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 #wordpress 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. #ai #llm #visualization https://perplexity.vercel.app/

Get an #RSS 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

#social #bookmarking with #activitypub 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: #hawkwind 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 #teachers in possession of decades of #classroom experience must be in want of a mandatory three-hour #professionaldevelopment 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 #ai 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. #food https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/09/11/the-lies-in-your-grocery-store