Stuff I found on the Internet
"beyond inflated key user metrics, our in-game research revealed an X-rated pedophile hellscape" has to be one of the worst buried ledes of all time
christ what a piece of shit
i always lose track of this site, which is very nice
"Fully remote work combined with regular and easily-accessible video-conferencing mimics much of the hub-and-spoke workspace design. In some cases ways it works even better. Video conferences can handle arbitrarily small or large groups of participants without any conference room conflicts. For those of us with other needs — with ADHD, anxiety disorders, hearing or vision loss, or mobility issues — we are more free to create the kinds of workspaces we need without impinging on other people’s work styles or space. A brightly-lit but cramped office space, again with long desks but pushed close together."
"When a decision making apparatus is non-human and your system's POSIWID function is to extract and dehumanize and murder for profit and power, let's call that what it is: humans with power deciding to harm the world, with some extra steps."
too many good quotes from this, among them: "[T]here are no labor shortcuts for caring, in and of itself, no stretching a little bit of intentionality to provide focused attention across some ever increasing population. Care doesn’t scale; cruelty does. You can’t automate your way around the infinite obligation to the other."
a few data points from a report that is hidden behind a form asking you to donate your e-mail address to a sales department; mostly anecdotes otherwise
at once hilarious, useful, and brilliant from a technical perspective
"I have a deep-seated fear... that the Black struggle will... just be about narrow Black interest.... I don’t think that’s how Martin Luther King thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Du Bois thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Baldwin thought about the Black struggle. Should it turn out that we have our first Black woman president, and our first South Asian president, and we continue to export 2,000-pound bombs to perpetrate a genocide.... I’m going to do what I can in the time that remains, and the writing that I have, to not allow that to be, because that is existential death for the Black struggle, and for Black people, as far as I’m concerned."
detailed description with lots of links
"The tech industry was never perfect. It never lived up to its lofty ambitions. But it has gotten demonstrably worse. And I think the fork-in-the-road moment was when the industry stopped trying to celebrate old-school hackers like Aaron Swartz and started working full-time to build monuments to Sam Altman instead."
"We present data in interesting, exciting, and revolutionary new ways, stopping people in their tracks and making them want to learn more"
not sure why i couldn't find these before? small, relatively inexpensive, same brand as the trackpads in the steam deck
"we should approach the public policy debate around this assuming that someday, we could be victims of exploding batteries, too"
"structured resources for the visual arts domain, including art, architecture, decorative arts, other cultural works, archival materials, visual surrogates, and art conservation" tons of fun stuff in here, love me a controlled vocabulary (via data is plural via lynn cherny)
"The field I know as 'natural language processing' is hard to find these days.... It's rare to see NLP research that doesn't have a dependency on closed data controlled by OpenAI and Google, two companies that I already despise. [...] [C]ollecting a whole lot of text in a lot of languages... used to be a pretty reasonable thing to do, and not the kind of thing someone would be likely to object to. Now, the text-slurping tools are mostly used for training generative AI, and people are quite rightly on the defensive. If someone is collecting all the text from your books, articles, Web site, or public posts, it's very likely because they are creating a plagiarism machine that will claim your words as its own." i feel this in my very bones
straightforward tutorial, links to complete example
"Even if these systems were providing value to disadvantaged people, that shouldn’t make them off limits to criticism. Is it classist to call out the shady business practices of companies like Walmart and Dollar General just because many lower income people depend on the low prices they provide?"
"I didn’t pay all that money for a good seat in the speakeasy just to be turned into a narc at the door."
with just a little bit of micropython code. neat!