href weekly | Sept10-Sep16

Bits

Before it was taken down, archivists managed to make backup copies of the museum’s content, highlighting both the fragility of online #archives and the archiving community’s penchant for quickly making copies of anything that’s under imminent threat. https://www.404media.co/archivists-back-up-nonprofit-museum-of-classic-chicago-television-before-sony-copystrikes-get-it-taken-down-from-youtube/

#wordpress now has an #activitypub #plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/

We’ve completely reimagined what a portal can be. Unfortunately, our collective imagination was limited to picturing what dozens of pages of tedious dental information might look like rendered on Microsoft Excel in 1988. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/we-are-thrilled-to-announce-we-have-invented-portals-but-are-saddened-to-reveal-they-suck

Great story about Merlin Bird ID from CornellU & #gamification of #birding #citizenscience https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-14-day-6/clip/16009862-as-fall-migration-begins-bird-id-apps-might

fleets of artificially intelligent, unmanned, relatively cheap weapons #ai #war https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/ai-and-the-next-generation-of-drone-warfare

As more households disconnect landline telephones and fewer families have access to broadcast television and radio, emergency managers have increasingly focused on wireless emergency notifications to instantly reach large numbers of people. But that modern system has its own limitations, relying on the resilience of cell networks and the proficiency of emergency crews across a patchwork of local agencies. https://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/131761

Music & Sound

Hurricane Edward – The Fall https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxTvzVUT2_Q

#novascotia #hurricanelee The Pixies – Stormy Weather https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgCXmJ6iljw

Hurricane Fighter Plane – Red Krayola https://youtu.be/3h03mh0MEMU?feature=shared

The Lemon Twigs Lemon Twigs live on WFMU .. hooks & harmonies forever .. https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/131792

vocalremover.org will help remove vocals from a song #karaoke #audio

Politics & Economics

#technofeudalism #economics The privatisation of the internet by America’s, but also China’s, Big Tech. And the manner in which Western governments and central banks responded to the 2008 great financial crisis. https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2023/09/07/technofeudalism-has-just-arrived/

private individual actions don’t increase at a rate sufficient to affect the problem in a timely fashion; collective action seeking changes in #policy and law can. #climatechange https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oil-coined-carbon-footprints-to-blame-us-for-their-greed-keep-them-on-the-hook

UK pubs adopt surge pricing for pints https://web.archive.org/web/20230913125119/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/13/business/surge-pricing-drinks-slug-lettuce.html

Privilege may keep you from certain kinds of risks, but it won’t make you resilient. Only community can. https://newrepublic.com/article/175311/america-polarized-traumatized-trump-violence

#hurricane #hurricanelee & the fragility of the Isthmus of Chignecto .. protected by 17th century Acadian dykes and the bulwark keeping #novascotia from becoming an island https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-14-day-6/clip/16009863-as-hurricane-lee-approaches-nova-scotias-vulnerable-lowland?share=true

20 years of the The Walrus magazine .. one of my fav pieces about #greyhound #bus #publictransit #canada https://thewalrus.ca/the-last-stop-for-greyhound/

 

href weekly | Sept3-Sep9

Bits

make beats with drum sounds found in phonemes from audio clips of public-domain historical speeches https://djphonetic.brianfoo.com

LocalWP .. set up a local development environment for your #wordpress site, allowing you to test changes and updates before pushing them to your live site. https://localwp.com/

For any given passage of text, it augments the original text with highlights and annotations that tell me how “surprising” each token is to the model, and which other tokens the model thought were most likely to occur in its place. #ai #llm #visualization https://perplexity.vercel.app/

Get an #RSS feed of (almost) anything. https://rssfeedasap.com/

Besides, as everyone in both Silicon Valley *and* the Valley of the Damned knows, just shipping is so much more important than what you ship. https://thread.choomba.one/thread?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmastodon.social%2F%40jimray%2F110792901356804895

#social #bookmarking with #activitypub built-in https://motd.co/2023/09/postmarks-launch/

Music & Sound

Shards of an aesthetic, like the weird Art Nouveau-ish t-shirt worn by the girl at the youth club, the truncated roar of “Silver Machine” coming from the open door of a pub, a friend’s older brother’s odd-smelling bedroom, all pointing to the existence of this thing: #hawkwind https://wearethemutants.com/2021/02/09/left-a-galaxy-of-dreams-behind-joe-banks-hawkwind-days-of-the-underground/

Comics

One Nite Only: When Zappa Played At State U https://wearethemutants.com/2022/09/26/one-nite-only-when-frank-zappa-played-at-state-u/

Economics & Politics

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a group of #teachers in possession of decades of #classroom experience must be in want of a mandatory three-hour #professionaldevelopment seminar run by an educational consultant who completed ten months of Teach for America in 1998. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/universally-acknowledged-truths-for-high-school-teachers

This year, heaps of abandoned, mud-covered trash have turned the early stages of the cleanup into a slog, testing the environmental mettle of a nine-day celebration that prides itself on its “leave no trace” ethic, but that also generates mountains of garbage. https://archive.ph/HDs7D

There’s a natural human tendency to think, If I can do it, I will do it, and not worry about whether I ought to. The #ai community has altogether too many people who just see the potentiality and aren’t willing to think about risks and responsibility. I would like to throw a pail of cold water on their heads and say, “Wait a minute, it’s not cool to make easily copied devices that will manipulate people in ways that will destroy their trust.” How to Live a Happy Life, From a Leading Atheist (NYT Gift Article Link)

private market gets the front of the package, and government gets the back.” Front labels give us images of farms and fields, and talk of antioxidants, fibre, omega-3s, vitamins, and probiotics; on back labels, we find “natural and artificial flavors,” high-fructose corn syrup, carrageenan, soy lecithin, and xanthan and guar gums. #food https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/09/11/the-lies-in-your-grocery-store