is a bit like a laptop. But it has a i7Nuc system running windows and then a Raspberry Pi 4 running debian. They share the…

rpi, cyberdeck, portable computing, 2020

is a bit like a laptop. But it has a i7Nuc system running windows and then a Raspberry Pi 4 running debian. They share the screen, keyboard and a usb port (for the mouse) and you toggle between them at the push of a button. The raspberry pi is also running an eInk screen, a microdot phat and then exposes a row of gpio pins to use (the available ones) for tinkering. there is also a bay on the back to plug a raspberry pi zero with a hat. For example a pi0 with a pimoroni audio.

(via /r/raspberry_pi )

When you encounter a broadly confident person, ask what that confidence is rooted in. Typically they’re good at one narrow…

IFTTT, Twitter, vgr


(via http://twitter.com/vgr/status/1325619503493836800)

Look around you. If there are others all moving in the same direction, and they look like you, and they move like you, and they…

nick cave, progress, direction

“Look around you. If there are others all moving in the same direction, and they look like you, and they move like you, and they all like the same things, and they hate the same things, and they are angry about the same things, and they are screaming about the same things, chances are you are on the wrong path.”

Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files Issue #123

“So, you ask me, where is your line of the outside? My own line of the outside, it is there, it’s to become a breeze. At first…

bergmans-ghost:

“So, you ask me, where is your line of the outside? My own line of the outside, it is there, it’s to become a breeze. At first glance, this is a bit simple, even a little silly, but if you live it strongly enough, it’s very, very difficult, you know. It’s true, I think, it’s not about heroism; you risk your life in this, you risk the unbreathable, you also risk being able to breathe… Being a person does not interest me, okay. I only see bad things about being a person.”

— Gilles Deleuze, seminar on Foucault, June 3, 1986

“If we’ve learned anything from this pandemic”

wolfliving:

“If we’ve learned anything from this pandemic”

*There must be a thousand stories of this kind. And, in this case, it’s all about the government of Canada, a G-7 major industrial power, becoming a kind of epiphenomenon of a Big Tech platform.


*This sounds very dull (because Microsoft always sounds very dull) but it’s consequential. Events have played into the hands of the tech majors, networking and remote-working developments that might never have happened at all are being hastily slammed into place, and – not to put too fine a point on it – there’s no sign of the Covid19 pandemic ever going away.


The Permanent Covid scenario is a bizarrely transformative prospect, about a hundred times as radically disruptive of human relations as any “Smart City” or “Internet of Things” project. It substitutes glass screens for shared breath.


If we’ve learned anything from this global pandemic, it’s that digital technology and data are truly critical infrastructure to enable business resiliency and continuity for all governments as they adapt sudden and unexpected changes to “normal” ways of delivering services. With a digital transformation journey already underway, the Government of Canada was able to swiftly pivot operations to deliver critical citizen services securely while simultaneously transitioning approximately 250,000 Federal Public Servants to remote work. To learn more about how they have adopted these changes in the delivery of services, register for Forward 50 (FWD50), taking place virtually November 3 to 9.

Over the past few months, we have seen incredible stories of resilience and adaptation from governments from coast to coast, that is only possible when you approach challenges with a growth mindset. We are working with them to provide the technology and infrastructure needed to enable remote government access, empower cross-agency collaboration, and deliver trusted secure services for this accelerated digital transformation. Although the task was daunting, critical services remained accessible to both government employees and Canadians, all without sacrificing security or productivity.

The National Research Council of Canada’s Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC IRAP), in collaboration with the Innovation, Science, and Economic Development (ISED)’s Innovative Solutions Canada (ISC) program, launched a challenge to Canadian subject matter experts (SMEs) for great new ideas to address COVID-19 needs in areas like diagnostics and testing, patient monitoring and tracking, sanitization and personal protective equipment. This required the development of a new online application portal, through which SMEs could register their technology to assist Canada’s COVID‑19 response. By using Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform cloud solutions, the NRC was able to quickly create a new simplistic online portal that allowed Canadian SMEs to submit their proposed solutions in record speed. On April 22, 2020, the application portal went live – only five days after the program was officially announced. By the week of May 11, 2020, contracts were being put in place with recipients and first deposits were made.

