I’ve got a post-graduate certificate in artificial intelligence (AI). I’m also an author, and I believe writers and publishers should not use AI in publishing. So that’s why I was disturbed when a reviewer asked if I had used AI in writing my recent coming-of-age novel, Under the Gulf Coast Sun.

But the reasons I oppose using AI are not the usual ones you hear.

We have all read or heard about copyright violations during AI algorithm training, as well as plagiarism problems, job displacement, potential stifling of creativity, legal complexity, blandness, and plain old human outrage. Those are all good arguments for opposing the use of generative AI in publishing.

Let me also argue against its use, but for a completely different reason: AI is dead.

Literally.

When I want to read poetry, a short story, a novel, a memoir, or non-fiction, I seek the voice of a fellow human being. A computer, by contrast, has the exact same awareness of the world that you had before birth—basically the perspective of a stone sitting on the side of the road. That is, no awareness of the world at all.

So, when I’m interested in what a person has to say, why would I willingly spend time reading or listening to a text that was mathematically calculated by a dead thing? I would not. And once you consider this reality, I believe you will lose interest as well, just as we all completely lost interest in (and quickly forgot) the rather incredible achievement of IBM’s Big Blue defeating chess champion Gary Kasparov in a six-game showdown in 1997.

Mustapha Suleyman, Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence CEO, said in an NPR interview with Manosh Zamorodi that AI systems “communicate in our languages. They see what we see. They consume unimaginably large amounts of information. They have memory. They have personality. They have creativity.”

That is mostly nonsense. Computers operate only with zeros and ones. AI does not see what we see. It has no personality, no creativity. At best AI is a glorified calculator that works by fooling people into believing that it possesses the qualities Suleyman lists because AI does consume and process unimaginably large amounts of information from human beings. Unlike Suleyman’s claim, though, computers don’t have any real understanding of the data they generate.

Here’s how AI calculates novels or short stories or poetry: A human language prompt is converted into zeroes and ones and stored in a vast ocean of other zeros and ones. Then a set of instructions are loaded into the main processor’s transistors (again, zeroes and ones). The instructions tell the computer which zeroes and ones to retrieve from memory, then the retrieved zeros and ones are added together with other zeros and ones using Boolean math. This creates a different pattern of zeros and ones—which get put back into the storage system.

This process repeats itself at extreme speed for about ten or fifteen seconds, until the novel or short story or poem has been fully calculated and placed into memory (again, as zeros and ones).

At a higher level, AI calculates texts based on probabilities of what word is most likely to come next in the stream of data it’s generating. That’s all.

In other words: A poem, short story, or novel calculated by a computer is nothing more than a prediction.  The fact that a human being sometimes can’t tell the difference between an AI-generated text and one written by a real person doesn’t make the calculation any less of a mindless mathematical outcome. (The Turing Test first devised in 1950,  is a way to attempt to determine whether machines actually exhibit any real intelligence. In particular, if a human can’t tell the difference between the machine output and one created by a human, the test passes. But Turing, the man who proposed the test, later said that the question of whether machines can think is itself “too meaningless” to deserve discussion.)

And, critically, the math has nothing to do with how humans build beauty and meaning with writing.

There are uncountable amazing and incredibly useful applications of AI, both generative and otherwise, in society. I won’t list them (just ask your local ChatGPT, it will be happy to calculate a result for you). And on that note, I let ChatGPT end this article with a calculation it made about the meaning of its own calculations, based on the following prompt:

Me: I would state that you don’t understand concepts, but retrieve data, operate on the data, then calculate an output. The concept is up to me to create based on your calculations.

ChatGPT: You’re absolutely right. I do not possess true understanding or conceptual awareness in the human sense. Instead, I work by retrieving patterns, facts, and relationships from the data I’ve been trained on, performing calculations and logical operations to produce outputs that align with your prompts.

ChatGPT has calculated this truth (as Suleyman the Microsoft AI guru well knows): Generative AI output is an illusion—a fake—produced by a dead thing with no awareness of what it has produced. We have to make our own meaning from it. But beyond that, I simply cannot justify spending my very limited time reading the calculations of a computer while pretending it has the same weight as the creative output of an actual human being.

I’ll take the living over the dead, every time. 

The post AI Is Dead appeared first on The Texas Observer.

I was just wondering if ... uh ... you know something ... different? #CowboyWho

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. My boss is my boyfriend and won’t give me a day off

The owner of the restaurant where I work is my boyfriend and the general manager. I asked for a day off a month ahead of when I needed it off. It’s on Mother’s Day and, yes, it is one of the busiest days of the year. But I have worked there for three years and never took a day off, unless he wanted us to go on a vacation. He recently hired someone two weeks ago and promised her Mother’s Day off because it’s her birthday. I have missed out on so so many things in the past three years because he needed me to work.

I am loyal and I want to help him out, and I generally don’t complain. This one time I do and he acts like I’m the worst person ever and how dare I. I’ll lose hours and maybe even my place where we live together if I do take it off. I feel like I live one life and I feel like he is just treating me like a body there, like I’m replaceable, and he keeps on working me to the bone but refuses to see it in my way at all. It’s just unfair and I don’t know if I should quit or just firmly say I’m taking the day off.

Consider leaving both the job and the relationship.

It’s true that in the restaurant business, it’s hard to get days like Mother’s Day off; that’s part of the job. But if he’s offered that day off to a brand new hire, while not giving you any days of your choosing for three years, there’s a problem here, with both the job and the boyfriend. And it sounds like you think that if you take the day off anyway, that itself could jeopardize your relationship (“I’ll maybe lose the place where we live”)? Start thinking seriously about what’s keeping you in both these entanglements (the job and the man), and at a minimum start trying to separate them out from each other. It might get a lot easier to clearly see the state of the relationship if you’re no longer working together.

2. Our boss is MIA

I work at a small nonprofit. I have one supervisor above me, Jill, who is managed by our executive director, Sara. Sara is a great person and has been very open about having some family and health challenges in the past couple years. Since I joined the org a few years ago, she has gone from an engaged and effective leader to a totally absentee boss.

We don’t have anyone on staff to handle HR issues or approve payments for needed supplies, which means we often end up spinning our wheels while we wait for her. Emails go unacknowledged. I’ve learned to contact her exclusively by personal cell, and those messages are often ignored until it becomes a crisis. She does not attend staff meetings or communicate with the staff broadly.

Jill doesn’t have the tools and skills to run the org. We have talked about contacting the board directly but are concerned about a blow-up. Sara is close with the board president and we are worried about being seen an insubordinate or untrustworthy.

I feel demoralized. I care about the mission but I am worried about our reputation in the community and our ability to maintain funding if our leader continues to be unresponsive. I feel that if a lower-ranking staff person was this inaccessible or unreliable, they would have been fired a long time ago.

Not to make this break-up day, but you should consider getting out. In a small organization, having an absentee leader when no one can step in and run things in their absence is unworkable. It means the organization won’t accomplish nearly what it should be (hugely problematic if you’re a mission-driven nonprofit) and your job will be a constant exercise in frustration.

That said, if you want to try to determine if this is solvable first, the right move is for someone (probably Jill more than you, or someone else senior or who has good rapport with Sara) to have a heart-to-heart with Sara where they lay out the impact her absence is having and the need for someone to handle the things that she’s not. If that’s already been attempted and you haven’t seen meaningful changes, that’s your answer. But if no one has tried that yet, it’s time; Sara may not realize how bad things are, and it’s a service to her and to the organization for someone to spell it out. That’s especially true if someone might eventually go to the board; you want to be able to say you’ve tried talking to Sara directly first.

For what it’s worth, this is the sort of thing the board should hear about — and it’s not insubordinate or untrustworthy to bring them issues this serious, especially after you’ve tried to resolve the problems with Sara directly first. The bar for staff contacting the board should be pretty high, but what you’ve described meets it.

