Happy Thanksgiving, friends. I hope you’re having a restful and delicious weekend.

Help my dad’s flip phone makes an audible sound when he gets a text

Turns out the friction of having to learn photoshop was a crucial firewall protecting society from the terrible taste of small business owners

terra firma, terra eterna 🚱🌉@kavi.bsky.social · last mo.

When I first heard about AI being used for menus and advertisements, my concern was largely that it would be used to idealize the food and make it look better than it actually was. At no point did I imagine that restaurants would willingly put out horrific looking images of their food on purpose

Autumn Woods Tom Thomson 1915

Autumn Foliage Tom Thomson 1916

Some necessary context, I think: I was born in Moncton. I grew up here. My parents still live here. I even worked in the Moncton Hospital occasionally during my Miramichi years. My partner is also from Moncton.

Alison@alisonburnis.bsky.social · 2d ago

Help I’m in Moncton

Also every vendor is throwing up Cloudflare issues now because they're sensitive to high traffic, which is messing with library proxy access.

Simon@simonxix.com · 6d ago

As I've said before, corporate actors like OpenAI are regularly taking down open research and publishing infrastructures – journals, books, archives, repositories – with complete impunity. Their bots don't even respect robots.txt requests.

Help I’m in Moncton

Once you realize that we treat people like pollution a lot of municipal politics makes sense

Colleen @cbailey6.bsky.social · 3d ago

It's always nice when we can stop pretending that zoning was ever about separating residential uses from polluting uses and acknowledge that it (a) treats renters as pollutants to be segregated from "real" residents and (b) concentrates them near other polluting uses like large roads. More honest.

I am once again telling everyone that I will not subject what little sight I have left to your awful slop posters and graphics. I will not be looking at them. I will not be reading them. I did not get multiple eye surgeries to look at garbage.

I think the problem is we let the computer do too many things. When I was a kid the computer was only good for learning the home row and playing Sim City and that's where it should have ended.

"one of the biggest forms of censorship is not having a school library" ~ Melissa Jacobs at a NYCC panel (or so I hear) --- CORRECT

a nobel prize is cool i guess but Anne Carson also received a Sappho finger puppet from yours truly and just look at that smile

My dad has suggested we’ll have turkey, ham, or hot dogs for Thanksgiving, and the odd choice here from him is turkey. My dad doesn’t believe you need to eat turkey more than once a year, and you do that at Christmas. If you must. He’ll roast a chicken instead if he can get away with it.

Canada is refusing to issue ISBNs to books primarily generated with AI. This illustrates both the urgency of the problem of the growing flood of slop books, and also the toothlessness of addressing it on the honor system without there also being consequences for lying

the cashier at the deli said "someone's shifting into soup mode" today when she rang me through today and its like I don't even need to be online anymore

As a society, we have forgotten that the phone still works when you hold it up to your ear

❌ AI generated slop menus with pictures that make your food look like worms ✅ scribbles on a piece of paper saying how much the soup cost

Whoever entered their email as idonotwanttoleavemyemail@sm.ca into the broken link form on the library catalogue, I just want to talk. I know everything is bad but where do you think your email would go? What do you think we're going to do with it?

One thing I find endlessly funny about the rise of AI is that it has revealed that there is a large number of people who believe that the reason they wrote essays at school or university is their teachers were desperately waiting for them to provide a definite answer to “Lear: what’s up with him?”

Dr Dean Burnett@drdeanburnett.bsky.social · 6d ago

"By using AI, tasks like essays that used to take hours can be completed in minutes!" Sure, like how if I arrive at the gym and immediately go for a shower, my workout is done in record time. And if I throw my sandwiches straight in the bin, I can finish my lunch in under 10 seconds.

Working from home today because I had a virtual therapy appointment this morning (same therapist, she just moved) and not only did my cat sit behind me crying while holding her favourite shoelace during therapy, she then browbeat into coming outside so she can play and I can freeze while typing.

Found the email I sent when I got accidentally added to the faculty listserv of an orthopedic surgery clinic and nobody would remove me so I sent this email to all faculty/staff/med students and they removed me almost immediately

nothing is more LinkedIn-pilled than assessing the ROI of fun

Matt Binder@mattbinder.bsky.social · 6d ago

can’t think of a better example of AI being mostly a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist also it can’t help when this is your user base

Oh look, a direct impact of the strike at University of Edinburgh.

CILIP Metadata & Discovery Group@cilipmdg.bsky.social · 7d ago

The platform hosting our OA Journal, Catalogue & Index, is currently down due to technical reasons; if you want to access a specific article or issue you can email your request to: catalogueandindex@gmail.com Anything up to & including issue 207 can be accessed at: www.cilip.org.uk/news-publica...

A nonfiction book written in, let’s say, the year 1795, is most likely still around in a library somewhere and every other work it referred to is probably accessible in some archive as well. A nonfiction book written in 2007 probably cites a bunch of urls that are dead or rotted beyond recognition.

Can’t wait for Hockey Night in Canada to return in December with the PWHL.

Just watched someone turn right onto Windsor from Cunard when they had a red light and panic, because they actually wanted to get onto Chebucto. You can’t do that! Hope that helps! The sign is very clear!

this is what "Haligonians like to park out front" actually looks like

햏@hehheh.bsky.social · last wk.

Yup. I've been taking drone photo shoots for this purpose exactly. Just to show people how much wasted space there is. Bayer's Lake is the prime example.

Sad news everyone. Our beloved friend the computer has now become a hated enemy

I broke this story in 2011, about the first major publisher-imposed loan restrictions on ebooks (the only truly big story of my trade journalism career). It’s been 15 years, and the only major difference is that public library budgets are lower and what publishers charge libraries has gone up.

Melanie Walsh@mellymeldubs.bsky.social · last wk.

In this powerful piece on libraries, this comment stuck out. I went to ALA for the first time this year, and I was struck by the prominent presence of corporate vendors, many of which are sucking libraries dry… www.nytimes.com/interactive/...