2024
- Began with free version, ca. 2007; was an improvement over Blogger (by then owned by Google).
- Ads become too obtrusive, so paid to remove them.
- Began using site not only to blog, but also as a professional signboard.
- Eventually upgraded to business plan to meet customization needs (add plugins).
So that’s Perplexity’s real innovation here: shattering the foundations of trust that built the internet.
Elizabeth Lopatto, “Perplexity’s grand theft AI”, The Verge, June 27, 2024.
😠 Shameless: “Israel blames U.N. for Gaza aid crisis amid fresh reports of starvation” (Washington Post) archive.ph/qSSPf
PSA: If you are posting a screenshot to a microblogging platform of some sort, please remember that these platforms are also mobile. And there are disparities in screen size and eyesight. If you use an iPhone or iPad, much of this is solved by an app called Linky by Pragmatic Code.
Death, destruction, refugeehood, humanitarian crises – those are the things we’re used to accepting as part of the reality of war… But in Gaza I also saw the death of the human soul. The Gazans are zombies. Death of souls on that scale, psychological wreckage at that level, I’ve never seen anywhere. At a certain point, I went through Rafah, and the streets were filled with refugee tents, and people, and booths, and there were hardly any vehicles, because there’s no fuel, so transportation is via carts and donkeys, and people move between them slowly. It took us two hours to cover a distance that normally would take 10 minutes. And all this time I looked at the faces of the people who were passing by us and I was shocked because they just looked dead.
Arwa Damon, quoted in “As a CNN War Reporter, Arwa Damon Thought She Had Seen Everything. Then She Went to Gaza” by Shany Littman, Haaretz, June 21, 2024.
Shared Notes: Why I'm Dropping Bear.app
Reading about Black Librarians and Knowledge Formation
"How Black Librarians Helped Create Generations of Black Literature" by Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times, June 19, 2024.
This is a fascinating short history that references the scholars whose work the cultural reporter draws on.
Teaser: “Recent scholarship is uncovering the role of the women who ran libraries during the Harlem Renaissance where they built collections and, just as important, communities of writers and readers.”
Agents of change: The necessary activism required of librarians in oppressive contexts will sound familiar to people today in the context of bans related to race and sexuality. For example, the only significant collection in the Jim Crow South was in Roanoke, Virginia. When the librarian there, Virginia Lee, was eventually told to get rid of the books, she moved them to the basement instead and continued to discretely circulate them.
Knowledge formation: The seemingly banal work of collection, classification, and organization required the creation of new knowledge. For instance, cataloging using the Dewey scheme required the addition of new subjects because that system only foresaw shelving Black-authored and Black-themed books in two limited spaces: under the headings of “slavery” and “the Negro question,” the latter a subset of “colonization and migration.” Dorothy Porter added entirely new categories, including for slave insurrections, the blues, and passing. She also reorganized American political history by situating presidents in topics important to Black readers. Andrew Johnson’s tenure was filed under “emancipation” and Rutherford B. Hayes under “Ku Klux Klan”.
Knowledge, culture, and sociability: This article has some wonderful photographs, including of the women in groups.
Addendum: The New York Public Library and, within it, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture have digitized some of their materials. That’s where I found a powerful pastel by Morris Schulman titled “The Writing Lesson”.
I noticed the GHI’s History of Knowledge blog was crashing this week. Apparently they solved the problem but had to disable the display of the blog’s categories. 🫤 Automattic, you disappoint me. I hope the GHI comes up with a workable, long-term fix soon.
Images of Returned POWs
I just saw images in The Telegraph of emaciated Ukrainian POWs recently traded back from Russia. These stark images were taken after the men had regained some 10 kilograms of their lost weight. If you look closely, you’ll actually see life in the photographed eyes. How did the same eyes and severely weakened bodies look before the exchange?
Starved and no contact with the International Red Cross—I’m trying to grasp what this intentionally extreme mistreatment means. After all, the Ukrainians are holding Russians. As far as I know, food as such is not in short supply in Russia. Was this the result of extreme mistreatment in one location? Or was it more widespread, systematic? Was it about torture with specific mission-related objectives? Was it zeal, resentment, sadism, corruption, indifference? Will this have any impact on Russian POWs in Ukraine? Or will Ukraine’s leadership continue striving to keep the higher ground?
Reading about Netanyahu's Clusterfuck of a War
"Amid the Fighting in Gaza, the Bitter War Between Netanyahu and Israel's Generals Is Intensifying" by Anshel Pfeffer, Haaretz, June 17, 2024.
"Netanyahu and the IDF Top Brass Fight Over Gaza Cease-fire While Spiraling Towards Total War With Hezbollah" by Amos Harel, Haaretz, June 16, 2024.
