Notices by Chris Adams (acdha@code4lib.social)

“Regardless of what one thinks about the merits of AI or explosive datacenter expansion, the scale and pace of capital deployment into a rapidly depreciating technology is remarkable. These are not railroads—we aren’t building century-long infrastructure. AI datacenters are short-lived, asset-intensive facilities riding declining-cost technology curves, requiring frequent hardware replacement to preserve margins.”
https://paulkedrosky.com/honey-ai-capex-ate-the-economy/

“I don’t know how to run a community forum in this future. I do not have the time or emotional energy to screen out regular attacks by Large Language Models, with the knowledge that making the wrong decision costs a real human being their connection to a niche community. I do not know how to determine whether someone’s post about their new bicycle is genuine enthusiasm or automated astroturf.”
https://aphyr.com/posts/389-the-future-of-forums-is-lies-i-guess

AP is reporting a possible motivation:

“The current #LibrarianOfCongress Carla Hayden is woke, anti-Trump, and promotes trans-ing kids,” the group, American Accountability Foundation, said on its X account earlier Thursday, just hours before the firing was made public. “It’s time to get her OUT and hire a new guy for the job!”

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-library-of-congress-carla-hayden-20a1862ce6d2e0d51a84a37b264ce2ef

#LibraryOfCongress

House Democrats have disclosed that Trump has told the #LibrarianOfCongress that she’s fired, but there’s no stated reason or clear authority to do so:

http://democrats-appropriations.house.gov/news/press-releases/delauro-firing-librarian-congress-dr-carla-hayden

“If kibble is so good, how come I never see you eating it?”

@ryanc that’s always quite the learning experience. Did you start a betting pool for how long before they’ll regret it?

One of the old Internet things I miss was when tech people thought they had to understand a field to compete in it. The speculator money pouring in changed everyone’s goal to cashing out before the bubble popped. https://hachyderm.io/@molly0xfff/113829408587935407

“Software developers are no longer a meaningful part of the upper echelons of the tech industry and no longer share in the upside.

The profession is about to reap the consequences of pretending to be superior to the cleaners and canteen staff, because it turns out employers really want to treat all workers equally badly.”
https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/2025/interim-5/

If you’ve ever wanted to know more about how #FIDO2 or #WebAuthn work and why, this is the overview the field has been looking for:
https://www.imperialviolet.org/tourofwebauthn/tourofwebauthn.html

🪦”you used computers 13-30 years ago, you’ll remember how different scrollbars used to be”
https://webkit.org/blog/16301/webkit-features-in-safari-18-2/

We helped Sony with a BeOS-based “internet appliance” around the turn of the century. They saved money on the graphics hardware by doing rotation for the portrait display in software (RIP performance) and dubbed it the eVilla…
https://mastodon.cloud/@adafruit/113629217073631025

The U.S. Library of Congress is hiring a GS-14 #accessibility specialist eligible for remote work:

https://www.usajobs.gov/job/809242000

#a11y #section508 #wcag #getfedihired cc: @jobs

@SecureWaffle @GossiTheDog They _must_ do that if they want to sell Windows in Europe, where they have a requirement that third-parties get the same access as their own security products do.

This is healthy in a way: if the kernel & Defender teams work out what it'd take for the latter to run in user space, I'd bet that MVP API would cover most other users with minimal additions since they all care about the same kinds of activities.

All of those goo.gl short links are about to break, exactly as predicted a decade ago. https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-url-shortener-links-will-no-longer-be-available/

“this month marks the fiftieth anniversary of a core piece of free software technology that would quickly become a seminal piece of collaborative software, the bedrock under every version control system and arguably the single most important piece of social software ever created.

Written by Douglas McIlroy and James Hunt and released with the 5th Edition of Unix, on this month in 1974 the world was given diff.”
https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2024/06/14/fifty-years-of-diff-and-merge/

@inthehands Ah, yeah, that's what I get for leaving the reply window open while I got lunch. Sorry about the redundancy but I'm glad to see more attention to the root cause vs. just ragging on HR.

@inthehands This is going to get so much worse with outsourced services job descriptions banks and, especially, LLMs to give false confidence that the listing, screen questions, etc. are okay because they have fewer glaring errors. The obvious grammatical or technical errors were embarrassments but they did at least give readers a cue that there wasn't a skilled reviewer in the loop at that stage.
Now ever penny-pincher is going to think they can pay HR even less because the tools do the work.

A sad open source plea: “I am dying and unable to continue work on any projects here. I am seeking folks to take them over.”
https://github.com/alt-text-org/in-need-of-adoption

@marick I think Diamond has held up better – I haven’t seen accusations of the outright misrepresentation in service of right-wing tropes which characterizes Haidt’s big books - but I think you’re right to reconsider contrarianism. It’s such an easy path to a rush of self-satisfaction that I think it almost inevitably leads to errors over time as the writer relaxes their self-doubt – Nate Silver used to be a better writer when he had to worry about what an editor would say, too.

This is why every news organization should have a Mastodon server:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/09/tech/meta-social-media-nightcap/index.html