Weekly Notes

• 🎓 This week was Highline’s graduation week, with the commencement ceremony on Thursday. We had a record number of graduates this year (almost 900 signed up to walk in the ceremony), and still managed to wrap up the ceremony in just slightly under two and a half hours. Not bad!

• 🍾 Happy anniversary to us! Friday was our thirteenth anniversary. Rather than doing anything big, as we just made it through graduation week and have plans coming up next weekend and beyond, we celebrated by having a quiet weekend of naps, reading, and movies here at home.

• 🌞 Happy solstice! Summer is officially here.

📸 Photos

📚 Reading

• Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a noir detective mystery in an alternate-present Sitka, Alaska.

• Meg Elison’s latest, Foundling Fathers, a very funny and sharp bit of sci-fi political satire that I really enjoyed.

📺 Watching

• Fantasy Island (2020): A horror prequel-of-sorts to the ’70s TV show. It was entertaining enough for a lazy afternoon.

• TRON: Ares (2025): Looks great, sounds great, no real substance and completely breaks my suspension of disbelief.

🔗 Linking

• Daniel Beekman at the Seattle Times: Seattle uses AI to help triage, divert 911 medical calls (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “For more than two years, a Denmark-based company’s artificial intelligence technology has been listening to Seattle residents’ 911 medical calls without their knowledge. ¶ And the Seattle Fire Department has been using the company’s AI to help dispatchers decide which callers don’t deserve a rapid response.”

• Catalina Gaitán at the Seattle Times: Judge to decide fate of Seattle’s unofficial nude beach (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): I’ve never been to this beach, but I know people who have and who would be disappointed if the NIMBYs got their way.

• James D. Walsh at New York magazine: Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College (archive.is mirror of a paywalled original): “In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments. In its first year of existence, ChatGPT’s total monthly visits steadily increased month-over-month until June, when schools let out for the summer. (That wasn’t an anomaly: Traffic dipped again over the summer in 2024.) Professors and teaching assistants increasingly found themselves staring at essays filled with clunky, robotic phrasing that, though grammatically flawless, didn’t sound quite like a college student — or even a human. Two and a half years later, students at large state schools, the Ivies, liberal-arts schools in New England, universities abroad, professional schools, and community colleges are relying on AI to ease their way through every facet of their education. Generative-AI chatbots — ChatGPT but also Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot, and others — take their notes during class, devise their study guides and practice tests, summarize novels and textbooks, and brainstorm, outline, and draft their essays. STEM students are using AI to automate their research and data analyses and to sail through dense coding and debugging assignments. ‘College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,’ a student in Utah recently captioned a video of herself copy-and-pasting a chapter from her Genocide and Mass Atrocity textbook into ChatGPT.”

• Jake Goldstein-Street at the Washington State Standard: Battle ramps up over WA ballot measure to bar transgender students from girls’ sports: In case you thought Washington was too blue to have to deal with this transphobic crap.

• Andy Baio: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows: “It’s one thing for a fan to share or remix copyrighted material out of love for the source material, with no commercial motive. (‘No copyright intended!’) It’s another for a marketing agency to take an entire living author’s book, replace its art with AI slop, add an AI word generator, monetize the traffic, promote it in their portfolio, and then outrank the official site everywhere.”

• Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism: Google’s AI Overviews Feature Is Telling Users That SCP Horror Fiction Entities Are Real: “As the lore goes, the SCP Foundation is a non-government organization that collects and contains supernatural discoveries. Writers catalogue these fictional phenomena — which range from the terrifying to the downright bizarre — in the form of fake records, studies, research documents, and logs, all of which are indexed in a sprawling archive. ¶ The key word, of course, is ‘fake.’ Google’s AI Overviews, it turns out, has a bad habit of presenting entities from the expansive SCP universe as real items, events, or beings — blatantly confusing those fabricated studies and records as actual evidence of horrifying or otherworldly happenings.”