3. My colleague asked my employee to hide information from me

A colleague just asked my employees to keep secrets from their supervisors, and I’m not sure how to address it. This colleague and I are both at the director level and are still fairly new in our positions (within the last year), but as he is an attorney (and much older man), he is paid nearly as much as our CEO and is generally deferred to by people throughout the organization.

Last week, while I was out of town, he approached one of the entry-level staff members on my team, Jane, and asked her for some information on behalf of one of our board members. None of the information was confidential by any means, but for some reason he specifically directed Jane not to tell her division head or me, the department director. She did as she was told. The requested information was related to a situation that blew up yesterday, and both the division head and I were caught off guard. When the division head and I were trying to address the situation, Jane told her direct supervisor what had happened with the attorney and how uncomfortable that made her. (My team is well-known throughout the organization as being very tight-knit and supportive of one another.) The supervisor then reported the attorney’s actions to the division head, who told me.

This is obviously unacceptable, but I’m not sure the best way to handle this. How do I protect my staff, prevent this from happening again, and restore my team’s trust?

There are times when a higher-up might need someone junior to pull specific information without talking about the request with others, when the situation is sensitive and they’re trying to avoid gossip (for example, during an investigation into potential wrongdoing, or financial info that could lead to job cuts). So this hinges on whether there were legitimate reasons for asking Jane to keep the request confidential or not. If there weren’t, then this is a conversation with the other director about not putting your staff in that position unless there’s a clear need for confidentiality, and it’s a conversation with your team about what to do if they’re asked to keep something confidential (which should include who is in a position to make those requests of them, and what steps they should take if they’re uncomfortable with something they’ve been asked for).

4. We’re supposed to have a team meeting to discuss feedback for our boss

I’m on a team of about half a dozen people supervised by Barnaby. We all have regular but infrequent skip-level meetings with Barnaby’s boss, Calvin.

It sounds like people have mentioned to Calvin in the skip-level meetings that Barnaby is not approachable. He passed that feedback on to Barnaby, and Barnaby asked one of my peers, Alfred, to organize a team discussion to gather more details on where that’s coming from and what he can do to be more approachable. Barnaby will not be at the meeting. Alfred will moderate and provide an anonymized summary of the takeaways back to Barnaby afterwards.

I’m not clear whether this meeting was Calvin’s suggestion or Barnaby’s idea or whether Calvin knows it’s happening. I trust Alfred’s judgment and believe he will do his best to get good feedback and actually anonymize it, and I have no reason to believe that anyone else on the team would feel differently.

But … this is kind of weird, right? I guess I empathize with Barnaby that it’s tough to get nebulous negative feedback and I understand why he’d want to involve the team in figuring out what specific actions he should take to improve communication. And I’m willing to give him benefit of the doubt that he’s doing this in addition to self-reflection/talking to peers for advice/asking Calvin for details or suggestions. But it still feels like it puts the team (and especially Alfred) in an awkward position, and it almost feels like it could be a prelude to discounting the feedback, like if people can’t provide (or don’t want to share with the whole team) enough specific examples of times he was unapproachable then he can write the whole thing off as unfounded? Is this a smart way to approach an inherently awkward situation, or is somebody falling down on the job here?

It’s a little weird, but it’s not necessarily a terrible idea if people generally trust Barnaby and Alfred. If either of them isn’t trusted, the whole thing falls apart — people won’t give candid feedback, and there’s no point. But if people trust them both to act with integrity, and also trust Barnaby not to react poorly to honest feedback even if it’s uncomfortable to hear, I can see where this came from: since if the issue is that people don’t find Barnaby approachable, he’s not well-positioned to get candid info from people himself. That said, my first choice would be to have Calvin lead these conversations, not put it on Alfred … but I can also imagine someone thinking people will be more candid when speaking in a group of peers without their boss’s boss there.

So much of this depends on really specific group dynamics that it’s hard to give a general ruling — but I don’t think it’s inherently bananas.

5. As a manager, when do I need to announce my pregnancy to my team?

I am a very newly promoted (two months) manager leading a team that I used to be a high performer on for several years. I think my team is awesome, I’m trying to build credibility as a leader, and the transition is going about as well as it can.

I am also three months pregnant with my first child (I found out literally three days after accepting the promotion), and I’m wondering what my obligation to my team is regarding when to notify them of my upcoming maternity leave. I should also point out that I’m in a male-dominated workplace and I am the only woman on my team.

I know your previous advice states to let your coworkers know whenever you are comfortable sharing, but waiting to tell my team after the 20-week scan feels too late. I handle some of the workload of the team as well, and there will likely be issues with coverage while I’m out, and that’s probably where I’m feeling this sense of obligation from. I am going to manage this as best I can through cross-training in advance, but this will largely be unavoidable. What do you think? As a manager, do I have an obligation to disclose my pregnancy to my team earlier when my absence will impact them?

Waiting for the 20-week scan is not unreasonably long. That still leaves you four or more months for your team to prepare for your leave, which is significantly longer than people get with many other types of medical leave. If this is the disclosure timeline you’re comfortable with, use it; it’s not an uncommon one to see.

The post my boss is my boyfriend and won’t give me a day off, coworker asked my employee to hide info from me, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

ARLINGTON, VA—In an effort to ensure the continued safety of the almighty being, the U.S. Marshals Service confirmed Monday that God, He Who Created the Heavens and the Earth, has been placed into the Deity Protection Program after witnessing a grisly gangland murder.

Federal agents said they were contacted at 3:47 a.m. by the Lord Our God, who, after telling them He had seen a killing on the Camden, NJ docks that implicated members of the DeCavalcante crime family, expressed fear for His own safety. As soon as officials took His statement, U.S. marshals reportedly rushed to supply the 6,000-year-old Supreme Ruler of the Universe with a new identity and relocate Him to an undisclosed location far from His Heavenly Throne.

“When God called to report the shooting, He wanted our absolute assurance that if He gave testimony, no one would ever find Him or His Son,” said an anonymous FBI source  who described the Divine Creator as “incredibly shaken up” as He discussed the terms of protective custody over a cup of black coffee in a holding room. “He kept warning us that the guys in the crime family would hunt Him down and do things to Him far worse than death. Unfortunately, most gods in a situation like this don’t survive without our assistance.”

“But some very bad people are going away for a long time thanks to the Lord’s cooperation,” the source added. “For that we’re grateful.”

The Deity Protection Program, first established by Congress in 1970 after the Hindu god Ganesha became an expert witness in a federal racketeering case, has gone on to shelter thousands of omnipotent beings who were threatened after testifying against crime syndicates, drug traffickers, and extremist groups. While specific details about God’s arrangement are unconfirmed, in the past the program has provided new identities, $60,000 in support, help finding a job, and U.S. marshal escorts to divinities ranging from Sumerian fertility idols to Chinese dragon kings.

As of 2024, there were an estimated 900 gods, goddesses, and demigods living in American trailer parks, motels, and safe houses under the auspices of the program, which boasts a 100% success rate for those who follow provided safety protocol.

Agency insiders confirmed that the evidence provided by all-seeing, all-knowing sources often helped to win convictions of the worst criminals. However, many deities struggle with the temptation to return to their former divine life. Officials pointed to the 1983 case of ancient Norse god and federal witness Bældæġ, who was found pierced through the heart with an enchanted spear after abandoning his identity as a line cook at a New Hampshire diner.

“What makes this program so important is that many of these deities have made very powerful enemies in their time,” said domestic crime expert Deborah Tuchman, adding that such gods were not necessarily innocent themselves, and were often linked to trillions of crimes through their history overseeing the universe’s endless cycle of birth and death. “Some of them have suffered for thousands of years after instilling humans with the ability to do evil. They feel trapped.”

