frandroid | Reading

READER. I thought I had lost all of my Firefox tabs. All 918 of them. While trying to recover them, I mistakenly shut down my browser again, preventing the "restore last session" type of dialogue from happening easily. And my Time Machine backup is not running on my work computer, which has remained my main web browsing machine. I had LOOOTS of podcast episodes banked on there. Plus different windows with extensive bibliographies for special research topics. ("

frandroid, why don't you just bookmark the pages?" "Shut up Pinky!"). I was fairly despondent. I have a back up going to last September which has the bulk of my special topics, but the podcasts seemed to be lost. Finally today while I was looking at something different, I realized that there was a different "restore session" button than the about:sessionstorage dialogue in the 'fox. I clicked on that and it restored a month-old session I had tested with, so I was overjoyed. Finally I searched the trash bin, found a session backup dating to just before I lost my tabs, and restored that. Magic!! I am so relieved.

Alright, on with our regularly scheduled program. The first item is pretty nice "me" stuff but the second one was fun.

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Chasing Leviathan - Understanding Modern Kurdish History with Dr. Djene Bajalan

In this episode, Dr. Bajalan describes how Ottoman, Turkish and Kurdish modernity were intertwined and how the idea of their respective nation-states developed in relation to each other, esp. In the crucial decades of 1910-1930.

(The PKK held a symbolic "weapons surrender" ceremony today, where they put 50 automatic rifles in a big container and set the whole thing on fire. Empty symbolism, clearly, which matches the Turkish' state own emptiness in this "diplomatic process". To demonstrate the point, an hour after this symbolic demonstrating of good will by the PKK, the Turkish air force bombarded a PKK position in Northern Iraq. What a clusterfuck. I've promised a follow-up post about this... It should come up soon.)

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Better Offline - Silicon Valley Fashion With The Menswear Guy

So it’s been a bit of a trend this year, if you have a successful podcast (probably one which pays appearance fees), to have

dieworkwear come on to talk about whatever? So Ed Zitron didn’t miss his chance and had him on to talk about the style a variety of tech executives, from Zuck to Jensen Huang (nVidia). At the end of the episode he discusses buying the best leather jacket for your taste. The thing that I love about him is that he’s all about “figure out your style, then rock it” kind of fashion guy, rather than the old school “this is the style now, forget everything you knew yesterday” thing.

...

I love Ed Zitron to bits, but other than in this episode and a few other interviews, his ranting about AI is getting pretty repetitive. I think I'll focus on listening to Tech Won't Save Us more than him.

altamira16

This book was a very well done AI skeptic book that was rooted in deep knowledge of the history of artificial intelligence, and it brought to light some interesting points that I had never thought about.

It gets into the history of AI, and a lot of that discussion is rooted in the type of probabilistic models that I learned about in grad school. It is discussing n-grams, Markov, and so on.

There is a discussion about how AI is an attempt to break labor and gets into a more detailed history of the Luddites. The Luddites were craftsmen, and machines were replacing their hard won skills with an inferior product. The machines that were doing this were also dangerous to their operators.

Various people involved in AI feel like there should not be any AI policy until it is thoroughly discussed, but the authors propose that existing laws should be used to limit the use of AI in areas where it can do harm. They quote Michael Atleson, an attorney within the FTC Division of Advertising Practices:

Your therapy bots aren't licensed psychologists, your AI girlfriends are neither girls nor friends, your griefbots have no soul, and your AI copilots are not gods.

For example, there should not be AI therapy or AI-driven law because the harm that can come from those things is great. Law has to do with the nuance of language, and generated language that no human really thinks through does not have the same nuance.

There were also good arguments for limiting the use of AI in education.

In August 2020, thousands of British students, unable to take their A-level exams due to the COVID-19 pandemic, received grades calculated based on an algorithm that took as input, among other things, the grades that other students at their schools received in previous years. After massive public outcry, in which hundreds of students gathered outside the prime minister's residence at 10 Downing Street in London, chanting "Fuck the algorithm!" the grades were retracted and replaced with grades based on teachers' assessments of the student work.

A lot of technology in education is designed to give an inferior education to poor kids and union-bust.

One thing that I did not know was that the little Gemini summary on a Google search uses 10-30 times more energy than search before this feature was added.

The authors see both AI doomers and AI boosters as two sides of the same coin. Both of these groups believe that the AI will become smarter than humans. The outcome is the only thing that they differ on.

The group that wants to consider the data used to train the models and the impacts that AI has on the present really does not want to get lumped in with AI doomers that think that the AI is going to eventually get so smart that it will destroy humanity. They are rooted in reality while the doomers are not. There was some criticism of how Vice President Harris was trying to get the people concerned with the present impact of AI to work with the doomers.

