THE TEXAS LIBRARY ASSOCIATION TELLS CHUCK TINGLE TO STAY HOME BUT WE PROVE...
I think Chuck Tingle is awesome and proves love. This was a disappointing decision by the Texas Library Association, which is hopefully a learning moment for every organization like it. Chuck's...
View ArticleMa used to say that she liked ...
Ma used to say that she liked to think of everyone we'd lost sitting on the beach at Sagelots, having a picnic and looking down at us. I like that image too, but I'd like to think of it as more of a...
View ArticlePlagiarism Detection Tools Offer a False Sense of Accuracy
"The tools that likely brought down Harvard president Claudine Gay are improperly used on students all the time. [...] The technology of text mining can be used to destroy the career of any scholar at...
View ArticleGenerated content is an invasive species in the online ecosystem
I like this argument that generated content is an invasive species in our content ecosystem. "As generated material rapaciously populates the Internet, human-created artworks will be outcompeted by...
View ArticleIt's infuriating when I find a blog ...
It's infuriating when I find a blog I want to subscribe to and it doesn't have any kind of feed. Please please please: if you're writing lots of posts on your website, make sure it has RSS or Atom....
View ArticleHow Threads will integrate with the Fediverse
An in-depth writeup of Meta's fediverse meetup last year by Tom Coates, who was one of the roughly 20 people in attendance. Most of these details have been discussed and speculated on at this point,...
View ArticleWhy Platformer is leaving Substack
It's feeling more and more like Substack will be toast if they don't significantly walk back their policy on Nazis. (And honestly, at this point, even if they did, who would want to be associated with...
View ArticleWhere have all the websites gone?
"So when we wonder where all the websites have gone, know it’s the curators we’re nostalgic for because the curators showed us the best the web had to offer once upon a time. And the curators— the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Running your own site is painful. Hosting Nazis is worse
I’ve spent much of my career telling organizations that they should publish in a space that they control, on their own domain name.My usual argument is that it shields you from major changes in...
View ArticleFlorida book bans take on dictionaries and encyclopedias
"Five dictionaries as well as eight encyclopedias and other reference materials including “The Guinness Book of World Records” and “Ripley’s Believe it or Not” are among over 1,600 books that Escambia...
View ArticleWhere is all of the fediverse?
A nice investigation into who actually hosts fediverse instances. I've been in a few situations where I've had to fend off a DDoS originating from Hetzner servers, and it's just now dawning on me:...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The fediverse for media organizations
Given all the talk lately of Threads, Mastodon, and ways that people can publish on their own sites, I thought it might be worth revisiting what the fediverse actually is — and why an organization...
View ArticleWhy return-to-office mandates fail
"My advice to business leaders is this: If your “personal belief” tells you that in-office work is better, approach the question analytically. What actual, measurable problems related to your business...
View ArticleA Time to Break Silence (Declaration Against the Vietnam War)
"We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people,...
View ArticleThe Taliban’s curious love of SIM cards
"Global trade now means that even a pariah government like the Taliban can invest in and operate sophisticated surveillance systems, while imposing regressive policies that keep its population poor,...
View ArticleThe incredible shrinking podcast industry
The entire podcast industry's numbers were juiced by a quirk of how Apple Podcasts and other podcasting apps work. The actual number of listeners were far lower - as revealed when Apple Podcasts made...
View ArticleOn being listed in the court document of artists whose work was used to train...
"They just take it. Whatever they want." A poignant and infuriating reflection on generative AI, from the creator of Cat and Girl. #AI [Link]
View ArticleI feel like I need someone to ...
I feel like I need someone to hold my hand and really explain how to use Obsidian effectively.
View ArticleEach Facebook User is Monitored by Thousands of Companies
"Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to [Facebook]. On average, each participant in the study had their data sent to Facebook by 2,230 companies. That number...
View ArticleSearch engine results are getting worse, research confirms
"We can conclude that higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality." SEO as an industry has made search engines...
View Article