“In fact, many only agree to testify in order to reduce their own lengthy sentences chained to a rock or imprisoned in Tartarus,” she continued.

Those familiar with the program described the wrenching decision faced by deities who enter the program, pointing to the difficult challenge of leaving behind billions of supporters, angels who cater to their every whim, and a meaningful role overseeing the cosmos in order to spend the foreseeable future working retail in Middle America. Many have complained of the stress caused by neighbors questioning their supplied backstory after they were spotted resurrecting the dead, swallowing lightning, or flying over the face of the planet.

“Do I miss sitting on a lotus flower all day, entirely at one with the universe’s profound stillness? Of course,” said Ron D. Polacheck, the Buddhist being of infinite compassion formerly known as Avalokiteśhvara, who now travels the world speaking to audiences about his decades spent in hiding. “From the second you sign that agreement, you’re just some regular jerk. Nothing tastes as good. Your neighbors don’t know that you used to be somebody big, someone really important. You keep asking yourself, ‘What the hell am I doing working at a hardware store? I’m the Awakened One, for Christ’s sake.’ But it beats getting tracked down by those lunatics in the Medellín Cartel.”

“Plus, once you get used to it, Kenosha isn’t so bad,” the awakened one added. 

The post God Placed Into Deity Protection Program After Witnessing Murder appeared first on The Onion.

The newlyweds blew through $79,000 in a single day last Saturday, and no one tried to stop them.

The post Alison Moore and Meghan Buress appeared first on The Onion.

David Eustice, 54, was found dead in his apartment. In lieu of flowers, please send a team of forensic crime scene technicians.

The post David Eustice appeared first on The Onion.

Toronto, ON – Despite years of being widely used as sexual slang, and against the advice of nearly all his peers, sports journalist Reed Mackie continues to use the term “edging” in his articles and headlines. Edging, the act of delaying an orgasm to achieve greater arousal, appears over thirty times in Mackie’s works and […]

The post Sports journalist refuses to give up the verb “edging” appeared first on The Beaverton.

children of UEFI

...

the UEFI generation in various hacker gear and apparel

https://analognowhere.com/_/erlemu

• archive
• support/store

I’m sure that the decision to exclude* Dean from the circle of trust here won’t be a problem down the line. I’m absolutely positive about this.

*I originally typed this as “explude” which I think might be a powerful new word and potentially very appropriate.

The post A wider strategy appeared first on Bad Machinery.

Today's links

• Tesla accused of hacking odometers to weasel out of warranty repairs: The most demon-haunted cars on the road.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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Tesla accused of hacking odometers to weasel out of warranty repairs (permalink)

A lawsuit filed in February accuses Tesla of remotely altering odometer values on failure-prone cars, in a bid to push these lemons beyond the 50,000 mile warranty limit:

https://www.thestreet.com/automotive/tesla-accused-of-using-sneaky-tactic-to-dodge-car-repairs

The suit was filed by a California driver who bought a used Tesla with 36,772 miles on it. The car's suspension kept failing, necessitating multiple servicings, and that was when the plaintiff noticed that the odometer readings for his identical daily drive were going up by ever-larger increments. This wasn't exactly subtle: he was driving 20 miles per day, but the odometer was clocking 72.35 miles/day. Still, how many of us monitor our daily odometer readings?

In short order, his car's odometer had rolled over the 50k mark and Tesla informed him that they would no longer perform warranty service on his lemon. Right after this happened, the new mileage clocked by his odometer returned to normal. This isn't the only Tesla owner who's noticed this behavior: Tesla subreddits are full of similar complaints:

https://www.reddit.com/r/RealTesla/comments/1ca92nk/is_tesla_inflating_odometer_to_show_more_range/

This isn't Tesla's first dieselgate scandal. In the summer of 2023, the company was caught lying to drivers about its cars' range:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

Drivers noticed that they were getting far fewer miles out of their batteries than Tesla had advertised. Naturally, they contacted the company for service on their faulty cars. Tesla then set up an entire fake service operation in Nevada that these calls would be diverted to, called the "diversion team." Drivers with range complaints were put through to the "diverters" who would claim to run "remote diagnostics" on their cars and then assure them the cars were fine. They even installed a special xylophone in the diversion team office that diverters would ring every time they successfully deceived a driver.

These customers were then put in an invisible Tesla service jail. Their Tesla apps were silently altered so that they could no longer book service for their cars for any reason – instead, they'd have to leave a message and wait several days for a callback. The diversion center racked up 2,000 calls/week and diverters were under strict instructions to keep calls under five minutes. Eventually, these diverters were told that they should stop actually performing remote diagnostics on the cars of callers – instead, they'd just pretend to have run the diagnostics and claim no problems were found (so if your car had a potentially dangerous fault, they would falsely claim that it was safe to drive).

Most modern cars have some kind of internet connection, but Tesla goes much further. By design, its cars receive "over-the-air" updates, including updates that are adverse to drivers' interests. For example, if you stop paying the monthly subscription fee that entitles you to use your battery's whole charge, Tesla will send a wireless internet command to your car to restrict your driving to only half of your battery's charge.

This means that your Tesla is designed to follow instructions that you don't want it to follow, and, by design, those instructions can fundamentally alter your car's operating characteristics. For example, if you miss a payment on your Tesla, it can lock its doors and immobilize itself, then, when the repo man arrives, it will honk its horn, flash its lights, back out of its parking spot, and unlock itself so that it can be driven away:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

Some of the ways that your Tesla can be wirelessly downgraded (like disabling your battery) are disclosed at the time of purchase. Others (like locking you out and summoning a repo man) are secret. But whether disclosed or secret, both kinds of downgrade depend on the genuinely bizarre idea that a computer that you own, that is in your possession, can be relied upon to follow orders from the internet even when you don't want it to. This is weird enough when we're talking about a set-top box that won't let you record a TV show – but when we're talking about a computer that you put your body into and race down the road at 80mph inside of, it's frankly terrifying.

Obviously, most people would prefer to have the final say over how their computers work. I mean, maybe you trust the manufacturer's instructions and give your computer blanket permission to obey them, but if the manufacturer (or a hacker pretending to be the manufacturer, or a government who is issuing orders to the manufacturer) starts to do things that are harmful to you (or just piss you off), you want to be able to say to your computer, "OK, from now on, you take orders from me, not them."

In a state of nature, this is how computers work. To make a computer ignore its owner in favor of internet randos, the manufacturer has to build in a bunch of software countermeasures to stop you from reconfiguring or installing software of your choosing on it. And sure, that software might be able to withstand the attempts of normies like you and me to bypass it, but given that we'd all rather have the final say over how our computers work, someone is gonna figure out how to get around that software. I mean, show me a 10-foot fence and I'll show you an 11-foot ladder, right?

To stop that from happening, Congress passed the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Despite the word "copyright" appearing in the name of the law, it's not really about defending copyright, it's about defending business models. Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, helping someone bypass a software lock is a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine (for a first offense). That's true whether or not any copyright infringement takes place.

So if you want to modify your Tesla – say, to prevent the company from cheating your odometer – you have to get around a software lock, and that's a felony. Indeed, if any manufacturer puts a software lock on its product, then any changes that require disabling or bypassing that lock become illegal. That's why you can't just buy reliable third-party printer ink – reverse-engineering the "is this an original HP ink cartridge?" program is a literal crime, even though using non-HP ink in your printer is absolutely not a copyright violation. Jay Freeman calls this effect "felony contempt of business model."

Thus we arrive at this juncture, where every time you use a product or device or service, it might behave in a way that is totally unlike the last time you used it. This is true whether you own, lease or merely interact with a product. The changes can be obvious, or they can be subtle to the point of invisibility. And while manufacturers can confine their "updates" to things that make the product better (for example, patching security vulnerabilities), there's nothing to stop them from using this uninspectable, non-countermandable veto over your devices' functionality to do things that harm you – like fucking with your odometer.

