href weekly | Jan 28 – Feb 3

Bits

But I’ve always thought that sessions make the most sense either when they accomplish something specific and practical that doesn’t take very long, or when they are as weird as possible. https://12ft.io/https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/where-will-virtual-reality-take-us

“If your product isn’t amenable to spontaneously producing a cult, it’s probably not impactful enough.” https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-companies-advocates-cult-1234954528/

Understanding the politics within systems matters more than ever, as they are quickly moving into the architecture of social institutions: deciding whom to interview for a job, which students are paying attention in class, which suspects to arrest, and much else. https://excavating.ai via: https://bionicteaching.com/weekly-web-harvest-for-2024-01-21/

You don’t need a low-level understanding of the neural networks at the core of large language models in order to align with the grain of that architecture. Although I can’t explain how LLMs work — arguably nobody can — I’m able to use them effectively, and I’ve begun to codify a set of guiding principles. via: @jonudell https://thenewstack.io/7-guiding-principles-for-working-with-llms/

Some teachers will be willing and able to adopt this radical new approach right now. Many will likely wait until it’s embedded in courseware with guardrails to keep students on track. But one way or another, there’s a sea change coming to https://thenewstack.io/learn-by-doing-how-llms-should-reshape-education/ via: @jonudell

We should know the ways in which we are advising or recommending students to interact with our provided materials using genAI tool, and the risks associated with such usage. But how they actually use those tools is up to them. https://blog.ouseful.info/2024/01/25/genai-in-edu-and-the-chinese-room/

very useful bookmarklet .. add https://cooked.wiki/ in front of any recipe URL – it’ll display just the recipe, generate a shopping list, save it for later, and a bunch of other great functions ..

Potemkin https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

cohost.org/mcc/post/178201-the-baseline-scene I Am Not A Robot is a Nabokov poem

The Internet remains a work in progress. But there’s reason to think that its future is being written in a very different place than its past was. https://12ft.io//https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/02/05/can-the-internet-be-governed

minimalist web experiments and sketches https://shelby.cool

Trips & Travels

While in Florence my daughter was approached by a young woman who asked to take her photo for a portfolio she was putting together .. my daughter agreed .. today she tagged her on Instagram when she posted the photo https://www.instagram.com/luliamura/p/C1YdBUdsnAH/

Music & Sound

Digging this release I somehow missed in 2023. Son Volt – Day of the Doug https://youtu.be/CyIfP6uO5H4?feature=shared

For all the Jonathan Richman fans https://vivonzeureux.fr/jonathanbook/

based https://www.futurity.org/artificial-intelligence-pitch-perfect-vocals-auto-tune-3173012/

What sounds like for people who don’t like .. one of many fun, creative audio experiments from There I Ruined It taken down by https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/851/572/925/055/376/original/5e8efee5a310a162.mp4

https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/ty

Comics

THE WAR ON GAZA – 1.26.24 by Joe Sacco https://www.tcj.com/the-war-on-gaza-1-26-24/

Film & Video

“We’re in a position where we’re kicking the door in. When you kick the door in, you should just put your foot in the door and stand there.” https://12ft.io/https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/lily-gladstone-is-holding-the-door-open

http://www.computerchessmovie.com/aboutthemovie.html Set over the course of a weekend tournament for chess software programmers thirty-some years ago, COMPUTER CHESS transports viewers to a nostalgic moment when the contest between technology and the human spirit seemed a little more up for grabs. We get to know the eccentric geniuses possessed of the vision to teach a metal box to defeat man, literally, at his own game, laying the groundwork for artificial intelligence as we know it and will come to know it in the future.

Politics & Economics

“..not only does Own This! advocate for a collective appropriation of platforms themselves; it also seeks to wrestle ownership of the imaginaries surrounding the development of the platform economy out of the hands of major corporations.” https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2024/01/10/book-review-own-this-how-platform-co-operatives-help-workers-build-a-democratic-internet-trebor-scholz/

What are the technological challenges of setting up ? How do relate to Trade Unions? How can a scale without losing its focus on community? https://www.versobooks.com/en-ca/blogs/news/own-this-a-verso-roundtable

“Setting prices with an algorithm is no different from doing it over cigars and whiskey in a private club …” https://www.propublica.org/article/senators-introduce-legislation-stop-landlords-algorithm-price-fixing

The 2023 report provides child and family poverty rates for using 2021 data. The 2023 child poverty report card records a rate increase in Nova Scotia in 2021 from 18.4% to 20.5%—this 11.4% increase is the highest single-year increase since 1989 when the promise was made to eradicate child poverty by the year 2000. A poverty rate of 20.5% represents 35,330 children. https://policyalternatives.ca/publications/reports/2023-report-card-child-and-family-poverty-nova-scotia

I guess when Galen Weston decided to engage in a criminal conspiracy to fix the price of bread – the most Les Miz-ass crime imaginable – it finally got someone’s attention, eh? https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

The clown show carries on .. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/coastal-protection-act-environment-tim-halman-climate-change-1.7102357

 

href weekly | Jan 21 – Jan 27

Bits

an image of a female crested black macaque monkey is at the heart of a legal row between UK wildlife photographer David Slater and Wikimedia Commons over its status https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2018/01/article_0007.html via https://bionicteaching.com/weekly-web-harvest-for-2024-01-11/

This desire to automate what can and must be human response is also simply a further indication of the dismissal of the importance of the labor of the primarily non-tenure-track faculty who teach courses like first-year writing … even entertaining the notion that the work can be done by generative AI shows the depth of scorn some administrators have for work that should be viewed as central to the institution. https://archive.ph/pBs1X

when disinformation is free, how can we restrict quality information to the privileged who choose to afford it? https://ianbetteridge.com/2024/01/24/the-information-grey-goo/

Music & Sound

A fantastic talk with Mark Hosler and Jon Leidecker of on https://www.wfmu.org/listen.m3u?show=136214&archive=247346&starttime=1:02:04

The History of the Mellotron https://www.gearnews.com/british-giants-the-history-of-mellotron-the-worlds-first-sampler/

“accommodate many levels of attention without enforcing one in particular.” https://daily.bandcamp.com/lists/music-for-airports-list

I somehow missed this 2021 https://www.npr.org/2021/05/06/993927925/negativland-tiny-desk-home-concert .. this is the bar by which live, online performances should be measured

Film & Video

I am Philbert now, but soon
I will be Whirlwind Dreamer.

https://www.criterionchannel.com/powwow-highway

Powwow Highway .. the older cousin of

Politics & Economics

“We are seeing accidents happen. We are frightening the public. We are getting laws passed [banning the drug]. We are not using the anthropological approach of insinuating a valuable drug of this sort into our culture . . . gradually demonstrating the goodness of the thing.” https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newyorker.com%2Fmagazine%2F2024%2F01%2F29%2Ftripping-on-utopia-margaret-mead-the-cold-war-and-the-troubled-birth-of-psychedelic-science-benjamin-breen-book-review