The Librarian @thelibrarian@scholar.social

Reading online news, 2008:
- go to website
- read news

Reading online news, 2018:
- go to website
- no, don’t share location
- hell no, don’t send me notifications
- consent to cookie warning
- consent to policies
- no, don’t open in app
- no, don’t want the newsletter
- skip inspirational quote
- close full page ad
- read news

I can't help myseeeeelf aauuuhhhh

and there's something really infuriating and nefarious about twitter/fb/google/whoever appropriating the word "algorithmic"—with all its connotations of fairness and impartiality and monolithicity—to mean "does whatever we want it to do at this particular moment" (instead of, you know, "following an unambiguous set of rules and steps")

I wish #Mastodon #emoji would be called "petroglyphs."

For those who stubbornly seek freedom around the world, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination.
-- Noam Chomsky

#anarchism #quote #bot

- a microSD card weighs somewhere around 0.4g
- the highest capacity microSD that's easily available is 256GB
- a trebuchet can throw a 90kg projectile over 300m

90kg worth of microSD cards is 225,000 of them

Therefore a trebuchet can throw 57.6PB of data over 300m

This would have the highest throughput of any telecommunications network ever created

~ The field of Arbol ~

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

I wish "uses too much memory for what it does" was considered a bug by more programmers.

There should be a word for the strangers you see repeatedly, year after year, as on a common commute. You watch them grow older, their children growing up. You see them happy, sad, yelling on their phone. You see the clothes they pick for each season. Their struggles and joys are reflected and known in the tiny daily slices we witness. How could we not feel connected, even distant and nameless?

This only happens in the city. You see a lot of strangers in the city.

(sigh)

On another front, have you Californians written your governor about #NetNeutrality? https://action.consumerreports.org/tech20180828comments9p7ylde

"Jaron Lanier interview on how social media ruins your life" https://youtu.be/kc_Jq42Og7Q

Great interview, and once again can't recommend his book on social media enough. The main problem he cites is algorithmic manipulation, although I think many of his points are also relevant for non-algorithmic social media like Mastodon. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37830765-ten-arguments-for-deleting-your-social-media-accounts-right-now

> "Is it possible for NASA to offset some of its costs by selling the naming rights to its spacecraft, or the naming rights to its rockets," Bridenstine said. "I'm telling you there is interest in that right now. The question is: Is it possible? The answer is: I don't know, but we want somebody to give us advice on whether it is."

Okay but how about—don't??

https://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2018/09/nasa_may_sell_corporate_naming.html

Sadly, the #Marylhurst University is closing its doors for good this month, and today was the last day its Shoen Library was open. It was a great source of theological materials. For now the Marylhurst Digital Collection is still online. It seems that the university is shutting down all its digital presence in two weeks, so download theses and papers now when you can. http://library.marylhurst.edu