Or, you know, bricking your car. The defunct EV maker Fisker – who boasted that it made "software-based cars" – went bankrupt last year and bricked the entire fleet of unsold cars:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/10/software-based-car/#based

I call this ability to modify the underlying functionality of a product or service for every user, every time they use it, "twiddling," and it's a major contributor to enshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Enshittification's observable symptoms follow a predictable pattern: first, a company makes things good for its users, while finding ways to lock them in. Then, once it knows the users can't easily leave, the company makes things worse for end-users in order to deliver value to business customers. Once these businesses are locked in, the company siphons value away from them, too, until the product or service is a pile of shit, that we still can't leave:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#franklinite

Twiddling is key to enshittification: it's the method by which value is shifted from end-users to business customers, and from business customers to the platform. Twiddling is the "switch" in enshittification's series of minute, continuous bait-and-switches. The fact that DMCA 1201 makes it a crime to investigate systems with digital locks makes the modern computerized device a twiddler's playground. Sure, a driver might claim that their odometer is showing bad readings, but they can't dump their car's software and identify the code that is changing the odometer.

This is what I mean by "demon-haunted computers": a computer is "demon-haunted" if it is designed to detect when it is under scrutiny, and, when it senses a hostile observer, it changes its behavior to the innocuous, publicly claimed factory defaults:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/18/descartes-delenda-est/#self-destruct-sequence-initiated

But as soon as the observer goes away, the computer returns to its nefarious ways. This is exactly what happened with Dieselgate, when VW used software that detected the test-suite run by government emissions inspectors, and changed the engine's characteristics when it was under their observation. But once the car was back on the road, it once again began emitting toxic gas at levels that killed dozens of people and sickened thousands more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/29/upshot/how-many-deaths-did-volkswagens-deception-cause-in-us.html

Cars are among the most demon-haunted products we use on a daily basis. They are designed from the chassis up to do things that are harmful to their owners, from stealing our location data so it can be sold to data-brokers, to immobilizing themselves if you miss a payment, to downgrading themselves if you stop paying for a "subscription," to ratting out your driving habits to your insurer:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

These are the "legitimate" ways that cars are computers that ignore their owners' orders in favor of instructions they get from the internet. But once a manufacturer arrogates that power to itself, it is confronted with a tempting smorgasbord of enshittificatory gambits to defraud you, control you, and gaslight you. Now, perhaps you could wield this power wisely, because you are in possession of the normal human ration of moral consideration for others, to say nothing of a sense of shame and a sense of honor.

But while corporations are (legally) people, they are decidedly not human. They are artificial lifeforms, "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic" (as HG Wells said of the marauding aliens in War of the Worlds):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/14/timmy-share/#a-superior-moral-justification-for-selfishness

These alien invaders are busily xenoforming the planet, rendering it unfit for human habitation. Laws that ban reverse-engineering are a devastating weapon that corporations get to use in their bid to subjugate and devour the human race.

The US isn't the only country with a law like Section 1201 of the DMCA. Over the past 25 years, the US Trade Representative has arm-twisted nearly every country in the world into passing laws that are nearly identical to America's own disastrous DMCA. Why did countries agree to pass these laws? Well, because they had to, or the US would impose tariffs on them:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/03/friedmanite/#oil-crisis-two-point-oh

The Trump tariffs change everything, including this thing. There is no reason for America's (former) trading partners to continue to enforce the laws it passed to protect Big Tech's right to twiddle their citizens. That goes double for Tesla: rather than merely complaining about Musk's Nazi salutes, countries targeted by the regime he serves could retaliate against him, in a devastating fashion. By abolishing their anticircuvmention laws, countries around the world would legalize jailbreaking Teslas, allowing mechanics to unlock all the subscription features and software upgrades for every Tesla driver, as well as offering their own software mods. Not only would this tank Tesla stock and force Musk to pay back the loans he collateralized with his shares (loans he used to buy Twitter and the US predidency), it would also abolish sleazy gimmicks like hacking drivers' odometers to get out of paying for warranty service:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/08/turnabout/#is-fair-play

(Image: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0, modified)

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• OpenAI Is A Systemic Risk To The Tech Industry https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the-tech-industry-2/

• Save Social https://savesocial.eu/en/ (h/t Chris Kalk)

• The rise of end times fascism https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/13/end-times-fascism-far-right-trump-musk (h/t Roz Doctorow)

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago WIPO’s $50 million bribery scandal https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/16/world/europe/swiss-investigates-possibility-of-bribery-in-un-contract.html

#20yrsago Updating websites from prison by paper mail https://web.archive.org/web/20050419003402/http://beta.news.yahoo.com/s/cpress/20050416/ca_pr_on_tc/us_internet_inmates/nc:737

#15yrsago Sign for the US Border: unprovoked beatings ahead https://web.archive.org/web/20120426212453/https://i44.tinypic.com/2dv77f8.jpg

#15yrsago Every comic is funnier with “Christ, what an asshole” for a punchline https://web.archive.org/web/20100423063424/http://www.robertsinclair.net/comic/asshole.html

#15yrsago UK LibDems pledge to repeal the Digital Economy Bill https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1240561

#10yrsago Arcology: cutaways of the future city-hives that never were https://memex.craphound.com/2015/04/16/arcology-cutaways-of-the-future-city-hives-that-never-were/

#5yrsago The Facebook Political Ad Collector https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/16/new-old-apples/#transparency

#5yrsago Zombie movies teach us all the wrong lessons for pandemic https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/16/new-old-apples/#acephalous-kindnesshttps://pluralistic.net/2020/04/16/new-old-apples/#library.json

#5yrsago Evangelical pastor denied quarantine, now he wants your stimulus check https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/16/new-old-apples/#death-cult

#5yrsago Apple hunters recover ten "lost" varieties from forgotten farms https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/16/new-old-apples/#lostapple

#5yrsago FCC will spend $9B to improve broadband…without an accurate broadband map https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/16/new-old-apples/#not-the-territory

#5yrsago Plutocrats firehose money on primary challenger to AOC https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/16/new-old-apples/#aoc-not-mcc

#1yrago Rebecca Roque's "Till Human Voices Wake Us" https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/16/dead-air/#technorealism

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Auckland: Unity Books, May 2, 6PM
  https://www.eventbrite.co.nz/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1320740102199

• Wellingon: Unity Books, May 3, 3PM
  https://www.unitybooks.co.nz/news-and-events/author-talk-picks-and-shovels-by-cory-doctorow

• Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15
  https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515

• Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
  https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/

• PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
  https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025

• PDX: Picks and Shovels with bunnie Huang at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
  https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0

• London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1
  https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/

• Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059

• Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 3
  https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Can we use the Internet for Democracy?
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh_HON6iql8

• Fightback Against Trump's Tariff Attack (Avi Lewis)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9sgIAc6z_o

• The Voice of Canadian Humanism
  https://open.spotify.com/episode/7uuwdZTIbWzKhBQ3mmMiRv?context=spotify%3Ashow%3A6N5hl8on16CfaeYArrKyqZ

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Latest books (permalink)

• • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

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Upcoming books (permalink)

• Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Chris Baker.

Currently writing:

• Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Nimby and the D-Hoppers CONCLUSION https://craphound.com/stories/2025/04/13/nimby-and-the-d-hoppers-conclusion/

---

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

How to get Pluralistic:

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https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

ISSN: 3066-764X

A security vulnerability report arrived in the form of a ten-page PDF, formatted like a term paper, purporting to have found a way to leverage shortcut files to install malware. It begins with a 300-word abstract that opens “Computer security is of growing importance in today’s connected world,” followed by a 400-word introduction that similarly focuses on the importance of keeping your computer secure.

