There is a famous photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on August 14, 1945. I j...

There is a famous photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on August 14, 1945.

I just saw someone post a Ghibli version of that photo.

'Abuse upon abuse' I thought, and it's worth understanding that the kiss was in no way reciprocated by the nurse. The sailor was George Mendonsa, who was witnessed to be just grabbing many random people on the street.

The nurse was Greta Zimmer Friedman, 21 years old at the time.

« She wandered into Times Square when a passing sailor locked her in an unexpected embrace. “I did not see him approaching, and before I know it I was in this vice grip,” she told CBS news in a 2012 interview.

“It wasn’t my choice to be kissed. The guy just came over and grabbed. That man was very strong. I wasn’t kissing him. He was kissing me”. »

When you know this, and see her limp arms in the photo, the photo takes on whole new meaning.

When someone uses that photo now to, in seconds without effort, generate a copy in a very recognizable cartoonish style made possible through pirated content from a true artist, it's a sad day.

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/v-j-day-kiss-times-square-1945/

Did you know that there are many types of curiosity, and that the quick answers that 'AI'...

Did you know that there are many types of curiosity, and that the quick answers that 'AI' and the internet provide can be antithetical to deeper exploration, the exploration encouraged by Epistemic and Empathic curiosity.

Someone recently reached out to let me know they really enjoyed one of my 10-year old blog posts, about curiosity.

I love when this happens because it encourages me to revisit my thinking at the time and reflect on why I may or may not be living and acting in accordance with that mindset in the present moment.

Re-reading this reminded me to spend more time being curious. Really curious.

https://axbom.com/curiosity/

@alavi I’m not necessarily marketing it as good ROI, but making the point that the argument bein...

@alavi

I’m not necessarily marketing it as good ROI, but making the point that the argument being used ("it only affects 1% of users") is invalid as it assumes that a statistic that is the effect of past decisions gives any indication of what that number would be after the work is done. The effort you put in, regardless of your ROI calculations and how large of an effort you decide on, will change the percentage.

Never mind that the statistic is often just completely made up and most organisations just don’t know, adding the risk of making things worse and essentially kicking people out.

You can’t say ”it’s not worth making it accessible for only 1% of our users”. That’s a logical fa...

You can’t say ”it’s not worth making it accessible for only 1% of our users”. That’s a logical fallacy. And reveals a lot about your understanding of the subject area, and your value system.

If you had made it accessible to begin with, people with disabilities could’ve been 20% of your user base.

And it would have been better for 100% of your users.

#a11y #accessibility

I wasn’t a fan of Iron Fist, so I’ve started putting together my own Marvel tv-series viewing ord...

I wasn’t a fan of Iron Fist, so I’ve started putting together my own Marvel tv-series viewing order list. I found it hard not to include the movie Black Widow in there for context prior to Hawkeye. Though to be fair there should perhaps be more of that.

Not sure yet where to place She-Hulk and Ms Marvel, amongst Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Echo.

https://lab.axbom.com/s/d033677b-c816-41ad-9462-ba896d33e6e7

Gotta love that this is the second paragraph in the Wikipedia entry for Backdoor: "In the U...

Gotta love that this is the second paragraph in the Wikipedia entry for Backdoor:

"In the United States, the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act forces internet providers to provide backdoors for government authorities. In 2024, the U.S. government realized that China had been tapping communications in the U.S. using that infrastructure for months, or perhaps longer; China recorded presidential candidate campaign office phone calls —including employees of the then-vice president of the nation– and of the candidates themselves."

More on this story:

https://reason.com/2024/10/11/chinese-hackers-used-u-s-government-mandated-wiretap-systems/

« "The problem with backdoors is known—any alternate channel devoted to access by one party will undoubtedly be discovered, accessed, and abused by another," David Ruiz of the internet security firm Malwarebytes Labs wrote in 2019. He noted that cybersecurity researchers had been making that argument for years. They've been repeating themselves for years because their warnings appear to fall on deaf ears. »

«Whittaker explained how AI agents are being marketed as a way to add value to your life by handl...

«Whittaker explained how AI agents are being marketed as a way to add value to your life by handling various online tasks for the user. For instance, AI agents would be able to take on tasks like looking up concerts, booking tickets, scheduling the event on your calendar, and messaging your friends that it’s booked.

“So we can just put our brain in a jar because the thing is doing that and we don’t have to touch it, right?,” Whittaker mused.

Then she explained the type of access the AI agent would need to perform these tasks, including access to our web browser and a way to drive it as well as access to our credit card information to pay for tickets, our calendar, and messaging app to send the text to your friends.

“It would need to be able to drive that [process] across our entire system with something that looks like root permission, accessing every single one of those databases — probably in the clear, because there’s no model to do that encrypted,” Whittaker warned.»

https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/07/signal-president-meredith-whittaker-calls-out-agentic-ai-as-having-profound-security-and-privacy-issues/