Linked List: August 2024
Friday, 30 August 2024
- Building a community based on trust ✶
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Ben Werdmuller, writing about the implications of artificial intelligence adding things that never happened to a photograph:
Ultimately, the biggest counter to this problem as a publisher is going to be building a community based on trust, and for an end-user is finding sources you can trust. That doesn’t help in a legal context, and it doesn’t help establish objective truth. But it’s something.
See also Ken Thompson’s classic paper, Reflections on Trusting Trust: To what extent should one trust a statement that a program is free of Trojan horses? Perhaps it is more important to trust the people who wrote the software.
Saturday, 24 August 2024
- Jerome Bruner ✶
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Bruner also believed learning should be spurred by interest in the material rather than tests or punishment, since one learns best when one finds the acquired knowledge appealing.
Added to to-read list: The Culture of Education.
Thursday, 22 August 2024
- Awareness of being a collection of traits and behaviors ✶
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From a fascinating question and answer session with software pioneer Alan Kay:
Neil’s idea was that all of us should become aware of the environments we live in and how our brain/minds are genetically disposed to accommodate to them without our being very aware of the process, and, most importantly, winding up almost completely unaware of what we’ve accommodated to by winding up at a “new normal”.
The start of a better way is similar to the entry point of science “The world is not as it seems”. Here, it’s “As a human being I’m a collection of traits and behaviors, many of which are atavistic and even detrimental to my progress”. Getting aware of how useful cravings for salt, fat, sugar, caffeine, etc., turn into a problem when these are abundant and consumer companies can load foods with them….
And, Neil points out — in books like “Amusing Ourselves To Death” and “The End Of Childhood” — we have cravings for “news” and “novelty” and “surprise” and even “blinking”, etc. which consumer companies have loaded communications channels with …
Many of these ideas trace back to McLuhan, Innis, Ong, etc.
Bottom line: children need to learn how to use the 21st century, or there’s a good chance they will lose the 21st century.
See also The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore.
- Starfield Update ✶
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Played it a bit to try the new surface vehicle and updated my ongoing review which now has a list of potentially interesting mods.
Friday, 16 August 2024
- Ambient Garden ✶
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Found via a discussion of about just intonation.
Thursday, 15 August 2024
- Blonde Redhead ✶
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Live on KEXP.
Tuesday, 13 August 2024
Friday, 9 August 2024
- GTA and Noita Updates ✶
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We managed to play Grand Theft Auto without lag yesterday, so the GTA series of streams are on, usually Thursdays at 9pm NYC time.
My Noita review is also up, and it feels good to be back on stream!