In the healthcare sector, the Newfoundland and Labrador Centre for Health Information moved nearly 4,000 healthcare workers to an Azure Virtual Desktop Environment and Microsoft Teams within five days. This provided their teams with a secure centralized repository for all COVID-19-related guidance, data, and information. Healthcare workers were able to screen patients for COVID-19 virtually, and their supply chain department can now order supplies remotely to ensure frontline workers have the resources they need to stay safe.

Nunavut is 2 million square kilometers and home to 38,000 people in 25 communities across three time zones. With a population as spread out and remote as this, communications, technology, and access to government services are critical. Once the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the Government of Nunavut leveraged the cloud to execute three years of digital transformation plans in just three weeks. Public sector employees in Nunavut are providing citizens with improved and expanded secure access to critical services….

Anarcho-spaceist. Utopian ideological goal of getting to be a spacefaring species by mildly-leftie-ancap means. Some…

IFTTT, Twitter, vgr


(via http://twitter.com/vgr/status/1322954102234472448)

“There are two important implications that I want to bring out as a conclusion to this chapter (and book). The first is that…

carvalhais:

“There are two important implications that I want to bring out as a conclusion to this chapter (and book). The first is that nonconscious cognition, far from being fundamentally alien to how human think, is in fact crucial to human cognition,…”

Hayles, N. Katherine. Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Unconscious. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2017.

DRM horror-stories needed

mostlysignssomeportents:


In 1998, Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act into law, including Section 1201, while felonizes the distribution of tools to bypass “access controls” (AKA DRM).

Practically speaking, that means if your printer cartridge has a digital lock that stops you from refilling it, then anyone who makes a tool to unfuck your printer risks a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine.

DMCA 1201 is an unmitigated disaster. Companies use this law to force you to sideline your own interests and instead conduct yourself to the sole benefit of their shareholders.

All they need to do is design the product so that using it your way means breaking DRM and your way becomes a literal felony: from repair to security audits, from consumables to parts, from apps to features.

DRM has proliferated as a means of enforcing shareholder preferences in your own home.

When DMCA1201 passed, Congress charged the US Copyright Office with holding hearings every three years to uncover potential problems with this very problematic law.

At these “triennials,” people whose legitimate activities have been undermined by DRM can go before a committee of Copyright Office lawyers and beg for the right to use their stuff their way.

To its credit, the Copyright Office has granted many exemptions over the years despite objections from big entertainment and tech companies. But these exemptions are only for “uses” and not “tools.”

When the Copyright Office grants archivists the rights to bypass DRM to preserve media, it can’t authorize anyone to give those archivists a tool to accomplish this use.

Or an exemption for visually impaired people to bypass DRM on ebooks so they can be used with screenreaders, Braille printers or text-to-speech: this permits each blind person to find and exploit defects in ebook DRM, but not to help one another, or get help from others.

There are instances in which a use exemption does some good: for example, if you want to make interoperable diagnostic tools for cars, a use exemption lets you bypass the engine’s DRM to learn what the error codes mean, and then build a tool that interprets them for others.

And many archivists are comfortable with sourcing underground tools to bypass DRM once they know they can legally use those tools.

But for the most part, the best thing we can say about use exemptions is they force the US government to document the defects in DMCA 1201.

The DMCA has a 22 year track record, and it’s uniformly terrible, and getting worse - DMCA 1201 is how Medtronic is preventing independent hospital technicians from repairing their ventilators, RIGHT NOW, during a once-in-a-century pandemic.

Documenting the law’s defects is more urgent than ever, especially as competition regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are investigating the ways that DRM creates and reinforces monopolies.

And you can help!

In 2021, the Copyright Office will once again consider petitions for exemptions to DMCA 1201, and @EFF is looking for your stories to help us craft our slate of proposed new exemptions.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/10/tell-us-how-you-want-modify-and-repair-devices-your-life

If you have a story about how:

  • someone in the United States;
  • attempted or planned to repair, modify, or diagnose a product with a software component; and
  • encountered DRM  that prevented completing the modification, repair, or diagnosis

—we want to hear from you!

