alexandra's pile of notes

So Staten filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in February. It was the type of complaint that HUD used to take seriously. The agency has devoted itself to rooting out prejudice in the housing market since the Fair Housing Act was signed into law in 1968, one week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. And, following a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that declared that civil rights protections bar unequal treatment because of someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity, HUD considered it illegal to discriminate in housing on those grounds.

Then Donald Trump became president once more. Two days after filing his complaint, Staten received a letter informing him that HUD did not view allegations like his as subject to federal law — a stark departure from its position just a month prior. The news gutted him. “I went through pure hell just to get turned away,” Staten said. (The property manager disputed Staten’s account and said he was rejected for fighting on the property, which Staten denied. The property owner declined to comment.)

This previous weekend was particularly nuts, with an older gentleman snatched from the streets of Paris' 14th arrondissement on May 1 by men in ski masks. The 14th is a pleasant place—I highly recommend a visit to the catacombs in Place Denfert-Rochereau—and not usually the site of snatch-and-grab operations. The abducted man was apparently the father of someone who had made a packet in crypto. The kidnappers demanded a multimillion-euro ransom from the man's son.

According to Le Monde, the abducted father was taken to a house in a Parisian suburb, where one of the father's fingers was cut off in the course of ransom negotiations. Police feared "other mutilations" if they were unable to find the man, but they did locate and raid the house this weekend, arresting five people in their 20s. (According to the BBC, French police used "phone signals" to locate the house.)

Sounds crazy, but this was the second such incident this year.

a very cute interactive article about cozy games, my favorite genre.

Authoritarians and tech CEOs now share the same goal: to keep us locked in an eternal doomscroll instead of organizing against them, Janus Rose writes.

Anyone with an internet connection can volunteer to transcribe historical documents and help make the archives’ digital catalog more accessible

A significant advance by Google Quantum AI in quantum error correction, using a surface code approach, may have competition in a competing method that its advocates suggest offers greater efficiency and scalability. Researchers in the field are divided, however, over which approach will define the future of practical quantum computing, New Scientist is reporting.

An attorney has said that jury selection may be very difficult in Luigi Mangione's murder trial as there is so much public sympathy for the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

According to Google, Willow solved a computational problem in under five minutes — a task that would have taken the world’s fastest supercomputers approximately 10 septillion years. This staggering feat, announced in a blog post and accompanied by a study in the journal Nature, demonstrates the extraordinary potential of quantum computing to tackle problems once thought unsolvable within a human timeframe.

stop letting billionaires own newspapers.

“Here’s my challenge to journalists over the next two months: quote Trump in full,” Max Kennerly, a lawyer and legal commentator, wrote on X on Thursday, alongside a video posted by the Harris campaign of Trump’s comments. “Don’t clean him up, don’t reinterpret what he says in a more sensible way, don’t secretly editorialize. Just quote him. Let the voters see how this man’s mind doesn’t work.”

Research shows 25% of web pages posted between 2013 and 2023 have vanished. A few organisations are racing to save the echoes of the web, but new risks threaten their very existence.

For months, players have been complaining about high rents in the city-building sim. This week, developer Colossal Order fixed the problem by doing something real cities can’t: removing landlords.

Before going to a protest, demonstrators or observers should note that their cellphones may subject them to surveillance tactics by law enforcement. If your cellphone is on and unsecured, your location can be tracked and your unencrypted communications, such as SMS, may be intercepted. Additionally, police may retrieve your messages and the content of your phone if they take custody of your phone, or later by warrant or subpoena.

When The Pew Charitable Trusts created Pew Research Center in 2004, we were surveying Americans using the established industry method at the time: calling people on their landline phones and hoping they’d answer. As the Center marks its 20th anniversary this year, survey methods have become more diverse, and we now conduct most of our interviews online.

Public opinion itself has also changed in major ways over the last 20 years, just as the country and world have. In this data essay, we’ll take a closer look at how Americans’ views and experiences have evolved on topics ranging from technology and politics to religion and social issues.

Four Thieves Vinegar Collective has made DIY medicine cheaper and more accessible to the masses.