Sure, backdating a day, but let’s see if I can get at least one weekly cadence post up before Norwescon throws me off again. :)
So, this past week…not a lot to tell, actually, for most of it
- This was spring break week for the college, so things around the office were a little slower and we all got to spend some time catching up on some of the little things that had been pushed into the “in a bit” piles. Not a bad thing at all! Since my wife is a teacher, she got a week at home to rest between quarters.
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Politically, everything is still a dumpster fire, of course. Saturday was the third No Kings rally and march, which we once again went up to Seattle to participate in. I don’t know how big it actually was (I know they were hoping for 100,000 in Seattle, though I don’t know if an official count has been announced yet), but it definitely felt big. During the march from Capitol Hill to the Seattle Center, we were somewhere in the middle of the pack, and whenever I had a raised view and looked ahead or behind, I couldn’t see either end of the crowd. I took a bunch of pictures, but don’t have them posted yet. Hopefully tonight or tomorrow so I have those up before Norwescon.
📸 Photos
📚 Reading
Read T. Kingfisher’s A Sorceress Came to Call and enjoyed it. Glad I managed to get one of her books in before seeing her at con this year!
🔗 Linking
And now, a few week’s worth of collected links. Some may be slightly “old new” by now, but so it goes.
Accessibility
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Adrian Roselli: Your Browser Can Already Speak a Page: “Is an “AI” company offering to provide spoken versions of your pages for users? Is an overlay company promising to make your content more accessible by its overlay speaking it? Is some other vendor pitching you on some kind of thing that reads your web pages aloud to users? ¶ You don’t need it. ¶ Or, rather, your users may not need it. Their browser already offers it. At no cost to you. Nor them.”
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Amanda Shekarchi at the CBC: When Comicon and other fan conventions focus on accessibility, everyone wins: “Many fan conventions implement accommodations like American Sign Language interpreters, accessible seating at panels and quiet rooms to break from sensory overload. Still, there is a lot of work to be done in terms of making the convention experience fully accessible.”
Entertainment
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Eoin Glackin at the Dublin InQuirer: Sixty years on, a Star Trek writer is still creating strange new worlds
: “Diane Duane’s early days writing fan fiction have led to a remarkable career as a novelist, comic writer and screen writer.” (Good article, but why is every sentence its own paragraph?) -
Charlie Jane Anders: Let Firefly Stay Dead!: “But also, if there is going to be a new show based on one of Joss Whedon’s creations, I think Buffy is a much better choice. Both Buffy and Firefly are chock full of Whedon’s preoccupations and stock characters, but Buffy has more potential to go in a different direction and become properly feminist this time around. Also, I really think it’s time to stop trying to make space westerns a thing.”
History
- Jocelyn Timperley at the BBC: The ancient reason there are 60 minutes in an hour: “To understand how we started counting, and still count today, 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute, though, we need to wind the clock back to an era before the dawn of timekeeping. Because it’s the story of one of the earliest number systems that started us off on this track – and explains why this awkward system has long outlived the civilisations who invented it.”
Local
- Paul Constant at the Seattle Times: Twice Sold Tales on Capitol Hill offers used books with a side of cats: “The interior of Twice Sold Tales has remained the same, with winding bookcases packed with noteworthy bargains of all kinds — from super-rare art books to paperbacks that will set you back a couple bucks — and all sorts of handwritten signs and other ephemera affixed to the walls. In many ways, wandering the shop feels like exploring a well-thumbed paperback. The shop is staffed with seven cats (who live in the stacks 24/7) and five booksellers (who go home at the end of their shifts).”
Photography
- Peter Dench at Amateur Photographer: I took Steve Jobs’ favourite ever portrait – it was all about the preparation: “The resulting portrait shot on film is stark, frontal, almost confrontational in its simplicity. It has become one of the most recognisable images of Jobs ever made. It was used on the cover of Jobs’ biography and Apple’s tribute, with Jobs later calling it his favourite photo. It looks effortless but was all in the preparation.”