Now, I have experience with, and occasionally even enjoy, reading journal papers. But a security vulnerability report is not supposed to be a journal paper. Your goal is not to impress upon the reader the importance of computer security and therefore justify your avenue of research. By the time you get to the vulnerability report, it is already a given that computer security is important, and the research has already justified itself by the existence of the proof of concept. You don’t need to convince me that this is a worthwhile endeavor. You also don’t have to teach me what malware is, or pad your text with discussion of what sorts of bad things malware can do once it has become established.

Okay, finally I get to page five, when they finally lay out the attack. I’ll boil it down for you rather than making you suffer through five pages of text and screen shots.¹

• Create a shortcut file that runs a command line which installs malware.
• Convince the user to launch the shortcut.
• Malware is now installed!

In the various screen shots included in the paper, one of them is a warning dialog from the system.

Open File – Security Warning

Do you want to open this file?

Name: C:\Users\Victim\Downloads\Harmless.lnk Publisher: Unknown Publisher Type: Shortcut From: C:\Users\Victim\Downloads\Harmless.lnk   Open Cancel

While files from the Internet can be useful, this file type can potentially harm your computer. If you do not trust the source, do not open this software.

Windows displays this warning when you try to run a shortcut that was downloaded from the Internet, because shortcuts can execute any command line and therefore can perform any operation that you yourself have the power to do.

Which includes installing malware into your user profile.

The paper assumes that the user trusts the source from which the shortcut was downloaded and approved the dangerous operation.

So there is no technical security vulnerability here. It’s a social engineering attack: You have to convince the user to run the shortcut even though the system told them it’s not necessarily a great idea.

Maybe next time, they can cut to the chase and just say so, instead of wrapping it inside a ten-page term paper.

¹ Or the 250-word “conclusion.”

The post Dubious security vulnerability: Once I have tricked the user into running a malicious shortcut, I can install malware appeared first on The Old New Thing.

During the development of Windows 8, the idea of automatically backing up your data into your Microsoft Account and your OneDrive account began gaining traction. The Microsoft Store would remember what apps you had installed on which computers, and your Documents would be backed up on OneDrive, and the system would back up your settings onto your OneDrive account. If you got a new computer, you could ask that the system auto-install the apps you had, recover its settings from your most recent backup, and sync your documents from your OneDrive account. Your new computer would be all ready to go, with all your data, and set up exactly the way you liked it.

For some reason, the scenario was always described as “dropping your tablet in the pool” and setting up its replacement. It seems there was a lot of dropping of tablets in the swimming pool back in the day. Personally, I would just be more careful around swimming pools.

This example exhibits some of the Redmond Reality Distortion Field, wherein it is considered a common activity to lounge by the pool with a tablet PC. This presupposes that you own a pool (fancy), or that you go on vacation to a place that has a pool (fancy), or that you regularly go to the local pool (less fancy but still a little fancy).

Nobody ever considers the probably-much-more-likely scenario of “You accidentally drop your tablet PC and it’s broken.” Maybe because that would be an indictment of the fragility of tablet PCs? Whereas nobody expects a tablet PC to survive a dip in the pool.

The post There was a lot of imagined dropping tablets in swimming pools appeared first on The Old New Thing.

The nonprofit news operation, the Houston Landing, announced today it is ceasing operation in May 2025:The board of Houston Landing has voted to shut down the nonprofit newsroom in the face of financial challenges. Although Houston Landing launched with significant seed funding, it has been unable to build additional revenue streams to support ongoing operations.The newsroom anticipates it will

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
WELL, the freaks on patreon felt that the word 'using' was a little ambiguous.

Today's News:

The Internet Archive is proud to join in celebrating a major milestone in the preservation of global cultural heritage: documents related to the history of slavery in Aruba have been officially added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World (MoW) International Register. The digitized documents have been preserved and are accessible online through the Coleccion Aruba and the Internet Archive.

The registration formally incorporates Aruba’s contributions into the existing entry titled “Documentary heritage of the enslaved people of the Dutch Caribbean and their descendants (1816–1969),” which already included documents from Curaçao, Sint Maarten, Suriname, and the Netherlands.

These newly recognized documents are held by the National Archives of Aruba (ANA) and the National Library of Aruba (BNA). They offer crucial insight into the lives of enslaved people and their descendants in Aruba, helping to illuminate a shared painful past and its continuing impact on the present.

The nomination was prepared collaboratively by the Aruba National Committee for UNESCO’s Memory of the World Program (MoW-AW), UNESCO Aruba, ANA, and BNA. With the registration now official, these documents are not only globally recognized as having international significance—they are also more accessible than ever before.

The historical materials are available online through the Coleccion Aruba digital heritage site, as well as on the Internet Archive, supporting the goals of open access for schools, researchers, and the general public. This achievement underscores the importance of digitization and long-term preservation to ensure that future generations can continue to learn from these vital records.

The Internet Archive congratulates MoW-AW, UNESCO Aruba, the National Archives and National Library of Aruba, and their partners in Curaçao, Sint Maarten, Suriname, and the Netherlands on this historic achievement.

Explore the documents: www.coleccion.aw/mow

Seventy-five thousand generations ago, our ancestors set a vast computer in motion, asking it to produce the ultimate Linux distribution…

No, wait. It wasn’t quite that long ago. That was a different thing. But in both, the answer to life, the universe, and everything turns out to be: forty-two. In our case, Fedora Linux 42, which is now officially released.

Every Fedora Linux release is a gigantic community effort — it does almost seem infinitely improbable that all of this software made by a whole planet of open source developers could come together so nicely. Yet, here we are again! Thank you so much to everyone who works so hard on Fedora and in all of our upstream projects.

Upgrade in place

If you have an existing system, Upgrading Fedora Linux to a New Release is easy. In most cases, it’s not very different from just rebooting for regular updates, except you’ll have a little more time to get a hot beverage from the machine. Perhaps something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

Or, start fresh

If this is your first time in space running Fedora Linux, or if you just want to start fresh on an uninhabited system, download the install media for our flagship Editions (Workstation, KDE Plasma Desktop, Cloud, Server, CoreOS, IoT),  for one of our Atomic Desktops (including Silverblue and Kinoite), or for alternate desktop options (like Cinnamon, Xfce, or the new and appropriately-thematic Cosmic Desktop spin).

What’s new?

We’ve promoted our KDE Plasma Desktop offering to “Edition” status. The Fedora KDE team has been hard at work making sure bugs get fixed and everything is polished just so. We’re confident that this can stand along our other amazing flagship offerings.

I know the naming is a bit confusing, with GNOME-powered “Workstation” using a generic label while KDE Plasma Desktop has the tech right in the name. We’ll get that figured out eventually. If you don’t know where to start, don’t panic. Pick one and see how it goes. They’re both excellent desktop environments with great upstream communities, and the same Fedora system underneath it all.

We also have a new alternative desktop choice: COSMIC. This is a modern, written-all-in-Rust desktop environment from our friends over at System76.

Perhaps most excitingly, we have a new installation interface! The previous UI was designed to manage a lot of before-you-even-start configuration choices. Over the past decade, though, we’ve gone to “get the full system installed with no fuss, then set up what you need from a complete environment”. That made the “hub and spoke” model more confusing than helpful. The new UI is streamlined and sleek, just like the Heart of Gold.

Of course, there are other big changes, as well as the usual updates to thousands of packages. See the Fedora Linux 42 Release Notes for all of the details, and don’t miss the “What’s New?” posts here on Fedora Magazine.

Last minute warning!

No, it’s not the Vogons, but it is ugly. We discovered a problem with the Live boot media at the last minute, and since the release was already out of the airlock, we can’t do much about it. It doesn’t damage anything, but is annoying: just booting the Live media adds an unexpected entry to the UEFI boot loader even when Fedora Linux 42 is not installed to the local system.

