Notices by Jason Lefkowitz (jalefkowit@octodon.social)

It amazes me that Britain is at the stage of having to ration food, and yet it's still politically infeasible for any respectable leader there to say that Brexit was a mistake https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/supermarket-food-shortages-aldi-asda-tesco-b2287794.html

@alcinnz I've never been to Idaho, but I imagine it's a bit like the time I spent as a kid in Utah, which is to say: beautiful country, shame about the people

Look, I'm gonna be blunt here: state legislatures are full of idiots. Just chock full of them. These are the places where the political careers of people who are too dumb, or crazy, or corrupt to win a seat in Congress top out. The talented politicians punch their tickets there and move up; the untalented ones stay there for decades. So it should not be surprising that state legislatures frequently produce awful ideas.

All that being said, though -- even by state legislature standards, this is a remarkably awful idea.

https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/local/capitol-watch/idaho-lawmakers-introduce-legislation-to-criminalize-those-who-administer-covid-vaccines-legislature/277-2436a514-e7da-4b31-9762-f9be10300075

@alcinnz makes me feel pretty old to realize I remember that was XUL’s XML namespace https://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul

Who gets to remind them about XUL

@mmasnick Disappointed to see him reach for the "it's going to be like Linux on the desktop" line, the favorite lazy dismissal of tech pundits who'd rather not think too hard about a subject

I sincerely admire that the website for ABC News is still a subdomain of Go.com, a domain that is a relic of a corporate branding decision made 25 years ago and abandoned 20 years ago. Cool URIs Don't Change, dammit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go.com

"Unlike the clean OSes you'd get from Google or Apple, Samsung sells space in its devices to the highest bidder via pre-installed crapware. A company like Facebook will buy a spot on Samsung's system partition, where it can get more intrusive system permissions that aren't granted to app store apps, letting it more effectively spy on users. You'll also usually find Netflix, Microsoft Office, Spotify, Linkedin, and who knows what else. Another round of crapware will also be included if you buy a phone from a carrier, i.e., all the Verizon apps and whatever space they want to sell to third parties."

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/the-samsung-galaxy-s23s-bloated-android-build-somehow-uses-60gb-of-storage/

I can testify to this. My last Samsung phone was a Galaxy S7. It came with Facebook pre-installed, and the system would not allow you to uninstall it

@xerz I think a lot of it is just that "normal" people have such low expectations for tech. They've been beaten into just assuming that tech is always going to be slow and complicated and unreliable, because so often that's what it is. So it doesn't surprise them that their phone takes forever to reboot. Sure my phone doesn't work, what else is new? NOTHING works.

A huge part of my practice is just teaching my clients that it's actually OK to demand better

You may be asking tonight how five Black cops could beat a Black man to death.

I can't answer that. All I can do is tell you a story.

During the Holocaust, at every stage of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, there were some Jews who were willing to help them along. Nazi rule in the ghettos of Eastern Europe was enforced by Jewish police. Forced labor gangs in the concentration camps were worked to death by Jewish overseers.

These collaborators worked under a range of titles, but in the history books one in particular has come to stand for all of them: "kapo." And that label has stuck. To this day, 80 years later, one of the worst insults you can hurl at a Jew is to call them a kapo.

Why did they do it? In a system rigged against them, collaboration was a way to suffer less. If you collaborated, you got better food, warmer clothes. You got beaten less. You got to live another day. And you got a little bit of power -- power that you could wield however you wanted, as long as you only wielded it against your fellow Jews.

The kapos would have told you they had other reasons, of course. Some would tell you that they were trying to be a buffer between their people and the system that oppressed them. Some may even have thought they could change the system from the inside. But in the end, the justifications didn't matter; when the kapos stopped being useful to their masters, they were just as disposable as their justifications.

