The Death of the Mind

The following guest post from editor and journalist Maria Bustillos is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. On August 13, 1961, the Sunday edition of The Honolulu Advertiser published its official Health Bureau Statistics (“Births, Marriages, Deaths”); on page B-6, in the leftmost column—just below the ads for luau supplies and Carnation Evaporated Milk—the twenty-second of twenty-five birth notices announced that on August 4, Mrs. Barack H. Obama of 6085 Kalanianaole Highway had given birth to a son. The Honolulu State Library subsequently copied that page, along with the rest of the newspaper, onto microfilm, as a routine addition to its archive. Decades later, as Donald Trump…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.archive.org/2024/10/08/vanishing-culture-keeping-the-receipts/

Today’s links

Prime’s enshittified advertising: Don’t touch that dial. No, seriously, DON’T.

Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.

This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023

Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.

Recent appearances: Where I’ve been.

Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em.

Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em.

Colophon: All the rest.

Prime’s enshittified advertising (permalink)
Prime’s gonna add more ads. They brought in ads in January, and people didn’t cancel their Prime subscriptions, so Amazon figures that they can make Prime even worse and make more money:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/10/amazon-prime-video-is-getting-more-ads-next-year/
The cruelty isn’t the point. Money is the point. Every ad that Amazon shows you shifts value away from you – your time, your attention – to the company’s shareholders.
That’s…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/03/mother-may-i/

Taxpayer-funded data locked behind insurance firm’s paywall

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) cannot reveal weather forecasts from a particularly accurate hurricane prediction model to the public that pays for the American government agency – because of a deal with a private insurance risk firm.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/10/01/government_hurricane_forecast_secrecy/

Tantek Çelik suggests that Creative Commons should add a CC-NT license, like the existing Creative Commons licenses, but written to make it clear that the content is not licensed for generative AI training. Manton Reece likes the idea, and would allow training—but understands why publishers would choose not to. AI training permissions are becoming a huge deal, and there is a need for more licensing options. disclaimer: we’re taking steps in this area at work now. This is a personal blog post though, not speaking for employer or anyone else. In the 2024 AI Training Survey Results from Draft2Digital, only 5% of the authors surveyed said that scraping and training without a license is fair use….

External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.zgp.org/fair-use-alignment-chart/

North Carolina law says a party gains or retains qualified status if its presidential nominee was on the ballot in at least 35 states. The party label doesn’t matter. Jill Stein will be on the ballot in 36 states in November 2024, so the party is now on the ballot for 2026 and 2028.
Parties also retain if they poll 2% for either President or Governor. Both offices are up in presidential years.
If Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. had not withdrawn, his party, the We the People Party, would also have qualified. However, he withdrew his name from North Carolina and eighteen other states, so he is only on in 31 states (plus D.C., but D.C. doesn’t count…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2024/09/24/green-party-will-remain-ballot-qualified-in-north-carolina-through-2028/

In my last blog post, Evolution of Logical Replication, I mentioned the future development of a feature to allow “upgrades of logical replication nodes.” The upcoming release of PostgreSQL 17 includes this feature. Previously, after major version upgrades (via pg_upgrade), users couldn’t immediately connect and write data to logical replication nodes. This was because the slots were lost during upgrades, preventing replication from continuing. As a result, new writes wouldn’t get replicated, causing data on both nodes to become out of sync. As explained in this blog post, users had to block applications from writing until the replication setup was re-enabled after the upgrade.With PostgreSQL 17, logical replication nodes can be upgraded without blocking writes or…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/6DR

That escalated quickly

WordPress on Wednesday escalated its conflict with WP Engine, a hosting provider, by blocking the latter’s servers from accessing WordPress.org resources – and therefore from potentially vital software updates.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/09/26/wordpressorg_denies_service_to_wp/

On September 25, the Ohio Secretary of State said he won’t count votes for Jill Stein, even though she is on the ballot as an independent presidential candidate. This is because the Ohio Greens sent in paperwork to swap out the stand-in vice-presidential nominee, Anita Rios, with the actual vice-presidential nominee, Butch Ware. The paperwork caused the problem. The due date for withdrawal is later than the due date for a new nominee. Therefore, the Ohio Secretary of State deemed the withdrawal of the stand-in to be timely, and he interpreted it as a withdrawal of Jill Stein herself and the stand-in vice-presidential candidate. But he deemed the new vice-presidential name to be too late.
There are…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2024/09/25/ohio-secretary-of-state-will-refuse-to-count-votes-for-jill-stein-because-the-green-party-tried-to-substitute-a-new-vice-presidential-nominee/

In a troubling blow to public access, a US appeals court sided with big publishers, erasing half a million books from the Internet Archive’s lending library. This case isn’t just about books; it’s also about who controls the digital commons.
A staff member wears a “Universal Access to All Knowledge” shirt during a twentieth-anniversary celebration of the Internet Archive in San Francisco, California, on Wednesday, October 26, 2016. (Carlos Avila Gonzalez / San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images) They’re burning the modern Library of Alexandria. That’s one way to describe the recent ruling of the Second Circuit US Court of Appeals against the Internet Archive (IA). The court sided with big-name…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobin.com/2024/09/copyright-internet-archive-library-lawsuit/