Hackers exploiting malicious software stolen from the National Security Agency executed damaging cyberattacks on Friday that hit dozens of countries worldwide, forcing Britain’s public health system to send patients away, freezing computers at Russia’s Interior Ministry and wreaking havoc on tens of thousands of computers elsewhere. The attacks amounted to an audacious global blackmail attempt spread by the internet and underscored the vulnerabilities of the digital age. Transmitted via email, the malicious software locked British hospitals out of their computer systems and demanded ransom before users could be let back in — with a threat that data would be destroyed if the demands were not met. By late Friday the attacks had spread to more than 74 countries, according to security firms tracking the spread. Kaspersky Lab, a Russian cybersecurity firm, said Russia was the worst-hit, followed by Ukraine, India and Taiwan. Reports of attacks also came from Latin America and Africa.

via https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/world/europe/uk-national-health-service-cyberattack.html?action=click&contentCollection=Europe&region=Footer&module=WhatsNext&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&moduleDetail=undefined&pgtype=Multimedia

Society likes saints and moral heroes to be celibate so they do not have family pressures and be forced into dilemmas of needing to compromise their sense of ethics to feed their children. The entire human race, something rather abstract, becomes their family. Some martyrs, such as Socrates, had young children (although he was in his seventies), and overcame the dilemma at their expense. Many can’t.

via https://medium.com/incerto/the-skin-of-others-in-your-game–3f51d8ccc3fb

People often say that online behavior would improve if every comment system forced people to use their real names. It sounds like it should be true – surely nobody would say mean things if they faced consequences for their actions? Yet the balance of experimental evidence over the past thirty years suggests that this is not the case. Not only would removing anonymity fail to consistently improve online community behavior – forcing real names in online communities could also increase discrimination and worsen harassment. We need to change our entire approach to the question. Our concerns about anonymity are overly-simplistic; system design can’t solve social problems without actual social change.

via https://blog.coralproject.net/the-real-name-fallacy/

What we fear is a future in which potent personal data is combined with increasingly sophisticated technology to produce and deliver unaccountable personalized media and messages at a national scale. Combined with data-driven emerging media technologies, it is clear that the use of behavioral data to nudge voters with propaganda-as-a-service is set to explode. Imagine being able to synthesize a politician saying anything you type and then upload the highly realistic video to Facebook with a fake CNN chyron banner. Expect the early versions of these tools available before 2020. At the core of this is data privacy, or as they more meaningfully describe it in Europe, data protection. Unfortunately, the United States is headed in a dangerous direction on this issue. President Trump’s FCC and the Republican party radically deregulated our ISP’s ability to sell data monetization on paying customer data. Anticipate this administration further eroding privacy protections, as it confuses the public interest for the interests of business, despite being the only issue that about 95% of voters agree on, across every partisan and demographic segment according to HuffPo/YouGov. We propose three ideas to address these issues, which are crucial to preserving American democracy.

via https://medium.com/@profcarroll/confronting-a-nightmare-for-democracy–5333181ca675

The Dreams of Santiago Ramón y Cajal is both a portrait of Cajal’s legacy as well as a testament to the beauty and vulnerability that occurs when our brain and body communicates. Though Cajal’s legacy is monumental; he is lesser known than his pioneering counterparts such as Newton, Darwin, and Einstein. For those who are unfamiliar with Cajal, the first part of the book reads as a biography. Readers become acquainted with his life and work, which are heavily intertwined. Before Cajal, the brain was seen as a “continuous web” as opposed to the individual units known as neurons that Cajal discovered them to be through his use of the Golgi stain. He, as well as Golgi, received the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking work on the structure of the nervous system in 1906.

via https://electricliterature.com/discovering-the-subconscious-of-santiago-ram%C3%B3n-y-cajal-ec6be1d4684e

At any one time, there have probably only been a few dozen accelerationists in the world. The label has only been in regular use since 2010, when it was borrowed from Zelazny’s novel by Benjamin Noys, a strong critic of the movement. Yet for decades longer than more orthodox contemporary thinkers, accelerationists have been focused on many of the central questions of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: the rise of China; the rise of artificial intelligence; what it means to be human in an era of addictive, intrusive electronic devices; the seemingly uncontrollable flows of global markets; the power of capitalism as a network of desires; the increasingly blurred boundary between the imaginary and the factual; the resetting of our minds and bodies by ever-faster music and films; and the complicity, revulsion and excitement so many of us feel about the speed of modern life. “We all live in an operating system set up by the accelerating triad of war, capitalism and emergent AI,” says Steve Goodman, a British accelerationist who has even smuggled its self-consciously dramatic ideas into dance music, via an acclaimed record label, Hyperdub. “Like it or not,” argues Steven Shaviro, an American observer of accelerationism, in his 2015 book on the movement, No Speed Limit, “we are all accelerationists now.”

