Ruth Malan

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The AI companies truly have no sensible defense for not paying for their training material.

Plants' chemical messages keep pests moving | Cornell Chronicle Plant chemical defense systems keep pests moving to new plants in dense populations, thereby distributing damage evenly and leaving minimal damage on each plant in a field, a recent study finds.

Some plants “call predators for help” when a pest eats them by releasing volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

Predators of small bugs and pests can smell the VOCs and know a bug is present for the predator to eat thus helping the plant get less eaten

news.cornell.edu/stories/2017...

Of the systems zine? Editable, not PDF? I keep meaning to fix the fonts (that got autotranslated between systems) now that I’m back from Europe.

Or Demon Dialogues? Lucy Bellwood has print for sale, but the pages are viewable on her site — scroll down at the link. They are wonderful!

* the inner critic demon drawing is inspired by Lucy Bellwood’s Demon Dialogues, but the words are courtesy of mine … :)

lucybellwood.com/books/100-de...

I envisioned creating a zine in the practice sessions, but given the pace of getting enough work done to inform discussion, really mostly became using the zine as a workbook… But the idea has potential!

And I created the handout zine in part for reference and in part to see how hard it is… for me*…

Because the zine was created as a reference for those who participated in the hands-on (practice intensive) sessions I facilitated, I wasn’t sure if they would have broader appeal… But also: zine! So there’s that :)

bsky.app/profile/ruth...

This made my day two weeks ago, and again today when I remembered!

No wonder my most frequently asked question is "What are we even doing here, people?"

I do try to find and use more...generous...formulations. I've been regressing under the sheer volume of made-up problems that do not need attention, let alone solutions.

also now on my list for “Infrastructures of critique” !

That is an *amazing* list of contributors! Putting it on my list.

When it doesn't, it's worth paying attention to whether their unaccountability is structural or individual.

Makes thought provoking points about AI and the turn of the design screw…

“The users are the ones being designed.”

Mercedes-Benz’s new $60,000 luxury sedan lets your boss watch you drive during Microsoft Teams meetings. The video stream won’t be visible to a driver in motion, but they will still be able to use many new Team features on the car’s central display

When I gather up links for my newsletter, I categorize them under a taxonomy of UX sins. But I'm honestly at a loss when it comes to this bullshit, because it ticks so many boxes at once.

It's a little early for a rant, but I hope you'll oblige me.

Let me cite a historical example because I want to stress again that no technology is God-given. The notion that the technical requirements for an efficient operation dictate the way technology is laid out is usually not cor¬ rect. The way a task at hand is dealt with can change as the values and priorities of a society change. My example involves slag from an ancient Peruvian smelting site. A colleague of mine had excavated a large site. It yielded all sorts of interesting smelting-related technical arti¬ facts, ore and slag, tools and furnace parts. My friend visited me to show me the slags from the site. When we looked at them under the microscope I realized that they were different from any other copper-smelting slags I had seen before - ancient Roman or Chinese, European or Middle Eastern. (One would think that when it comes to copper slags, if you have seen one, you have seen them all.) First I did not believe that what we were looking at was slag at all-and I remember saying, “This isn’t slag, this is a dog’s breakfast.” Eventually the residue made sense, as evidence of the way such processes were carried out in other societies.

In ancient Peru most ordinary people were subject to a labour tax —that is, they gave time to agricultural or other projects of the state or the local community.1 These people were not specialists or particularly skilled at the task at hand. The copper smelting, as the slags showed, was appropriately laid out for these conditions. There were many quite small furnaces, not larger than soup pots, which could be filled with an appropriate mixture of ore and charcoal and heated, using mainly unskilled labour. The little furnaces were left to cool, then broken up—with some of the contents indeed looking like a dog’s breakfast. The mixture of slag and copper could be further broken up using water and panning tech¬ niques. This type of smelting could be carried out effec¬ tively with non-specialized labour. Only when it came to the remelting and alloying of the recovered copper would skilled artisans — “the experts’’— be needed. A process laid out like this would not occur to us — nor would it have occurred to the Romans — but it made good sense in the context of ancient Pern. To be sure, history is not a rerun for slow learners. We are not ancient Peruvians. But I cite this historical example to help expand our discourse and our social imagination. Technology is not preordained. There are choices to be made and I, for one, see no reason why our technologies could not be more participatory and less expert-driven.