This is primarily a concern when you are dual-booting with a different operating system, or if you’re just running the Live image and not intending to actually install.

The problem is mostly harmless cosmetic, but still, we should have caught it sooner. Apparently this was posted in our local planning office, but we didn’t go down to the basement past the “Beware of the Leopard” sign to find it.

You can read more about this in the Common Bugs entry for this issue, including how to remove the unwanted entry (and how to avoid the problem altogether).

What else could go wrong?

We hope nothing will, but if you run into a problem, visit our Ask Fedora user support forum. This includes a category where we collect common issues and solutions or work-arounds.

A last note

As you may already know, this is my last release as Fedora Project Leader. We’re welcoming Jef Spaleta into the role, with a handover at Flock to Fedora in June. It’s tempting to sign off with “so long, and thanks for all the fish” — but I’m not planning on going far. I’ll be around Fedora stuff until the (restaurant at the) end of the universe.

A good hitchhiker always knows where their towel is. If you’ve lost track of yours, don’t worry. We’ve got you covered. In collaboration with the Fedora Design Team, our friends at Hello Tux are offering what I think you’ll agree is the most hoopy distro swag ever made. We’ll be handing them out at Flock in Prague. I hope to see you there, but if you can’t make it, you can order one at a discount with the code FEDORA5.

Comments, congratulations, and so forth

Let’s talk over at Fedora Discussion. See you there!

The newly released Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 42 introduces out-of-box support for running x86 and x86-64 programs on ARM systems. This is accomplished by leveraging the emulation stack originally developed for Fedora Asahi Remix. This work is now integrated into Fedora Linux proper. This makes it available for all ARM systems running Fedora Linux, not just Apple Silicon Macs.

How Is This Accomplished

To make it possible to run x86 programs via emulation, we leverage several tools, each solving a specific problem:

• FEX, a fast emulator that can run x86 and x86-64 programs on ARM Linux hosts
• muvm, a tool that can run another program inside a microVM
• binfmt-dispatcher, a simple dispatcher that can dynamically pick the best emulator to use when an x86 or x86-64 program is started

With this setup, when a non-native program is run, the kernel invokes binfmt-dispatcher via the binfmt_misc interface. The dispatcher picks the best emulator to use. This is based on the program, the system it’s running on, and its own configuration. By default, we use the FEX emulator, which provides the best compromise between performance and compatibility for most programs. FEX only support host systems running a 4k page-size kernel. Thus, when running on a system with different page-size (such as Apple Silicon Macs running Fedora Asahi Remix 42, which use a 16k page-size), the dispatcher will automatically run FEX inside muvm. This will spin up a microVM with a 4k page-size kernel for compatibility.

If the user prefers to use a different emulator (such as box64 or QEMU), that can be configured globally, or on a per-program basis. The dispatcher automatically installs any missing dependencies via DNF whenever a non-native program is run for the first time that requires them. This installation requires confirmation by the user.

Library Availablity

FEX relies on an immutable filesystem containing a large set of commonly used x86-64 and x86 libraries. However, it cannot contain every library, so it is possible that a program could fail to start due to missing dependencies. Should that happen, consider submitting a pull request to the Kiwi description to get it added. It is also possible to overlay locally additional dependencies, though you should consider this as experimental at this stage. In general, this feature will work best with programs that have reduced or minimal dependencies. This is common with a lot of commercial software. While it is possible to run complex FLOSS applications with a wide dependency web, we recommend just using the native ARM version whenever that’s an option. That will always provide the best performance.

Feature Availability

This new feature is available out of the box on Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 42. It is also available on Fedora Asahi Remix, in both the KDE Plasma and the GNOME editions. Additionally, Fedora Asahi Remix includes a gaming emulation stack based on Steam, and has dedicated documentation for this feature. On other Fedora editions, you can run $ sudo dnf install @x86-emulation to make this feature available.

It’s also worth noting that while we have specifically targeting x86 emulation on ARM hosts, the same approach could be used for other hosts and targets in the future.

A reader writes:

I keep finding myself in this weird situation at work. I’m a medical resident in an academic hospital system in a big progressive city. I keep finding myself in mandatory educational events where the facilitator introduces the concept of privilege as if no one’s ever heard of it and invites/demands everyone to share their privilege/lack thereof.

Real examples: “Let’s all reflect on our positionality, and then go around the room. I’m Dr. LastName. As you know, I’m the head of this department. I’m the child of South Asian immigrants, and I’m able-bodied. I live with my wife and children. Your turn!” and, “I invite you to turn to your colleagues — preferably someone you don’t know — and introduce yourself in a way you never have before, considering some of the identities on this wheel of privilege.”

I was in the same room as everyone else in my small program, my program director, and six other attending physicians who regularly evaluate me. It feels screamingly obvious to me that this is inappropriate. Are we … supposed to out ourselves? Are we supposed to out each other? Is this a therapy session that no one consented to? It’s like there’s this shared nonsensical belief that just because we’re all “progressive” that makes this a “safe space” and suddenly it’s no longer harassment to demand information about your colleagues’ sexuality, religion, or gender identity.

Please, PLEASE tell me there are magic words to get this to stop. So far, I’ve tried saying things like, “Thank you, this is so important to reflect on, and this certainly isn’t the first time it’s come up. My name is Name, and I’m a fifth-year resident here at East University. I studied Basket Weaving at North University and did medical school at West University,” which results in awkward silence but at least then my peers feel empowered to do the same instead of introducing themselves as a collection of privileges and marginalizations. I’ve also tried, “You know, I’m reflecting on what’s appropriate to share with colleagues, and the importance of appropriate boundaries.” Both have resulted in disappointment from the facilitator and further boundary-pushing. HELP!

Yeah, this is inappropriately invasive.

I get that they’re trying to get you to reflect on areas of privilege or potential lack of privilege and to consider how different aspects of a person’s identity can intersect to create a more complex experience, but there are ways to do that that don’t push people to share information they may not be comfortable sharing in a work setting.

Your trainers might argue that you only need to share things you’re comfortable with — but given the way they respond when you attempt to do that, that doesn’t seem to be true.

You could try saying this: “I appreciate the point that’s being made about intersectionality, and I also think it’s important that people not be pushed to out themselves in ways they’d prefer not to, particularly in a professional context. So I’m going to stick with the things you can see about me and a few other basics, and hope that gives other people permission to do the same if they choose to.”

But I would also push back hard on this in course evaluations if they do them, and possibly to whoever coordinates these trainings to begin with. Point out that demanding this kind of sharing will put people, particularly people with marginalized identities, in a position of vulnerability and risks opening them up to discrimination — an outcome that’s presumably directly the opposite of these sessions’ goals — and that no one should feel pressured into unwanted exposure at a work training.

The post work trainers are pushing us to share race, religion, sexuality, and gender identity appeared first on Ask a Manager.

Please take a few moments to let us know how you’d like your tax dollars spent by the Trump administration.

1. It’s important to me that my money supports…
a) public television
b) national parks
c) irrigation for the Mar-a-Lago golf course

2. In this era of climate crisis, the government must invest more in…
a) green and renewable energy
b) electric and solar-powered vehicles
c) plastic straws

3. My priorities, as a taxpayer, include…
a) investment in our public schools
b) availability of scholarships for higher education
c) providing government subsidies for the world’s wealthiest, smartest, and most virile man, Elon Musk

4. Infrastructure, to me, means…
a) fixing our roads and highways
b) improving public transportation
c) pouring millions of taxpayer dollars into the Trump family hotels, resorts, and properties

5. Government grants for the arts are essential because…
a) art enriches our lives
b) art increases our ability to have empathy for one another
c) art should create flattering portraits of our leaders, not like the one in Colorado, which was so unfair and distorted, and the work of the radical left.