There were a lot of references Karen Hao's work. How has recently released the book "Empire of AI." Hao is an AI journalist specifically focused on OpenAI.

conuly

Adrian Tchaikovsky is amazingly hit-or-miss for me, but this looks like it's coming up "hit". The sapient arthropods are a swarm of bees. If there are any spiders, I haven't met them yet!

chickenfeet

https://operaramblings.blog/2025/07/11/final-thoughts-on-the-fringe/

sabotabby

I finally processed these. They're all from St. John's and Ferryland.

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frandroid

So even though I've been selling zines for 25 fucking years now, there are two big zine things I have never done until now:
1) put out my own zine
2) organize a zine fair.

Amusingly, the second item is happening before the first one. I had thought about organizing a small bar-hosted zine fair for a while (Cut 'n Paste in Toronto used to be held at Sneaky Dees (a sizeable punk-ish bar with two floors), and the first zine fair I visited, Generous Margins, was held at the Sugar Refinery). I long have had a bar-owning friend who is open to the idea. Then last fall, Canada's largest fair, Canzine, was cancelled because the guy running it and Broken Pencil got cancelled for a second time in a few years, this time for being a rabid, lying, libelling, fabulating Zionist. So he decided to just destroy his two indie institutions. Then this spring I learned that SOMEONE ELSE had held a bar fair (which I missed by a day), so now I was like IT'S ON!! This summer I was talking to a new zine friend about it, and he told me that he and some other people were getting together to organize a new zine fair, to ostensibly replace Canzine. So I have joined this collective, we have held a few organizing meetings so far, and it looks like this thing is serious!!! I'm very excited. It's going to be on a smaller scale than Canzine (it had between 150 and 200 vendors, depending on the year/venue--we could probably cram 80 in our venue but others are a bit more conservative/chill/insecure about it, so we're looking at 56 to 70. It's going to be an application fair so we'll see how many people we decide to let in and possibly adjust the number of tables in consequence.

We were discussing whether to have sponsors or not (not soliciting them, but even just allowing them to ask for the privilege), and while I was in the "sure, we could do more things with more money" mindset, one of the collective members, incidentally the person who had organized that spring bar zine fair, was like "if they're not selling zines, even if they're an indie business, they're still a business trying to use our reputation to make more money". I'm not absolutist like that (I'm fine with indie book publishers/bookstores paying hundreds of dollars for a table if they feel like it), I dig this anarchist/zine purist take and I feel like we're in good company. (We're going to have a notice for potential sponsors to write to us to ask to sponsor, but it looks like we'll be picky. At most we'd probably have three sponsor tables anyway.)

chickenfeet

https://operaramblings.blog/2025/07/10/lucian-plato-and-the-secrets-of-the-pussy/

arlie

Today's offering: Should We Politicize the Texas Flood? Absolutely: When it comes to disasters, accountability delayed is accountability denied

I responded to this post, based entirely on the title, as follows. The response pretty much immediately disappeared, in what amounts to a sea of vitriol.

In common decency, people should refrain from casting blame while victims and bystanders are still reeling, and delay even longer before anything that smacks of blaming the victims.

In the news today, we have a person who lost her job for a social media post saying that the victims got what they deserved, given the voting records of part of the area affected.

I can't find it in me to be annoyed at those consequences.

It's just too soon to say things like that. At least wait until the bodies have been found and buried.

A chat board I once frequented imposed a 3 day delay for comments about disasters. It helped a lot to keep the furor down.

Parts of Krugman's actual text make good sense, and he's right about Trump et al politicizing disasters in "blue" areas. But that politicization was treated - and seen - as shocking at the time. Why does he choose to demonstrate to all and sundry that Democrats are not only just as bad as Republicans, but just as bad as MAGA? At least he managed to avoid blaming anyone except political figures, from county level on up, unlike the doctor who lost her job I referenced in my response.

Yes, the news cycle is likely to move on, forgetting about these floods as soon as some celebrity breaks up with their significant other, or whatever else occurs they think will drive clicks better than "old news". But a delayed furor about these deaths - complete with concerns for future deaths - ought to get news attention, especially if it comes with decent proposals for preventing or at least reducing future deaths.

frandroid

Watch on YouTube

conuly

"Why work here?"

"Weekly pay!"

Yup, that's why I would like to apply for any and all jobs!

(On a side note, A has been sending me a lot of job links today. I'm a bit inundated, but I somehow don't think that "Great, please don't send them to me, just fill them out with my resume for me" is going to go over very well.)

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conuly

Asked where I lived, was concerned that the answer is "Staten Island". FFS, it's not Siberia!

