CSS is present in the raw RSS feed (which makes sense, since it displays properly when loaded directly in NNW).

Screenshot of the proper HTML/CSS in the RSS feed as seen in BBEdit.

But when I use Safari’s inspector to peek at the HTML that Feedbin is rendering, though the span tag is there, the style argument with the inline CSS has been stripped out.

Screenshot of the HTML as served by Feedbin showing a span tag with no arguments.

Is this a bug? Or is Feedbin intentionally stripping inline CSS style declarations out for some reason? Update: Not a bug! See the added note at the beginning of this post.