Here’s New Young Pony Club’s “The Get Go.” The groove on this one is terrific. It’s more or less the groove from Bryan Ferry’s “Don’t Stop the Dance,” except that since it’s not Bryan Ferry, it’s playful and not threatening.
Zach Barocas, Diasporist Diarist
Here’s New Young Pony Club’s “The Get Go.” The groove on this one is terrific. It’s more or less the groove from Bryan Ferry’s “Don’t Stop the Dance,” except that since it’s not Bryan Ferry, it’s playful and not threatening.
Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI? | Locus
AI companies are implicitly betting that their customers will buy AI for highly consequential automation, fire workers, and cause physical, mental and economic harm to their own customers as a result, somehow escaping liability for these harms. Early indicators are that this bet won’t pay off. Cruise, the “self-driving car” startup that was just forced to pull its cars off rthe streets of San Francisco, pays 1.5 staffers to supervise every car on the road. In other words, their AI replaces a single low-waged driver with 1.5 more expensive remote supervisors — and their cars still kill people.
via Alan Jacobs
I’m bringing the Shorts micropost feed back. It’s more or less a personal twitter feed, short posts, links, stuff found on the fly. I’ve been posting these items in the main blog but like the idea of giving them their own space, separate from the more ponderous and longer-form stuff I post occasionally. It’s a separate RSS feed, so if that’s how you follow along with sites like these, you’ll need to add the subscription.
I’ts pretty bare-bones by intention but I might spruce things up a bit. One never knows. Meantime, I moved all of the existing microposts over so the archive runs pretty deep. It might occasionally run contrary to the mission, too: I imported all of the posts from the micropost category from the main blog and some of them might be longer or more involved than the micro- prefix indicates.
What’s Inside This Crater in Madagascar? | Kottke.org
I wonder if profiling this village on the internet is a good thing to do. This isn’t some YouTube bro helicoptering into the village unannounced — the Vox team worked with locals, received permission, etc. — but these villagers are a minority group who have chosen to live in a remote area with particularly good natural resources…and now their secret is out.
From Weapon or Considering the Evidence Against Me by Justin Rovillos Monson
…later, I read about Evangelista Torricelli, who reasoned that we live “at the bottom of an ocean of air.”
Melanie, Singer Who Made a Solo Splash at Woodstock, Dies at 76 | The New York Times
Just 22 when she charmed the festival crowd, she went on to enjoy success with songs like “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)” and “Brand New Key.”
I can never quite believe “Within the Context of No-Context” was published in The New Yorker but it was. Saddle up. This could take a while.
The most powerful men were those who most effectively used the power of adult competence to enforce childish agreements.
Today marks nine years without tobacco. I think this is the first year I’m not somehow surprised to be a non-smoker. I won’t go into how much I loved smoking, or how much I smoked. Ex-smokers are boring with our two-packs-a-day stories. We all smoked two packs a day. We all loved it. As much as any smoker, it was my identity, my manager, my clock, my comfort, my voice. But however deeply important it was to me, life is better without it.
Things at the shop are settling back into a less fervid routine: the retail holiday season really is a separate planet, orbiting the one we live on the rest of the year, with its own seasons and special days compressed into roughly a month of life here on earth.
Last day of 2023. Wishing you all good things for the coming year.