Oof, this is terrifying.

Lots to like in this post.

I could nitpick some of this, but it’s an important read.

Good work from the EFF here.

Love this kind of work from The Onion.

Love a company response that comes down to “sure, we talked about it, but we didn’t actually do it.”

This comparison crossed my mind, too, and I’m glad for this write-up.

I was reading some Jacques Ellul yesterday, where he noted that in “technical morality,” technology cannot do wrong, only the humans using the technology.

Flock’s response here seems to be a variation on that: The technology cannot be inaccurate, only the humans using it.

Amazing update to a dumb saga.

Look, some of the problem is Flock, but the core of the problem is ALPRs, and merely switching companies doesn’t solve that.

This movie is well done, and Turing is a figure I’d love to learn more about, but I got the sense that these two observations were in tension with each other. In short, I’m so annoyed at how obviously the history has been made (and changed) to conveniently fit a movie that I can’t enjoy what is not a bad film otherwise.

Finally got my July 4th print edition of The Onion, and I don’t know if this fake ad is regular Onion absurdism or an under-the-radar Mormon-adjacent joke.

Missed the original story, but wow.

Some very interesting perspective on fair use and asking permission.

I want to disagree with some of what Doctorow says here, but that’s precisely why I am bookmarking it. I want to make sure that my opposition to generative AI is principled rather than reactionary, and his defense of certain uses of it is something I need to keep in mind.

Hard to pick a single killer line from this one. There’s this paragraph:

Appreciate for a moment the bind Meta finds itself in: Its product allowed customers to behave so objectionably that the company responded with a content ban, as if to say “Stop making us look bad.”

And then this conclusion hits hard:

In saying the company will police the creepiest version of smart glasses content but sidestepping deeper questions, Meta is trying to have it both ways: It gets to tout its enforcement while creating the conditions for this content to exist in the first place.

Looks like the Trump administration is responding to dumb decisions and cynical cuts with pure exploitation:

After withdrawing from the World Health Organization and losing access to its global network that tracks and combats disease outbreaks, the U.S. is attempting to obtain the information necessary to address potential pandemics through a patchwork of deals with individual countries

Flock is gross, but so is this.

I feel like everything I read about the Taylor Farms response to being identified with the cyclosporasis outbreak makes me distrust the company more than just their being identified with the outbreak.

Quelle surprise.

Love this headline, hate the story.

I wish I’d had this on hand during a conversation with someone last month who was willing to give Musk credit for what he’s done with Starlink. As Bode points out, there is genuine value in the product, but there are huge problems, too.

Terrifying stuff.

I haven’t been preaching for Community of Christ for very long, but by virtue of different demographics and traditions than the denomination I grew up in (in short, I preach more often for Community of Christ than I would have continuing in Latter-day Saint congregations), I suspect that I may be soon approaching the number of “talks” that I’d given in my past religious life. Maybe not this year, but that might happen in the next couple of years if I keep up the schedule that I’m on. Anyway, I bring that up because in my short time preaching for Community of Christ, I’ve never struggled with a sermon as much as I have with this one, and I’m trying to remember if that’s also true of my contributions to Latter-day Saint worship services over the years.

Wow, was this good! I picked it up because I was struggling with a sermon on the parable that gives the book its name, but even if I didn’t end up taking much from the book for my sermon, it really made an impression.

It’s evocative, and it does an amazing job of describing a hopeful apocalypse. I can see how other media I like—Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway or the indie TTRPG Why We Fight—owe something to this book.