Jerusalem: Journalists attacked as Israeli nationalists march in Old City - BBC News:

Thousands of Israeli nationalists have been marching into the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem's Old City, with violence directed at media covering the event. The flag parade is part of Israel's Jerusalem Day, marking its capture of the east of the city in the 1967 war. A group of marchers threw stones, sticks and bottles at Palestinian and foreign journalists at the Damascus Gate entrance. They also cheered and chanted racist slogans, including "Death to Arabs". Far-right Israeli cabinet ministers have joined the procession. One of them, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, declared: "Jerusalem is ours for ever."

Tiny Electronic Desktop Sculptures:

Daring Fireball: Proposed Name for GM’s Upcoming In-House Software Platform (You Know, the One That Isn’t Going to Support CarPlay): Edsel:

I don’t think the name fits… The Edsel was chock-full of cool moon-shot features that were not quite fully baked, and didn’t have engineering support to keep at it until they were good.

jwz: “Please Stand By - Jacking In…":

Last night at the spooky goth club, someone handed me a floppy disk with a zine on it! I'm living the dream, you guys.

NYC mayor wants to cut childhood programs by more than $500 million:

Current Mayor Eric Adams has announced he wants to cut the budgets that fund the pre-K program, public education, and the public library, among others. His administration’s 2024 budget proposal would cut $567 million from the universal pre-K program’s expansion plans. This would, in effect, stop the program from being truly universal. And since July 2022, his administration has failed to pay many of the small providers and nonprofits doing the work of caring for New York City’s 3- and 4-year-olds.

The attack on the city’s families is multipronged. There is the overarching threat to the budget and a lack of administrative follow-through on accounting. Lastly, Adams has replaced most of the people with institutional knowledge of the program with the kinds of people that hang on and suck up to Eric Adams.

These cronies have been disastrous at handling the very large system and half-assed at the important task of reaching out to the communities that need pre-K the most. On top of this, they have been slow to sign kids up and 30,000 spots remain empty. Bloomberg reports that millions of dollars have yet to be paid out from last year, and some providers have had to go out of business while awaiting payment from the city.

Oh, yeah, and because Adams wants to make all generations feel his fiscal wrath, he is trying to slash millions of dollars in funding from the program that delivers meals to seniors at their homes.

How does the GOP keep finding and electing the worst people…

Rep. Paul Gosar has a neo-Nazi on staff:

Talking Points Memo appears to have quite the scoop, reporting that they've identified a "relatively prominent" pseudonymous booster of the neo-Nazi "Groyper" movement as a staffer for scandal-plagued House Republican Rep. Paul Gosar.

An "extensive digital trail of interconnected Groyper social media pages" has been "linked to" Wade Searle, Gosar's digital director. The news won't come as a terrible surprise to anyone familiar with the House Republicans’ many, many past dalliances with white supremacy and neo-Nazi support, but the revelation that one of his top staffers has a double life as an enthusiastic supporter of the neo-Nazi movement does a lot to explain the constant nods to neo-Nazism in Gosar's campaigns and public statements.

Cartoon: COVID’s over* party supplies:

23 Pandemic Decisions That Actually Went Right - The Atlantic:

Not every lesson has to be a cautionary tale, however, and the end of the COVID-19 emergency may be, if nothing else, a chance to consider which pandemic policies, decisions, and ideas actually worked out for the best. Put another way: In the face of so much suffering, what went right?

To find out, we called up more than a dozen people who have spent the past several years in the thick of pandemic decision making, and asked: When the next pandemic comes, which concrete action would you repeat in exactly the same way?

While I’m not willing to say we’re at the end of the emergency, the points raised are good and I wish we were continuing to engage with them.

CNN’s open-mic night for Trump was a disgrace:

From the very first moment of CNN’s beyond ill-advised open mic night for Trump, he simply lied in response to everything that host Kaitlan Collins asked and either ignored any attempt to correct his lies, or shouted (and sneered) Collins down with the help of a pro-Trump crowd, hand-picked by CNN, which cheered him at every lie, whooped over every insult, and applauded at every threat.

At the end of the evening, CNN issued a statement saying, “Tonight Kaitlan Collins exemplified what it means to be a world-class journalist. She asked tough, fair and revealing questions. And she followed up and fact-checked President Trump in real time.” Anyone unfortunate enough to watch even a moment of the evening knows that CNN has confused the term “journalist” with “doormat.” A day after Donald Trump was held responsible for the sexual assault and defamation of one professional woman, CNN simply gave him another professional woman to humiliate in front of the nation. And he did. While a room full of adoring worshippers laughed.

CNN has made a mockery of itself with this “event”… They have, like Fox before them, staked their existence not as a News organization but as an Entertainment one.

1-bit Hokusai’s ”The Great Wave” – Hypertalking:

Stunning take on the original, the concept feels in the spirit of Hokusai’s works (Japanese woodcut series inspired by the styes and colors of the Dutch Master artists).

