Community Roundup Week of 2024/10/13

When the Torah is Missing — Rabbi Ariana Katz

Chesed to the End — Rabbi Ariana Katz

I had the pleasure this year of attending the high holidays with Hinenu Baltimore. These devarim from Rabbi Ariana Katz were both very impactful on me and I really think they are worth reading. They both touch upon topics that have been heavy on my heart and it felt so perfectly aligned when Rabbi Katz spoke directly to these topics. I cried.

If you want to say thank you, don't say sorry — Yao Xiao

I saw this years ago and it has always stuck with me. It's truly incredible how big a difference "thanks for being such a good friend" versus "sorry for being such a burden" makes on the way people around you feel. It's so much more effective at showing care for others who are showing care for you.

Impossible Door — Shel Kahn

A beautiful watercolor from the other Shel.

Xomatok's Stairs

I love this architectural celebration of indigenous art and culture in South America. It's so visually striking makes such strong use of the geography of the Andes.

Bert & Ernie in a Sukkah — MagicScience

Chag Sukkot sameach. I'm not really doing anything for Sukkot this year but I loved this art piece of our favorite gay monsters eating in the sukkah.

Microsoft is Discontinuing a secure Windows, What Then? — Azhdarchid

We have really been struggling with this at work. The advantage of Windows over Macs used to be that it was highly customizable and excellent for Enterprise systems with a lot of users. It also used to have cheap and free licenses for "learning institutions" which is a category Microsoft has slowly been shrinking to include fewer and fewer institutions causing already under-funded public institutions to have to spend exorbitant amounts of money on windows licenses that they can't even use because the Recall feature is a violation of federal laws regarding computer security for certain public institutions. It's totally a disaster. We've had brand new windows 11 machines for our patrons to use just sitting in the back for nearly a year now because our IT department can't figure out how to essentially hack windows to comply with federal security regulations and every time they get it usable, a new update reverts everything because in Windows 11 you can't customize which updates you accept it's all just a bundle. Our IT guys are also just complaining that the ability to make the computers locked down enough to be for public use really does not exist in windows 11 in the way it used to in older versions of windows.

One of the more annoying things we've been dealing with is that Microsoft puts advertisements on the lock screen and when you unlock the computer is will open a full screen Edge window showing you some Bing article that was being advertised about how a hospital in Taiwan is using Bing AI to make triage more efficient or something. Given the fast pace of library work, this is really annoying and slows us down. It also seriously confuses our less tech literate staff.

IT has edited registry values to disable these ads and articles multiple times but every time Microsoft pushes a new update they don't just revert the registry change, but add a new additional registry value which re-enables the ads and auto-opening articles. So they can't just push a new registry edit to every machine flipping it back, they have to find out what the new registry value is and disable it again. They've given up on this battle so I guess our work machines just have pop-up ads now. At the level of the operating system.

I asked one of them "At what point do we just switch all the public machines to Linux? If they're only using a web browser and a word processor anyway how bad could it be?" He had the most pained expression on his face I've ever seen and took a very long time to answer that he simply doesn't know what they're going to do. We are one of the oldest institutions on this entire continent and we are struggling to negotiate getting our computers to work correctly with Microsoft. The cost of windows licenses is more than the salaries of 1-2 IT personnel.

One of the more dystopian feeling things about the current zeitgeist is watching the unsustainable technological status quo of the last thirty years break down. Those of us born in the 90s and 80s watched computers grow better and better, and now they are getting worse without obvious solutions or ways to opt out. It's surreal to watch it all decline as we experience a moment of change in history. Things we became accustomed to are breaking down.

Western culture is built upon this collective memory of Classical Antiquity. The Roman Empire existed and for two hundred years we had the Pax Romana. One day, it all started to changed, get worse, and then it all collapsed into a dark age for Europe. The Romans were on the verge of inventing the steam engine!

It is not new for it to feel like the world is ending. This has been the zeitgeist since 1912. We have been obsessed—in America—with the idea of the world ending for over a century now. What makes the current moment different is that it is not global war or nuclear war that creates this feeling. It is a visible slow erosion of what has been built. There was never a Pax America because America is always in a forever war. But it feels like things are getting worse at every level in very small ways. It does not feel like the world will end tomorrow, but perhaps in 200 years it will be clear that the current age of history is over for the west. Link rot and the troubles of archiving digital and online materials will make it difficult to preserve knowledge from our "age of the cloud."

It's important to remember that the eastern Roman Empire survived for another thousand years. The dark ages for Europe were the renaissance for the Muslim world. The world is not ending, only the slow erosion of American hegemony. Perhaps now is the time for a Chinese tech company to invent a new operating system to compete with Microsoft and Apple. The oldest institutions in America would never use it, but it might at least prevent some security breaches in other countries.