href weekly | Sept3-Sep9 2023

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 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. https://perplexity.vercel.app/

Get an 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

with 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: 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 in possession of decades of experience must be in want of a mandatory three-hour 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 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. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/09/11/the-lies-in-your-grocery-store

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post's permalink URL. Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post's URL again. (Find out more about Webmentions.)