⚠️ Update: As #Iran wakes up to a new day, metrics show the national internet blackout is past the 84 hour mark. Years of digital censorship research point to these workarounds: 📻 Shortwave/HAM radio 📶 Cell towers at borders 📡 Starlink terminals 🛰️ Direct-to-Cell satellite

READ ⬇️ “They want us to scatter in fear, to give up hope, and to give up on each other. But we will hold more tightly to one another, plan more strategically, and care even more deeply. We will resist the normalization of their violence, the immobilization of fear, and the sense of inevitability.”

I'm not done writing up my annual music data analysis post because I keep doing things like building a chart of total songs listened vs purchased vs playlisted vs rated by hand in excalidraw. This is peak blogging.

I want everyone with this many thoughts to have a blog

sometimes I miss megaupload and mediafire, google drive and dropbox links hit different

I've been considering what LLMs mean for the practice of writing documentation for years now, but didn't fully conceptualize what it means for how we provide content to readers... I coalesced my thoughts into a "strategy": thisisimportant.net/posts/ai-str...

"It’s not enough to write effective, accurate, and useful content. You also need to identify how people discover your content — invest in documentation discovery and evangelism." thisisimportant.net/posts/docume... getting people to care about your content, like horses and water...

"Automation never meets a task in the world and simply does it." www.robinsloan.com/lab/all-that...

shoutout to my favorite reference doc on the internet strftime.org

“Maybe we’re onto something.” “How can we tell? We’ve only done this 187,623 times with the same success every single time. Could be a fluke.”

We're running a 💻 CYBER MONDAY 💻 sale. Get 25% off an annual subscription: access to all of our articles, podcasts, bonus content, FOIA Forum trainings, full text RSS feed, no ads, and support independent journalism. Get yours here: www.404media.co/cyber-monday...

trying to get back to a world where I'm avidly following all the cyborgology folks online...

Anyway if YOU feel like the algorithm has eroded your curiosity and you want to hear a bunch of varied and novel new music I strongly recommend taking part in THE WORLD CUP OF 2025 on @peoples-pop-polls.bsky.social

This pretty much sums up how I approach learning about things and existing (when I have the energy) so uh, highly recommend if you want to know more about more things: naomialderman.substack.com/p/how-to-act...

Weekend Reading — Cloud outages will continue until morale improves labnotes.org/weekend-read...

"The new NRF report acknowledges that retailers do not 'have a unified industry database collecting retail crime data,' and many retailers lack 'the resources or capabilities to collect and track retail theft.' Yet the NRF still issued a report claiming shoplifting has increased 93% in four years."

one of my niche interests is music data analysis... a couple months ago I gave a lightning talk about music metadata and finally finished writing up all the details for my blog: thisisimportant.net/posts/music-...

constantly internally raving about how good this extension is and didn't do enough raving about it externally: www.libraryextension.com any page that you go look at a book, it will search your local library catalog and tell you if it has it!

@sfmta.bsky.social please please run more N trains at rush hour, I’d like to be less physically close to my fellow commuters on a regular basis.

I also have a blog at thisisimportant.net, please motivate me to publish more than once every 6 months (oh no)

for folks in the SF bay area, I restarted my monthly events (mostly shows, but also book talks and more) newsletter a few months ago: buttondown.com/see-moir-mus...

Just 10 members of Congress have even dared to call Israel's mass murder in Gaza a genocide. Meanwhile, they're straight up murdering journalists. The gulf between what's happening and what most of our leaders will acknowledge is so remarkably vast.

How much more evidence of genocide do Western governments and press need to acknowledge reality?

and also check out sharing and reuse to make sure your posts can't go where you don't want them to go

pjreddie, who made the best real-time computer vision system, epically explaining that he quit AI because the primary use case was killing people

Just got back from a trip so now I have like 10 emails from each company I interacted with asking how my trip was... can we not do CSAT like this, please?

fun news! I was laid off from Twilio. going to take this weekend to chill out, and will start looking for roles next week. if you or someone you know is looking for staff/principal level Developer Advocacy, OSPO, dev infra, or similar roles pass them along! reposts from tech folks appreciated <3

the two news reading personas in 2025

the scope and scale of ICE Air is not well understood, and the agency likes it that way as a Plane Guy, I am both in awe of the logistical complexity involved and deeply saddened to see that effort and aviation in general weaponized against humanity in such a brutal yet mostly invisible way

It seems that only the science community is noticing that NIH and NSF budgets are cut 40% and 55% in the budget bill, respectively. If you live in Maine, West Va, Pennsylvania, Alabama, or Louisiana, CALL YOUR SENATOR as they could make a difference. See below. prospect.org/politics/202...

Our digital repositories team spends a great deal of their time now simply protecting our commoned public digital resources from bots. This insatiable, aimless, destructive desire to excrete novel slop is impeding our access to — and even damaging — our cultural heritage + vetted public knowledge.

Like I've said before, if you have any doubts about climate change, just go to a super-boring insurance conference and listen to the super-boring panels where they dryly talk about the growing threat of disasters so catastrophic and unpredictable in scope they simply cannot be insured at any price.

⚠️ Update: Metrics show internet connectivity has been restored in northern #Gaza after a ~100 hour telecoms blackout. Operator Paltel says it has been able to repair damaged lines while efforts are ongoing to restore service in central and southern areas of the Gaza Strip 📈

Thanks @erikaishii.bsky.social for being a fashion idol. Everyone should follow these simple and effective tips

The Owens Valley is a special, beautiful place that has survived in spite of our best efforts to destroy it. A Canadian mining company wants to begin exploration for an open pit gold mine just off the 395. BLM is accepting public comment til 6/16. Please speak out. eplanning.blm.gov/eplanning-ui...