"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.”"
"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."
"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
"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?"
wonderful manifesto + sketches on the topic of sustainable computing and graphic design. importantly: "permacomputing requires thorough consideration to prevent it from becoming a hobby for the privileged or glorifying and aestheticizing poverty"
"For those eager to truly grasp how compilers work, Writing a C Compiler dispels the mystery. This book guides you through a fun and engaging project where you’ll learn what it takes to compile a real-world programming language to actual assembly code."
Shannon Mattern: "What if we imagined that Field as a Library: a public space, a social infrastructure, an intellectual and ecological commons, a site for the convergence of myriad ways of knowing?"
a wonderful, thoughtful, and down-to-earth statement on LLM use in educational contexts. "I’m a super straight-laced Mormon and, like, never ever swear or curse, but in this case, the word [bullshit] has a formal philosophical meaning... so it doesn’t count :)" lmao.
"Trilling scrolls right to left across the screen, recombining footage from the early 80s television program "Three's Company" into a sequence of traveling gestural loops."