The Standard Ebooks RSS feed was a pleasant suprise today. Happy Public Domain Day! https://standardebooks.org/

When the clock strikes midnight tonight, most of the published works from 1927 will move into the public domain in the US. Celebrate these works at one of our two Public Domain Day celebrations, January 19 & 20:
http://blog.archive.org/2022/11/30/the-best-things-in-life-are-free-two-ways-to-celebrate-public-domain-day-in-2023/

I know, it’s just a “Someone Is Wrong On The Internet” piece, but that NYTimes piece about Why Signal Is Bad And Privacy Is Bad needs to be refuted in a compact explainer, so here’s mine: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/12/29/Privacy-is-OK

Memo to the media:

Stop letting politicians get away with calling asylum seekers "illegal immigrants" or saying they're not coming to this country "the right way." Seeking asylum is legal. Presenting themselves at the border & requesting asylum is "the right way" to seek asylum.

He talked about electric cars. I don't know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.

Then he talked about rockets. I don't know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.

Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I've ever heard anyone say, so when people say he's a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets.

A lot of discussions on here take for granted the fact that certain affordances--like quote-tweets--meaningfully contributed to anti-oppression work because they allow us to talk back to the powerful, to tell some elite wanker to fuck off, or otherwise correct their disinformation or counteract their bigotry or propaganda.

But I've become very skeptical of that argument lately.

As I wrote in Wired:

happy christmas adam to all men’s rights activists

Costa Mesa doing some marketing for our new video now live (exclusively) on Nebula. https://nebula.tv/videos/lindsayellis-we-dont-talk-about-et

jesus christ wolfram alpha, I'm sorry I asked

"build first, ask questions later" aka the Now Habit 🙄 IS an increasingly common ideological interpretation of a modern-tech principle that you should start prototyping early in a design/development process; it's striking in the current context how close it is to "don't think, just do" & how it's part & parcel of the egregious disempowerment of design & research & even QA in the last 10 years of tech

Should I turn on iCloud Backups now?

I’ve had them off for over a decade but this is a game changer

"To a remarkable extent, inequality, which fell during the New Deal but has risen dramatically since the late 1970s, corresponds to the rise and fall of unionization in the United States." https://www.epi.org/publication/unions-decline-inequality-rises/

Yall, the Twitter archiver that @darius made is seriously bonkers. You give it the zip file from Twitter, and it generates a magical website that you can host that contains EVERY TWEET you ever twot and you can search them instantly and view them and share them and they show up with previews LIKE A PRO.

https://tinysubversions.com/twitter-archive/make-your-own/

Here is mine that I made it took about 3 seconds:

https://benbrown.com/twitter/

The new Twitter policies re: linking to other social media platforms are designed to do two things: to make it harder for you to export your social graph and to make a rule so broad that it can be used as an excuse to ban just about any account.

🚨🚨🚨

This is what it looks like when the parasite of white supremacy eats its host…fuck both these dudes 😂🤣😂

This just hurts my soul. Microsoft basically hid a Black cemetery on land they got for free after tax breaks and then allowed for the desecration of the graves. The county and newspaper aren’t off the hook either. Same with the consultants and archeologists. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-authorities-erased-historic-black-cemetery-virginia