via https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationism-how-a-fringe-philosophy-predicted-the-future-we-live-in

mostlysignssomeportents:

Felipe Pantone, a graffiti artist based in Valencia, Spain, does these amazing, cyberspace-is-everting murals, skinning buildings and even cars all around the world. ( via JWZ)

https://boingboing.net/2017/05/11/information-overload.html

allthingslinguistic:

An interesting-looking new machine translation technique that takes grammar into consideration by Ehsaneddin Asgari and Hinrich Schütze. Excerpt from a summary on Technology Review: 

This data set is not big enough for the kind of industrial machine learning that Google and others perform. So Asgari and Schutze have come up with another approach based on the way tenses appear in different languages.

Most languages use specific words or letter combinations to signify tenses. So the new trick is to manually identify these signals in several languages and then use data-mining techniques to hunt through other translations looking for words or strings of letters that play the same role.

For example, in English the present tense is signified by the word “is,” the future tense by the word “will,” and the past tense by the word “was.” Of course, there are other signifiers too.

Asgari and Schutze’s idea is to find all these words in the English translation of the Bible along with other examples from a handful other language translations. Then look for words or letters strings that play the same role in other languages. For example, the letter string “-ed” also signifies the past tense in English.

But there is a twist. Asgari and Schutze do not start with English because it is a relatively old language with many exceptions to the rule, which makes it hard to learn.

Instead, they start with a set of Creole languages that have developed from a mixture of other languages. Because they are younger, Creole languages have had less time to develop these linguistic idiosyncrasies. And that means they generally contain better markers of linguistic features such as tense. “Our rationale is that Creole languages are more regular than other languages because they are young and have not accumulated ‘historical baggage’ that may make computational analysis more difficult,” they say.

One of these languages is Seychelles Creole, which uses the word “ti” to signify the past tense. For example, “mon travay” means “I work” in this language, while “mon ti travay” means “I worked” and “mon ti pe travay” means “I was working.” So “ti” is a good signifier of past tense.

Asgari and Schutze compile a list of past tense signifiers in 10 other languages and then mine the Parallel Bible Corpus for other words and letter strings that perform the same function. They repeat this for the present tense and future tense.

The results make for interesting reading. The technique reveals linguistics constructions related to tense in common languages such as “-ed” in English and “-te” in German, as well as the words and phrases that perform the same functions in much less common languages such as the past tense signifier “den” in the Gourmanchema language from Burkino Faso,  and “yi” in Yalunka, spoken in Mali, and so on.

This work allows the researchers to create maps showing how languages using similar tense constructions are related (see diagram).

That’s interesting work. Asgari and Schutze have developed a computational method to analyze the way people use the past, present, and future tense in over 1,000 languages. This is the largest cross-language computational study ever undertaken. Indeed, the number of languages involved is an order of magnitude greater than in other studies.

The full paper is on arXiv here.

Do you speak Yalunka? Your computer soon might along with 1000s of other rare languages

RT @nebogeo: Self healing transistors for a 20 year trip to Alpha Centauri

via http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/selfhealing-transistors-for-chipscale-starships

Linguistics Breakthrough Could Allow Machine Translation for Thousands of Rare Languages

via https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607825/new-software-program-translates-thousands-of-rare-languages/?set=604309

reading haraway against haraway.

via https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/05/08/cthulhu-plays-no-role-for-me/

Tribes solves the inaccuracies and other significant flaws in other recommendation systems such as inference engines and collaborative filtering. Tribes solves the problems inherent in existing recommendation systems for “products of taste.” It does this by recognizing that the only relevant information is a single datum: a personal preference expressed in terms of future intentions. Products of personal taste include wine, books, movies, music, cheese, and restaurants and more. Wine is a good example of why current systems fail. It’s nearly impossible for a retail consumer to reliable choose a good bottle that they will like enough for a subsequent purchase. Many retail purchases are so disliked that they get poured down the kitchen sink.

