I keep thinking about the similarity of exploitation of academic labor by publishers to the exploitation of everyone’s labor by AI companies, and stories like this just make it more clear.

I teach WordPress, and I guess I should be covering this this semester. I’ve been avoiding reading about recent drama at Automattic, but if this is a taste of it, wow, wow, wow.

Posting this as a bookmark. It’s mindboggling how overtly racist this is—and how much work the GOP will do to dismiss it as nothing. I want to be able to return back to this in the weeks and months to come, to remind myself and others just how bad things are. gift link

It is hard to have honest conversations about the difficulty of parenting: Even in reading this post, I tensed up, because these are things you aren’t supposed to say. I’m glad someone was vulnerable enough to write this.

What a wild story.

Compelling metaphor.

I had never heard of the tram driver Olympics before, and I love it. [gift link]

Taking cues from neo-Nazis is a great look for the GOP ticket.

24 hours on Elon’s Twitter feed is a great idea for a story, and I’m glad someone did it!

Who benefits from AI? Who doesn’t?

A good take by Molly White. I remember when I stopped thinking about ebooks in terms of screens (as opposed to paper) and started thinking about them in terms of DRM (as opposed to free use). DRM helps the already powerful at the expense of everything else, and I want to do more to push back against it.

I’m currently reading Extremely Hardcore and can’t wait to read Character Limit. The Twitter purchase alone ought to dismiss any serious ideas that Musk could do this kind of work.

Good for the dad, and shame on the politicians being this terrible.

Can something be shocking but not surprising? I’ve been thinking about this all day and still can’t believe it’s real.

Wish it were for more principled reasons, but I’ll take it.

It is wild—and worrying—just how close this race is.

I’m bookmarking this episode for later because it does a better job than I’ve ever heard of talking about how messy and complex and difficult it can be to have Mormon roots in Community of Christ—and it doesn’t even get into some of the “outside Utah” vs. “in Utah” dynamics that I personally think get overlooked.

This is a take on digital labor and datafication that I can honestly say I never expected.

I really ought to read the original piece instead of just the Slashdot excerpt, but I tried that, and it just made me even more angry, and I don’t think it would change my response. I’m not opposed to doing away with grades, but I’m not convinced by hand-wringing about grade inflation. Grades do need to be meaningful to be useful, but the idea that As need to be reserved for an elite few speaks less to meritocracy (referenced in the full piece) than to a need for an elite.

Deeply appreciate Masnick’s writeup. I don’t know the ins and outs of the law, and that’s given me some pause in being upset about the ruling. To see a lawyer find fault with so much gives me greater confidence in my own frustration. The most dangerous part, though, doesn’t require a law degree to understand. The logic of the findings poses a threat to all libraries, not just this one.

What a disaster.

Interesting read wirh important implications for how we think about research quality.

I am way more pessimistic about AI than Masnick is, but we agree on this sort of thing. Algorithmic surveillance is no more appropriate in response to AI concerns than it is to cheating concerns.

In a weird kind of Streisand effect, I’ve only started using the Internet Archive library since this lawsuit began and it’s a fantastic service. I won’t pretend to know the ins and outs of copyright law, but this sucks.

Got a good chuckle from this.

Sometimes the internet is good.

This is one of these stories where I’ve been waiting to get Masnick’s take on it, and he does not disappoint.

I’ve been trying to think through Durov’s arrest since I first heard about it—there are a lot of complex things going on here. I think this captures nicely my thoughts and taught me a few things, too. Telegram is a sketchy platform (technically even more than in terms of content), but that doesn’t mean arresting the founder is warranted. Yet, that doesn’t mean that outcry on the right is in good faith, either.

One thing this article misses is how often CAPTCHA has been used to train AI. It’s always been playing both sides against each other.

This article speaks to a deep tension in Mormon theology: You can pray to God to tell you what is right, but you shouldn’t expect it to tell you something different than what church leaders say. To what extent, then, does prayer become subordinated to obedience?

Prisoners got punished for taking advantage of a hilarious exploit in an app for transferring money from their commissary accounts to a private company’s media store, but no one at that private company is being held accountable for unironically describing prisons as a “growth industry.” This sounds like something Doctorow would have made up for The Bezzle, and it’s kind of amazing that I’m reading it in the news instead.

The state and a private company are splitting millions of dollars that they earn from charging a literally captive audience to use tablets. This is straight out of Cory Doctorow’s The Bezzle, and I hate it so, so much.

Rand Paul is so often wrong, but when he’s right, he’s often really right.

Interesting—and hopeful—read.

I’ve only skimmed this, but I’m posting it as a reminder to myself that everything I said about Disney yesterday also applies to Apple, and that I need to find ways of extracting myself from their ecosystem, as hard as it may be.

What reckless hubris. As I wrote earlier today, I’m in favor of more liberal IP law, but not so that businesses can swallow up content to profit from it.