Posts from beehaw.org

First, they came for the editors. And I was an editor, so I was fucked.

It’s no secret that much of social media has become profoundly dysfunctional. Rather than bringing us together into one utopian public square and fostering a healthy exchange of ideas, these platforms too often create filter bubbles or echo chambers. A small number of high-profile users garner the lion’s share of attention and influence, and the algorithms designed to maximize engagement end up merely amplifying outrage and conflict, ensuring the dominance of the loudest and most extreme users—thereby increasing polarization even more.

We already live in a world where pretty much every public act - online or in the real world - leaves a mark in a database somewhere. But how far back does that record extend? I recently learned that record goes back further than I’d seriously imagined.

I’ve been familiar with the concept, but this is by far the best behind-the-scenes explanation I’ve seen.

Like many teachers at every level of education, I have spent the past two years trying to wrap my head around the question of generative AI in my English classroom. To my thinking, this is a question that ought to concern all people who like to read and write, not just teachers and their students. Today’s English students are tomorrow’s writers and readers of literature. If you enjoy thoughtful, consequential, human-generated writing—or hope for your own human writing to be read by a wide human audience—you should want young people to learn to read and write. College is not the only place where this can happen, of course, but large public universities like UVA, where I teach, are institutions that reliably turn tax dollars into new readers and writers, among other public services. I see it happen all the time.

WPlace is a desktop app that takes its cue from Reddit’s r/place, a sporadic experiment where users placed pixels on a small blank canvas every few minutes. On Wplace, anyone can sign up to add coloured pixels to a world map – each user able to place one every 30 seconds. By internet standards one pixel every 30 seconds is glacial, and that is part of what makes it so powerful. In just a few weeks since its launch tens, if not, hundreds of thousands of drawings have appeared.

The job market is queasy and since you’re reading this, you need to upgrade your CV. It’s going to require some work to game the poorly trained AIs now doing so much of the heavy lifting. I know you don’t want to, but it’s best to think of this as dealing with a buggy lump of undocumented code, because frankly that’s what is between you and your next job.

[alt text: an image of Sonic the Hedgehog characters playing basketball in a basketball court. Eggman is doing a crossover on Sonic, and Sonic is laying on the ground in front of him in a pile of rings like he has just been knocked over. In the background, Tails is looking at Sonic with concern, and one of Eggman’s robots is running into position.]

Honestly not sure what to say except INSANITY!!!!

As always with Zitron, grab a beverage before settling in.

https://archive.is/Lc6DA

Man, The Last of Us Part II Remastered is seriously next level. The story hits hard, and the gameplay keeps you hooked with all its twists and moments. Every chapter felt different and kept me on my toes. Definitely one of those games you don’t forget anytime soon.

To All Beavers of Slatsville Who May Have Been Affected by Recent Events:

the Disney-fication of Nintendo continues

“Friction is nice. Makes things more meaningful.” So says Lady Love Dies, the protagonist of Kaizen Game Works’ cult indie-hit Paradise Killer, to an inquisitive AI-bot of a vending machine. This quote has coiled into my thinking regarding game design that apes early net art and user interfaces. How faithful should one be to the textures of historical technology and its representational qualities? How speculative can one be when games and technological preservation in general have become so fraught? The idiosyncratic friction of user experience is often an underestimated identifier for specific periods of digital history. Even when we’re seeking to subvert corporate interests to jealously guard IPs, or convince the more open and communicative organizations to adapt or invent new methods of sustainable and accessible archives, human memory and its malleability are the missing link. I mean this last point both literally and figuratively.

There are many different methods for making coffee, some more energy-efficient than others. However, there are no coffee makers that you can power with a small solar PV panel. For example, a commercially available 12V DC drip coffee maker requires a solar panel of 300 watts to brew coffee and keep it warm.

Video of DevGAMM Awards 2025 ceremony Lisbon (2025-11-07, YouTube)

The modern smartphone, laden with the corporate ecosystem pulsing underneath its screen, robs us of this feeling, conspires to keep us from “true” fullness. The swiping, the news cycles, the screaming, the idiocy — if anything destroys a muse, it’s this. If anything keeps you locked into a fetid loop of looking, looking, and looking once more at the train wreck, it’s this. I find it impossible to feel fullness, even in the slightest, after having spent just a bit of a day in the thralls of the algorithms.

Falling in love with A.I. is no longer science fiction. A recent study found that one in five American adults has had an intimate encounter with a chatbot; on Reddit, r/MyBoyfriendisAI has more than 85,000 members championing human-A.I. connections, with many sharing giddy recollections of the day their chatbot proposed marriage.

VPN company CyberGhost just sent Cloudflare a bogus DMCA takedown demand, claiming that our article about their last bogus copyright takedown demand, somehow violates their copyright.

Worth noting … the feds are coming for archival sites.