I need to start telling people I'm moving in with a friend in Tribeca. Just straight up lie.

chickenfeet

https://operaramblings.blog/2025/07/09/quiltro/

mildred_of_midgard

Knee getting slightly better, but still oscillating back and forth between the front part hurting and the back part hurting, depending on how exactly I angle my foot when I'm using the computer.

I did manage a little over 29 miles of walking on Friday, but I had to lie down constantly because my back was hurting. I'm sure if not for that, I would have had to stop for other things (right foot, left knee, left hamstrings), but not *this* much! It took 12 hours to cover 29 miles. Even accounting for ice cream, snacks, and bathroom pit stops, it should have been an hour or two less at least.

I'm not sure why my back got so much worse some time between November and May. I hope it gets un-worse soon. I still haven't sorted out the mattress thing (it may be a delusion that I ever will, as in 4 years, I haven't, but I won't give up hope as long as I have new ideas to try out), so it needs to get back to where it was on its own!

Friday's walk: a LARGE cardamom Persian ice cream at the place in Watertown! In fact, so large that the lady thought I wanted a carton to take home. "No, ice cream lady, I will eat it all right here. Hand it over with all speed." :D

I also saw Perkins School for the Blind. When I was looking at the map for the ice cream place, that name jumped out at me in the vicinity, and indeed: it is the same school that Annie Sullivan and Hellen Keller went to. So I walked over there and took a couple pics of the signs. It's a nice-looking campus!

I'm hoping my back, knee, and hamstrings hold up for another long walk this weekend! If I can't run, I at least want to walk. I'd like to get my walks up to over 30 miles. At this point, I think my legs can do it, it's my back that makes it simply take too long to fit in one day (plus my knees' inability to shave off some time by running).

chickenfeet

https://operaramblings.blog/2025/07/08/me-and-you-and-the-highland-coo/

rydra_wong

Especially while it's at 75% off in the sale, making it 62p:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/406150/Refunct/

For anyone who might want to sample some easy platforming with a very very low entry threshold.

Chill and rather lovely environment (okay, probably depends on you liking brutalist architecture, but still -- there's a day-night cycle! there's sunshine! the water is gorgeous! the music is gentle!) with no time pressure and no penalties for failing a jump hundreds of times (except that, at worst, you fall in the water and have to swim about and haul yourself out again).

N.B. Most reviews describe this as a half-hour game, and there are achievements for speedrunning it in under 8 minutes or under 4 minutes.

It took me over five hours of playtime to beat it, which should be indicative of the co-ordination and skill levels I'm working with here. And yet it did not at any point feel stressful or humiliating for me. It felt like a pleasant, relaxing environment in which to fail repeatedly and experiment.

It started at a level low enough that I could manage it, and then had a really satisfying difficulty curve. If I was stalling on the next objective, I could still run and parkour round the environment purely for fun (and sometimes ended up working out how to pick off the optional achievements in the process).

Towards the very end, I started to think that the last jumps might just flat-out exceed the limits of what I am currently capable of, and it felt like if that did happen, I would still be able to walk away pretty happily having already got way more than 62p's worth of enjoyment out of it.

Will absolutely be playing it again.

conuly

Just went through the website and applied to everything I meet the minimum qualifications for, for what good it may do.

They could, in theory, save my information from one application to the next. They don't do that. They could also not require me to answer "where did you hear about this?" every time - but the joke's on them. "I went to your website and clicked on every job where I meet the minimum qualifications" is not an option, so I've just been lying and saying "hiring event" because that's the first choice. They will get no useful data from me, no thank you!

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conuly

( Cut for being perhaps a bit insensitive or factually wrong )

Also, two links where you can donate.

conuly

is the constant whiplash between panic and popcorn.

Right now I'm hovering over "popcorn" - new political parties? With added drama and infighting? LOL, okay, let's see how that works out for you!

(Look, I need a break from panic now and again, and I will take my fun where it appears.)

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frandroid

The Dig - How Zohran Won w/ NYC DSA

If you're like me in the left, you're excited that Zohran Mamdani has won the NYC democratic nomination for mayor, esp. in light of the insane amount of vitriol and Big Money put against him. So Daniel Denvir decided to interview the co-chairs of his campaign. They discuss how this absolutely did not come out of nowhere, but is the culmination of years of running smaller campaigns and capacity city building on the part of NYC DSA. One of the top organizers there cut her teeth on the Obama 2008 campaign, so you could say that the seeds were first planted there.

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On a related note, I dislike the tag #PodcastFriday now because I do my write ups on most OTHER days. :P. I created this tag in the mold of #FollowFriday tag from Twitter's early days, but meh. :). Sometimes I bank them but this episode is totally exciting to listen to.