Sonia Connolly

About a year ago, a Portland friend who was in town said she had a ticket for a singing meditation event at Spirit Rock the next day, and she could pick me up on the way if I wanted to go too. Sure, why not! So I bought my own ticket, and we got there early and had a picnic lunch and walked around the gorgeous grounds in hilly rural Marin until it was time to go into the hall.

We opted for chairs rather than meditation cushions, and I'm glad because it was a couple of hours long. I had no idea what to expect, but I thought it would include periods of silent meditation. I think we had one ten minute period of meditation, but Melanie DeMore came out singing in her rich deep gorgeous voice, and mostly sang spirituals (surviaval songs) and told us stories about her interactions with other famous singers like Pete Seeger, and explained that Kumbaya was actually "Come by me," a prayer from enslaved people. She called us her babies. I wept into my mask through a lot of it, at the realness and the kindness in that voice surrounding us.

Here you can see and hear her lead a couple of songs at a concert in 2014



In February, a friend said she was going to see Linda Tillery in a few days in Berkeley, did I want to get a ticket and go too. Sure, why not! Linda Tillery is a legendary Black singer from San Francisco, and she had gathered together many members of her Cultural Heritage Choir for a Black History Month reunion. She is a force and a voice to be reckoned with, even with health issues that led to using a wheelchair for the concert.

To my delight, Melanie DeMore was there as a past member of the Cultural Heritage Choir. The musicians took turns leading songs, each more skilled than the next, and she led some Gullah Stick Pounding, with powerful rhythms.

Here she shares some of the history of Gullah Stick Pounding and why she teaches it to choirs all over.



And one more, teaching "I will be your standing stone, I will stand by you"

I thought I posted this before, but I'm not finding it.

A group of mainly women scholars and makers at the top of their fields gathered together to interpret and recreate the outfit and gifts that the suitor gave to the woman he's pursuing in the song Greensleeves. Fascinating look at history and the details of both the clothing and how to make it. The Greensleeves Project

The making of video



And the result

Minneapolis Is Going on Offense Against ICE, interview with Interview with organizer Aru Shiney-Ajay by Eric Blanc, via cosmolinguist.

Jacobin’s Eric Blanc spoke with Aru Shiney-Ajay, Sunrise Movement’s executive director and a lifelong Minneapolis resident, about Minneapolis’s organizing pushback and how ICE’s opponents can go on the offensive nationwide by pressuring companies like Hilton, Enterprise, and Home Depot to stop collaborating with the agency.[...]

Aru Shiney-Ajay: I don’t think the main barrier in the US is fear. It’s skepticism. Most people don’t believe in our ability to change things. So one of the most important things for organizers right now is to pick campaigns that are ambitious, tangible, and winnable — wins that aren’t so small they feel meaningless but are still actually achievable. Because one of the biggest things we need to prove to ordinary people right now is that we really do have power over how the government operates, and over what happens in our society.

Your phone edits all your photos with AI - is it changing your view of reality? by Thomas Germain. "From simple enhancements to hallucinated facial features, modern phones choose how our memories will look."

No. You can't tell it was written by AI by Segun Famisa.

In this essay, I will argue that, your favourite “tells” that a document was produced by AI, at best, is wrong, and depending on your position, in life, at worst, is dangerous and harmful.[...]
So who trained [AI]? A lot of the early training, data annotations and other manual processes, happened with cheap labour in African countries. There are multiple sources that have revealed the hidden economy of workers that big-tech outsources these kinds of tasks to African countries with unstable political situations, weaker workers rights, and cheap labour.

Curious about how LLM's actually work? So What's The Next Word Then? by Matthias Kainer does a good job of explaining it, with diagrams. Via Martin Fowler's blog.

Acting ethically in an imperfect world by Jürgen Geuter describes and addresses Cory Doctorow's defensiveness about using LLMs.

I appreciate a lot of work Cory Doctorow has done in the last decades. But the arguments he presents here to defend his usage of LLMs for this rather trivial task (which TBH could probably be done reasonably well with traditional means) are part of why the Internet – and therefore the world – looks like it does right now. It’s a set of arguments that wants to delegitimize political and moral actions based on libertarian and utilitarian thinking.

GenAI has an Alignment Problem by Richard George.