Politics
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Erin Reed at Erin in the Morning: Kansas Sends Letters To Trans People Demanding The Immediate Surrender Of Drivers Licenses (archive.is snapshot of a Substack original): “As a result of this extreme anti-transgender law, the state of Kansas has seen its status deteriorate to a “Do Not Travel” warning in the EITM Trans Risk Map. Transgender people should exercise extreme caution when traveling through the state, and those already living there should take immediate steps to legally protect themselves in the face of laws that could strip their driving privileges, expose them to criminal penalties, and subject them to thousand-dollar bounties simply for using a restroom. For most transgender people who do not already live in Kansas, the risk is now too great to travel there at all.”
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Kelly Jensen at Book Riot: A Nationwide Book Ban Bill Has Been Introduced in the House of Representatives: “H.R. 7661 is an anti-trans bill, and tucked within its provisions are those that ban books for those under 18 that “include sexually oriented material.” This is the same vague language used in numerous states across the U.S. to ban books from public schools and public libraries. This bill includes “lewd” and “lascivious” dancing as prohibited topics or themes. No such books for young readers exist, but facts don’t matter to a regime seeking total and complete control.”
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Cedar Attanasio for the AP: Callers to Washington state hotline press 2 for Spanish and get accented AI English instead: “For months, callers to the Washington state Department of Licensing who have requested automated service in Spanish have instead heard an AI voice speaking English in a strong Spanish accent.”
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“Staff” at the Kent Reporter: King County blocks construction of ICE detention centers: “Mosqueda said the ordinance is consistent with legislation that has been adopted, or is under consideration by, Tukwila, SeaTac, Port of Seattle, City of Seattle, Baltimore County, Kansas City, Missouri, and other jurisdictions around the country, and ensures that King County’s land use regulations can continue to focus on strengthening public health and community resilience.”
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Steve Hunter at the Kent Reporter: Kent City Council passes moratorium on detention centers: “The Kent City Council joined a growing list of King County jurisdictions to adopt a measure to prohibit any new or expansion of jail, corrections or detention facilities in town with expectations that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) might be looking to add another center to go with its Tacoma site.”
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Karl Bode at TechDirt: 37,000 Fake AI Comments Mysteriously Oppose Washington State’s Effort To Tax The Rich: “Washington State has been exploring the RADICAL SOCIALIST ANTIFA EXTREMIST idea of having the state’s rich actually pay their taxes. That’s not been received particularly well by the extraction class, which has been making empty promises about leaving the state. ¶ Recently the state opened up the public comment system to input, and not too surprisingly it was immediately flooded with upwards of 37,000 fake comments opposing the idea of taxing the rich.”
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Aaron Glantz in The Guardian: US veteran charged with ‘conspiracy’ over ICE protest refuses to plead guilty: “The right to protest is ‘supposed to be fundamentally American’, said Bajun Mavalwalla, who walked foot patrols as US army sergeant in the Horn of Panjwai, the birthplace of the Taliban and one of the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan’s Kandahar province. ¶ ‘It’s among the rights that when I joined the military, I thought I was joining to protect,’ he said. ‘You can’t do it violently. You can’t do it in a way that harms other people, but you have a right to stand up for what you believe in.'”
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Bret Devereaux: Miscellanea: The War in Iran
: “This post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any special information, so I am going to treat that all with a high degree of uncertainty. But I am a scholar of military history with a fair bit of training and experience in thinking about strategic problems, ancient and modern; it is this ‘guy that analyzes strategy’ focus that I want to bring to this.”
Technology
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Maarten Paulusse at the Eindhoven University of Technology: Are AI-generated summaries suitable for studying and research?: “When dealing with large amounts of text, the process of reading, evaluating, and summarizing can feel daunting. It is understandable to want to outsource this cognitive heavy lifting to a GenAI tool. However, the quality of AI-generated summaries is insufficient for academic use, and they will not provide the coherent, reliable overview you are looking for. Furthermore, by generating a summary instead of writing your own, you miss an essential step in processing, memorizing, and applying information effectively.”
