FeedCity

The new Instax from arrived! Special pink edition only available in Japan, which ironically I had seen in person in Hong Kong just a few weeks ago, but assumed I would be able to buy it in the US. So I had to buy it from a third party shipper instead.

Sad to hear there were two deaths in the FSU shooting. When news broke that it was a handgun, it gave me a small bit of hope that it wouldn’t be as terrible as it could’ve been. Imagine an AR-15 instead. That is why they should be banned.

Hey Guy’s

Thursday session

Great post from The Fediverse Report about Bluesky complying with requests from the Turkish government and how a labeling service can be used to hide accounts:

Such a moderation layer allows Bluesky (the app) to apply moderation decisions that are only experienced by people currently geolocated in a specific country, more on that below. A few days ago, the Turkish moderation labeler became active, and the labeler started hiding accounts, making the accounts invisible for people in Turkey.

Taria & Como looks like a clever, crank-friendly platformer, part of the upcoming season 2 on Playdate. There’s a trailer on YouTube.

The Internet Archive is asking for help to defend against lawsuits:

A coalition of major record labels has filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive—demanding $700 million for our work preserving and providing access to historical 78rpm records. These fragile, obsolete discs hold some of the earliest recordings of a vanishing American culture.

The Internet Archive is a unique force for good. Sad that they have to waste any time on this.

I like that Powell is telling Trump he won't go. I wish Obama had had the guts to say that to McConnell when he wouldn't hold hearings on Garland. "Well if you won't take a vote, we'll take that as consent," says the President. "And you can quote me on that." In a televised event Obama himself would walk Garland over to his office at the Supreme Court and administer the oath and let him take his seat. I don't know about you but I would have felt great about America then. We're finished being such pussycats.

Matt Mullenweg blogs about the WordPress 6.8 release, how WordPress might use AI in the future, and the experience of being deposed at the WP Engine trial:

I really appreciated the due process and decorum of the rule of law, and just like code, law has a million little quirks, global variables, loaded libraries, and esoteric terminology. But wow, after a full day of that, I’m mentally exhausted.

I like the way Tony Stubblebine is running Medium. On sticking with diversity, equity, and inclusion:

Medium was built by and is run by a diverse group of people. This diversity is a raise-the-bar strategy. As a CEO, I feel confident that embracing diversity as a strategy increases the business, cultural, and intellectual capabilities of our company.

Unfortunately the acronym DEI has been poisoned. I think it’s fine to abandon the letters, while keeping to the principles.

Some interesting data here in the MIT Technology Review about energy use for AI data centers:

Electricity demand is on the rise from a whole host of sources: Electric vehicles, air-conditioning, and appliances will each drive more electricity demand than data centers between now and the end of the decade. In total, data centers make up a little over 8% of electricity demand expected between now and 2030.

There is so much noise around AI that it’s increasingly difficult to tell what is misinformation or just outdated.

Matt’s beach thoughts are like a satisfying susurrus in my RSS reader.

adactio.com/links/21857

This piece echoes what I’ve been saying. Twitter was a fine start, in 2006, but today it’s clear a lot of its rules and limits were mistakes. 19 years later it’s ridiculous that Bluesky and Mastodon repeat those mistakes. I love the term he uses, the "shape" of Twitter. Each...

Dave Winer has more thoughts on the “Twitterlike is a bad shape” post:

Each decision we make in developing our means of discourse shapes the discourse. And with the character limit and the inability to edit, and the incentives are all wrong (I can tap into your follower flow without your permision just by posting a reply) and makes almost all discourse spam or abusive or both. I’m planning a different structure for discourse in the World of WordLand.

I’m not a Gmail user or Notion user, but gotta say the UI and interactions in Notion Mail look quite good. I’ve watched a few videos for inspiration.

This is a great post outlining many of the problems with Twitter-inspired social networks: Twitter and its imitators have adopted a structural design that is fundamentally bad for people. This isn’t just a matter of who’s in charge; it’s a problem with the thing itself. I’...

Watching debates on CNN it’s amazing how many arguments would be settled by saying “It’s nice you feel that way, but that’s not what the Constitution says.”

It’s an annoying cognitive task: detecting weird photo artifacts, bizarre movement in videos, impossible animals and body horror, and reading through reams of anodyne text to determine if the person who prompted the synthetic media machine cared enough to dedicate time and energy to the task of communicating to their audience.

I hate that this is the bleak future which venture capitalists and AI boosters have gleefully laid out for us, that they consider this to be a “democratizing” technology in any real sense of the word. Far from strengthening democracy, these are technologies more apt at propping up scam capitalism and multi-level marketing schemes. I would like my time and mental space back.

adactio.com/links/21856

This is clever: putting CSS inside a noscript element to hide anything that requires JavaScript.

adactio.com/links/21855