via http://recommendationinsights.com/?p=48

The new kind of neural networks are an evolution of the initial feed-forward model of LeNet5 / AlexNet and derivatives, and include more sophisticated by-pass schemes than ResNet / Inception. These feedforward neural networks are also called encoders, as they compress and encode images into smaller representation vectors. The new wave of neural networks have two important new features:
generative branches: also called decoders, as they project a representation vector back into the input space
recurrent layers: that combine representations from previous time steps with the inputs and representations of the current time step

via https://medium.com/towards-data-science/a-new-kind-of-deep-neural-networks–749bcde19108

The practice of using people’s outer appearance to infer inner character is called physiognomy. While today it is understood to be pseudoscience, the folk belief that there are inferior “types” of people, identifiable by their facial features and body measurements, has at various times been codified into country-wide law, providing a basis to acquire land, block immigration, justify slavery, and permit genocide. When put into practice, the pseudoscience of physiognomy becomes the pseudoscience of scientific racism.

Rapid developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning have enabled scientific racism to enter a new era, in which machine-learned models embed biases present in the human behavior used for model development. Whether intentional or not, this “laundering” of human prejudice through computer algorithms can make those biases appear to be justified objectively.

via https://medium.com/@blaisea/physiognomys-new-clothes-f2d4b59fdd6a

rjzimmerman:

The Thwaites Glacier. This is the glacier that frightens the climate scientists and other scientists who study the ice shelves and glaciers in Antarctica. This Rolling Stone article tells about Thwaites, and the increasing instability of the ice in Antarctica and the effects on coastal areas if that instability results in glaciers leaving the continent of Antarctica to fall into the ocean. And what happens when those things happen in conjunction with continued melting in Greenland?

Excerpt:

The trouble with Thwaites, which is one of the largest glaciers on the planet, is that it’s also what scientists call “a threshold system.” That means instead of melting slowly like an ice cube on a summer day, it is more like a house of cards: It’s stable until it is pushed too far, then it collapses. When a chunk of ice the size of Pennsylvania falls apart, that’s a big problem. It won’t happen overnight, but if we don’t slow the warming of the planet, it could happen within decades. And its loss will destabilize the rest of the West Antarctic ice, and that will go too. Seas will rise about 10 feet in many parts of the world; in New York and Boston, because of the way gravity pushes water around the planet, the waters will rise even higher, as much as 13 feet. “West Antarctica could do to the coastlines of the world what Hurricane Sandy did in a few hours to New York City,” explains Richard Alley, a geologist at Penn State University and arguably the most respected ice scientist in the world. “Except when the water comes in, it doesn’t go away in a few hours – it stays.”

With 10 to 13 feet of sea-level rise, most of South Florida is an underwater theme park, including Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Tampa and Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s winter White House in West Palm Beach. In downtown Boston, about the only thing that’s not underwater are those nice old houses up on Beacon Hill. In the Bay Area, everything below Highway 101 is gone, including the Googleplex; the Oakland and San Francisco airports are submerged, as is much of downtown below Montgomery Street and the Marina District. Even places that don’t seem like they would be in trouble, such as Sacramento, smack in the middle of California, will be partially flooded by the Pacific Ocean swelling up into the Sacramento River. Galveston, Texas; Norfolk, Virginia; and New Orleans will be lost. In Washington, D.C., the shoreline will be just a few hundred yards from the White House.

Seventy percent of the Earth’s fresh water is frozen here in ice sheets that can be nearly three miles thick. The continent is roughly divided by the Transantarctic Mountains; East Antarctica is bigger and colder than West Antarctica, which is far more vulnerable to melting, in part because the bases of many glaciers in West Antarctica lie below sea level, making them susceptible to small changes in ocean temperatures.

The Doomsday Glacier

video link

new-aesthetic:

Music for 18 Musicians - Steve Reich ; Video clip made with Machine Learning. - YouTube

I used videos recorded from trains windows, with landscapes that moves from right to left and trained a Machine Learning (ML) algorithm with it. First, it learns how to predict the next frame of the videos, by analyzing examples. Then it produces a frame from a first picture, then another frame from the one just generated, etc. The output becomes the input of the next calculation step. So, excepting the first one that I chose, all the other frames were generated by the algorithm. The results are low resolution, blurry, and not realistic most of the time. But it resonates with the feeling I have when I travel in a train. It means that the algorithm learned the patterns needed to create this feeling. Unlike classical computer generated content, these patterns are not chosen or written by a software engineer. In this video, nobody made explicit that the foreground should move faster than the background: thanks to Machine Learning, the algorithm figured that itself. The algorithm can find patterns that a software engineer may haven’t noticed, and is able to reproduce them in a way that would be difficult or impossible to code.