“Please email us at RightToMod-2021@eff.org with the information listed below, and we’ll curate the stories we receive so we can present the most relevant ones alongside our arguments to the Copyright Office.”

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/10/tell-us-how-you-want-modify-and-repair-devices-your-life

(make sure you click through to see the questions before you email!)

Splorts Teams

lewisandquark:

There is a game called Blaseballthat started online in summer 2020. Gameplay is both entirely straightforward and profoundly confusing - a rulebook is now available, but is almost completely redacted, and what is left is ominous. Players have names like “Jessica Telephone” and “Jaylen Hotdogfingers” and keep getting incinerated, and weather effects can include “Black Hole” or “Lots of Birds”. There are no graphics, unless you count a few simple icons and emoji.

And the teams, which each come with their own little emoji logo, are odd. There are reasonable names like:
🦀 Baltimore Crabs
🔥Chicago Firefighters

but also disconcerting teams like:
👟Charleston Shoe Thieves
🍬 Kansas City Breath Mints

Teams are not limited to the US, nor, apparently, need they be cities. There’s:
🗣️ Canada Moist Talkers
🍗 Mexico City Wild Wings
🐅Hades Tigers
🌞 Hellmouth Sunbeams

(Again, these are the ones that as far as I know are generated by humans). So, heedless of the possible consequences, I gave the existing list of 20 teams to GPT-3, a neural network trained on a dataset that includes most of the internet - at least, the internet as it was in October 2019. That version of the internet never knew Blaseball. With absolutely no idea what it was doing, or what any of this means, the AI predicted that, given the list of 20 existing teams, the set of teams likely to follow include the following:


Washington, D.C. Mish Mash	📚
St. Louis Mashed Potatoes	🥔
Omaha Face Punchers	👊
Europe Medium Toast	🥖
Toronto Hotcakes	🥞
Vanuatu Apple Holes	🍎
Prague Partridges	🐦
Atlantis Turnips	🥕
Grand Rapids Wet Pretzels	🍩
Fargo Pretty Trees	🌲
Faroe Islands Plesiosaurs	🦐
Death Valley Submarines🚳
Phoenix Warm Nuggets	☀️
Detroit Octopods	🐙
Syracuse Locusts	🦗
Philippines Fierce Frogs	🐸
Russia Slush Pals	☃️
Orlando Brooms	🧹
Venus Skunks	🦨
Las Vegas Moonsharks	🐟
Tokyo Cherry Blossom Spiders	🕷

[very cursed font: Deep Script 2, generated by a neural network]

I didn’t include ALL of the AI’s suggested teams. For example, the San Francisco Scrotums and the Daytona Suppositories were eliminated from the short list. And although the AI generated emojis to go with each team, I decided to substitute the skunk emoji for the poo emoji it had originally chosen for the Venus Skunks, and the grasshopper emoji for the ant emoji it chose for the Syracuse Locusts. The skunk and the grasshopper were only introduced in 2019, and hadn’t spread to much of the internet by the time GPT-3 was trained.

But, again, the AI had also never heard of Blaseball. Although it would add a few teams at a time to the existing list, it would often stop adding teams and start writing stories. Such as the story of the four Lone Wolf Kids and the Ravenwood School’s portal (they like texting and taking selfies!). Or the story of Rachel, wandering near Blister Creek, contemplating the mysterious illness that has Marked her (the doctors say it’s “normal”).

The AI also switched directly from generating teams to generating this magnificent table of contents, and had even started the first chapter before it was stopped:

Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication

Light, Act I
1. Glints and Glitters
2. Behemoth’s Shiny Buttocks
3. Wooden Caskets
4. Howler Express
5. Flawless Coordination
6. Three Men and a Flask
7. A Gruesome Gift
8. Laughs Galore
9. Splintered Wood and a Glowing Jaw
10. Leeches and Moonflowers
11. Sword Sister
12. The Dog Park
13. Glitter and Gilding
14. The Unlightful Light
15. All Things in Their Place
16. Infuriating Smartness
17. The Reestablishment
18. Friend or Foe
19. Horrible Stories
20. High-Pressure Charms
21. Breaking In and Breaking Useful
22. One Step Forward, One Stomp Back
23. Dangling Down
24. Unanticipated-but-No-Longer-Unwelcome
25. Ring of Outrageous Grenades
26. Vicious Spreads of Snakes and Skeletons
27. Full Circle
Author’s Note