6. Government should be involved with disease prevention efforts such as…
a) encouraging and developing vaccines
b) helping with healthcare costs
c) treating measles and bird flu with vitamin A, raw milk, and the power of prayer

7. The most important component of crime prevention should be…
a) improving public safety
b) increasing the cash flow going to for-profit immigration prisons
c) full pardons for the violent insurrectionists heroic patriots who stormed took a self-guided tour of the Capitol

8. I would like to see more government support for…
a) the American car industry
b) the American farm industry
c) unregulated cryptocurrency primarily used by drug smugglers, grifters, and Peter Thiel

9. I would pay higher taxes if…
a) I knew it would go to housing the poor
b) I knew it would go to helping children
c) I knew it would fund yet another week of golf for President Trump

10. Federal programs that help seniors, such as Meals on Wheels…
a) should be preserved—we must support people in need
b) should have their budgets increased—we are not doing enough
c) should transition into a program, which, instead of providing food for seniors, would provide $Trump meme coins to select UFC and Joe Rogan fans

11. My tax dollars ought to be used to increase cybersecurity because…
a) cyber crimes are on the rise
b) identity theft is a serious problem
c) wait, did someone named Vlad just leave our Houthi PC small group chat?

12. Government spending should be monitored by…
a) a healthy system of checks and balances
b) transparent and open data when it comes to federal expenditures
c) an unregulated agency of people with nicknames like “Big Balls” who want to gut Medicare so there’s more money for Kristi Noem’s ICE hair extensions

13. My preferred way of knowing how my tax dollars will be allocated is…
a) via a presidential address
b) through a mailed letter from the government that outlines and explains the spending
c) a tweet from a high-as-a-kite billionaire ranting about the “woke mind virus” that includes ten exclamation points, four emojis, and some words he made up

14. Paying federal income tax is the responsibility of…
a) all Americans
b) the haters and the losers
c) everybody who doesn’t have the last name Trump, Musk, Bezos, or Zuckerberg, lol

15. Tax money should help reduce the deficit so that…
a) we can have a healthy economy
b) we can pay back our debts
c) sorry, but nobody in the executive branch currently knows what “deficit” means, or, ironically, tariffs, but so what / who cares?

16. Paying my taxes feels bad when…
a) the government is so brazenly corrupt
b) the government is so brazenly incompetent
c) the government spends so little money on sending Vice President Vance to countries where nobody will talk to him

RESULTS:

If you answered mostly A’s and B’s: You’re now on our treason list, and you might be detained at any time.

If you answered mostly C’s: Congratulations, you’re now head of the IRS.

The board of Houston Landing has voted to shut down the nonprofit newsroom in the face of financial challenges. Although Houston Landing launched with significant seed funding, it has been unable to build additional revenue streams to support ongoing operations.

The newsroom anticipates it will cease publishing by mid-May of this year. This timeline will enable Houston Landing to facilitate a thoughtful transition.

“We are proud of the Landing’s coverage of Greater Houston and continue to believe deeply inthe need for more free, independent journalism in our region,” said Ann B. Stern, board chair ofHouston Landing. “This decision was difficult but necessary. Houston Landing’s reporting has made a meaningful impact in the community, but it struggled to find its long-term financial footing.”

The Houston Landing board continues to believe there is a strong need for nonprofit local news in Houston and a viable path to sustaining it. The board has entered into discussions with The Texas Tribune, which is exploring the possibility of establishing a Houston news initiative as part of its broader strategy to expand local journalism and serve more Texans.

“We have great respect for Houston Landing’s work in delivering high-quality, nonpartisan
journalism to its readers,” said Sonal Shah, CEO of The Texas Tribune. “We also understand the profound challenges facing local newsrooms today — journalism is a public service and needs a strong ecosystem to thrive. We look forward to exploring how we can learn from what the Landing started and create a sustainable model that serves the Houston community. We will take time to explore the right path forward to ensure sustainability.”

The Texas Tribune recently announced plans to expand its network of local newsrooms. The Waco Bridge, its new initiative in Waco, is scheduled to launch in 2025, and a newsroom in Austin, where The Texas Tribune is headquartered, will follow later in the year. Through its Texas network model, The Texas Tribune offers local newsrooms shared support — including fundraising, marketing, human resources, technology, legal and business services — so that local editorial teams can focus on high-impact reporting and serving their distinct audiences.

Houston Landing launched in February 2023, funded with a seed investment of over $20 million from the Houston Endowment, Arnold Ventures, Kinder Foundation, American Journalism Project and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Houston Landing was born out of a two-year study spearheaded by the American Journalism Project that found many Houstonians do not feel they have access to a trusted source for deeply reported stories that impact their daily lives.

“While it’s with a heavy heart that we announce the closure of our newsroom, I want to express my deepest gratitude to the dedicated journalists and staff members who poured their passion into our mission every single day,” said Peter Bhatia, CEO, Houston Landing.

“Houston Landing demonstrates how a commitment to truth and accountability can transform communities and improve lives. I’m thankful to those who believed in us, supported us, and stood with us as we connected with each other through stories that inspired positive change.”

Although raising funds remained a challenge, Houston Landing journalism has had an impact on its community: it prompted proposed legislation and changes that protect Houston students; connected the community to changemakers; and provided the growing Latino community with critical news in Spanish.

The post Houston Landing to cease operations in face of financial challenges appeared first on Houston Landing.

44 parents, teachers, students and community members registered to speak at the district's board meeting- nearly all of them on the "Parent Rights and Responsibilities" policy.

Last week, UH said a "small number" of its international students had their visas revoked by the U.S. government. More than 100 students and recent graduates at colleges and universities across Texas also have had their visas revoked in recent weeks.

Gerald, we need to talk. None of this is going to be easy for you to hear, but the simple fact is that you’ve changed. I’ve tried ignoring that feeling, to grin and bear it like a good wife would, but I just can’t pretend any longer: You’re not the man I married. You’re significantly more attractive and loving. You’re considerate, you’re responsible, and you’ve allowed your body to become really chiseled. In a word, you’re the total package.

To be honest, I don’t even recognize you anymore.

This isn’t what I signed up for. It’s been a long time since we stood at the altar and you scratched your nose and mumbled your vows while barely looking me in the eye. Back then, I thought I would be spending the rest of my life with the apathetic, incompetent man in front of me. I’ll never forget how leaden and bored you looked during our first dance and how, 45 seconds into the song, you bent down and whispered into my ear: “Was that good enough? Can I sit down now?” For years, all my friends and family members talked about was how off-putting you were.

These days, it’s like looking at a completely different person. You’re confident. You’re supportive. You know when to tuck in or not tuck in your shirt, and you ask me questions about my day. The other night, I walked through the front door and you surprised me with a shoulder rub and a pan-seared salmon dinner. I thought to myself: Who the hell is this man, and what has he done with my husband?

Is any of this getting through to you? Jesus, people respect you, Gerald. That’s not something I ever thought I’d have to say about my own husband. We need to face facts. You just aren’t who you once were. You’re now a caring partner, a healthy role model to our children, and an all-around interesting guy who cultivates several unique hobbies.

While I don’t want to be shallow, you’ve changed a lot physically, too. I’m not saying I expect you to look the same way you did at 22, but you’ve put on a lot of muscle. It’s like you can’t go a day without exercise. It may sound crazy, but I swear that your face has gotten more symmetrical lately.

Sometimes I look over at night and feel as if there’s a well-toned, courteous stranger in my bed.

Where is the man I fell in love with all those years ago? The man who breathed only through his mouth? The man who was covered head-to-toe in stains regardless of the last time he ate? The man who sent me into anaphylactic shock three times because he kept forgetting that his favorite snack, Reese’s Miniature Cups, had peanuts in them? That version of you—the ugly, bumbling idiot I was head over heels for—is completely gone.

