Items of interest, March 29 - April 9. 2024, past and future edition
If you’re looking for a classics scholar who is not a marble bust avatar, Takes of Time Forgotten by Spencer McDaniel will scratch that itch.
Substack Is Setting Writers Up For A Twitter-Style Implosion - Andrea Grimes. “New reporting from The Wrap details how Substack’s decision to implement a new “follow” feature — part of its transition from newsletter publishing platform to social media site — has tanked subscription growth for lots of newsletter writers…”
OpenAI Startup Fund: GP Hallucination
- Apparently, OpenAI’s $175m vulture capital fund was briefly run by a made-up person, possibly to “facilitate transactions and/or actions that Sam Altman and others don’t want attributed to them.” It’s fraud all the way down.
If you want to write fast software, use a slow computer by Devine Lu Linvega looks like an interesting repository of ways to think about computing at the most fundamental level. I need to be more awake now than I’ve been at any time since 2018 to properly understand much of it, but I do want to have another look at it.
Best printer 2024, best printer for home use, office use, printing labels, printer for school, homework printer you are a printer we are all printers. This article is a lot. Needless to say I’m outraged! Outraged, I tells ya!
‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza - Yuval Abraham , 972mag.
During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.
A bold proposal: Manifesto of the Committee to Abolish Outer Space - Sam Kriss, The New Inquiry. Emphatically, “abolish” does not mean “destroy”, it means to give up on the whole concept.
This week on New Old The Hooded Crow Tracks, we have Dogshit. I mean that’s the title, it’s actually a pretty good song, written by Johan Dijkhuis and featuring a lovely bassline by Pieter van Slobbe, from our first demo from 1994. As usual, it’s been demixed and remixed by Johan.
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