Stuff I found on the Internet
"What EA pushes is expected value as a life hack for morality. Want to make the world better? GiveWell has done the calculations on how to rescue poor humans. A few clicks and you’re done: Move fast and save people."
"Technology and the rational division of labour had enabled ordinary people to contribute to acts of mass extermination with a clear conscience, even with frissons of virtue, and preventive efforts against such impersonal and available modes of killing required more than vigilance against antisemitism."
"The central claim of the tech companies selling LLMs is that any work that people do that results in text artifacts is just "text in-text out" and can therefore be replaced by their synthetic text-extruding machines. The best response to that claim is not "oh no, we can't keep up" but to take pride in one's work... and push back"
"survivable futures require that we all have access to better ways to be together online"
"a selection of reference books showcasing techniques and designs for embroidering and weaving letters" some truly gorgeous stuff in here
"Doug Clouse explores connections between typography and tectonic crafts, those that build by the accumulation of similar units. Typewriter art, food cart signs, letterpress printing, type design, needle work, weaving, bricklaying, and mosaics reveal similar creative impulses that are not well understood."
"Instead of the shafts of a conventional loom the Weberknecht-loom has a pattern device that is equipped with pattern discs. These discs have small raised rings on their surface, the warp lifters, which will lift up the warps threads when in working position. Otherwise the thread remains lowered on the larger centre ring." extremely cool idea, free 3d models and instructions, i wanna make one this summer
dyed PLA to match classic colors
"We need much more steel if we replace thermal power plants with renewable ones. Because there is not enough steel scrap available, we can only produce that extra steel from iron ore in blast furnaces burning fossil fuels. To address climate change, we need to build low-carbon sources quickly and in great numbers. However, to achieve circular material flows and build low-carbon power sources from scrap and renewable electricity, we would have to do the opposite: slow down the development of a low-carbon power grid."
"People who take precautions to avoid COVID are making the wise decision to protect themselves and their families; they are also safeguarding their ability to work and earn money in a society that disposes of people who cannot produce. It is a rational decision; in the case of Long COVID patients, it is a necessary one."
"If texts become liquid, they become flexible, permeable, and difficult to contain. If we can make them slosh around in a big bucket, maybe we can catch some drops on our tongue..."
yet another example of how the nytimes is a horseshit newspaper and organization
"In other words, some users get the full experience, the one with all the words, all the context, and all the options. But if Nielsen’s AI thinks you have a disability, you’ll get a different experience, a simpler experience that’s more appropriate for people like you. It’s an ugly kind of paternalism with a new AI twist."
Nick Montfort's poetics: "Writing very small-scale computational poems allows me to learn more about computing and its intersection with language and poetry. Not computing in the abstract, but computing as embodied in particular platforms, which are intentionally designed and have platform imaginaries and communities of use and practice surrounding them."
"Open source, open data, open training code, fully reproducible and auditable text embedding model"
references, articles, publications on the history of fax machines
I define "writing" as a heuristic or a way of making educated guesses, letter by letter, until a writing task is considered complete. Users can experience this with whichever file they choose to upload."
"Participating in their strange bureaucracies is a major concession of our time that we could use for our animal purposes, to observe and make sense of the world, and to describe OUR visions. I propose that we stop playing along. I am imagining a type of degrowth, a disassembly of dominant structures, a refusal."
"the manual can be a compound collaborative object around which a social ecology emerges and evolves" (Shannon Mattern, as always, bringing the heat)
"an open source, open hardware, and open design SCSI solution for vintage computers"