Tag Archives: reclaimopen

href weekly | June11-June17 2023

Bits

Audiocraft is a PyTorch library for deep learning research on audio generation. At the moment, it contains the code for MusicGen, a state-of-the-art controllable text-to-music model. https://huggingface.co/spaces/facebook/MusicGen

This Blog Now Powered By A.I. Levine https://cogdogblog.com/2023/06/powered-by-a-i-levine/

– reclaiming human scale https://ammienoot.com/brain-fluff/reclaimopen-reclaiming-human-scale/

20,000+ mods from over 7,000 subreddits with more than 2 billion collective readers” https://web.archive.org/web/20230612032340/https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/1401qw5/incomplete_and_growing_list_of_participating/

Capcom rolling out their 40th anniversary with some browser emulation https://captown.capcom.com/en/retro_games

Why Is Everyone Watching TV With the Subtitles On? https://archive.is/CgLj3

“All I did was go to a website that is designed to facilitate cheating and set up a kind of camera to see who visited it.” .. a instructor, no less .. https://dailynous.com/2023/05/25/am-i-the-unethical-one-a-philosophy-professor-his-cheating-students/

One day, the entirety of our lives will be at our backs and the what-if of it all will still haunt me ..” https://www.newyorker.com/culture/screening-room/an-ai-generated-film-depicts-human-loneliness-in-thank-you-for-not-answering

The kind of change we need isn’t going to happen on an app. https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/in-1970-alvin-toffler-predicted-the

myth: you need to be original
myth: you need to be an expert
myth: posts need to be 100% correct
myth: writing boring posts is bad
myth: you need to explain every concept
myth: page views matter
myth: more material is always better
myth: everyone should blog
https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/06/05/some-blogging-myths/

if people prefer corporations as their digital landlords, this is fine, but they should be made aware of the consequences and the repercussions of this decision. We should all be allowed to make this decision on an informed basis, just like with our real, physical living spaces”. https://publicspaces.net/2023/03/29/framasoft-a-non-profit-committed-to-popular-education-around-digital-sovereignty/

A federated alternative https://lemmy.ca/instances

The dawn of large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4, Facebook’s LLaMA, and all sorts of massive models need to be trained on human text. is essentially a gigantic website full of highly organized, natural human interactions and makes for good training data. https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5yykm/the-reddit-protest-is-a-battle-for-the-soul-of-the-human-internet

ELIZA (1966) chats with ChatGPT (2023) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yZRNt25Wdo

Vibes-based search is very bad for research in situations where factual accuracy is important (legal briefs, journalism), but it’s not an entirely useless function.” https://maxread.substack.com/p/i-cannot-believe-the-shit-that-morons

We’ll still see each other from time to time, and maybe if you can Snap out of your midlife crisis one day we’ll get back together.” https://hackaday.com/2023/05/22/dear-ubuntu/

We need to move away from focusing on red herrings like AI’s potential “sentience” to covering how is further concentrating wealth and power. https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/media-coverage-chatgpt.php

is not magic
are not always right
The we use to train algorithms matters
AI comes with ethical issues like
https://algorithmliteracy.org/

Sound & Music

My God, It’s Full of Oscillators https://www.giorgiosancristoforo.net/softwares/

Great new guides https://vcvrack.com/Free

Winamp in your browser https://webamp.org/

Game Synth: Draw sounds synchronized with video playback https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeHqLyKdndE

We Hold This Myth To Be Potential https://www.ubu.com/sound/cage_ra.html .. When John Cage met Sun Ra – the avant-garde concert of the century https://thevinylfactory.com/features/when-john-cage-met-sun-ra-the-avant-garde-concert-of-the-century/

Wonky: The beat that captivated Questlove was made by the legendary James Dewitt Yancey, better known as J Dilla. Although he only lived to 32 and never had a mainstream hit, he is now considered one of the most influential producers in hip hop and popular music. https://pudding.cool/2023/06/groove/

The point is that these four minutes and four seconds have been all about you—you can come back here any time that you need. Now, go pick up your kids. And don’t forget karate classes at seven and gymnastics in the morning. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-note-for-divorced-dads-on-keith-jarretts-bordeaux-concert-live-part-iii

Politics & Economics

The series tells the story of why the 1970s book “The Limits to Growth” was, after positive initial reception, fought and since ignored. https://tippingpoint-podcast.com/the-problematique-part-1/

A group of 1970s campus librarians foresaw our world of distributed knowledge and research, and designed search tools for it.” https://aeon.co/essays/the-1970s-librarians-who-revolutionised-the-challenge-of-search

“New data from the University of Maryland (UMD), now available on Global Forest Watch (GFW), provides a more detailed view of how fires are driving tree cover loss across the globe.” https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/global/

Where does the library go from here? Because it’s clear that being “the last public space” isn’t a privilege. It’s a sign that something has gone terribly wrong.” https://thewalrus.ca/future-of-libraries/

moving to non-market housing would pose an enormous challenge to both private property developers, who profit from financialized housing, and the banks, who profit from all this debt. But it’s the only way to break the cycle of borrowing and that has created this dangerous overhang of debt for Canadians.” https://rabble.ca/economy/house-of-cards-interest-rates-household-debt-and-the-housing-crisis/

The Solutions Are Already Here – Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below https://archive.org/details/TheSolutionsareAlreadyHere/page/n3/mode/2up

#reclaimopen Closer to the Heart

The blacksmith and the artist
Reflect it in their art
They forge their creativity
Closer to the heart

Reclaim Open 2023 was the first in-person conference I have attended since OEGlobal19. The group of brilliant people it drew together was exactly the injection of insight, reflection, and commiseration I have been missing.

I generally lean into hope, resilience, and determination in the face of adversity but have been dismayed for years that I am witnessing the decline of the open web. A large part of that struggle is a sense of guilt that I have played a role in it. Twitter ate my blogging practice years ago and my 5 year affair with Known flamed out in 2021. While my emerging interests in solarpunk had me getting my hands dirty with other technologies over the past few years, I felt my enthusiasm for the web suffering.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s keynote “We Have Never Been Social: Web 2.0 and What Went Wrong” resonated deeply with me. Reflecting on the open web with a group of insightful, creative educators who connect with the optimism of the early open web and also share a sense of loss gave me permission to cut myself some slack. Kathleen’s talk sharply illustrated how we were all sold a bill of goods by the Web 2.0 run at the read/write web. We traded bits of our online identity and autonomy for tokens to the online carnival. Carnivals can be fun – I’ve enjoyed a few – but when the rides and games leave town they leave behind trampled ground and loads of garbage.

Sustainability and cultivation require responsibility and work.

I am encouraged, uplifted, and energized by the few days with the Reclaim Open 2023 choir. As Joe Murphy noted in Discord, I really needed this practice.

I am going to start taking more responsibility and do the work at https://networkeffects.ca. To start, I am re-committing to my blog practice by adopting Tom Woodward‘s practice of Weekly Web Harvests. Tom is a thoughtful educator and gifted technician – I have endless bookmarks drawn from his Weekly Web Harvests.

In addition to all the excellent on-site coordination, the Reclaim folks also committed to sharing sessions via hybrid delivery – those archives are all available at Youtube. I was furiously gathering links and notes during #reclaimopen and will be revisiting those archives to organize my thoughts in the weeks to come.

Atop all this learning and reflection Reclaim Open 2023 brought me together with wonderful friends – many of whom I had not seen in years. Thanks and gratitude to the Reclaim Hosting team for gathering these outstanding folks – I’ll keep working on my night moves to “lose the awkward open web blues”.