5 years ago I started a now completely stalled project (fingers crossed I can figure out how to restart soon) to draw all of Hokusai’s 36 views of Mount Fuji as 1-bit pixel art.

– Via kottke.org

As Twitter sinks, Musk rearranges the deck chairs | Boing Boing:

An announcement from Elon "Pedo Guy" Musk yesterday put the world on notice: he is adding functionality to the Twitter app that has nothing to do with their core mission, or that you don't already find elsewhere. It is as if Musk is investing what little resources he has left in new deck chairs for the Titanic after throwing all the old ones overboard just weeks ago.

Why would Twitter now seek to add voice calling and encrypted private messaging? Twitter is, first and foremost, a public messaging system. Musk has been diluting the value of that public messaging system by undermining its trust, and now he invests his remaining engineers in developing "trusted" private messaging that is already widely available and used in other apps.

Remembering Phony Stark’s obsession with “X” as a rebranded twitter nee WhatsApp alternative, and his fan’s obsession with encrypted messaging as a feature of that when planning an illegal coup attempt or avoiding judicial oversight, etc, this seems on-brand in the efforts of destroying the brand.

there is no middle – WIL WHEATON dot NET:

Remember how much fun it was to harmlessly TP your friends’ houses? How silly and goofy it was to ding-dong ditch someone? Just to do silly, childish, ultimately harmless expressions of being a kid who’s fooling around? Or how about playing hide and seek? Remember how fun that was?

Thanks to the Republican fascists who have gerrymandered and suppressed their way into minority rule In 21st century America, any of those things will now likely get you killed by a paranoid gun nut who won’t suffer any consequences. And when it’s a white man who murders a BIPOC child, his state’s Republican governor will pardon any consequences that somehow slip past the barriers to justice they’ve built.

Pick a side. There is no middle.

You’re with the fascists and terrorists, or you are with the rest of us. There is no middle. There is no “both sides”. One side wants as much death and terror on the streets as possible. The other side wants all of us to have healthcare and a home.

GA Republican says fake elector scheme came from Trump’s legal team:

CNN and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution report Shafer's attorneys have said that Shafer was following the "repeated and detailed advice" of Trump's legal team when he gathered up a team of so-called "contingent" Republican electors and appointed himself as one of them. So they said to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, whose office is investigating the fake electors plot as they probe other attempts by Trump and the Republican Party to override Georgia's official election results.

Shafer's lawyers told Willis in a letter sent last week that Trump's legal team had given him "very direct, detailed legal advice on the procedure he should follow, and he followed those instructions to the letter." Shafer was following the instructions of "legal counsel," says Shafer's new legal counsel. This "eliminat[es] any possibility of criminal intent or liability" in forming a new slate of "electors" inside a Georgia state house committee room on Dec. 14, 2020 to vote for Donald Trump even as the officially designated Georgia electors cast their votes for Joe Biden elsewhere in the statehouse.

Sheriff: Louisiana man shot child playing hide and seek:

Investigators learned that several children were playing hide and seek in the Starks neighborhood and were hiding on the neighbor’s property.

David Doyle, 58, told detectives that he got his gun when he saw shadows outside his home and shot at people he saw running away, unknowingly hitting the girl, officials said.

Firearms have only one purpose. If you discharge one intentionally, at something person shaped, it should be charged as attempted murder, period.

What does an AR-15 do to a human body? A visual examination of the deadly damage. - Washington Post:

This is not a pretty read. This is meant to be traumatic, because the subject matter is exactly that.

If you can view this, and still think any civilian should be carrying .223 or similar rifles, you are certifiably a monster.

The animation glosses over that a 9mm or other handgun ammo can also do hydrostatic shock, and depending on slug can still do massive trauma, but even with those considerations it’s nothing like the energy-transfer, cavitation, and fragmentation trauma from .223 or 7.63 rounds issued for combat.

(480) Kate Bush /David Gilmour - " Running Up That Hill " - YouTube:

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

Daring Fireball: Ford CEO Jim Farley Seems Very Happy That GM Is Dropping CarPlay:

Great 3-minute clip from Joanna Stern’s interview with Ford CEO Jim Farley at the WSJ’s Future of Everything Festival. She asks him about GM’s plan to drop CarPlay from their future EVs, and Farley starts by saying “Yeah, how about that?” and laughing.

Farley says, “The interior has to be really well done. But in terms of content? We kind of lost that battle 10 years ago. So get real with it, because you’re not going to make a ton of money on content inside the vehicle. It’s going to be safety/security, partial autonomy, and productivity in our eyes. [...] 70 percent of our Ford customers in the U.S are Apple customers. Why would I go to an Apple customer and say ‘Good luck!’? That doesn’t seem customer centric.”

