Dave T-W @davoloid@qoto.org

May all the rest of your times be boring and precedented.

Here’s a question for you.

Why is it that advocating for universal healthcare or affordable education instantly earns you the “Socialist” stamp, while demanding mass deportation isn’t enough to get you called a “Fascist?”

(Hint: it’s not because you’re *not* a Fascist)

Today’s daily essay:

https://joanwestenberg.com/the-f-word-were-too-fucking-scared-to-say

Academic authors 'shocked' after Taylor & Francis sells access to their research to Microsoft AI
https://www.thebookseller.com/news/academic-authors-shocked-after-taylor--francis-sells-access-to-their-research-to-microsoft-ai
Authors have expressed their shock after the news that academic publisher Taylor & Francis, which owns Routledge, had sold access to its authors’ research as part of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) partnership with Microsoft—a deal worth almost £8m ($10m) in its first year.

Business stakeholders: If you talk down to your helpdesk/IT people today, you're a bad person (a piece of human excrement).

This isn't on them. Go take out your frustration somewhere else. Like on the executives who were told about these consolidation risks but didn't care.

Events like this are why tech needs crisis researchers who are obsessed not with "productivity" or whatever the hot little project metric of the day is but with the human behaviors and cultures that help people navigate, coordinate, create immediate community under stress, and all the things that we do when large systems in our lives break down. And I am not making that comparison lightly at all (having family deeply and inextricably involved in traumatic natural disaster crisis work)

I've been shouting that URl shorteners were a bad idea for a *long* time.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/11/the-perils-of-url-shortners/

Now it looks like Google is finally killing off goo.gl. Still, it lasted longer than some of their products!

https://social.kernel.org/notice/Ak4Ij3NuRdr6mJEhu4

Hundreds of thousands of books with irrevocably broken links.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22://goo.gl%22&sca_upv=1&sca_upv=1&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:2010,cd_max:2024,bkt:b&tbm=bks

So that's a million academic citations deleted.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=90&q=%22https://goo.gl/%22&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5

Today is the day of finding out who runs on #Microsoft #Windows ...

#Crowdstrike #StarTrek

There's a reason decades of psychiatric research and feminist theory eventually converged on: "Fuck it, who cares what gender is. Just let people do what makes them happy."

Because the alternates were untenable and always ended up being abusive and oftentimes deadly.

To which the conservative response has been: "But we like that."

Behind every "family values" conservative is the belief that them having power over someone else is more important than that person's happiness. And that's evil.

Ten reasons I’m happy to be autistic 😎

A thread...

🧵 ⬇️

#ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #Neurodivergent #AuDHD

Look, having goals is great.

Working towards something can give your life meaning and direction. But the self-help industrial complex has turned goal-setting into some kind of extreme sport. It’s not enough to have goals anymore. You need to have SMART goals, stretch goals, 10-year vision goals. And you better be crushing them, smashing them, absolutely obliterating them.

What happened to just doing your best? 

When did that stop being enough?

https://joanwestenberg.com/the-anxiety-epidemic

You read this and it gives you hope the #Olympics in #Paris2024 may actually be a sustainable and lasting celebration of sports and its infrastructure
#green #architecture #Sport
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/article/2024/jul/15/french-revolution-can-paris-deliver-the-leanest-greenest-olympics-yet