via https://asynchronous.in/2017/04/21/Email-with-notmuch-and-astroid/

To put it simply, Chaos Engineering is one particular approach to “breaking things on purpose” that aims at teaching us something new about systems by performing experiments on them. Ultimately, our goal is to identify hidden problems that could arise in production. Only then will we be able to address systemic weaknesses and make our systems fault-tolerant. Chaos Engineering goes beyond traditional (failure) testing in that it’s not only about verifying assumptions. It also helps us explore the many unpredictable things that could happen and discover new properties of our inherently chaotic systems.

via https://blog.gremlininc.com/the-discipline-of-chaos-engineering-e39d2383c459

“We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

–Buckminster Fuller

“The idea that we live life in a straight line, like a story, seems to me to be increasingly absurd and, more than anything, a kind of intellectual convenience […] I feel that the events in our lives are like a series of bells being struck and the vibrations spread outwards, affecting everything, our present, and our futures, of course, but our past as well. Everything is changing and vibrating and in flux.”

–Nick Cave

rjzimmerman:

I read the article published in Scientific American, and most of the report described in the article. The report is entitled,  “Snow, Water, Ice, and Permafrost in the Arctic.”It is an assessment compiled every few years by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, the scientific body that reports to the governments that make up the Arctic Council, a forum for issues affecting the region. The last assessment came out in 2011. Here’s the link to the report if you want to read it.

My concern is obvious: the echo chamber. Those of us who are worried about climate change, including scientists and some politicians, will be concerned. Those who can take policy actions to address the causes of this problem, particularly in the US,  will continue ignoring, avoiding or denying the problem. And Nero will keep on fiddling and the emperor has no clothes. Right?

Excerpt:

The Arctic is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet, suggests a huge assessment of the region. The warming is hastening the melting of Arctic ice and boosting sea-level rise.

The report, compiled by more than 90 scientists, documents the myriad changes already under way across the Arctic because of climate change—from declining sea ice and melting glaciers to shifting ecosystems and weather patterns. From 2011 to 2015, the assessment finds, the Arctic was warmer than at any time since records began around 1900 (see ’Arctic warming’).

Sea ice continues to decline, and the extent of snow cover across the Arctic regions of North America and Eurasia each June has halved as compared to observations before 2000.

“The take-home message is that the Arctic is unravelling,” says Rafe Pomerance, who chairs a network of conservation groups called Arctic 21 and was a deputy assistant secretary of state for environment and development under US President Bill Clinton. “The fate of the Arctic has to be moved out of the world of scientific observation and into the world of government policy.”

The report increases projections for global sea-level rise, which takes into account all sources of melting including the Arctic. Their new minimum estimates are now almost double those issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2013 for some emissions scenarios. In fact, the latest calculations suggest that the IPCC’s middle estimates for sea-level rise should now be considered minimum estimates.

In one scenario, which assumes that carbon emissions rise slightly above the goals set by the 2015 Paris climate agreement—but still see a considerable reduction—sea levels would increase by at least 0.52 metres by 2100, compared with 2006, the Arctic report says. Under a business-as-usual scenario, the minimum increase would be 0.74 metres.

Major Report Prompts Warnings That the Arctic Is Unraveling

“The dominant culture tolerates parasitic counter-cultures as more or less innocuous deviations, but it cannot accept critical manifestations which call it [the dominant culture] into question. Counter-culture comes about when those who transform the culture in which they live become critically conscious of what they are doing and elaborate a theory of their deviation from the dominant model, offering a model that is capable of sustaining itself.”

–

Umberto Eco

this is a deeper phenonemon called the “tar-baby” principle and is basically: You are attached to what you attack. In academic parlance, the idea is that the currently reigning powers define the space and the terms of engagement. Both the definition of “culture” and “counter-culture” are part of a “hegemonic discourse” (Antonio Gramsci).

via https://medium.com/culturing/joe-this-is-a-deeper-phenonemon-called-the-tar-baby-principle-and-is-basically–215f69dd5f4e

Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?” The aesthetics of solarpunk merge the practical with the beautiful, the well-designed with the green and wild, the bright and colorful with the earthy and solid. Solarpunk can be utopian, just optimistic, or concerned with the struggles en route to a better world — but never dystopian. As our world roils with calamity, we need solutions, not warnings. Solutions to live comfortably without fossil fuels, to equitably manage scarcity and share abundance, to be kinder to each other and to the planet we share. At once a vision of the future, a thoughtful provocation, and an achievable lifestyle. In progress…

via https://medium.com/solarpunks/solarpunk-a-reference-guide–8bcf18871965#_=_

History is largely peace punctuated by wars, rather than wars punctuated by peace. When you read historical accounts, you are under the illusion that history is mostly wars, that states like to fight as a default condition, whenever they have the chance, and that the only coordination between entities takes place when two countries have a “strategic” alliance against a common danger.[…] We will be fed by tomes of histories of wars. […] Reading a history book offers a similar bias to reading an account of life in New York seen from an emergency room employee at Bellevue Hospital.