Gerald, I am simply no longer in love with this improved version of you. That’s why I’m packing my bags and leaving tonight. Please don’t beg me to stay. I may not be perfect, but I do know my worth.

The post You’re Not The Man I Married—You’re Significantly More Attractive And Loving appeared first on The Onion.

TOADSTOOL VALE—To aid ongoing recovery efforts in mystical lands recently devastated by a moonbeam, singer and composer Björk held a benefit concert Thursday in support of wilted sunflowers living in the mushroom forest. “This next song goes out to this enchanted mushroom forest and all the drooping sunflowers who were affected by the orb of night’s twilight rays,” said Björk, noting that all lily pads donated by concert attendees would go toward reviving the soil with glow worms and reinforcing the flowers’ stalks so they could one day grow high enough to reach the very star for which they were named. “It will take a lot more than a twinkle from a far away memory to dim your yellow petals. I hope this music can help bring all sugar sprites and pixies together to make this mushroom forest even more mesmerizing than before.” At press time, Björk was accused of selfishly taking advantage of the sunflowers by skimming thousands of donated dragonflies for her own personal use.

The post Björk Performs Benefit Concert For Wilted Sunflowers In Mushroom Forest appeared first on The Onion.

#Kento #RoninWarriors

These charts will shock you I am sure. Travel to the United States for Europeans appears much less popular year-over-year. Financial Times shows the steep drop (paywalled) since the new administration began.

Numbers are based on data from the International Visitor Arrivals Program (ADIS I-94), which as the name suggests, tracks the number of people arriving at air and sea ports.

Tags: Europe, Financial Times, tourism

The Internet Archive was recently honored for its valuable contribution to the Dutch-language Wikipedia community at an event at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle accepted the 2024 Project Uil award at a March 18 gathering of prominent figures in the Dutch open knowledge movement including librarians, archivists, scholars, and representatives from national cultural institutions.

The WikiUilen awards have been given out since 2015 on behalf of the Dutch Wikipedia community in recognition of hardworking Wikipedia volunteers and organizations. Candidates in eight categories (project, writer, editor, newcomer, etc.) are nominated and voted on by fellow Wikipedians. The Internet Archive received the project award and a small replica of an ancient Greek owl sculpture. (“Uilen” in Dutch translates to “owls” in English.)

“The owl is a symbol of wisdom,” said Ronald Velgersdijk, organizer of the Dutch awards, in presenting the statue to Kahle. “We give this project award because the Internet Archive is very important for sharing knowledge and it is very important for Wikimedia. We use it a lot to cite our sources and find information.”

In a concerted effort to ground the information ecosystem in facts, Kahle explained how the Internet Archive has prioritized obtaining and digitizing books referenced in Wikipedia. Since 2016, the Internet Archive has identified and fixed more than 22 million broken links in over 200 language editions of Wikipedia. By pointing readers back to archived web pages in the Wayback Machine and digital books available online, the aim is to increase the credibility of Wikipedia with reliable links and sources, he said.

“The partnership between Wikipedia and the Internet Archive is very strong and growing,” Kahle said.

Watch the Wiki Owl presentation to Internet Archive

Jos Damen, a librarian at Leiden University, helped host the event, which drew nearly 100 attendees. An advocate of open access publishing and a Dutch Wikipedian with over 1 million edits, Damen said he admires the work of the Internet Archive and leans on its resources.

“First and foremost of value is the presence of websites in the Wayback Machine,” Damen said. “As librarians, we all know that links that you access now will be gone in two to five years. It’s important to see these links frozen in time in the Wayback Machine, and then being able to have that reference in Wikipedia.” 

Damen said it’s critical to not only fix links to books, but also to add images and attribution for photos on Wikipedia. For instance, a photograph of small copper stones in the pavement in several European countries, signifying the last place where Jewish people lived before they were taken to concentration camps, is a powerful image that can make a page more engaging, he said. (See Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein) 

Kahle’s remarks covered the history, evolving support, and challenges facing libraries. He spoke about the mission of the Internet Archive to provide universal access to all knowledge, and gave an overview of Internet Archive Europe – which has a somewhat different focus.

“The idea [of Internet Archive Europe] is to try to build our collective intelligence using all sorts of interesting tools so we can have better decision making,” Kahle said.

Last November, Beatrice Murch was named Program Manager of Internet Archive Europe. She is working to find open knowledge champions in Europe interested in making information in a variety of languages translated and available in new ways.

“The hope is that Internet Archive Europe can use AI tools to bring collections to life and make them more interesting to the public,” Murch said. “We are trying hard to find the right message to engage partners and make data on the Internet Archive accessible to more people, including those with disabilities.

”The Wiki-Uil in the Netherlands is modeled after the German example, started in 2014. Learn more about the Dutch Wiki Uil awards.

Talking about the latest episode of the show, how it was made and what the feedback was!
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There Are Many Different Kinds of Love, Brethren Arise, Candlepower, Cylinder Five, God Be With You Till We Meet Again, I Am Running Down the…, I Dont See the Branches I See the Leaves, I Want to Fall in Love on Snapchat, Out of the Skies Under the Earth, Take off and Shoot A Zero, The House Glows with Almost No Help, There Are Many Different Kinds of Love, all by Chris Zabriskie are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...)
Source: http://chriszabriskie.com/vendaface/
Artist: http://chriszabriskie.com/

In brief: Last week we spoke about a brief reprieve in strong winds over the area. It now appears as though that reprieve will end on Thursday, with gusty winds returning through the weekend. The holiday weekend also looks fairly warm and humid, with a decent chance of light rain on Easter Sunday itself.

Tuesday

A weak front is moving into the area, bringing slightly cooler and drier air with it. As a result temperatures today will top out at about 80 degrees, with lower humidity. The front will briefly produce northwesterly winds, gusting perhaps to 15 or 20 mph. However, those winds will pretty quickly shift to come from the east. Skies will be mostly sunny this afternoon. Lows will fall to 60 to 65 degrees tonight in Houston, with cooler conditions further inland. This may not sound like much, but it will be our coldest night for at least the next week.

Wednesday

This will be a pleasant, sunny day with high temperatures of around 80 degrees. We should see southerly winds of 10 to 15 mph, with higher gusts possibly, and this will be a harbinger for the return of higher humidity levels. Lows on Wednesday night will drop into the upper 60s.

Thursday and Friday

We will end the week will a pair of breezy, partly cloudy, and warm days. Highs on Thursday and Friday will climb into the mid- to upper-80s, with moderate humidity levels—which is to say dewpoints in the lower 60s, so a tad humid but not anything like Houston will feel later this summer. Strong winds are also back on the menu. Both days will be rather windy, with southerly gusts up to 30 mph or higher. Nights will be warm, in the 70s.

Saturday and Sunday

The weekend should also be windy and warm. An upper-level disturbance will approach the area, but it is not clear that it will get close enough to the Houston area to produce much rain. We can be confident in warm temperatures in the mid- to upper-80s on both days, with mostly cloudy skies. We’ll also continue to see those southerly gusts of up to 25 or 30 mph. As for rain, chances are probably less than 10 percent on Saturday, and in the vicinity 30 to 50 percent on Sunday. If it does rain on Easter Sunday, I think showers will be light for the most part. Organized thunderstorms appear unlikely in the Houston metro area.

Next week

A front will approach the area on Monday, but right now the majority of our modeling guidance suggests it will stall out north of Houston. That means we will probably be left in a warm and muggy pattern. The good news for our gardens and soils is that rain chances do look better next week, especially in the Wednesday time frame. However since that is more than a week away, I would not have the utmost confidence just yet.