But the mundane reality is much simpler: LLMs fail to effectively solve the problems we have, while creating a vast new class of problems to be solved. They are, ultimately, completely mis-aligned with our needs, and incompatible with the society we live in.

Relatedly, why AI isn't actually helping software companies. Dax Raad just dropped the most honest take on AI productivity written up by JP Caparas.

everyone's talking about their teams like they were at the peak of efficiency and bottlenecked by ability to produce code
here's what things actually look like:
- your org rarely has good ideas. ideas being expensive to implement was actually helping
- majority of workers have no reason to be super motivated, they want to do their 9-5 and get back to their life
- they're not using AI to be 10x more effective they're using it to churn out their tasks with less energy spend
- the 2 people on your team that actually tried are now flattened by the slop code everyone is producing, they will quit soon
- even when you produce work faster you're still bottlenecked by bureaucracy and the dozen other realities of shipping something real
- your CFO is like what do you mean each engineer now costs $2000 extra per month in LLM bills"

The only developer productivity metrics that matter by John SJ Anderson.

1. How often does the team routinely ship new versions of the software they build?
2. How often do things break when the team ships a new version?

Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots by Lionel Dricot.

A programmer's loss of identity by Dave Gauer.

The social group I still identify with shares my values. We value learning. We value the merits of language design, type systems, software maintenance, levels of abstraction, and yeah, if I’m honest, minute syntactical differences, the color of the bike shed, and the best way to get that perfectly smooth shave on a yak. I’m not sure what we’re called now, "heirloom programmers"?

"Acoustic" programmers (like guitars)? "Thought-powered" programmers (like gas-powered cars)? I'm not ready to be an heirloom yet!

Carbon Dysphoria by Iris Meredith. How tech workers in general behave in dysphoric ways and what we might be able to do about it.

AI Data Centers: Power-Hungry, Water-Thirsty, and Rare-Earth Reliant by Daniel.

There is a general strike called for Friday January 23 in Minnesota. Stay home from work if it feels right, and definitely don't cross any picket lines, including the electronic ones of shopping at big corporations like Amazon, etc. (if you can avoid it).

From my union:
"This is a verified page fundraising support for the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation, AFL-CIO and Working Partnerships' 2026 rapid response effort to meet the needs of impacted union members, worker center members, and their families..."
https://workingpartnerships.betterworld.org/campaigns/support-impacted-union-families

Here is how you can help:

Posts by naomikritzer

How to help if you are outside Minnesota.

She covers a variety of topics, including how to start preparing for if and when this shit comes to your home state, and the suggestion to talk About immigration, and make it clear you think it’s GOOD.

If you are in Minnesota.

How to Temporarily Disable Face ID or Touch ID, and Require a Passcode to Unlock Your iPhone or iPad by John Gruber.

Just press and hold the buttons on both sides. Remember that. Try it now. Don’t just memorize it, internalize it, so that you’ll be able to do it without much thought while under duress, like if you’re confronted by a police officer. Remember to do this every time you’re separated from your phone, like when going through the magnetometer at any security checkpoint, especially airports. As soon as you see a metal detector ahead of you, you should think, “Hard-lock my iPhone”.

"The Sick Times is an independent news site founded by journalists Betsy Ladyzhets and Miles Griffis. We report on the Long COVID crisis, COVID-19, and infection-associated illnesses." They redacted the excerpt I had linked here because they found the whole book engaged in Covid denial and promotion of harmful treatments for ME/CFS. (Thanks to silveradept for the heads up.)

Replacement link, by one of the editors at Sick Times: The Soft Butch That Couldn’t (Or: I Got COVID-19 in March 2020 and Never Got Better) by Heather Hogan.

(On a lighter note) 6th grader's science experiment answers, 'Do cat buttholes touch every surface they sit on?' by Jacalyn Wetzel, Upworthy staff.

The results? Turns out that, no, cat buttholes do not touch every surface cats sit on. Now, let's all take a collective sigh of relief while we go over the details.

A Culture of Resilience by Lindsey Foltz, a beautifully written and photographed exploration of home food preserving in Bulgaria.

[I]ndustrial and small-scale agriculture; cultivated and wild foods; formal and informal economies; leisure and work do not function as stark polarities but rather in interconnecting, mutually supportive relationships through which home preservers practice, develop, and share their craft. The entanglement of formal and informal economies, domestic and wild foods, smallholders and industrial farms, local and global influences visible in everyday food practices in Bulgaria specifically and Eastern Europe more broadly condense in household cellars. As the cellar tour I describe below illustrates, these uniquely social practices provide resilience in terms of food security and the ability to pursue something more than mere survival.