1 Glints and Glitters

TRISTAN PUT THE CORK BACK INTO THE FIZZY LIGHTNING CANNISTER HE’D GOTTEN off a random Galactic Warrior, then lobbed it between the battling monsters. Nearby, as the fizzing mist curled out into the monstrous puffs over the sewer, a surprised whisper sounded, “My! A parachute!” Could it really be that simple? Tristan passed a hand down his face to relive the blistering feeling of exultation that had no doubt brightened his features.

GPT-3 has seen a lot of fanfic online, so I guess that’s where all this is coming from? question mark? Had I given it existing team names, it would have generated more existing names, but with a weird input like the blaseball teams, it went careening off into fictional universes.

If you want to read the stories of the Lone Wolf Kids, of Rachel, and some terrible fiction about warriors battling a cordyceps, check out the bonus post!

My book on AI, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why it’s Making the World a Weirder Place, is available wherever books are sold: Amazon - Barnes & Noble - Indiebound - Tattered Cover - Powell’s - Boulder Bookstore

i’ve run a bunch of scenarios on https://t.co/IW212608yy and it seems like the most effective things are: 1. wear an n95 mask 2….

IFTTT, Twitter, bcrypt


(via http://twitter.com/bcrypt/status/1321927992805740544)

Cestum jellies are shaped like gliders, with a central cockpit-like mouth flanked by two huge wings. On each wing, countless…

Jellies, ocean, luminous, Cestum veneris, biographic, 2020

video link

Cestum jellies are shaped like gliders, with a central cockpit-like mouth flanked by two huge wings. On each wing, countless cell hairs flap back and forth to propel the jelly forward, creating a shimmery prism of rainbow color. When the jellies are feeding, rather than migrating to or from the ocean’s depths, these moving wings create a wake that buffets and frightens would-be prey, such as small shrimp-like copepods

via https://www.biographic.com/northern-lights-from-the-deep/

I say what we do is - all put little Javascript bubbles on our pages and start a new Web and you HAVE to HAVE bubbles on…

kickscodor, weiweihsu, comics, collage, web, bubbles, 2020

I say what we do is - all put little Javascript bubbles on our pages and start a new Web and you HAVE to HAVE bubbles on the page to be respected at all. If you can’t put bubbles on your page then you’re not underwater like the rest of us.

https://www.kickscondor.com/weiwei-hsu/

For now, I’d like to try and make collages with photos, words, and lines and shapes! As I understand myself more, I realize that I think better in a blend of media types, and I’m looking forward to making more and iterating on comic log as a way to share stories.  

http://weiweihsu.com/comic

In short, image-scaling attacks enable an adversary to manipulate images, such that they change their appearance/content after…

ML, image scaling attack, image manipulation, images, 2019

In short, image-scaling attacks enable an adversary to manipulate images, such that they change their appearance/content after downscaling. In particular, the attack generates an image A by slightly perturbing the source image S, such that its scaled version D matches a target image T. 

(via https://github.com/EQuiw/2019-scalingattack )

’[W]hat stands in the way of solving the problem of consciousness is the impossibility of interpreting or defining it in terms…

IFTTT, Twitter, PeterSjostedtH


(via http://twitter.com/PeterSjostedtH/status/1321138238522859524)

Acoustic cartography: the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is running a “soundscapes” competition to develop tools…

IFTTT, Twitter, geoffmanaugh


(via http://twitter.com/geoffmanaugh/status/1320920723959889920)

watcha doin’? just replacing Facebook with quantum-encrypted co-operatively owned open source social networks issuing carbon…

IFTTT, Twitter, adrianhon


(via http://twitter.com/adrianhon/status/1320842964210503686)

Today was the last Marine Zoönomy series! Every Friday for the last 3 weeks @KlaasJK and I have worked with participants in…

IFTTT, Twitter, thesjef


(via http://twitter.com/thesjef/status/1319694264343953408)

Zoom shuts down an NYU academic event on zoom censorship. Facebook asks NYU researchers to stop doing research on political ads….