via https://medium.com/incerto/peace-neither-ink-nor-blood–4657956c82ac

But, in truth, it’s not that difficult to understand Ethereum, blockchains, Bitcoin and all the rest — at least the implications for people just going about their daily business, living their lives. Even a programmer who wants a clear picture can get a good enough model of how it all fits together fairly easily. Blockchain explainers usually focus on some very clever low-level details like mining, but that stuff really doesn’t help people (other than implementers) understand what is going on. Rather, let’s look at how the blockchains fit into the more general story about how computers impact society.

via https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/by-the-end-of-this-article-youre-going-to-understand-blockchains-in-general-and-ethereum-a-next-e11df6a1d7cf

“Some say why waste your time believing in God when there is so much natural beauty and awesomeness around us. Some say that there is more beauty and wonder looking at a butterfly and I agree, butterflies are beautiful things, but if you get a human being to look closely at a butterfly, to look very closely and get some more human beings to look at that butterfly so that there is a collective of people all peering intently at the butterfly they will ultimately fall to their knees and worship that butterfly. It’s the way humans are put together. I don’t think that makes them stupid. I think it’s kind of sweet. Until someone says well my butterfly is the true butterfly and yours is not and flies a plane into the twin towers.”

via http://www.gq.com/story/the-love-and-terror-of-nick-cave

In a world which is rapidly being decentralized — there also needs to be a decentralized way to ensure adequate payment for those who provide us with the infrastructure. We have found a way to get there and now we will present an evolutionary path towards it. For the last month we have been examining existing technology and its potential, to perform POC (Proof Of Concept) experiments — with the goal of understanding how to build a decentralized VPN service and how to provide monetization to people running this network — VPN node operators.

via https://medium.com/mysterium-network/building-decentralized-value-exchange-into-decentralized-vpn–382e6a2cc7

“Over the course of his or her life, a typical member of a modern affluent society will own several million artefacts – from cars and houses to disposable nappies and milk cartons. There’s hardly an activity, a belief, or even an emotion that is not mediated by objects of our own devising.”

– Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. 2015. (viacarvalhais)

Quantum Biometrics Exploits the Human Eye’s Ability to Detect Single Photons

via https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604266/quantum-biometrics-exploits-the-human-eyes-ability-to-detect-single-photons/

I made a predictive policing app that targets white collar crime. With @BrianClifton_ & @frnsys & @newinquiry

via https://whitecollar.thenewinquiry.com/

‘Could queer kinship help us make sense of these new taxonomic conundrums that synthetic biologists engineer?’

via http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2017/04/biology_and_queer_theory_are_dismantling_the_tree_of_life.html

“On Interventionistas and their Mental Defects” via @Medium https://medium.com/@nntaleb/on-neo-cons-and-their-mental-defects-d12685585b11?source=ifttt————–1

via https://medium.com/@nntaleb/on-neo-cons-and-their-mental-defects-d12685585b11?source=ifttt————–1

“An early set of notes proposed a “service equipped to advise on all problems of design”, addressing the needs of “the State, Municipal Authorities, Industry or Commerce.” They anticipated a post-war demand for technical expertise and a need for “the reconditioning and re-designing public utility services” recommending “contact… with the railway companies, motor coach lines and so on.“”

–Design Research Unit - Wikipedia (viaiamdanw)

video link

A huge payoff from the longevity of the LRO mission is the repeat coverage obtained by the LROC Wide Angle Camera (WAC). The WAC has a very wide field-of-view (FOV), 90° in monochrome mode and 60° in multispectral mode, hence its name. On the one hand, the wide FOV enables orbit-to-orbit stereo, which allowed LROC team members at the DLR to create the unprecedented 100 meter scale near-global (0° to 360° longitude and 80°S to 80°N latitude) topographic map of the Moon (the GLD100)!