• ♿️ With the last two weeks being the final two weeks of spring quarter (the last week of classes and finals week), there’s been a lot going on that I’ve been either directly or tangentially involved with. There’s been the launch party for this year’s Arcturus, Highline’s annual student literary journal, the Achieve students’ capstone presentations, a short student-written and produced play, and a discussion panel by four graduating journalists from the Thunderword, our student paper. Plus, of course, all the usual work stuff. I’m looking forward to getting through graduation this coming week and (hopefully) having things slow down a bit over the summer.

• ✨ Interestingly, and often amusingly, AI has been an ongoing theme this week.

  • 🎓 During the capstone presentations for Achieve, where students from our program for intellectually disabled students present what they’ve done and accomplished over their time at Highline, several of them made it clear that they’d done all the work on their presentations themselves, without using AI.

  • 🎭 The play, written and improvised by the four actors, had an ongoing plot line about whether or not to use AI, with one character convincing another to stop using it. In the after-play conversation, the actors and students in the audience had more to say along these lines.

  • 📰 During the Thunderbird panel, the journalists got a question about AI use, and all vehemently decried the use of AI for their writing. “We’re humans, and we want real human writing, feelings, and reactions in our stories.”

  • 💼 This week was a “listening session” with a representative of a headhunting firm as Highline starts the process of looking for a new college president. AI came up here as well, with people recognizing that we can’t ignore AI’s effects, but also stressing that we don’t want someone who would attempt to push AI over actually educating our students.

  • 👍🏻 Overall, it was heartening that throughout the weeks, from our students to our staff and faculty, there is a lot of healthy skepticism (at best) about genAI.

• 🎨 Also work-related, this week we had a presentation to Highline’s Board of Trustees telling them about a project we’ve had in progress with Sound Transit’s art program (STart) over the course of the year. We’ve had three visually disabled students working with artists on a piece of tactile artwork for the Kent-DesMoines light rail station, giving their input on materials, colors, and other aspects to make the artwork effective for Blind and low-vision people. The piece is still being finished, but should be installed sometime in August. I’m really looking forward to seeing it!

• 🚀 Outside of work, last Sunday was Norwescon’s summer picnic…or, well, summer-ish picnic, as for some reason it was much earlier in the year than usual. It was a nice day of hanging out with Norwescon people, chatting and tossing ideas around. Plus, on a personal note, I formally turned over administration duties for our Google Suite to someone else, taking one more thing off of my plate! I’m getting closer to having an actually reasonable amount of duties, instead of my usual “you do how much?” lineup.

📸 Photos

📚 Reading

Three books finished over these two weeks, one of which was even non-fiction!

• Zombies of the Gene Pool by Sharyn McCrumb, a mystery and sequel to the somewhat notorious (in SF circles) Bimbos of the Death Sun.

• The AI Con by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, which did a wonderful job of reinforcing my anti-AI biases.

• Possession by J.M. Dillard and Kathleen O’Malley, a TNG-era Star Trek novel.

📺 Watching

• This afternoon we watched Send Help (2026), Sam Raimi’s latest horror comedy, and really enjoyed it. Dark, twisted, funny, and with a very satisfying end.

🔗 Linking

• Sarah Mizes-Tan at KNKX/NPR: Transgender ballot initiative could require genital exams for WA secondary school students: Just in case you thought WA was too blue for this sort of bigotry: “Student athletes in Washington state who want to compete in girls’ sports would likely have to obtain genital exams to participate if a controversial ballot initiative passes in November.”

• Heidi Groover at the Seattle Times: Downtown Seattle may house new data center: “A Texas real estate firm filed permit applications with the city last week proposing a six-story building including a data center, office and retail space at Third Avenue and Virginia Street. The location once housed a Bed Bath & Beyond store and since last year has been home to the contemporary arts center Cannonball Arts.”