What the World Got Wrong About Autistic People by Ludmila N. Praslova, Ph.D., SHRM-SCP via andrewducker.

Prejudice is one reason decades of research got autism so wrong. Researchers measured autistic people against neurotypical expectations and called every difference a deficit. They tested empathy by measuring in-group preference and missed commitment to universal fairness. They measured creativity by counting the number of ideas and missed originality. They saw moral consistency and called it rigidity. They saw deep engagement and called it rigidity. They saw sensory richness and called it disorder.

Most critically, they failed to ask autistic people about their inner experiences. They studied autism without genuinely listening to the autistic perspective. For decades, science examined autistic people through a lens of pathology and deficit, rather than dignity, comparing us to animals while missing our humanity. But autistic people don't lack humanity. Research just lacked the humanity to see it.

On the mundane side, I ran across FlossGrip a while ago via network, and it sounded like a good idea, but the website is very 90's and I was dubious about ordering internationally, even with PayPal's guarantees. I went ahead and ordered in late October, and received a confirmation email saying I should receive it in 10 days, 30 days at the most. 30 days later had received nothing, so I wrote and asked about next steps.

The proprietor and inventor Gui wrote back and said he could ship again, or I could have a refund. Since I didn't know what went wrong and if it would go any better the next time, I opted for a refund, and got it quickly. Yesterday, almost two months after ordering, it showed up in the mail!

I wrote back to Gui and asked how to pay him again, since I now had the item. I ended up placing another order and paying for it, with the understanding that he wouldn't send anything. He said, "Ps: you are really a lovely person; I can tell you it’s not all the clients who are reacting the way you do."

All I did was pay for goods received, but it's nice to be reminded that my efforts to be a good person do succeed and do make a difference, since it's the mistakes that usually echo in my head.

(I tried out the FlossGrip this morning and it indeed uses much less floss, but it was awkward to use. Maybe I'll get better at it.)

Kids Deserve a New Gender Paradigm by Kai Cheng Thom.

[I]n the trenches of trans health care, there is a growing idea that pushes back against the “one true gender for each individual” framing altogether—one that could allow us to resolve the bitterly divisive culture war over the psychological and medical care of transgender children. What if, instead of viewing gender as a fixed trait, we started to think of it as something that could evolve over the course of a lifetime? Or if detransitioning wasn’t considered a sign of failure and was instead regarded as a natural and healthy part of the gender development process?

Confessions of a ‘passenger princess,’ traveling Pittsburgh without a car by Emma Riva.

Taking the bus might not feel as sexy as driving a Mustang, but this is the role of the passenger princess: to romanticize the blue glow of the late-night buses; to celebrate the serendipitous conversations with poets, former MMA fighters and sommeliers doubling as rideshare drivers; to enjoy the intimacy and trust of a loved one driving you somewhere you need to go. Let’s keep the city yours and mine.

My parents gave me their older car when I was a senior in college, and later I bought one new, both small hatchbacks with few fancy features. I already biked around town a lot and arranged my life so I didn't have to commute by car. After a crash in September 2002 totaled my little blue hatchback, I decided I didn't want another car.

Over the last 23 years as cars have gotten bigger and more complicated and more invasive of privacy, I'm only confirmed in not wanting one.

I use public transit sometimes, and I get rides from friends sometimes, but mostly I get around on foot and by bike. Even in a place with good transit by US standards, it's still infrequent enough and unreliable enough to be a huge hassle. I'd rather be out in the cold and the rain on my bike than standing waiting for a bus.

Someone asked me recently how cold it has to get to stop me from riding. The answer is, cold won't really do it in the places I've lived. In Portland I had good enough gear to ride when it was 25 or 30 degrees. In the Bay Area it just won't get cold enough. Ice and snow stop me, and wind strong enough to blow me into the opposing lane.

I hope I can continue being car-free for a good long time to come. I love being out in the weather, breathing the air, saying hello to other cyclists, and being graciously allowed to cross big streets by drivers. I have a bike trailer to haul big items, and a bike pannier to haul groceries or sheet music or whatever else I need.