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Jon Hicks: My perfect Music app doesn’t exist: I don’t have exactly the same ideal requirements as Jon does, but he captures a lot of the frustration with today’s music options. I’m still (somewhat reluctantly) using Apple’s Music player (for owned, locally stored music most of the time, rather than the Apple Music service), and am making most of my music purchases through Qobuz, as it has the best artist payout.
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AJ Dellinger at Gizmodo: Dear Meta Smart Glasses Wearers: You’re Being Watched, Too
: “According to a joint investigation published by Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten, sensitive and personal footage captured by the devices—including people going to the bathroom, getting dressed, and having sex—is being reviewed by contractors who see all of it uncensored.” -
Steve Bonifield at The Verge: Grammarly is using our identities without permission (archive.is snapshot of a paywalled original: “In a statement to The Verge, Alex Gay, vice president of product and corporate marketing at Grammarly parent company Superhuman, commented: ‘The Expert Review agent doesn’t claim endorsement or direct participation from those experts; it provides suggestions inspired by works of experts and points users toward influential voices whose scholarship they can then explore more deeply.'” The feature has since been pulled (and a class action lawsuit filed), but it’s just such egregiously shitty behavior that I didn’t want to drop the link off this roundup.
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Mike Masnick at TechDirt: We’re Training Students To Write Worse To Prove They’re Not Robots, And It’s Pushing Them To Use More AI: “The irony of being forced to dumb down an essay about a story warning against the forced suppression of excellence was not lost on me. Or on my kid, who spent a frustrating afternoon removing words and testing sentences one at a time, trying to figure out what invisible tripwire the algorithm had set. The lesson the kid absorbed was clear: write less creatively, use simpler vocabulary, and don’t sound too good, because sounding good is now suspicious.”
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Rogi: I Verified My Linkedin Identity. Here’s What I Actually Handed Over.: “Understanding what I actually agreed to took me an entire weekend reading 34 pages of legal documents. ¶ I handed a US company my passport, my face, and the mathematical geometry of my skull. They cross-referenced me against credit agencies and government databases. They’ll use my documents to train their AI. And if the US government comes knocking, they’ll hand it all over — even if it’s stored in Europe, even if I’m European, and possibly without ever telling me. ¶ All for a small blue checkmark on a professional networking site.”
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Jeff Johnson: If computers are the future, why are computer users expected to be permanently illiterate?: “The latest front in the war against power users is Artificial Intelligence. The promise of AI appears to be that you’ll never have to learn anything. Don’t know something? Just ask AI for the answer. Can’t do something? Just ask AI to do it. Ignorance is bliss. Laziness is encouraged in the name of efficiency. The prospect that one may have to work and struggle to achieve one’s goals is considered abhorrent. The very notion of self-improvement becomes obsolete. Life under AI is a video game, pure joy… as long as you continue inserting tokens into the machine. Hopefully my video arcade metaphor hasn’t become obsolete too.”
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Sam Henri Gold: “This Is Not The Computer For You”: “Nobody starts in the right place. You don’t begin with the correct tool and work sensibly within its constraints until you organically graduate to a more capable one. That is not how obsession works. Obsession works by taking whatever is available and pressing on it until it either breaks or reveals something. The machine’s limits become a map of the territory. You learn what computing actually costs by paying too much of it on hardware that can barely afford it.”
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Shubham: The 49MB Web Page: “I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.”
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Stephen Hackett at 512 Pixels: Hide macOS Tahoe’s Menu Icons With This One Simple Tric: “I really dislike Apple’s choice to clutter macOS Tahoe’s menus with icons. It makes menus hard to scan, and a bunch of the icons Apple has chosen make no sense and are inconsistent between system applications. ¶ Steve Troughton-Smith is my hero for finding a Terminal command to disable them.”
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Hana Lee Goldin at Card Catalog: Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here’s How to Use It.: “The search bar you already have is more capable than that arrangement requires you to know. With the right syntax, it becomes a precision instrument: narrow by domain, by date, by file type, by exact phrase. We can pull up archived pages, surface open file directories, and even find what people said in forums instead of what brands want us to find. None of it requires a new tool or a paid account. The capability has been there the whole time.”