In Lexington, we have a local hemp store called The Botany Bay, and every time I see one of their advertisements, I just smile at what a great choice of name that is.

Still angry about Reddit and RSS: Praising RSS’s role in the “open web” in an announcement that they’re shutting it off isn’t saying the quiet part out loud, but it is pointing a giant neon sign at the quiet part.

I just had a brief moment where I felt some sympathy for Reddit: “Maybe I’m part of the problem for only consuming via RSS, which isn’t good for their bottom line.” Then I remembered that they don’t produce the content I’m interested in, they just profit off it, and now I’m even angrier.

Reddit ditching RSS b/c of massive web scraping tolerated because protecting IP is now a threat to business is threefold disrespect for Aaron Swartz, and everyone should be ashamed. (I don’t think IP is the issue w/AI, but it’s what let feds harass Swartz in a way that they never will AI).

There are a handful of subreddits I follow via RSS, and the decision to stop supporting RSS is burning up whatever remaining respect I had for the platform.

I don’t want to defend Reddit too much here, because I’ve been disappointed with them for years, but this is another example of “the problem is with the mere existence of the technology,” and “the technology” is once again generative AI.

Wild numbers here. Why does Lexington have these cameras if Lexington is only using them 4% of the time?

Ditch Flock in Lexington.

An “employee benefits company” reimbursed me for medical expenses by putting the money into an account at the company instead of my bank. Now, my employer is no longer contracting with this company, so I have to hurry and find things to buy before it starts taking it back $5 at a time. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

Ugh, don’t like this at all.

People are just catching up, Garrett. They should have been this angry for the past nine years, and no one should have let things get this far.

This sucks so much.

No, gross, ew, why?

Some good insights here. Taylorism is always worth talking about.

This sucks. I feel bad for not being subscribed to the Herald-Leader, but it was McClatchy who chased me away.

Excellent satire.

Wait, is there a distinctively Mormon way of pronouncing “nursery”? I feel like this dialect quiz is overemphasizing patterns (my “most like” is ~55% and my “least like” ~45%, which doesn’t seem enough to assign a location), but I would accept this particular tell.

Review is good, removal is better.

I am repeatedly on record as being a fan of the Book of Mormon despite believing it’s ahistorical and despite recognizing how deeply problematic some of its ideas are. If there’s one problematic idea that I’m not totally sure can be redeemed even with a critical, willing-to-push-back reading of the text, it’s the appropriation of Indigenous history into the core narrative of the Book of Mormon.

Recently rereading Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything drew my attention some specific aspects of this relationship that I think are particularly interesting (and troubling). They are also professionally interesting to me since Graeber and Wengrow are fundamentally pushing back on narratives of technical progress. In fact, I nearly wrote this post for my “Work” sub-blog but am too lazy this morning to do the scaffolding needed to make the Book of Mormon narrative accessible to those not familiar with it; I recognize that someone can also read my “Communities” posts without being super familiar with the Book of Mormon, but I’m going to roll the dice on that one and answer questions as they come up.

Only skimmed this—and it deserves a more thorough reading—but it’s a good reminder that “Meta is awful” does not justify all constraints on Meta.

Living in interesting times.

Masnick always makes me think (even when I don’t fully agree with him), and this is no exception. (Though Heather Burns is the one who came up with the most important thing bouncing around my brain now).

I own a physical copy of this book but sold out to hoopla to listen to it over the weekend so I could say I’d finally read it. I appreciate just how practical this book is: outlining steps one can take rather than simply appealing to an abstract anarchist ideal.

I also felt a real tension while reading this. The ideals it sets out really speak to me, but the amount of work and commitment that it would take to actually follow these principles feels intimidating to me.

Haven’t finished the interview yet, but so far, Hochul isn’t impressing me. Ghost guns terrify me, and I would celebrate Meta collapsing as a company, but I think there are reasonable critiques of these policies, and when confronted with them, she kind of shrugs?

Combined with her seeming celebration of AI and tech companies in general, this just feels a lot like “I am solving a problem” performativity rather than thinking deeper about what the issues are here.

If Andy Barr of all people is removing Trump mentions from his website…

So much going on here. I think Boxer’s comments are some of the most important.