Found it! This is from Ursula Franklin's The Real World of Technology:

This quote always generates interesting discussion of boundaries in systems.

Oh what a legend! I’ve had the pleasure of attending the #Eisners twice & Jackie who had no reason to know me, was so kind & helpful & generous. What a gift she’s created & giant shoes to be filled! Congrats to all tonight - was nice to follow along at home to something so positive! #EisnerScrolling

Tiny excerpt of comics page in progress - end of life for a dwarf star and its nebula state or supernova if it has a partner star

Dwarf star (like our own) becoming red giant and then transitioning into white dwarf - if it’s solo remains as dwarf and nebula if binary - it will steal gas from its partner and explode in a supernova… panels are rough as I figure all of this out…

Also! SoCraTes Soltau was wonderful. If you’re in Europe, I highly recommend you get it on your calendar now, so you apply for the ticket lottery in the first round. Lovely people. I was surprised (I’m shy!) how much I liked the Open Space format of the main two days

www.socrates-conference.de/home

With a little behind the scenes music video for my song with Career Woman :)

youtu.be/lftYgpdIAyA

the zine before folding

It’s pretty cool that this turns into a little booklet with just 4 folds and a cut!

(Yes, I still need to research who came up with that!)

i’m so excited for this album and you should be too

A bored woman in a Cafe. The caption says, this meeting could have been an email.

some of the pages of the zine to show what it looks like when folder

The Adventures in Systems handout zine from SoCraTes Soltau:

Formatted for 11x17 www.ruthmalan.com/Systems/2025...

Formatted for A3
www.ruthmalan.com/Systems/2025...

Folding instructions: www.flickr.com/photos/withj...

Photo of flip chart showing the following list of gathered bumps holding us back when it comes to building secure enough products: Authentication and authorization: boring and annoying, complicated and easy to mess up Knowledge: where to even start, lack of imagination what attackers might do "We had more important things to do" Implied trust Poor observability: complex, what to consider malicious "Let's hide this - we can't use the paper trail" Unclear incident response process: what now when the heat is on Insecure defaults Regulation: just ticking boxes, overinterpreting what is sensitive data Third party tools: no insights, so many supply chain attacks Performance drops: additional auth requests Poor usability of security features: people find workarounds

Photo of flip chart showing the following list of gathered boosters helping us move forward when it comes to building secure enough products: Authentication and authorization: enabler for features Check and update dependencies through tools Knowledge sharing: helpful security team, security champions, threat modelling Awareness by example: CTFs, cheat sheets Use helpful security products - trustworthy ones Define "secure enough" and risk appetite Use metrics for the win: show progress, motivation Regular external penetration tests Do security testing yourself first Regular fire drills and dry runs for emergency cases Regulation: what data do we really need? Security features supporting user experience: SSO Iterate Standardization: don't reinvent the security wheel Competitive advantage: customers expecting level Zero trust: guardrails, limit blast radius Celebrating success stories: reinforce good practices

Joined very interesting sessions at #SoCraTes2025 today and gave two myself. "Building Secure Enough Products - Bumps & Boosters" led to an impactful experience exchange of what holds us back & what helps us move in good directions. 💡

1/2

Also en route! So excited to join my first *in person* open space!

“zines are back baby” — @spavel.bsky.social

Photo of the screen of the ticket booth for the metro station. It displays the choice between “add value” or “add time”

Existential crisis at the metro station

This ok to use with attribution here? (It’s a zine handout for a hands-on session—after folk give the exercise a go themselves.)

I need to add: making zines is the heart of the session, and that’s all thanks to you!!