Tag Archives: art

href weekly | April 21 – April 27 2024

Bits

An education in public interest technology that cuts across established fields like law, sociology, journalism, public policy and more allows students to better understand the challenges technology can either worsen or address — providing young people with pathways to pursue careers in technology for purpose across many established fields. https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/challenging-inequality/technology-and-society/public-interest-technology-and-its-origins/strategy/

.. if we want a true we must be prepared to fight for it. Hope is not enough. https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/any-technology-indistinguishable-from-magic-is-hiding-something/

If you really want put them in a password manager you control. But don’t use a platform controlled passkey store, and be very careful with security keys. https://fy.blackhats.net.au/blog/2024-04-26-passkeys-a-shattered-dream/

Music & Sound

research on the depletion of coral reefs due to Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease and the impact of Harmful Algae Blooms on coastal economies was converted and performed as a piece of music by the university’s Symphonic Band & Wind Ensemble https://www.stpetersburg.usf.edu/news/2024/music-data-crescendo-concert.aspx

Hold the Line is a piece of sound art generated by data from Canada’s 2023 wildfire season. Every single fire that was reported by the Canadian Interagency Forest Fires Centre between 1 April and 30 November is represented by a click sound, with each real-world day playing out over 2.5 seconds of sound. A bass note drops at the start of each new day. https://www.loudnumbers.net/hold-the-line

Politics & Economics

Over 87 percent of farm capital in Canada is land and buildings, and many farmers don’t own anything—they rent. https://thewalrus.ca/inside-farmings-tech-boom/

a small team of researchers analyzed how local economies have responded to the last 40 years of warming and projected those effects forward to 2050. They find that we’re already committed to warming that will see the growth of the global economy undercut by 20 percent. That places the cost of even a limited period of at roughly six times the estimated price of putting the world on a path to limit the warming to 2° C https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07219-0

is notorious for nurturing oligopolistic tendencies—there are several variations of the joke that the country is three companies in a trench coat. https://thewalrus.ca/loblaw-has-become-an-everything-company/

href weekly | March 3 – 9 2024

Bits

love this application of https://www.tiktok.com/@thereiruinedit/video/7341212496226995499

We have to keep our heads about us because when opportunities do arise to voice our concerns, or propose alternatives, we need to be able to calmly and clearly describe the future we’d rather have instead. https://cohost.org/mtrc/post/4279028-ai-is-already-better

“the equivalent of adding a new heavily industrialized country, like Sweden or Germany, to the planet.” https://newrepublic.com/article/179538/environment-artificial-intelligence-water-energy

Unlimited AI-generated practice problems and answers https://www.wolframalpha.com/problem-generator/

“Don’t bookmark. Download. Hard drives are cheap. Fill them up with everything you think you might need to consult, watch, read, listen to, or cite in the future.” https://ubu.com

“Ransomware also tends to be the bill collector for technical debt.” https://www.bl.uk/home/british-library-cyber-incident-review-8-march-2024.pdf

According to a new study by University of California Riverside researchers, roughly two weeks of training for GPT-3 consumed about 700,000 liters of freshwater. The global AI demand is projected by 2027 to account for 4.2-6.6 billion cubic meters of water withdrawal, which is more than the total annual water withdrawal of Denmark or half of the United Kingdom. https://www.noemamag.com/thirsty-bots-are-drinking-our-scarce-water/

Music & Sound

ambient.garden is a musical landscape in a website. The music is laid out in a landscape which can be explored, either interactively, or automatically when the autopilot is left on.

Politics & Economics

“the relatively new revenue source for landlords across Canada has been a major cause of housing financialization, where is treated as a commodity, or a vehicle for profit and investment, rather than a social good.” https://thewalrus.ca/airbnbs-canadian-housing/

More than 20 communities in Manitoba and nearly 70 northern communities nationwide are fly-in only for most of the year, and rely on a window lasting just six to eight weeks in the winter to import their annual supply of food, fuel, medical supplies, construction materials and other vital infrastructure on a network of roads built from ice and snow. https://thenarwhal.ca/manitoba-ice-road-emergency/