IFTTT, Twitter, sedyst


(via http://twitter.com/sedyst/status/1319933814920122370)

long-term thinking makes people unhappy because it almost necessarily means they’re thinking about big problems the only future…

IFTTT, Twitter, vgr


(via http://twitter.com/vgr/status/1319819179491381248)

No. Consumers don’t have meaningful power. Humans aren’t ambulatory wallets. Citizens have power. Join a movement. Nothing you…

IFTTT, Twitter, doctorow


(via http://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1319751125969453059)

Foucault on Delueze’s “reversed Platonism”

shrinkrants:

shrinkrants:

In any event, here is Deleuze. His “reversed Platonism” consists of displacing himself within the Platonic series in order to disclose an unexpected facet: division. Plato did not establish a weak separation between the genus “hunter,” “cook,” or “politician,” as the Aristote lians said; neither was he concerned with the particular characteris tics of the species “fisherman” or “one who hunts with snares”, he wished to discover the identity of the true hunter. Who is? and not What is? He searched for the authentic, the pure gold. Instead of sub dividing, selecting, and pursuing a productive seam, he chose among the pretenders and ignored their fixed cadastral properties, he tested them with the strung bow, which eliminates all but one (the nameless one, the nomad). But how does one distinguish the false (the simulators, the “so-called”) from the authentic (the unadulterated and pure)? Certainly not by discovering a law of the true and false (truth is not opposed to error but to false appearances), but by looking above these manifestations to a model, a model so pure that the actual purity of the “pure” resembles it, approximates it, and measures itself against it; a model that exists so forcefully that in its presence they sham vanity of the false copy is immediately reduced to nonexistence. With the abrupt appearance of Ulysses, the eternal husband, the false suitors disappear. Exeunt simulacra. Plato is said to have opposed essence to appearance, a higher world to this world below, the sun of truth to the shadows of the cave (and it becomes our duty to bring essences back into the world, to glorify the world, and to place the sun of truth within man). But Deleuze locates Plato’s singularity in the delicate sorting, in this fine operation that precedes the discovery of essence precisely because it calls upon it, and tries to separate malign simulacra from the masses [peuple] of appearance. Thus it is useless to attempt the reversal of Platonism by reinstating the rights of appearances, ascribing to them solidity and meaning, and bringing them closer to essential forms by lending them a conceptual backbone: these timid creatures should not be encouraged to stand upright. Neither should we attempt to rediscover the supreme and solemn gesture that established, in a single stroke, the inaccessible Idea. Rather, we should welcome the cunning assembly that simulates and clamors at the door. And what will enter, sub merging appearance and breaking its engagement to essence, will be the event; the incorporeal will dissipate the density of matter; a timeless insistence will destroy the circle that imitates eternity; an impenetrable singularity will divest itself of its contamination by purity; the actual semblance of the simulacrum will support the falseness of false appearances. The sophist springs up and challenges Socrates to prove that he is not the illegitimate usurper. 

*
To reverse Platonism with Deleuze is to displace oneself insidiously within it, to descend a notch, to descend to its smallest gestures-discreet, but moral - which serve to exclude the simulacrum; it is also to deviate slightly from it, to open the door from either side to the small talk it excluded; it is to initiate another disconnected and divergent series; it is to construct, by way of this small lateral leap, a dethroned para-Platonism. To convert Platonism (a se­rious task) is to increase its compassion for reality, for the world, and for time. To subvert Platonism is to begin at the top (the vertical dis tance of irony) and to grasp its origin. To pervert Platonism is to search out the smallest details, to descend (with the natural gravita tion of humor) as far as its crop of hair or the dirt under its fingernails-those things that were never hallowed by an idea; it is to discover the decentering it put into effect in order to recenter itself around the Model, the Identical, and the Same; it is the decentering of oneself with respect to Platonism so as to give rise to the play (as with every perversion) of surfaces at its border. Irony rises and subverts; humor falls and perverts. To pervert Plato is to side with the Sophists’ spitefulness, the unmannerly gestures of the Cynics, the arguments of the Stoics, and the fluttering chimeras of Epicurus. It is time to read Diogenes Laertius.