• Ex Astris Scientia: The Evolution of Screen Ratios in Star Trek: “This article looks at the technical standards that shaped television and cinema, the artistic choices that influenced how Trek moved between these formats and how the franchise entered the era of modern widescreen TV with its new possibilities. It also highlights some odd and inconsequential decisions along the way, including humorous uses of inconsistent aspect ratios in crossovers. Finally, it examines the pros and cons of ‘cinematic’ screen ratios for television series.”

• Hunter Ingram at Variety: How ‘For All Mankind’ Works With Apple to Revive and Upgrade the Forgotten Newton as Its Alt-History iPhone: “Apple products and their use in film and TV have long been a source of conversation. Who can carry an iPhone on screen? Are bad guys forced to use nondescript phones and computers so as not to sow chaos with a device bearing Apple’s famous logo? Well, ‘For All Mankind’ asks a different question altogether: Can its characters use a completely forgotten Apple product canceled two decades ago?”

• Tierney Sneed, Jeremy Herb, and Gabe Cohen at CNN: Postal Service won’t deliver mail ballots for states that don’t hand over voter lists, under plan for Trump directive: “The March 2026 executive order is one of several moves Trump has made recently to seek federal control over elections and restrict mail-in voting, which he has repeatedly cast as a tool used by his opponents for election cheating despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud.”

• Better Images of AI: “We aim to create a new repository of better images of AI that anyone can use, starting with a collection of inspirational images. We will continue to gather images for this repository and commission original work. We welcome image submissions and funding to commission and brief more artists.”

• John Scalzi: Please I Beg of You Do Not Use “AI” In Your Business Communications: “Why would I want to do business with someone who can’t even write a single fucking email on their own? This is a ‘basic competence’ issue, folks. If you can’t get it together to write a simple business communication by yourself, what confidence should I have about any other aspect of your business? What value do you have for me?”

• Catherynne M. Valente: The Democratic Urge to Lose (archive.is mirror of a Substack original): “I’ll tell you what we’re doing here. The same thing we do every single time a Democratic candidate gets any traction or momentum at all. Passively watch the media tuck a napkin into its bib and eat that D alive with a massive bowl of hot buttery hypocrisy to dunk them in before shrugging helplessly and losing again. What else could we possibly do? Not demand youth and experience and a perfect personal life from the cradle on and massively overclocked charisma and perfectly pure policy stances that satisfy the whole tent from blue dog to radical leftist from every single candidate for every single office or else fascism can just take us all? Don’t be stupid, if we did that, we might win!”

• Chris Person at Aftermath: Ian’s Shoelace Site Is Still The Best Site For Tying Your Shoes: “But what makes Ian’s site truly great is not that it documents a few knots, but is a cornucopia of methods for tying and lacing your shoes. Ian’s Shoelace Site is from a different time on the internet, when people simply made websites that they were passionate about.”

• BBSG: Bash Static Site Generator: “BSSG processes Markdown files and builds a minimal, accessible website suitable for personal journals, daily writing, or introspective personal newspapers.” Thinking this might be my first step into moving to a static site generator.

• 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

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:

• The Inheritance (2024): ⭐️⭐️
• A Haunting in Venice (2023): ⭐️⭐️⭐️
• Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017): ⭐️⭐️⭐️

🔗 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.”

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

📚 Reading

• Dayton Ward’s To Defy Fate, in the Star Trek: Picard line, but with enough timestream bouncing around that it almost feels like a stealth 60th anniversary release.
• David Pogue’s Apple: The First 50 Years, indulging one of my other fandoms. I can obsess over something other than Star Trek!
• And then, of course, another Star Trek novel; John Vornholt’s TNG-series Rogue Saucer.

🔗 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.”