Anshel Pfeffer’s analysis draws on the time-tested framework of civil-military relations. First and foremost, there is the conflict between the prime minister and his generals. Netanyahu is right to insist on the primacy of civilian political control of the army, but he has apparently never learned the value of taking counsel from his generals. Worse, he is resorting to using a stab-in-the-back conspiracy theory about the generals. People familiar with fascist takeovers will get very uncomfortable with this rhetoric.
Besides the conflict between the civilian and military leadership, there is the army itself, the IDF, whose ranks include conscripts and men and women called back because of their obligations in the reserves. There might be people who escape military service in Israel, but its army is more closely linked to civilian society than any in countries that use all-volunteer professional militaries. That places limits on how irresponsibly it can be used.
🫤 Why don’t I have any muscle memory for where the # key is when my keyboard is dark? I guess hashtags are still a relatively recent phenomenon, as far as my typing fingers are concerned.
Reading about Evidence of Russia Using Starvation as a Weapon in its War on Ukraine
"New Report: 'Deliberate Pattern' of Starvation Tactics against Ukrainian Civilians by Russian Forces in Siege of Mariupol City" by Global Rights Compliance, June 13, 2024. (Summary in Ukrainian followed by English)
Full report in English (PDF) — "The Hope Left Us": Russia’s Siege, Starvation, and Capture of Mariupol City
Full report in Ukrainian (PDF) — "Надія залишила нас": Облога, моріння голодом і захоплення Маріуполя Росією
I still need to process this report, but its outline already lines up with the reporting presented in the prize-winning Frontline/AP documentary, “20 Days in Mariupol” (available in full on the Internet Archive). Its chapters include:
😀 Historian Daniel Bellingradt has been growing a thread "of screaming and horrified city gates" in Europe. Here's the first image in the series at @[email protected].
Reading Aryeh Neier on Israel, International Humanitarian Law, and Justice
Aryeh Neier, “Is Israel Committing Genocide?”, The New York Review of Books, June 6, 2024.
The author, who has seen much as one of the founders of Human Rights Watch, has long been “sparing” in his application of the term “genocide” to state-committed atrocities over the past several decades. Initially he did not think of Israel’s indiscriminate, even criminal violence against civilians as genocide, because Israel had a clear right to defend itself against the barbarous acts of Hamas.
I am now persuaded that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. What has changed my mind is its sustained policy of obstructing the movement of humanitarian assistance into the territory."
Reading about Israel's Universities during War
"Israel’s Universities: The Crackdown", The New York Review of Books, June 5, 2024.
Teaser: “Last October, Palestinian students and academic staff in Israel faced unprecedented penalties for their speech. Now the repression persists.”
Takeaway: This piece shows just how far academic institutions in Israel have been willing to go in order to serve the state’s goals at the expense of academic freedom, free speech, and the rule of law.
Question: How are universities governed in Israel? How vulnerable are they to outside political pressure under less fraught conditions? I am wondering about the political effects of Israel’s extreme right-wing government, on one hand, and the broad effects of the current wartime climate, on the other.
🙄 That feeling after you try to do a thing that requires an app you haven’t used in a while, but that app acts up, so you research and fix the problem, but by then you no longer know what you were trying to accomplish in the first place. Yeah, that.
Here’s a Git repository that gathers information about LLMs and offers some ways to deal with them. The only tool I know how to use is the robot.txt file, which depends on voluntary cooperation. Speaking of, the repository contains an interesting table of bot metrics, which is gathering information about the behavior of these things. For more, follow the link to the repository owner’s blog post on Cory Dransfeldt.
Shared Notes: Tiny Theme – Use and Modifications
Shared Notes: Why Move from Wordpress.com to Micro.blog?
My history with WordPress.com
What Can We Do about LLMs on Our Independent Websites?
The following post appeared in my Mastodon timeline this morning:
As of today, MacStories is disallowing all known AI crawlers, including ChatGPT and Applebot. If you want to read our site, you should use a web browser or RSS.
✌️
Federico Viticci, June 13, 2023
This pronouncement could, indeed, is being made by countless others who run independent websites. Questions and anxiety abound, but we are nowhere close to fashioning responses adequate to the current moment. A visceral sense of violation, of wrong, is hitting many of us, who have long since had enough of Silicon Valley, Madison Avenue, and all the rest treating the traces we leave online as a natural resource to extract value from. Yesterday, the above-quoted observer on Mastodon reported, “I was grossed out when I read that Applebot scraped ‘the open web’ to train their AI model…”
Creepy noises outside: Sounded like a life-and-death struggle between two small creatures in the woods, but maybe they each got away in one piece.