We should be alert to the surface effects in which the Epicurians take such pleasure: emissions proceeding from deep within bodies and rising like the wisps of a fog-interior phantoms that are quickly reabsorbed into other depths by the sense of smell, by the mouth, by the appetites, extremely thin membranes that detach themselves from the surfaces of objects and proceed to impose colors and contours deep within our eyes (floating epiderm, visual idols); phantasms of fear or desire (cloud gods, the adorable face of the beloved, “miserable hope transported by the wind”). It is all this swarming of the impalpable that must be integrated into our thought: we must articulate a phi­losophy of the phantasm construed not through the intermediary of perception of the image, as being of the order of an originary given but, rather, left to come to light among the surfaces to which it is related, in the reversal that causes every interior to pass to the outside and every exterior to the inside, in the temporal oscillation that al ways makes it precede and follow itself-in short, in what Deleuze would perhaps not allow us to call its “incorporeal materiality.

It is useless, in any case, to seek a more substantial truth behind the phantasm, a truth to which it points as a rather confused sign …
— T H E A T R U M  P H I L 0 S O P H I C U M, Michel Foucault (at http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpfoucault5.htm)
Thanks to lointaine-3

Apologies to followers who find Foucault’s rhapsodizing off-putting. I think this essay is a treasure, and I’ve never known of its existence. I have friends who are very taken with Delueze, but I have always found his writings to be overly ornate. (I prefer High Renaissance architecture to Baroque. That should tell you a little about where I stand on these things.) But in this essay, Foucault reminds me of Michelangelo: the bursting forth of  a fully ripened genre, spreading the seeds of what is to follow. In doing so, he sharpens my curiosity about Deleuze. Foucault’s joy at showing off is so unrestrained, but at the same time so artful, that I just sit here radiating joy. I’m happy to be alive in a world where people enjoy playing so seriously with ideas. 

I had forgotten this til outersystems liked it today. It gives me joy to read it again. Still thrilled.

untitled 632630538494197760

weaselle:

3amthoughts-stuff:

doragonlw:

warriorsofficial:

theprisonindustrialcomplex:

elucubrare:

gardeninthevoid:

kedreeva:

zeyrablue:

bunjywunjy:

mjalti:

oh it totally does, but you can’t hear it because space is a vacuum and sound can’t travel through a vacuum! 

and that’s a good thing, 

because the roar of the sun would clock in at around 120db heard from earth, about the equivalent to having a train’s horn go off three feet from your face. 

constantly. all the time, even at NIGHT. there would be no escape.

this is simply terrifying. how do you erase knowledge please ?

NASA actually recorded the sun, if you want to hear it:

And they recorded the planets too:

so, the sun and the earth sound about how i would’ve expected, and a lot of other planets just make strong wind sounds which is perfectly reasonable but venus sounds like pure dread?!?! WHY IS SATURN SCREAMING?!? pluto isn’t bad and is actually kinda nice but it’s very strange to me too like Why Does It Do That. jupiter is super chill 10/10. pluto and jupiter need to collab i would buy that album

oh, fuck, guys, you know what this means? it means the ancient world was right about the music of the spheres. 

Sun

Mercury

Venus

Earth

Mars

Jupiter

Saturn

Uranus 

Neptune

Pluto

i can hear these photos and i don’t like it

Is anyone going to explain why Saturn is basically screaming?

I’m afraid

NASA says…

Saturn’s complex radio spectrum with rising and falling tones, is very similar to Earth’s auroral radio emissions. These structures indicate that there are numerous small radio sources moving along magnetic field lines threading the auroral region.

Time on this recording has been compressed, so that 73 seconds corresponds to 27 minutes. Since the frequencies of these emissions are well above the audio frequency range, we have shifted them downward by a factor of 44.