Wandering Adventure Party

*sigh* several weeks ago, I tried to view something on Harvard University's rare manuscript site ("Curiosity Collections"), but the images were all broken. Digging into the javascript console, I found that the images are not missing from the server if you extract their URLs, but the json is being put together wrong and the viewer can't parse it.

I sent an email to the site's contact person with all the info I had. They were apologetic and said their maintainers were "aware" of the issue, but the vague reason they gave me (a VPN issue) doesn't make a lot of sense in the context that the images are all loadable if you know their URL and the viewer is crashing in a json parsing function. So I suspect someone told the contact person a plausible-sounding reason without investigating. At the very least, they don't seem to be trying at all to fix it.

So the rare manuscripts website of a world-major university has been languishing broken for several weeks at minimum, but who knows how long it'd been like that before I, personally, noticed. I guess this is a "state of American education" post.

psychology literature on autism is all so cringe.

"90% of autistic people are men" 100% of us can't believe you've fallen for this self-fulfilling diagnostic issue. ... and 90% of us wear striped knee socks.

"a few autistic people are so high-functioning that they even manage to hold down a job" we are holding down the entire science and tech economy, Clarence.

"a defining characteristic of autism is a lack of desire to share interests with others and a deficiency in theory of mind" I think the issue might be that you have never once spoken to a single autistic person as if YOU possess theory of mind, Karen. Now, the doors have been locked for your convenience, and my six hour presentation on obscure writing systems may commence.

no-one's quite sure what this Western Zhou art piece *is,* but so many people said "are you sure it's not a wifi router?" that the Anhui Museum installed a working wifi access point named "Western Zhou Router" in its display case.

source https://www.chinanews.com.cn/cul/2025/12-01/10524970.shtml h/t @dramforever

with or without AI, A/B testing as practiced by Silicon Valley is unethical. It ranges from quiet gaslighting to full-on Stanford prison experiments with no ethics board or informed consent.

AI Warning: Google has been caught A/B testing replacing real article headlines with AI-generated substitutes, which are of course sometimes wildly misleading/against journalistic ethics. If you see a blatantly horrible headline in a news aggregator, check whether the site's own page matches before blaming the site! https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/googles-toying-with-nonsense-ai-made-headlines-on-articles-like-ours-in-the-discover-feed-so-please-dont-blame-me-for-clickbait-like-bg3-players-exploit-children/

Fresh graffiti on Odin’s usual route — so presumably they meant him. #dog #dogs #dogsofmastodon

To translate formal Dutch to informal English: “bro, are you saying that if an undocumented immigrant calls us, the cops, and says ‘help help I’m being murdered’, we’re not allowed to go save them? do we need to ask to see someone’s passport before we pull them out of a burning fire? we, the cops, find this new law profoundly fucked up” https://www.politie.nl/nieuws/2025/juli/4/00-reactie-politie-op-instemming-tweede-kamer-met-anmw.html

a clarifying followup thought: “just use Linux” is implicitly in the context of “install it yourself to replace Windows and a few dozen different apps on your computer that you use for a wide variety of tasks.” Chromebooks run Chrome and Steam Decks run Steam, both of which are apps available on Windows that many people with average computer literacy are already exposed to — which is exactly why they’re successful; “Linux” is an implementation detail that’s not imposing a learning barrier. Those users are using Linux in the sense that Nintendo Switch users are using FreeBSD.

If you want to use that as an on-ramp for teaching people — “you probably have something in your house that already runs Linux, here’s some fun examples” — that’s great!, but you have to TEACH people how to use Linux as an everyday driver OS, and they need to have the time and interest to learn.

Examples of things that people with average computer literacy can “just” do:

- just reboot it

- just email it to yourself [unless it’s over 25MB or contains an executable in which case you’re not gonna “just” anything]

- just use an iPhone instead

Examples of things people with average computer literacy absolutely cannot “just” do:

- just use Linux

- just run your own email server

- just replace this polished, slick-onboarding but expensive software with a foss alternative but make sure you use this fork because the official one had some drama and it’s kind of poorly maintained and also just simply be someone who doesn’t need accessibility features or just implement the accessibility features yourself in a special dialect of C++ that just needs a particular build of gcc from 1997 available on an ftp server that only appears during the Witching Hour on a new moon

- just use a VPN, one that’s not a privacy-violating scam I mean

- just set up a separate media server and torrent all your shows and connect all the kids’ devices to it and just don’t catch a virus or get scary legal threats in the mail doing this

- just refrain from decking your smug “helpful” computer-literate cousin in the face

STOP: before you give someone less technical advice about computers:

Do they really "just" need to do what you're recommending, or did you spend your youth investing all your skill points in learning how to "just" do that?