If you are wondering how a system can get to a point where people are oppressing their own, all I can tell you is: that is how oppressive systems work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapo

Congratulations to everyone who worked on this for completely missing the point of music https://google-research.github.io/seanet/musiclm/examples/

The thing about "AI art" is that it is quite obviously created by people who care way more about the AI than about the art

Many thanks to the JavaScript community for making it mandatory that every web development project include a build step, the thing whose absence is what attracted me to web development in the first place

A thing that computer technology killed before most of you were probably even born is now an artifact of newspaper history: the "bus plunge story." Let's discuss it in a short thread (🧵).

Back in Ye Olden Days, when you flipped through a print newspaper, you'd come across an extremely brief news item. Here's a real example, from the New York Times of July 21, 1964:

BUS PLUNGE KILLS 8
Las Palmas, Canary Islands, July 20 (UPI)—Eight persons perished today when a small bus plunged over a 300-foot cliff into the sea near the town of Mogan. One man jumped from the vehicle before it reached the edge and was saved. All the victims were Spaniards.

These came to be known as "bus plunge stories," because they were so often about, well, buses plunging off a cliff somewhere.

But why would readers of the New York Times care about a bus going off a cliff in the Canary Islands?

The short answer is, they didn't. The bus plunge story wasn't there for the reader; it was there for the paper's editors.

In the earliest days of television most shows were broadcast live, because everything was technically much simpler that way. So television was a bit like the theatre — the curtain would go up, the show would occur, and when the curtain came down, the whole enterprise would vanish into memory.

But even though there was no easy way to pre-record a television program, there were still cases where producers might want to preserve a copy of a live program; to allow affiliates who weren’t connected to the live network to retransmit it, to give affiliates the opportunity to rebroadcast at a different time than the live air time, or just to save it for the historians.

Eventually this problem would be solved by the invention of videotape, but practical videotape systems didn’t come along until the mid-‘50s. So before then, producers used a much less elegant solution: the kinescope. A kinescope was just a 16mm or 35mm film camera pointed at a TV monitor; when the show aired live, the kinescope would record a copy of it onto film, which could then be copied and distributed using all the familiar tools filmmakers used to distribute film. The quality sucked, and the whole system was so rickety it’s a miracle it ever worked at all. But for a decade plus, it was the only record anyone was making of the otherwise completely ephemeral world of television.

This YouTube channel is dedicated to aggregating and presenting old kinescope recordings of all kinds. It’s a fascinating archive of what television was like in the years when television was still trying to figure that out for itself.

https://youtube.com/@freethekinescopes3137

Every schoolchild knows that Thomas Edison invented the motion picture camera. Right?

Not so fast. Edison first publicly exhibited his motion picture system (actually designed by an employee of his, William Kennedy Dickson) in 1891. But three years before that, in 1888, a Frenchman, Louis Le Prince, shot what is now believed to be the oldest surviving motion picture — a scene of his family in the garden of their house in Leeds, England. Le Prince got a British patent for his work that same year.

So why doesn’t the world remember Louis Le Prince as the inventor of the motion picture? Because on September 16, 1890, while preparing for the first public exhibition of his system, Louis Le Prince got on a train… and vanished.

The inventor was never seen again. In the 132 years that followed, no one has ever been able to establish what happened to him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Le_Prince

"Hi, we're CKEditor! The Internet loves us for our easy, drop-in functionality. That's why we've completely rebuilt our product so that every single goddamned feature has to be installed separately via NPM and wired together via JavaScript you have to write yourself before compiling in a build step you didn't have before WAIT COME BACK"

Never in my life have I seen a new version of a software product misunderstand the product's core appeal as comprehensively as CKEditor 5 does

Do any of my followers know anyone at Mozilla? Because I want to hear from the person at Mozilla who decided it would be a good idea to teach beginning web developers that <b> is the "Bring Attention To" tag and <i> is the "Idiomatic Text" tag

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/b

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/i

(kudos to @aparrish for spotting this, it is making my brain melt)