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On Website Technicals (2022-08) - Tech updates: FUELINST glitch, review pros and cons, a11y, fanlife, Save-Data, traffic nadir, JXL. - https://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-site-technicals-63.html

On Website Technicals (2022-08)
Tech updates: FUELINST glitch, review pros and cons, a11y, fanlife, Save-Data, traffic nadir, JXL.

Ilhan Omar's office says she's 'not a millionaire' after $30M filing revised down to under $100K: report (Fox News)
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ilhan-omars-office-says-shes-millionaire-30m-filing-revised-100k-report
http://www.memeorandum.com/260418/p52#a260418p52

Jason Witten on Hall of Fame omission: 'I didn't leave there feeling like I lost' https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/jason-witten-on-hall-of-fame-omission-i-didn-t-leave-there-feeling-like-i-lost

“We are a nation of laws.
You can't just make up things whole piece,”
said Senator Bill Cassidy,
following his primary loss.
“People are concerned about making ends meet, not about putting a slush fund together without a legal precedent.”
It’s not clear yet what approach Cassidy will take in his final months in office,
but he’s got plenty of opportunities to make his voice heard,
including on the effort to limit U.S. hostilities against Iran wi…

Bill Cassidy Is Done Holding Back What He Thinks
The Louisiana Republican is already speaking out against the president's “weaponization” fund and money for a White House ballroom.

Not only will the Ring Road not solve the traffic issues as report after report has highlighted only 3% is bypass traffic, but it will CPO and affect 54 homeowners.
The N6 will encourage private car use, raise emissions, waste money, and not even solve traffic.
https://www.

Galway Ring Road CPO issued as residents seek clarity
The marathon N6 Galway City Ring Road project has moved a step closer following the publication of the compulsory purchase order (CPO) notice last week, but families facing the loss of their homes say they are still waiting for direct communication about what happens next.

The need to call customer service is often, in reality, a failing of UX: a bug, an explicit decision to employ a dark pattern. ‘Why is my account not letting me do x or y’: bug. ‘Why can’t I cancel the website?’: dark pattern. ‘Why can’t I schedule this appointment right now’: UX failing. 1/2

Filing: Unitree, China's leading robot company, is aiming to raise ~$610M in its Shanghai IPO; it brought in ~$247M in revenue in 2025 and ~$41.6M in net profit (Jessica Sui/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious

--Ted Chiang, The Atlantic
Should we seriously consider the possibility that Claude, or any large language model, might be conscious? And if it has feelings, is it capable of receiving moral instruction?
No. Absolutely not. Generative AI is harmful enough when we understand it as a conventional technology, but if we confuse fluency at generating text with consciousness or moral agency, we’re at risk of assigning re…

No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious
Taken to its logical conclusion, this line of thinking is absurd—and damning.

Logistics in the technical sense (part of supply chain management) is a subset of logistics in the vernacular sense ("the handling of the details of an operation"). You can explore this second and more general sense, and thereby build an understanding of the first and more technical sense, by iteratively asking the question, "how does one make that happen" and follow questions from there.
A big part of organizing is figuring out the (vernacular) logistics (and helping others figure it out). You want to organize a seed swap? Ok. How does one make that happen? Well, you need seeds, people, a place, and perhaps a time. How does one make that happen? You can forage seeds or you can buy seeds for a garden and swap extras. How do you get people to come? Well, figure out where you want people to come from and choose an accessible place. What's the easiest thing to do? Get people from your neighborhood. How does one make that happen? Well, maybe put up flyers. How does one make that happen? Well, print them on your printer if you have one, or at a library, then go post them up. Etc.
Keep asking questions until you either find a roadblock that you can't find a way around, or you find things you can do yourself (one of those things you can do yourself is asking friends to help).
If you practice the exercise of thinking about how things happen, you can start to find things that you can do yourself. You can start to understand what exists now, and you can imagine what's possible. By thinking about logistics, you can figure out how to replace things when they collapse or are dismantled. You can also identify things that can't easily be replaced, and try to figure out alternatives.
This practice is good for figuring out how to build, but it can also be a valuable practice for figuring out how to resist. Concentration camps and ethnic cleansing also require logistics. Mass displacement means moving people. How does one do that? People are generally going to be moved in planes or buses. How does one do that? Well, people get loaded on to planes or buses in specific places. Planes and buses need fuel. Planes are fueled at their airports, which may well be the same places where people are loaded on to them. There is a fuel depo and a fuel truck that makes flying people out of a specific place possible. How does the fuel get to that fuel depo? Well, that fuel is probably also delivered by truck. Someone drives those trucks. Someone fuels those planes. Someone clears the planes for takeoff. Someone fuels those busses. Someone drives those busses. And so on.
Logistics networks can be highly complex. The more complex the operation, the more possible points of failure and more possible points where pressure can be applied, where operations can be disrupted. Ethnic cleansing is a complicated operation. The logistics of disrupting complicated things tend to be much less complicated than the logistics of the complicated things themselves.
The Right has exploited this fact for a long time. Centralized social services are logistically complex. Public infrastructure is logistically complex. By destroying these things, they can loot public resources by privatizing the infrastructure and functionality.
But the things that support the Right are even more logistically complex. Oil, cars, AI data centers, internal paramilitary, these are extremely complicated and fragile. There are numerous pressure points, all of which can respond to numerous strategies.
If we want to win, we should reduce the influence of politics over the things we care about. We should focus on building distributed mutual aid networks that don't rely on state funding and aren't subject to the whims of politicians. This is also known as "dual power." That is, creating counter-institutions outside of the dominant political system. The Right already does this in the form of churches and corporations.
As we reduce our complexity, we can then press our complexity advantage against the things for which the Right *needs* the state: the apparatus of violence needed to maintain capital and enforce the dominant order.

Jason Witten on Hall of Fame omission: 'I didn't leave there feeling like I lost' https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/jason-witten-on-hall-of-fame-omission-i-didn-t-leave-there-feeling-like-i-lost