• ♿️ I spent all week in Spokane for the annual linked spring conferences for DSSC (Disability Support Services Council) and WAPED (Washington Association on Postsecondary Education and Disability), two disability in higher education groups I’m part of. Both conference were good, with a good mix of networking, support, and information; many of these are people I see regularly via Zoom and on listservs, and it’s always good to get a chance to connect in person.
• 😷 Unfortunately, it appears that I let my masking game slip at an inopportune point, and came home from the conference with a cold. So our weekend was a lot of rest, fluids, and trying to kick this out of my system.
• 🎂 Sunday was my birthday – I’ve successfully made it to 53! This was a pretty low-key birthday (in part due to the aforementioned cold, but also planned that way, as we knew I’d be coming off of a week of travel and conference), but it wasn’t a bad one. Lots of naps, some cake, and a few presents…including the Enterprise-D Lego set that’s been sitting in our basement since it arrived in December!

📸 Photos

📚 Reading

Two books finished this week, the final two books in a TOS Star Trek trilogy that I started last week:

• Best Defense by David Mack
• Purgatory’s Key by Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore

📺 Watching

While traveling, I watched the first three of the modern Planet of the Apes reboots. Now just need to find some time to watch the latest one.

• Rise of the Planet of the Apes: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
• Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
• War for the Planet of the Apes: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

🎧 Listening

I’ve been on a bit of a Front Line Assembly (and associated projects) kick this week, in part due to the release of the nine-disk Excursions 1992-1998 anthology, focusing on various FLA side projects (Noise Unit, Synæsthesia, Pro>Tech, Equinox, and Delerium).

🔗 Linking

• Joshua Solorzano at the Kent Reporter: Federal Way man’s Lego legacy includes model of Space Needle: “Hussey said his acme is the 14-foot-tall Lego Space Needle that now sits in the Space Needle gift shop in Seattle for visitors from around the globe to see.”

• Mike Carson: I Bought Friendster for $30k — Here’s What I’m Doing With It: “…I created an iOS app for Friendster, and I made it so that in order to connect with someone as a friend, you have to actually tap phones together in real life. […] If two friends go a full year without tapping phones, the link between them softens. Not a punishment — a gentle nudge that real friendships are kept alive in person, not online. […] All of this is built around the simple idea that real friendships happen when you actually meet in person.” It’s an interesting idea, but I have more than a few quibbles with the assumption that I don’t have “real friendships” with the many, many people whom I have rarely, if ever, interacted with in person. Or that the friend I’ve had since third grade isn’t a “real” friend because we live 3,000 miles apart and don’t arrange for annual get togethers. It’s a interesting, but for me, somewhat flawed concept.

• Nataliya Gumenyuk at The Guardian: As a Ukrainian journalist, I’ve covered the US for 20 years. I find it increasingly shocking: “My country has been under occupation, dogged by corruption and war. Yet even I’ve been bewildered by the way the US seems to be fracturing.”

• Anil Dash: Why are the Artemis II photos on Flickr?: “If you followed along with the recent joyful celebrations of the Artemis cruise around the moon, and took a moment to dive into the photographic archives of the mission, you might have noticed that all of the original images were shared by NASA on the venerable photo sharing service Flickr. What you might not know is… why?” I remember so much of this history — I joined Flickr in September 2004 (here’s my first photo), when it was just seven months old (according to Wikipedia), and while never a “big name”, was around for all of that history. 22 years and 22,192 photos later, I’m glad Flickr’s still doing its thing.

• Jaron Schneider at PetaPixel: Adobe Has Run Out of Allies: “It is hard to imagine a more widely detested brand among its own users than Adobe. ¶ Adobe is alone, and it has only itself to blame. ¶ Those who once would have thrown themselves in front of oncoming fire to protect the software they loved — loved because of what it allowed them to do — will now do nothing but point and laugh as the company suffers.”

• Artemis II Photo Timeline: What it says on the tin. Great way to browse through the Artemis II mission.

• Tom Nardi at Hackaday: The GPS III Rollout is Almost Complete, But What Is It?: “Just last week, the tenth GPS III satellite was placed in orbit by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Once it’s properly configured and operational, it will join its peers to form the first complete “block” of third-generation GPS satellites. Over the next decade, as many as 22 revised GPS III satellites are slated to take their position over the Earth, eventually replacing all of the aging satellites that billions of people currently rely on.”