Right-wing commentator Stephen Crowder threatened wife and “exposed himself” to co-workers | Boing Boing:

Stephen Crowder, a right-wing commentator whose fame rose with YouTube's decision to favor his virulent brand of content, is being divorced by his wife. Footage released amid the proceedings shows Crowder berating, threatening and emotionally abusing his then-pregnant spouse: actions that once might have gotten him "canceled" for good but now seem mostly to have focused conservative anger on the right to a "no-fault" divorce–the right that allows his wife to free herself. Today we learned that Crowder is accused of exposing his genitals to colleagues, giving conservatives obsessed with male prerogatives something else to chew on.

Daring Fireball: The Onion: ‘Netflix Condemns WGA Strike for Putting Future Show Cancellations Behind Schedule’:

Emphasizing the negative effects the recent union action would have on the company, Netflix officials condemned the Writers Guild of America strike Tuesday for putting future show cancellations behind schedule. “We have dozens of shows already stuck in the early stages of the preproduction process, but this strike will cause significant delays in our eventual scrapping of those projects,” said Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, who added that preventing work that writers had committed over a year of their lives to from becoming fully realized creations that the streaming platform could kill before they ever saw the light of day was unconscionable.

Enterprise XCV-330 (c2100) - Roddenberry Archive:

The Roddenberry Archive is a multi decade collaboration with The Roddenberry Estate, OTOY, and iconic Star Trek artists Denise and Mike Okuda, Daren Dochterman, and Doug Drexler to collect significant documents and art from Gene Roddenberry’s lifetime of work, beginning with the Starship Enterprise, and to make them accessible through innovative means of presentation. The project aims to preserve this information for those studying his career in the future, for those who appreciate his work, and to provide accurate information for those involved in future productions and other projects based on Roddenberry’s work.

…

Over two dozen USS Enterprise bridges are currently in this archive portal (with more on the way) - from the first 1964 concept artwork for the Star Trek pilot, to the newest ship to be called Enterprise, revealed at the conclusion of Star Trek: Picard Season 3.

Microsoft Broke Google Chrome Feature to Promote Edge Browser:

An April Windows update borked a new button in Chrome—the most popular browser in the world—that let you change your default browser with a single click, but the worst was reserved for users on the enterprise version of Windows. For weeks, every time an enterprise user opened Chrome, the Windows default settings page would pop up. There was no way to make it stop unless you uninstalled the operating system update. It forced Google to disable the setting, which had made Chrome more convenient.

I have tried to give MS the benefit of the doubt about getting better… Their cloud gaming offering is an interesting value proposition that works entirely in-browser on non-Windows systems, their ownership of Bethesda seems to be mostly benevolent, and they’ve been an OK shepherd of GitHub from outside appearances despite some missteps… But every once in a while they show that streaks of their old selves live on in the company, and every time it happens I have to reassess how much I trust any part of them.

Musk, who has been scuffling with the media since acquiring the platform last year, asked if NPR was going to start tweeting again. — Read on www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1173422311/elon-musk-npr-twitter-reassign

It seems like Phony Stark is really hurt that content producing entities are dumping him.

The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small | Defector — Read on defector.com/the-internet-isnt-meant-to-be-so-small

It is worth remembering that the internet wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting forests you could stumble into and dark ravines you knew better than to enter. The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight. Instead, like most everything American enterprise has promised held some new dream, it has turned out to be the same old thing—a dream for a few, and something much more confining for everyone else.

DeSantis wrote his own confession, to the delight of Disney lawyers:

Disney condemned the "Don't Say Gay" law as being bad for business, upon which Dear Leader Ron had an absolute public fit over the audacity of a U.S. corporation announcing an opinion he didn't like. Immediately after signing the bill into law, state lawmakers were already mulling a repeal of Disney's 1967-granted special property rights in the area surrounding their Florida theme parks, explicitly citing Disney's "woke ideology" as the reason why.

DeSantis and Florida Republicans would eventually follow through with that threat, though not before Disney's allies could so badly outmaneuver them as to render the whole thing nearly a farce, and that leads us to the present. Disney is now suing DeSantis and other Florida state officials for a "targeted campaign of government retaliation—orchestrated at every step by Governor DeSantis as punishment for Disney's protected speech."

Special points:

DeSantis did all of this in an effort to become the next Republican president, of course. That is why DeSantis has done everything ever since he came into office, as he mimes and mimics his way into the Republican psyche by attaching himself to every scrap of "culture war" he can find. But DeSantis is never going to get the nomination, because he is very creepy, completely devoid of personality, and has no political moves other than grumpy, whining showboating.

Unless Donald Trump dies. If Donald Trump dies, DeSantis will dig him up, wear his skin, and cruise to the nomination claiming to be him. But that’s a tall order, and Ron no longer has a plausible Plan B.

If there’s no Plan B, it’s because he outlawed it out of spite…

CERN celebrates 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web • The Register:

On April 30, 1993, CERN signed off on a decision that the World Wide Web – a client, server, and library of code created under its roof – belonged to humanity (the letter was duly stamped on May 3).

"CERN relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code, both source and binary form, and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify and redistribute it" states a letter signed on that day by Walter Hoogland and Helmut Weber – at the time respectively CERN's director of research and director of administration.