Searching for media lab prof's names like....sighcry.

People found so far:

* Neil
* Ed

This short story by him is I think the best encapsulation of our times. I remember reading it 30 years ago while wandering through a university library as a teenager, and it has stuck with me ever since: www.jstor.org/stable/44340...

Note that I would be saying the same thing about travel to the US for a conference right now.

As the deadline is upcoming, I feel it incumbent to make a public statement about this, that if you are LGBTQ+ and considering attending ISEA in Dubai, you are putting your life in danger.

I have reached out to a member of the ISEA board for clarification, and to ask if they would consider canceling ISEA in Dubai, or at least advising LGBTQ+ people to not attend. I sent that message a month ago and have not received a response yet.

Transgender people, mostly trans women, have been detained just for traveling through airports in the UAE. To host a "diverse" conference in a nation where LGBTQ+ activity is punishable by death is...just mind-boggingly tone-deaf.

Indeed, depends on the country. In the NL where I live now I pay around €165/mo for the insurance (which is a pretty standard amount) and have a yearly deductible ("eigen risico", or "own risk) of €380/year. I can't overstate how important the lower healthcare costs were to my decision to move here.

The case of Frank Malina is instructive. He was living in France when his passport was canceled due to HUAC investigations. He eventually got French citizenship, but I don't know what happened immediately after the passport was revoked.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_M...

youtu.be/Ykl57izCofs?...

By my reading, in the case of the NL, to have a canceled passport would be a violation of the residence permit. What repercussions that would have would likely be contingent on whether a bureaucrat would have any leeway in deciding things.

Given that IE is in the EU, I imagine it would be similar.

I was wondering that same thing starting on 20 January 2025. And have been waking up everyday since wondering it. I have been able to get no definite information, and when I asked such a question on an expat group I'm in I started a flame war.

Terra incognita indeed.

The same thing could be said for other forms of accessible design practices that should be ingrained in people from the beginning.

Is it, uhh, normal for a US military vehicle to have a marking resembling a Christian cross on the driver's door?

Asking for a friend.

It's 2025 and we still don't have a good way to annotate the electronic text we read. Especially one that is self-hosted and not dependent on a startup who will eventually sell my data to someone else.

Sigh.

Rant off :)

Yes, I use Calibre, yes, I use KOReader, yes I know all about the various syncing methods available.

I really wish that instead of wasteful LLM development, techies worked on solving the seemingly simple problem of merging annotations of EPUBs when you are reading and annotating those EPUBs across multiple devices.

the dovetails, I'm quite happy with how this turned out, especially how smooth the piece is without using any sandpaper at all.

This thing should last a hundred years or more with just occasional maintenance of reapplying the finish every few decades or so.

Commission, and are ultimately forgotten.

I am having a harder and harder time with this.

the "messiness" in them :)