July 25, 2025

spencergreenhalgh.com posts digest for Jul 25 2025

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Here are long-form blog posts I published recently:

• « en présentiel » et d'autres phrases à apprendre pour une traduction de CV

Here are microblog posts that I published recently:

• Talking in the car about Unicode standards for emojis, like all daddy-daughter pairs.

• Just sent one of the most stressful emails of my career and got an out of office reply. I’m not mad—good for people taking time away from work—but that’s a heck of an anticlimax.

• Bien content que ma fille me fasse confiance pour traduire quelques mots fr français dans une épisode de My Little Pony.

• A dehumidifier that we’ve been putting off taking to an appliance disposal dropoff—for months—decided to magically work for us after a late night fridge leak yesterday. Thanks, little guy. Don’t know what kind of karmic advance we had to call in for that, but I’m grateful.

• Went to claim kiddo’s prizes for doing library summer reading and walked away with four free admissions to the roller rink, an EXIT-brand puzzle gamebook, and a bunch of other stuff. Libraries are great.

• I don’t think copyright is the best argument against generative AI (strengthening copyright law will benefit big companies more than small creators), but “can’t make an AI omelette without breaking a few copyrighted eggs 🤷🤷🤷” is still a depressingly cynical national policy.

• Current levels of home maintenance confidence: Feeling like a god for taking a pocket door off its track and feeling utterly intimidated by needing to eventually put it back on.

• I’m glad I have my files organized enough to retrieve preprints of about a decade’s worth of research, but I really wish I’d been doing this as I went.

Here are photos that I published recently (or at least their descriptions):

• Quand mon navigateur web se trompe mais ça me gêne pas trop.

Here are news articles and podcasts I commented on recently:

• 🔗 linkblog: The Em Dash Responds to the AI Allegations

• 🔗 linkblog: Will AI end cheap flights? Critics attack Delta’s “predatory” AI pricing.

• 🔗 linkblog: The Astronomer CEO's Coldplay Concert Fiasco Is Emblematic of Our Social Media Surveillance Dystopia

• 🔗 linkblog: Why I’m not going back to the U.S.

• 🔗 linkblog: La Suisse, un pays peuplé d'irréductibles Helvètes qui résistent encore et toujours à Amazon

• 🔗 linkblog: La liberté de la presse toujours plus attaquée par Donald Trump

• 🔗 linkblog: Mark Zuckerberg Is Expanding His Secretive Hawaii Compound. Part of It Sits Atop a Burial Ground

• 🔗 linkblog: Inside a Gaza hospital: A British surgeon on what he's witnessing firsthand

• 🔗 linkblog: This ‘violently racist’ hacker claims to be the source of The New York Times’ Mamdani scoop

• 🔗 linkblog: The NIH Is Capping Research Proposals Because It's Overwhelmed by AI Submissions

• 🔗 linkblog: ChatGPT Hallucinated a Feature, Forcing Human Developers to Add It

• 🔗 linkblog: Une lycéenne accusée d'avoir triché avec une IA au baccalauréat de philosophie obtient finalement son diplôme

• 🔗 linkblog: Trump unveils his plan to put AI in everything 

• 🔗 linkblog: Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain

• 🔗 linkblog: Instructure and OpenAI Announce Global Partnership to Embed AI Learning Experiences within Canvas

• 🔗 linkblog: The White House orders tech companies to make AI bigoted again

Here are my reviews of books and other media I consumed recently:

• 📚 bookblog: Victory's Price (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

• 📺 tvblog: Murderbot Season 1 (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

• 🎙️ radioblog: The Honourable Schoolboy (❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤)

• 🎙️ radioblog: Smiley's People (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

If you have thoughts about anything I've posted, feel free to comment directly on my website through Hypothesis or to reply to this email with what you have to say.

Thanks for reading!

Spencer