http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/posts/707

“Feudalism and the “Algorithmic Economy”” via @Medium https://medium.com/basic-income/feudalism-and-the-algorithmic-economy-62d6c5d90646?source=ifttt————–1

via https://medium.com/@ebonstorm/feudalism-and-the-algorithmic-economy–62d6c5d90646?source=ifttt————–1

video link

Available to listen/download now, particulate fans Newsletter going out with the transcript some time today

via http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08mbjqp

Why didn’t ancient humans eat each other? A new study compares the nutrition of humans and mammoths

via http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/04/human-cannibalism-nutrition-archaeology-science/?sf71528651=1

Vainio’s influence on ambient and industrial electronic music was somewhat unspoken in his lifetime. He was not a figurehead of a scene, but pretty much all booming palettes of mechanical sound being made today nod in some way to Vainio and his work with Pan Sonic […] Vainio’s beats weren’t beats at all, they were the sound and feeling of a black hole opening up in the centre of your chest.[…] like “flares, vapour trails, LEDs, neon tubes close to death, heart murmurs, apertures opening and closing in cement walls, tiny mechanised guillotines snipping the heads from tin soldiers, sheets of led unfurling in underground car parks”.

via https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2017/apr/18/mika-vainios-quiet-influence-on-electronic-music-was-deafening

Estonia is Europe’s leading catcher of Vladimir Putin’s spies as well as Europe’s leading unmasker of his manifold agents of influence. It is uncharacteristically unafraid to advertise its own national security threats by naming and shaming its yearly haul of enemy operatives, at least in comparison to other Western NATO democracies, which tend to hush up such bilateral embarrassments, preferring the discreet expulsion of spooks or “PNGing” of diplomats who glad-hand by day and engage in dead-letter drops by night.

via http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/04/15/estonia-the-little-spycatcher-who-could.html

“

The workshops also highlighted a major blind spot in thinking about AI. Auto­nomous systems are already deployed in our most crucial social institutions, from hospitals to courtrooms. Yet there are no agreed methods to assess the sustained effects of such applications on human populations.

Recent years have brought extraordinary advances in the technical domains of AI. Alongside such efforts, designers and researchers from a range of disciplines need to conduct what we call social-systems analyses of AI. They need to assess the impact of technologies on their social, cultural and political settings.

A social-systems approach could investigate, for instance, how the app AiCure — which tracks patients’ adherence to taking prescribed medication and transmits records to physicians — is changing the doctor–patient relationship. Such an approach could also explore whether the use of historical data to predict where crimes will happen is driving overpolicing of marginalized communities. Or it could investigate why high-rolling investors are given the right to understand the financial decisions made on their behalf by humans and algorithms, whereas low-income loan seekers are often left to wonder why their requests have been rejected.

“People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they’re too stupid and they’ve already taken over the world.” This is how computer scientist Pedro Domingos sums up the issue in his 2015 book The Master Algorithm1. Even the many researchers who reject the prospect of a ‘technological singularity’ — saying the field is too young — support the introduction of relatively untested AI systems into social institutions.

–There is a blind spot in AI research : Nature News& Comment (vianewdarkage)

“Seeing that I cannot choose any subject of great utility or pleasure, because my predecessors have already taken as their own all useful and necessary themes, I will do like one who, because of his poverty, is the last to arrive at the fair, and not being able otherwise to provide for himself, chooses all the things which others have already looked over and not taken, but refused as being of little value. With these despised and rejected wares — the leavings of many buyers — I will load my modest pack, and therewith take my course, distributing, not indeed amid the great cities, but among the mean hamlets, and taking such reward as befits the things I offer.”

–Da Vinci, Codice Atlantico 119 v. a, in The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Edward MacCurdy (trans.), Vol 1, Oxford: Jonathan Cape, 1945, p. 61 (viadearyesno)

“Beaches today are where we turn our backs not just on the world at large but also on our inland selves. They are a sanctuary, groomed to remove all distractions, sometimes including the other creatures that once made them their home. Beaches are thought of as a place where time stands still, devoid of a troubling past but also of an ever pressing future.”

–John R. Gillis, Life and Death of the Beach, New York Times (June 30, 2012)

“Utopia for Realists” vs “The Radical Incrementalist” - two different manifestos on creating new futures: #future

via http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/utopia-realists-radical-incrementalist/

“Adapt to real-world dysfunctional organisations rather than waiting for an orderly process to appear”

via https://paulcairney.wordpress.com/2017/04/10/psychology-based-policy-studies–5-heuristics-to-maximise-the-use-of-evidence-in-policymaking/

Device pulls water from dry air, powered only by the sun | Berkeley News

via http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/04/13/device-pulls-water-from-dry-air-powered-only-by-the-sun/

Prediction: impact of Fake News will pale relative to impact of Fake Art like Fearless Girl (it’s an ad campaign)

via https://gregfallis.com/2017/04/14/seriously-the-guy-has-a-point/

‘There is a generally agreed-upon menu of ghost-friendly food and drink offerings.’

via https://www.pri.org/stories/2017–04–06/thailand-blood-sacrifice-out-strawberry-fanta

“We have never had to deal with problems of the scale facing today’s globally interconnected society. No one knows for sure what will work, so it is important to build a system that can evolve and adapt rapidly.”

