Today is the day we honor Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life and legacy,?/!: I want to do so by uplifting one of the geniuses he helped inspire: Stevie Wonder. Though he’s one of the most gifted and important artists to have ever created popular music, Stevie’s legacy as a tireless and fearless advocate for justice may he even more powerful, and is too often overlooked. We should heed every word he says. (Full post here: https://anildash.com/2022/01/17/how-stevie-celebrated-a-birthday/ )

I don't want Mastodon to be a place where all I talk about is the continuing demise of Twitter, but...Twitter pulled the plug on all of the top third-party Twitter clients and Twitterrific's Craig Hockenberry has some things to say about it:

https://furbo.org/2023/01/15/the-shit-show/

still blows my mind that cohost has managed to convince their userbase that they are a non-profit, or a not-for-profit (they do not seem to know the difference), when they are a registered for profit company

i think they have confused "non-profit" with "not-profitable-currently"

Why are ethics questions always like:
"is it ethical to steal bread to feed your starving family?"

And not:
"is it ethical to sell bread when families are starving?"

@quoteme

a re-creation of Dark Sky (weather website/API) based on open data was released today! 🌤️
https://merrysky.net/
https://pirateweather.net/

Not nearly enough tech people (or researchers studying tech!) are willing to admit that the last ten years of reckless and non-consensual experimentation on people for their little gadgets have done profound harm to people and that we will look back on this period the way we now view Victorian ingestion of arsenic or health sanitoriums. The lack of care or concern is astounding, constantly.

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