C’est du n’importe quoi, ça. Quelle honte, ce pays.

On one hand, if the university’s connections are tenuous, I can understand making the easy move to get the administration off our back—especially when I’m confident that UK is pushing back against NIH indirect costs and other issues. On the other, I certainly hope that our response to every attack isn’t going to be to roll over and wash our hands of things.

Surveillance sucks, and here’s the latest example.

I have been meaning for months to embrace Kagi, and this is pushing me further over that edge.

Some good things to think about right here.

Cory Doctorow’s The Bezzle continues to play out in real life.

This weekend, I visited family and complained to myself that their Amazon Fire sticks were emphasizing ad delivery over being a TV. I guess that’s the future for my Roku stick, too? What a sucky future we live in.

The “brute force” metaphor is helpful here, and the article also draws attention to the vulnerability of algorithmic media to generative AI brute forcing.

I’ve been trying to figure out how angry to be about this move from Amazon, and Doctorow’s thinking is helpful: Very angry. (I don’t own and would never own an Echo, but it still makes me mad).

Acknowledging the ambiguity in Musk’s salute is important: not to let him off the hook, but to recognize how much more dangerous things are when they’re ambiguous than when they’re straightforward.

I believe that scraping the internet to profit off of generative AI is ethically problematic BUT I concede that it should be fair use BUT this is still a soulless and terrible argument.

I mean, I’ve always wanted to live and work in France, but I’ve never wanted to feel like I would have to.

Worrying stuff.

If I don’t bookmark this article, I will quickly forget how dumb this whole thing has been (not to mention petty and mean).

Posting this in the interest of fairness, but I’m still not happy with Mozilla right now.

Le sigh.

Laugh to keep from crying.

Honestly, I get the original call, but I’m glad Bluesky backtracked. Content moderation is hard.

Hmmm. Don’t love this.

What a mess.

What gross software.

Yes please.

I have qualms about the U.S. providing military support to any cause, but if there is such a thing as good U.S. military support, Ukraine is a clear example of it, and either way, this is an embarassment.

Some bonkers details in here.

I soured on Section 230 for a bit, but I came back and largely because of arguments like this one.

If Jordan Bardella thinks it was a Nazi salute… gift link

DOGE continues to insist on the dumbest way to carry out its dumb goals.

This is very cool, especially the SSO bit.

It’s all bad right now, but it’s still important to call out the particularly bad stuff.

One more thing right out of the Twitter playbook from DOGE: Firing people without understanding how important they are.

Bookmarking this in case I need to show it to a family member.

McSweeney’s pulls no punches, but Vance has earned no mercy.

Love this framing of using Meta as “making donations to Mark Zuckerberg.” It nicely describes the idea of digital labor that’s been on my mind for a couple of years now.

The headline is a little provocative, but it’s scary that we live in a world where it makes some sense. More broadly, though, I found that the first Trump administration converted me to nuclear disarmament—yes, this president is scary, but that any president has access to that much destructive power is scarier still. I expect I’ll go further in that direction this time around.

Starting to sense a pattern.

The rules seem to be that it’s okay to do whatever in the GOP, but no Democrat can even seem to be in a sticky situation. What a joke.