Apr 21, 2023 3 min read

You Should Read - Apr 21

Collected Ephemera

Esquire It's Not Sexist to Ask an 89-Year-Old Who Isn't Showing Up to Work to Consider Retirement: Dianne Feinstein has served the public well in a trailblazing career, but she should learn from the case of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
⇛ I recently turned 50, so I'm sensitive to ageism. It's real and a recurring topic of discussion amongst similarly aged friends. This is totally different. Gerontocracy is a serious problem for the US. There is an amazing bench of leaders waiting to take the stage.

NPR A Navy Ship Named for a Confederate Victory Now Honors a Black Union Hero: The U.S. Navy has finally shed the last two ship names that honored the Confederacy — and renamed one of them in honor of a man whose life story reads like an action movie hero.

Lorenzo Bernini Fictional Brands Archive
⇛ I sometimes use fictional brands in mockups for proposals at work. This is a good resource that I hope grows over time. It's somewhat surprising how bad most fictional logos are. Though, I'd view a fair number of the entries not to be "brands", per se.

Holland Sentinel MillerKnoll Employee: Company Threatening Termination for Speaking Out About Bonuses: MillerKnoll employees were threatened with termination for speaking to media about controversial comments from the company's CEO that went viral this week.

Ars Technica Free Software Foundation: Chrome’s JPEG XL Killing Shows How the Web Works Under Browser Hegemony: Google, with 80% of browser share, says there's not enough ecosystem interest.
⇛ It's been a long time since I gave web standards and browser support much thought, so this is a bit of a throwback to the late 90s early 2000s when I was super passionate about the outcome of standards debates. Such an innocent time!

The Verge Can ActivityPub Save the Internet?: The tech industry is abuzz about a new standard for social networking that is more open, more user-centric, and potentially more powerful than Twitter and Facebook. But we’ve been here before.

Bloomberg Google’s Rush to Win in AI Led to Ethical Lapses, Employees Say: The search giant is making compromises on misinformation and other harms in order to catch up with ChatGPT, workers say

Airmail News Nazi Pieces of Work: Memorabilia linked to the Third Reich is a favorite collectible of the super-rich. What are they thinking?

Rolling Stone A War Crimes Team Investigated the Portland Police. The Results Are Damning: A forensic investigation found the police used dangerous amounts of tear gas in an attempt to put down Black Lives Matter protests

ABC News DeKalb County Releases Autopsy in 'Cop City' Protester Manuel Teran's Death: Teran was protesting the development of a police training center.
⇛ Funny how the cops are now claiming they "can't comment on an ongoing investigation" when they were first out of the gate to claim the shooting was justified because Teran was armed and pointed a gun at them, all of which is now being shown to be lies. Teran's death has been ruled a homicide. News outlets: Cops lie. Stop repeating their bullshit.

Seattle Times Laid Off by Big Tech, Then Recruited for Contract Work — at the Same Place

Washington Post Airlines Want You to Buy Carbon Offsets. Experts Say They’re a ‘Scam.’: Spending a few dollars to offset the footprint of your flight may sound too good to be true because it is, climate experts say.

Forbes What Does Generative AI Mean For Your Brand And What Does It Have To Do With The Future Of The Metaverse? (note: paid placement article)

Washington Post Inside the Secret List of Websites That Make AI Like ChatGPT Sound Smart: Tech companies have grown secretive about what they feed the AI. So [we] set out to analyze one of these data sets to fully reveal the types of proprietary, personal, and often offensive websites that go into an AI’s training data.

The Wabbit Hole

Selections from my Wikipedia searches this week.