Linked List: January 2022

Boycotting Spotify

I think that Spotify should pay artists well, rather than toxic people who don’t make art and only seek attention.

I like Neil Young’s music.

I have cancelled my Spotify premium account.

Pointer Pointer

Finding pointer…Please hold still.

All We Can Save

Truth, courage, and solutions for the climate crisis.

Added to to-read list. Via Brian Eno.

Bud Anderson 100 Years

An amazing pilot and human being. I warmly recommend Bud’s book, To Fly and Fight.

100 Custom Bits First Ever Cheer 🥇 Schippah

Thank you for being the first person to cheer a custom 100 bits, Schippah!

2 Custom Bits First Ever Cheer 🥇 Talkittynora

Thank you for being the first person to cheer a custom 2 bits, Talkittynora!

007 Custom Bits First Ever Cheer 🥇 Talkittynora

Thank you for being the first person to cheer a custom 007 bits, Talkittynora!

Separate Audio in OBS

Excellent guide by Pete Wilkins about separating audio channels in OBS using an open source plugin. Update 2022-01-20: I have had a few OBS crashes after installing this plugin, which is in beta, by the way, and also dropped frames during streams that I am not sure are related to it or not. I am going to remove it for testing in the next few streams and report back.

The Technium

My favorite advice in this is the “take sabbaticals” one. Once a week, once a year, and a big one at least once in your lifetime.

What Do You Wish to See More of at Hypertexthero Streams?

New year ears are listening!

Web3 First Impressions

Moxie Marlinspike:

Also – cards on the table here – I don’t share the same generational excitement for moving all aspects of life into an instrumented economy.

Even strictly on the technological level, though, I haven’t yet managed to become a believer. So given all of the recent attention into what is now being called web3, I decided to explore some of what has been happening in that space more thoroughly to see what I may be missing.

I want an open currency to work, and I want artists, and anyone, to be able to make digital money from their own work, freely.

But if you’re buying into the hype, don’t put too much money in, because with the way things are currently set up the money may just go Poof!

What Bodies Think About

Fascinating and somewhat chilling presentation by Michael Levin about how “…biology has been computing at many scales long before brains came on the scene”, found the day after reading this excerpt from Feynman’s “Surely You’re Joking…” book:

So my impression of these animals is that their behavior is much too simplified in the books. It is not so utterly mechanical or one-dimensional as they say. They should describe the behavior of these simple animals correctly. Until we see how many dimensions of behavior even a one-celled animal has, we won’t be able to fully understand the behavior of more complicated animals.

I use the word “chilling” because it is concerning to me how close humans are getting to manipulating life itself.

We are becoming the gods.

What kind of gods are we?

You Learn a Lot by Having a Bicycle

The complete Fun to Imagine with Richard Feynman.

Education in the New Technological Environment

From Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s book, The Medium is the Massage - An Inventory of Effects:

The young today live mythically and in depth. But they encounter instruction in situations organized by means of classified information — subjects are unrelated, they are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint. Many of our institutions suppress all the natural direct experience of youth, who respond with untaught delight to the poetry and the beauty of the new technological environment, the environment of popular culture. It could be their door to all past achievement if studied as an active (and not necessarily benign) force.

The student finds no means of involvement for himself and cannot discover how the educational scheme relates to his mythic world of electronically processed data and experience that his clear and direct responses report.

It is a matter of the greatest urgency that our educational institutions realize that we now have civil war among these environments created by media other than the printed word. The classroom is now in a vital struggle for survival with the immensely persuasive “outside” world created by new informational media. Education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery—to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the language of forms.

The young today reject goals. They want roles — R-O-L-E-S. That is, total involvement. They do not want fragmented, specialized goals or jobs.