–Elinor Ostrom

Once you’re boarded, united may not take your seat for overbooking reasons. You are not obligated to follow any unreasonable or illegal crewmember instruction. The police should not enforce civil contracts without a court order, and they took United’s side when clearly they were in the wrong. Aviation is a special case in many ways, but we don’t abdicate our rights or reason when we decide to fly. Everyone at united — from the CEO on down — has demonstrated a marked lack of thought, compassion and contrition. They deserve the maximum punishment that is possible.

via https://medium.com/@gzicherm/understanding-united–3411–51f196c2276b

mindblowingscience:

The Ukrainian government has announced a plan to turn the area surrounding Chernobyl - the site of one of the worst nuclear meltdowns in history - into a solar energy farm, by constructing a series of solar panels inside the exclusion zone.

Not only would this plan - which is currently seeking investment - allow the country to use a giant chunk of radioactive land that’s unfit for human settlement, it would also provide a cheaper source of reusable energy that might decrease the country’s reliance on Russia.

“The Chernobyl site has really good potential for renewable energy,” Ukraine’s environment minister Ostap Semerak said in an interview in London. “We already have high-voltage transmission lines that were previously used for the nuclear stations, the land is very cheap and we have many people trained to work at power plants.”

Continue Reading.

Chernobyl could soon find a second life as a giant solar farm

video: #libcinder #particles #creativeappsnet #creativecoding

via https://www.instagram.com/p/BSwqEccjKiU/

‘There is a strong intuition that speculative understanding for its own sake is one of the ultimate elements in the…

via https://twitter.com/i/web/status/851816080490278914

Everywhere is someone’s dystopia, etc. - solarpunk-hellscape: watsons-solarpunk: solarpunk-hellscape:…

via https://thejaymo.tumblr.com/post/159451316243/everywhere-is-someones-dystopia-etc#_=_

“Are you a markov? Because I’d sure love to chain your bot!”

via http://lewisandquark.tumblr.com/post/159302925452/the-neural-network-generated-pickup-lines-that-are

.@izakaminska at it again.

via https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/04/10/2187210/flight-seats-as-fractional-reserve-banking/

mostlysignssomeportents:

 From my Github post:

I confess to being mystified by the argument – promulgated by DRM advocates – that standardization at W3C doesn’t matter to the viability of DRM on the web. 

On the one hand, we have lots of urgent talk about the user harms arising from the difficulty of implementing DRM in the HTML5 world where NDAPI and its like have been abolished, leaving browser vendors and publishers to strike expensive, difficult-to-sustain deals as a series of one-offs to synchronize proprietary components at both ends that would create technical problems for users that cause them to reject the publishers’ products. 

On the other hand, we have the argument that DRM on the web is inevitable and actually a fait accompli, entirely separate from the outcome of the W3C process, such that the decision not to publish EME as a W3C standard would make no “difference” (“difference” being the thing that we must seemingly enumerate in order to advance this debate). 

But if DRM will happen regardless of W3C standardization, with no “difference,” then there will be no “difference” if the W3C doesn’t publish it, or requires members to agree to a nonaggression covenant as a condition of ng so. 

DRM’s “difference” and inevitability is thus posed as simultaneously maximum and minimum, totally irrelevant and utterly salient. I believe the technical term for this in SDOs is “having one’s cake and eating it too.“ 

Thrown into this mix is the asserted inevitability of the web itself being sidelined in favor of apps and walled gardens if DRM doesn’t become part of HTML5, but this is usually uttered in the same breath as a blank assertion that DRM is coming to HTML5 no matter what the W3C does. Only one of these things can be true. 

A note on accessibility: DRM laws make any accessibility features built into the spec the ceiling, not the floor, on accessibility. Notably, the current spec excludes any kind of third-party automated bulk or realtime processing, such as feeding cleartexts into a machine-learning system to spot and interdict seizure-causing strobes; to shift color-gamuts for color-blind people, or to add subtitles/descriptive tracks. 

