Category Archives: News

Article note: Is this in-person reopening plan actually supposed to be viable, or is it just theater to get students to commit before an inevitable outbreak and shutdown? I was doing prep work on campus earlier this week, and most of the visible efforts seem to be more performative than effective. Lots of disingenuous blame-shifting signs like "Please physically distance by 6ft on this busy 4ft wide path" and "Elevator occupancy 2; go heavy-breathe on each other in the crowded stairwell." Similarly, the "test every student (but not staff or faculty) once sometime vaguely around their arrival" plan seems like an effort to check the testing box rather than accomplish any practical goal. Likewise, the food services in the student center looks like they can handle about 25% capacity while sending customers out to fend for themselves for a safe place to unmask and eat, which was frankly not that easy even with the tiny fraction of people already back. As someone else [pointed out a few days ago](https://old.reddit.com/r/UniversityofKentucky/comments/i3xc0h/a_vent_re_the_absurdity_of_in_person_classes/), allowed room occupancy vs. enrollment is tilted such that many in person courses will be "in person" in name only even in a best-case scenario. Enough at-risk students are already getting in touch about remote options that it seems most courses will need to provide all-remote options even _before_ the quarantine and illness absences start to stack up and/or we go full remote following a probable outbreak, so effort for in-person instruction is feeling increasingly futile. As an instructor trying to do right by my students, while I appreciate that there are difficult decisions being considered at the every level, I'm increasingly frustrated by the lack of credible planning coming down from above, and the decisions it is forcing me to make for the upcoming semester. Realistic, honest planning for an all-remote semester with early resource commitment would have offered a better experience than wasting time and resources planning for an infeasible in-person scenario, then having another hasty "unplanned" shutdown with students who were promised something else.

Article note: Oh sad. From my perspective as a person with compilers background, Fran Allen is in the tiny handful of most important field founders. And despite being the first female Turing award winner, never seems to get prominently mentioned in those "woo women in computing" pieces.

Article note: I actually rather like GPM, it's focused and unobtrusive, it's the only such thing I found that did a decent job of commingling local and subscription content, it has good enough library coverage I don't usually bother to pirate lately, and it produces pleasing seed-generated stations. I wouldn't care what they called it if Youtube music weren't an enormously shittier product - but it really is. It (at least last I used it) commingles history with Youtube and contaminates your shit, preferentially plays random video trash from Youtube over just playing songs, has only a very tenuous and crippled concept of local media, and has an offensively non-music-focused UI. I think I'll ditch and take my $10/mo elsewhere, but I'm not really hyped about any of the alternatives.

Enlarge / Please don't hurt our music collections, Google. (credit: Google Play Music)

Google Play Music has been given the death sentence by Google, and today the company has announced a bit more detail about how its execution will be carried out. The main message from today's blog post is "back up your music now," as Google says it will wipe out all Google Music collections in December 2020.

We've known for a while that the shutdown would be sometime in 2020, but for most regions, Google has now narrowed it down to "October." Here's the full timeline:

• Late August—Users will no longer be able to upload or download music through Music Manager. Pre-orders and purchases will be shut down.
• September—Streaming shuts down for users in New Zealand and South Africa.
• October—Global streaming shutdown. The Google Music app and website will cease to be.
• December—Music collections get deleted.

At the time of the streaming shutdown, the app will have been showing shutdown messages for about five months. If a user has somehow missed all of those, two months with no streaming at all will hopefully be enough to get them to research what happened to Google Music.

Article note: I've seen some fairly-compelling arguments that the higher rates in the south are partly due to our AC. We've been making half-jokes for months that one good infected sneeze in the wind-tunnel between OHR and FPAT could take out the whole college.

Article note: Awesome! That little corner of code rot has been an annoyance for retro computing for a while.

Article note: Sloppy keyword recognition spam detection resulting in a 10-day sms ban with no notification. I'm cool with effective, clear spam prevention efforts - the POTS network is nigh-unusable because of the level of spam these days - but this kind of dumb shit that silently breaks low-threshold innocent behavior shouldn't be tolerated. Alternatively, if carriers and platforms keep doing a shitty job with platform management _and_ engaging in invasive behavior with the content they carry, we could trade a little more spam to solve a bunch of other problems and switch to a legal regime that protects blind carriers but makes them liable for anything they parse. Incentivize the fuck out of e2e crypto and non-retention policies.

Article note: Asshole vs. Asshole cases. No one likes a nazi sympathizer, but fuck a whole bunch of arbitration clauses and ToS shenanigans.

Article note: I hope not, Nvidia are such jackasses about licensing, artificial market segmentation, platform lock-in, and community relations that they would be a concerning parent for the IP holder on the dominant architecture of the era.

Article note: These hearings have produced some super-interesting reading. Amazon is exactly as evil as they've always seemed, the way the crushed Quidsi (diapers.com, soap.com) is pretty much the definition of anti-competitive behavior, and on record. (the ArsTechnica article on that one is better) Apple's forcing everyone on iOS into the payment system they get a cut of is some scrip bullshit, and their Right to Repair behavior is so bad even the journalist-enthusiasts didn't bite. Facebook is ... facebook, they're always full of careless tech-bro shit. The weird mixture of inter-FAANG antagonism/special deals with things like video platform interop are fascinating sets of contrast (probably due to warring kingdoms inside the mega corps) and clear signs of collusive monopolists.