Tag Archives: crypto

href weekly | Sept17-Sep23 2023

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Bits

River is a visual connection engine … surf laterally through imagespace https://river.maxbittker.com

Last week, the gang ALPHV Caesars and MGM, taking down multiple systems across the giants’ networks. https://www.404media.co/inside-mgms-hacked-casinos/

A new, more inclusive vision of can emerge only if the basis of social power changes. https://newrepublic.com/article/175357/big-tech-ruining-dream-ai

are not search engines looking up facts; they are pattern-spotting engines that guess the next best option in a sequence. https://ig.ft.com/generative-ai/

Music & Sound

Create custom-length with text prompts – powered by diffusion models. https://www.stableaudio.com

“to be able to accept and move in both the world you were born into and the world you found on your own.” https://bittersoutherner.com/feature/2023/lucinda-williams-and-the-idea-of-louisiana

the album feels like a five-alarm blaze, prophesying an era of corporate-driven consensus and the outsourcing of America’s manufacturing sector. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/listening-booth/the-replacements-are-still-a-puzzle

Comics

A that arouses children’s interest in and encourages shaping https://fsfe.org/activities/ada-zangemann/

Politics & Economics

The claim that the region remains relatively undisturbed, given the 70,000-person party that rolls in every year, rang particularly hollow. https://grist.org/culture/burning-man-protest-mud-geothermal/

It occurred to shockingly few people that the guys at the top made all that money not because they were smart, not because they were good, but because they were thieves. https://newrepublic.com/article/175335/crypto-ceo-appeal-sam-bankman-fried

“sola-stalgia” .. a term gaining traction in circles that loosely translates to the loss of a place that once brought you solace. https://thewalrus.ca/prince-edward-island-storm/

“In New York or Paris, if you do a horizontal, leaderless, and post-ideological uprising, and it doesn’t work out, you just get a media or academic career afterward. Out here in the real world, if a revolution fails, all your friends go to jail or end up dead.” https://newrepublic.com/article/175314/decade-mass-protest-mass-disappointment

href weekly | May14-May20 2023

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Bits

New “primer” on generative AI in higher education from Jisc. It’s clearly going to be a system-wide in no time at all – eg licences will likely “put generative AI directly into the hands of all our staff and students with access to Microsoft 365”, while third party EdTech AI applications for HE “built on tools provided by OpenAI and powered by the same technology as ChatGPT” are appearing at pace – despite the many problems the report highlights. https://nationalcentreforai.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2023/05/11/generative-ai-primer/ HT: Ben Williamson

The barrier to entry for training and experimentation has dropped from the total output of a major research organization to one person, an evening, and a beefy laptop. https://archive.ph/7d2S0

This blog is running on my $180 Android phone running Android 11 https://androidblog.a.pinggy.io/

a free platform for learning modern cryptography https://cryptohack.org/

Bellingcat has built a new tool for searching OpenStreetMap data to help geolocate images and identify starting points for geolocation investigations, based on objects and structures you can identify in an image. https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2023/05/08/finding-geolocation-leads-with-bellingcats-openstreetmap-search-tool/

It is absolutely not useful to spend mote one of concern on “what if an somehow got its mitts on an effectively infinite supply of vector processing” until you solve for problems with drastically higher probability. We should probably have a decent asteroid defense system, too, but I’d rather we mitigate the high-probability capital fascism issue at a higher priority part of the solution. https://www.metafilter.com/199326/Can-We-Stop-Runaway-AI#8399517

Don’t trust cheap Android boxes on AliExpress or Amazon that have firmware signed with test keys. They are stealing your data and (unless you can watch DNS logs) do so without a trace https://www.reddit.com//r/Android/comments/101k0eg/t95_android_tv_allwinner_h616_includes_malware/

Comics

“Utopia has been achieved and society follows the Four Pillars of Community, Peace, Harmony, and Equality. In doing so, they have eliminated ambition, diversity, creativity, and instruments of capital. However, the utopia is about to be unraveled. How does it fare?” https://readcomicsfree.net/comic/symmetry/issue-1

Photos

Border Hammock via: https://museumpublicity.com/2013/04/13/mak-austrian-museum-of-applied-arts-contemporary-art-present-signs-taken-in-wonder-searching-for-contemporary-istanbul/

Politics & Economics

Given five fat sheep and ninety-five thin, how [to] induce the ninety-five to resign to the five the richest pasture and shadiest corners? https://theconversation.com/taxing-the-wealthy-to-the-hilt-would-make-us-all-much-better-off-203814

The Royal Bank of Canada ranked as the world’s largest financier of fossil fuels in 2022, providing fossil fuel companies with US$42.1 billion with a total investment of US$253 billion since 2016 — the fourth highest on the globe. https://theconversation.com/canadian-financial-institutions-are-fuelling-the-climate-change-crisis-204957