href weekly | Jan 14 – Jan 20

Bits

https://letsblock.it Remove low-quality content and useless nags, focus on what matters.

How the internet reshaped itself around Google’s search algorithms — and into a world where websites look the same. https://www.theverge.com/c/23998379/google-search-seo-algorithm-webpage-optimization

the line between benign content and spam [is becoming] increasingly blurry – a situation that will surely worsen in the wake of https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/17/google_search_results_spam/

At this point, our average bro, reborn from Cryptohell, will chime in and teach us that this is just the beginning and that very soon, we won’t be able to tell the difference anymore. Well played, AI bro! But you’re off-topic. We can tell now and we need to not fool ourselves that others won’t notice. https://ia.net/topics/ai-art-is-the-new-stock-image

Sound & Music

Here are some major touchpoints from the catalog to be found on from genre originators, to fast followers and regional spin-offs, to artists proudly self-identifying with the genre today. https://daily.bandcamp.com/lists/cowpunk-album-guide

Yamaha channeling some Teenage Engineering https://usa.yamaha.com/products/music_production/music-production-studios/seqtrak/index.html

it does evoke winds whipping over lonely plains, scratchy 45s booming out of shotgun shacks, and the vertigo-induced melancholy of being at the center of a giant landscape. Move over, Midwestern emo: this is Southwestern ambient. https://daily.bandcamp.com/album-of-the-day/cowboy-sadness-selected-jambient-works-vol-1-review

On one level it’s impressive that Spotify can perfectly capture my musical taste in a series of data points, and regurgitate it to me in a series of weekly playlists. But as good as it has gotten, I can’t remember the last time it pointed me to something I never expected I would like, but ultimately fell totally in love with. https://www.platformer.news/why-pitchfork-died/

Politics & Economics

“My biggest gripe about urbanization is it’s essentially unplanned except for one thing: commerce. That’s planned. Poverty is a design issue. It’s a failure to accommodate everybody. By design, cities should include every single individual who lives there.” https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newyorker.com%2Fculture%2Fthe-new-yorker-interview%2Fdickson-despommier-wants-our-cities-to-be-like-forests

two million square kilometres of land and water https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/nunavut-trudeau-sign-devolution-argreement-1.7086272

 

href weekly | Jan 7 – Jan 13

Sound & Music

Love the creations from this creator https://somasynths.com/ether/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-hIZH4uDt8&t=7s

Politics & Economics

outrageous and embarrassing https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/coastal-protection-act-environment-tim-halman-climate-change-1.7080933

@Linkletter has been fighting years against a spurious legal case from a proctoring company that uses AI to enforce automated discrimination. This week he lost. Lesson: Law and AI are in cahoots to protect against critical scholarship https://linkletter.opened.ca/