themba 🇨🇻

109 Followers
273 Following
345 Posts
Y’all know me. Still the same OG. To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. — James Baldwin; #libraries #linguistics #music #infosec #privacy #highered #CV #brasil #dataviz #GIS #poetry #diaspora toots in Castellano, Français, Kriolu, and Português

A shout out to librarians, libraries and library science -- and the practices of care, community and service which make up their democratizing force.

https://buttondown.email/maiht3k/archive/information-access-as-a-public-good/

Dear Hackers,

Public libraries, and libraries in general, are not your enemies. They are some of the last places in the world where people can go, hang out, and do things without any expectation of money changing hands. They are a physical manifestation of file sharing and a corporeal form of torrenting. That in mind, libraries are chronically underfunded and they're currently under attack by right-wing politicians and fascists, but I suppose I repeat myself there.

As such, they make lousy targets for ransomware attacks. Chances are, you're not likely to see any money because they have no money to pay you. All you've done is hurt those who are less fortunate than you, you've hurt children, you've hurt students, and you've made no progress towards "sticking it to the man" or whatever.

For god's sake, leave the library alone. Or maybe, come visit one sometime.

Thanks,
Cyberpunk Librarian

https://shelftalkblog.wordpress.com/2024/05/28/an-update-about-access-to-library-technology-systems/

An update about access to Library technology systems

Last updated: Wednesday, July 10 at 2:15 p.m. Información en español: Estado de los servicios de la biblioteca 简体中文信息 : 图书馆服务状态 繁體中文資訊 : 圖書館服務狀態 Thông Tin Bằng Tiếng Việt: Trạng Thái Cung Cấp Dịch …

Shelf Talk
The Inquirer building also housed, until the early 2000's, their printing plant, making it one of the last major dailies where it was at least theoretically possible for an editor to run downstairs and yell "stop the presses!" if a major story came in.
Oh, this is now my favorite shorthand

It’s a trap. More code is not your friend, it’s your enemy.

Don’t add the dependency. Don’t generate 8000 lines of JavaScript. Replace JS with CSS. Don’t accept the digital grey goo spewed out of tools such as Copilot.

Code is a liability. Anything that helps you make more, quickly, with no effort, is leading you down a very dark path.

(muting this now; sorry, but it’s too noisy)

I didn’t get any of the NYT Connections today 😮

@luckytran Pointedly, from the article: "Work on revising isolation guidance has been underway since last August but was paused in the fall as covid cases rose."

Soooo... the CDC's own work on addressing covid prevalence was delayed due to high covid prevalence, and their answer is to implement a policy that will only help to increase covid prevalence?!

🙄😠

I feel like this is the social media platform I *should* be using and it also feels like driving 54 mph on the highway

People like bringing up the fact that LLMs hallucinate but then leave out the fact that Google results are often straight garbage these days.

It’s to the point where there are classes of queries like the above that I don’t even consider trying in Google Search. The above example is one where I thought to myself “how bad could the Google results be?” and surprisingly they were quite bad.

Paramount+ is now entirely useless if you use a pihole to block New Relic, Doubleclick, and Braze. You literally can't watch the shows you paid for without providing minute-by-minute viewership data to multiple ad platforms.

#enshitification