onfocus

Reference to due process first appeared in a statutory rendition of clause 39 in 1354 thus: "No man of what state or condition he be, shall be put out of his lands or tenements nor taken, nor disinherited, nor put to death, without he be brought to answer by due process of law."

People have been working to curb our worst human impulses for a long time. Let’s learn from history and keep that going instead of continually rediscovering why people have been working on it.

I have collected here many (85) color palettes of Retro CRTs, LCDs, CROs, VFDs, Nixie Tubes, Numitrons, Calculators, Terminals, and Computers (in text mode). Most of these are high contrast and are easy to read.

These are fun!

The last portion of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker's 2025 State of the State and budget address included Pritzker invoking Nazis when criticizing President Donald Trump.

This is what defending our liberty really looks like. Don't fall for the scam of blaming our friends and neighbors for our problems.

The President of the United States is aligning himself with the dictator of Russia, Vladimir Putin, to undermine the independence of Ukraine and its democracy.

The US Republican party is betraying our longtime allies and siding with the forces of oppression around the world. I don't think people voted for this.

One day, I saw what felt like Gorton on a ferry traversing the waters Bay Area. A few weeks later, I spotted it on a sign in a national park. Then on an intercom. On a street lighting access cover. In an elevator. At my dentist’s office. In an alley.

Beautiful story of discovering some surprisingly ubiquitous typography that tells us about past production methods.

Alarmed about the possibility of being seen as “woke” or partisan, Shogan is purging the museum of everything that could substantiate such an allegation, such as exhibits that treat Native Americans, Japanese Americans, and civil rights activists as human beings with valuable and important stories.

The preemptive surrender to white supremacy is also something we need to constantly fight against. This washing of history from a Biden appointee is disappointing.

Juneteenth’s history prevailed through sheer will and a fight for representation. Black activists have been fighting for Juneteenth to become a paid federal holiday for decades. It was only on July 17, 2021 that US President Joe Biden finally signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, declaring Juneteenth an official federal holiday.

A brief, shocking (to me) history of Juneteenth. Shocked to learn people continued to be illegally enslaved into the 1960s.

McKinsey is to the middle class what flesh-eating bacteria is to healthy tissue.

Edward Zitron reads Google's internal emails revealed in a DOJ suit and names names:

These emails are a stark example of the monstrous growth-at-all-costs mindset that dominates the tech ecosystem, and if you take one thing away from this newsletter, I want it to be the name Prabhakar Raghavan, and an understanding that there are people responsible for the current state of technology.

Scathing.

So in the story of the loss of ancient Greco-Roman literature, library fires are just a footnote. No single library had a monopoly on the classics anyway. A much bigger role was played by a format shift that affected every book, everywhere: the shift from scroll to codex. That format shift took place in the years 100 to 400 — in antiquity: most of the loss occurred before the dissolution of the western empire.

Interesting history of preserved Greek texts. Expiring formats have always been a problem, I guess? When Word, Powerpoint, and PDFs eventually die we're going to lose a lot of knowledge. It's easier to copy data once it's digital, but it's also easier to erase.

This overview of the historic origins of these Artificial General Intelligence boom or doom cults by Timnit Gebru should be required viewing. We have a real world with existing needs that these ideologies ignore. The result of these scifi inspired beliefs is promoting authoritarian politics. As mentioned in this video, the main question to ask: who benefits now?

See also: The Wide Angle: Understanding TESCREAL — the Weird Ideologies Behind Silicon Valley’s Rightward Turn.

It could have been a lot better. Trump didn’t just “raise eyebrows” with his vermin line; Welker should have said it was redolent of Nazism. Welker let it drop instead of following up. It also shouldn’t have been a yes/no question, but rather something like “how do you feel when he says something like this”?

Small signs the media is evolving on Trump coverage.

Statement from Brewster Kahle, digital librarian of the Internet Archive: “When people want to listen to music they go to Spotify. When people want to study sound recordings as they were originally created, they go to libraries like the Internet Archive. Both are needed. There shouldn’t be conflict here.”

Argh, still mad about this. Scratchy 78s are not competition for Sony or Universal. These companies should be helping the Internet Archive preserve music.