Tag Archives: rss

href weekly | Sept3-Sep9 2023

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 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. https://perplexity.vercel.app/

Get an 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

with 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: 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 in possession of decades of experience must be in want of a mandatory three-hour 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 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. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/09/11/the-lies-in-your-grocery-store

href weekly | June25-July1 2023

Bits

Volunteers who maintain the digital encyclopedia are divided on how to deal with the rise of AI-generated content and misinformation.” https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7bdba/ai-is-tearing-wikipedia-apart

Gold rushes always finish ugly, and this AI rush is another one of those. It will resemble that glamorous Atomic Age transition from “energy too cheap to meter” to “garbage too expensive to bury.” https://www.newsweek.com/2023/07/21/ai-scariest-beast-ever-created-says-sci-fi-writer-bruce-sterling-1809439.html

neal.fun/password-game/

Utilizing a technique called “Adversarial Patch” that induces false recognition by adding a specific pattern to an image or video. This method lets AI cause misrecognition, miss objects or recognize objects as different. https://unlabeled.jp/en/camouflage

Ten years after its untimely death, the team that built the much-beloved feed reader reflects on what went wrong and what could have been. https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-rss-social

The NABU Network was an obscure, forgotten part of Canadian tech history—until the day the internet noticed that thousands of NABU machines were being sold on eBay at rock-bottom prices. https://www.vice.com/en/article/ak3k34/2200-forgotten-vintage-computers-are-being-liberated-from-a-barn-in-massachusetts

Comics

Goodnight Phone https://www.theverge.com/c/23558791/goodnight-phone-comic-interactive-gina-wynbrandt

Sound & Music

It’s a haven for Centrist Dad and people who say ‘It’s Wine ‘o’Clock’ https://flashbak.com/the-battle-of-the-beanfield-1-june-1985-461713/

Public Enemy’s Chuck D … We Wreck Stadiums pays homage and salute to some of the baseball greats and the undeniable impact they’ve had on the game and the world .. https://chuckdasmistachuck.bandcamp.com/album/we-wreck-stadiums

Millions of songs on Spotify have been forgotten. Let’s give them new life in new ears – yours. http://www.forgotify.com

Photos

July 1 2023 Annapolis Royal Glass Blossoms

July 1 2023 East Coast Binary Suns

Politics & Economics

Climate Parables is a series of short, speculative stories from some of the most talented climate-fiction writers. We ask them what life could be like after technological and societal shifts have actually mitigated climate change—and we’ve adapted to chronic environmental stresses. https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/category/climate-parables/

Rest in Power Sue Johanson .. I remember seeing her bits on zed.cbc.ca in the early 2000’s .. fearless, funny, and direct .. a gifted educator https://youtu.be/kDs2tIrBfEo

Gaucher said he’s not totally opposed to LNG Canada and Coastal GasLink but he doesn’t stand for colonial violence against Indigenous people. Speaking out publicly alienated him from much of his community, he said, who he described as “too afraid to speak.”

“What’s crazy is being classified as one of those ‘crazy anti-pipeline people’ because not once did I say I was against it,” he said, his fists clenched on the table. #canada
https://thenarwhal.ca/bc-kitimat-boom/