Founding E.D. & Director of The Lab@ThePeale. Mother to 3 young dragons. Inclusive & immersive storytelling #a11y #BhereBmore
This is an insane bill attempting to criminalize abortion medication. But on top of that...
"The bill also contains a controversial provision that says it cannot be challenged in state court before it is enforced, and a state judge who holds the law to be unconstitutional can be personally sued for $100,000."
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/05/23/texas-legislature-abortion-pills-crackdown/
@overholt The screen grab you shared says on loan. Maybe they haven't updated it? 🤷♀️
@overholt Is it on loan?
@overholt There are ~1.5 million objects in the Met's collection. In 2017 they released nearly 500k images to open access. They probably haven't gotten around to/don't have the budget for digitizing that one at a higher res yet. In the past museums were paranoid and stingy in the way you imply, but these days the zeitgeist is very open; we just don't have the funds & staff to do it all.
If they wanted to,
Congress could impeach or invoke the 25th
The Supreme Court could reverse his policies
The media could report his lies and illegality accurately
U.S. billionaires and corporations could stop funding and bribing him
They don't want to. The problem isn't him. It's them.
@georgetakei It's almost like they're afraid if they're recognized that bad things might happen to *them* like - I dunno - retribution or PROSECUTION...
Why are ICE agents masked to begin with? Our law enforcement officers shouldn’t be anonymous. Ever.
@jessebot The gold standard for accessibility work of this sort in the US is https://pac.bz/team/
Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany | 1932
Museums #museumhistory #Germany @BritishPathe
Today, Donald Trump made it clear that he intends to have people deported to El Salvador without due process, including United States citizens.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has something to say to us about this moment.
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If… if… We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more—we had no awareness of the real situation… We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Just got this from Bookshop.org:
Amazon is Shameless
Every April, we celebrate Independent Bookstore Day to remind us how vital indie bookstores are to our communities and society. It’s a day of joy and solidarity, and significant financial impact for these bookstores.
This year, Amazon is undercutting that with a “Book Sale” on the same day—a calculated move by a company that has already put half the bookstores in the country out of business, controls over 60% of the market and sells far more books than all indie bookstores combined. The people at Amazon responsible for the timing of their "Book Sale" should be ashamed, but they are shameless.
It's up to us to make sure they don't succeed at spoiling Independent Bookstore Day. Visit your local indie this weekend and help ensure that future generations can experience the sublime pleasure of shopping at a local bookstore.
—Andy Hunter, Bookshop.org CEO
#Bookstodon #Amazon #AmReading
#Deepseek is interesting to me for a number of reasons. No, it doesn't suddenly make #AI good, but it does expose the hypocrisy in the space.
Us tech giants can only function as a monopoly. They can not compete on an even playing field as they are extremely inefficient and unprofitable. They believed AI was a technology exclusively available to them. If they could shoehorn AI onto all general purpose computing applications then they ensure that all such applications happen on their servers allowing them to levy a tax. They have no incentive to create a less expensive AI because doing so would lower the cost of entry and threaten their monopoly.
Enter China. They create a system equal to the american systems, runnable on consumer grade hardware, and gives it away for free. Now anybody wanting to build an AI product can do so on a home server without billionaire support and without paying the open AI tax. Now Microsoft is left holding the tab on their nuclear power plant while a startup can create their AI powered smart fridge without them. Where is the ROI on that?
It also exposes the fact that generative AI is still firmly experimental. If a Chinese investment firm can relatively simply remove orders of magnitude of cost on their first attempt, what other improvements are still waiting to be discovered? Billionaires have money not intelligence. They were betting on the improvements coming from higher spend not creativity. Any geek in their basement could come up with a better algorithm, but only they can light a warehouse full of money on fire.
If AI is the future as they have claimed endlessly. DeepSeek demonstrates that such a future can exist without them.
All the AI companies scraping the Internet Archive for its unique content should pay a fee that would be used to help defend the IA from legal threats for hosting abandoned content.
AI companies preserve a wellspring, and the public gets a place to preserve old materials.
I see it. I have lived it. 83 years ago, the U.S. government turned upon a group of its own citizens and residents and sent them to internment camps without due process. I was there among them. American fascism is back. It is here. It is now.
“John Palfrey will not be obeying in advance.” Philanthropic organizations are joining the civic movement to fight for U.S. constitutional democracy. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/19/philanthropy-foundations-trump-resistance
Blood in the Machine should be made into a TV series.
My dad was a ham: KA4IZN. He taught me Morse Code & sparked my interest in the rest of the world connecting with hams in places I'd never heard of before. He also helped people & emergency services during the frequent hurricanes in eastern NC when ham radio was all that worked. Don't let the FCC enshittify ham radio: we'll end up less safe and dumber while billionaires rake in even more. Sign the petition: https://hamadvocate.org/ H/T @VE6LK - TNX 4 CQ! @pluralistic
April 11 is your LAST day to file comments for the FCC's "Delete Delete Delete". This webpage shows you how to do it https://hamadvocate.org/
“ 👉🏼 “After a backlash👈🏼, National Park Service restores old Underground Railroad webpage that prominently features Harriet Tubman”
A reminder that if the government can send migrants to a prison camp without any due process, it can send U.S. citizens there, too. I know because this happened to me and my family in 1942.
