Anyways. While the isolation argument does technically connect with inconvienences and consumerism, by not acknowledging that modern tech even *is* highly inconvienent compared to tech you just...own. And can fix. And it more or less works? The actual argument gets weakened.
Anyways, all this rambling to say...I think the author means well. But is missing the forest for the trees. It's not nostalgia for more inconvienent times.
It's desperately wanting to be free from scams, tricks, and advertisements.
I'm tired of software as a service, of never really owning anything, of needing to be online all the time, of being at the mercy of distant servers and subscriptions, and of video games that die when their servers do even when they're fully single-player.
And I'm not alone.
I would really like to see a "declouding" movement where consumers demand any software that doesn't strictly need to be in the cloud, be downloadable to run locally on their own hardware.
The way that things used to be.
Seconded.
There’s a place for the cloud for data, e.g. your device has limited capacity and are travelling, or as a backup, but I’d rather primarily use local external storage.
I’d prefer software to be local, to buy & own it, not subscribe to a service model. Also it means I can work offline.
I'm at the point of the semester where my to do lists are becoming fractal...
The longer I spend in digital humanities, the more I am obsessively drawn to analog technologies and convinced we must actively and intently teach them or the digital world loses its color, texture, and depth.
Why do we even bother with endnotes--this is my personal pet peeve as a historian, I need to read the spicy, sassy, whiny footnotes immediately
Bluesky seems to be occasionally truncating my search text in the last few days. This has led to some surprising search results!
Really not happy finding out that some textbooks now are only available as ebooks. I need to pull out my spray bottle and spritz the publishers with a strong NO.
I was very annoyed to find that the current edition of a textbook for a class I'll be teaching is only available as an ebook. I am seriously considering changing the course to use the version 2 editions back so the print version is an option!
BUT I do sometimes chuckle at *their* disciplinary confidence in *documentation*
if my career in DH/academia has taught me anything, it’s that we could literally wallpaper the lab with instructions, checklists, best practices, & warnings—& (at least) half the patrons would miss/ignore every word
A venn diagram with a small circle that says "Software That Works" and a much larger circle that says "Software that looks like it works"
A slide from my upcoming PyTexas talk about vibe coding and AI. PyTexas is in beautiful Austin this year, April 17 to 19. www.pytexas.org/2026/
Colorful food on a plate. Includes rice, tofu, salmon, beans, fish cake, and lots of picked and sautéed vegetables (onion, carrot, cucumber, daikon, spinach, pumpkin, and lotus).
I may be slightly obsessed with pickled vegetables!
A telling point. We've always had to put our trust in some software we don't necessarily understand, hoping it was created in good faith by skilled people. But now we are expected to put trust in an opaque guessing machine, or code created by that opaque guessing machine.
The facades on the buildings built over a hundred years ago are amazing to me because so much art was involved in the architectural designs. It would have been fun to be in the construction business back then. #architecture #art #buildings #barcelona #photography #streetphotography
Paused MAD MEN while Ted Chaough’s partner was in the hospital and the HBO Max interstitial ad made it look like his dying wish was for a Whopper.
I suspect it’s probably related to why reading in a physical book results in better retention:
there is a physical/spacial aspect to information storage. Where something was located on a page, where on a page we wrote something.
We are embodied creatures, not brains in an abstract environment.
So excited to see what Judith does!
Happy #WorldWaterDay! Fetch yourself a big glass of the good stuff and take a look at the watery wonder which is Hamonshu (1903), a Japanese book of wave and ripple designs: publicdomainreview.org/collection/hamonshu-a-ja...
reading [good] documentation and trying to get into the head of someone (or some people) who made a library or designed a language is interesting. figuring out how they did something - and why - is rewarding. learning out their way of thinking about a problem can be applied to my problems is great.
Good news!
As we head into another wildfire season:
"We find that the observed increase in extreme fire weather bears a clear externally forced signal, detectable at 99% confidence above natural variability and attributable to human-induced climate change."
www.science.org/doi/epdf/10....
In all the foofaraw surrounding AI, many people seem to have forgotten that product development is not all about coding, and that coding is maybe 10% of the actual work.
1/7
it's one of my core frames. context is how we make meaning, and the whole pitch of LLMs is that you don't need an embodied context to make sense of the world
At this point I often intentionally search for resources from University IT departments because they have not only "how-to" aspects but also often context around when to use feature a vs feature b specifically in a university setting.
U of Virginia has a nice comparison of teams vs groups - virginia.service-now.com/its/its?id=i...
Wisconsin has good pages for teams - kb.wisc.edu/microsoft365...
and groups - kb.wisc.edu/microsoft365...
George Mason has info on teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint files - its.gmu.edu/knowledge-ba...
Stanford has some nice text resources under "Learn More" (more than just links to the Microsoft documentation). It includes a glossary and info on creating teams and sharing files. Some actions/helpdesk links are Stanford specific. uit.stanford.edu/service/micr.... Sorry for solidarity posting!