The oft-repeated assertion that humans could manually add these features to EME-locked videos is obviously deficient. UC Berkeley just killed 20,000 hours of instructional videos because they couldn’t adequately subtitle them – the fact that an army of humans who produced a set of subtitles could then add them to the video is nice, but in the absence of such an army, and in the presence of ever-better machine subtitling tools, it’s utterly, blatantly obvious that EME will stand in the way of the future of legitimate, powerful accessibility adaptation. 

Is there anyone who believes that in the future the majority of accessibility adaptation for any media will be done by humans, working by hand? Here’s what I think: 

DRM-protecting laws mean that making DRM easier to implement on the web makes the web intrinsically less open, less safe, and less accessible 

• Standardization matters and makes technology more viable 
  
• EME is unfinished and will require future versions (this was the argument for pursuing a W3C policy interest group that couldn’t affect EME – it would affect the inevitable future versions), so the W3C walking away from EME would have material effect on its viability 
  
• This means that DRM standardization advocates need the W3C process to continue, and must work with people who want to safeguard open web equities in the Consortium if they are to make progress 
  
• The EME process – and the W3C’s credibility – are now at a crossroads because DRM advocates literally refused any further discussion of this, 13 months ago, at an AC meeting in Cambridge 
  
• As a result, we are now in a situation where a large plurality of W3C members do not want to see EME published until a covenant is arrived at, but having done nothing on that front for more than a year, we have a lopsided world where the technology is asserted to be ready for launch and the policy component is still on the drawing board
  

Whether a refusal to discuss this issue was a deliberate calculation or a tragic misjudgment, it was a terrible mistake. Because of a leadership decision to steamroller the opposition rather than compromise with it (or even continue talks with it), the W3C has, for the very first time in its history, arrived at the moment of publication with no consensus in sight, and no path to consensus in sight either.  

Publication at this point would mark not one, but THREE sea-changes in the W3C’s nature: 

1. The W3C is now the kind of body that makes standards to allow browser vendors to restrict how users can use the data they receive 
   
2. The W3C is now the kind of body that allows members’ IPRs to control who may interoperate with its standards 
   
3. The W3C is now the kind of body where deeply divisive issues are settled by allowing one group to simply declare the other group to be out-of-bounds, out-of-touch, out-of-scope or out-of-order and to thus publish things that large numbers of its members have deep moral, technical and legal objections to, rather than deliberating and compromising to resolve these divisions.
   

DRM opponents at the W3C extended a significant compromise to DRM advocates: a covenant that would allow DRM users to enforce copyright, torts and trade secrecy (and every other right they have in law), while making DRM. 

The members who want DRM insisted they would only proceed if DRM could also be a tool for asserting rights that no legislature ever granted them. That is what brought us to this juncture: an unwillingness on one side to make any compromise whatsoever. 

That is not in the spirit of multistakeholder processes or the history of the W3C. Any future progress on EME at the W3C will require compromise on both sides, not blithe assertions that no "difference” is to be found in going down one path or the other. 

Cory

In 2009, the British physicist Stephen Hawking performed a variation of this experiment, holding a party for time travellers, but sending out the invitations after the event had taken place, so that only visitors from the future could possibly attend. But nobody came. Dr Hawking said this constituted “experimental evidence that time travel is not possible”.

via http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/01/economist-explains–6?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/howcanyousearchfortimetravellers

Neighbours @Counterflows #GLA

via https://twitter.com/RussellHaswell/status/851179482312577025/photo/1

“Ever owned a digital book signed by the author? No you didn’t.” via @Medium https://medium.com/impossible/lets-talk-about-ownership-6e6c82585472?source=ifttt————–1

via https://medium.com/impossible/lets-talk-about-ownership–6e6c82585472?source=ifttt————–1

united nation of Yugoslavia was not easy prey for imperialist intentions like we see taking place today. It is a fact, that after World War II, socialist Yugoslavia became something of a European success story. Between 1960 and 1980 the country had one of the most vigorous growth rates in the world: a decent standard of living, free medical care and education, a guaranteed right to a job, one-month vacation with pay, a literacy rate of over 90 percent, and a life expectancy of 72 years. To my knowledge, not one of the Balkans states that were created can claim half this prosperity.

via http://moderndiplomacy.eu/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=1257%3Ahow-yugoslavia-was-syrianized–25-years-ago&Itemid=132#.WPA-g8tSCVU.twitter

“A Universe Explodes: A Blockchain Book, from Editions At Play” via @Medium https://medium.com/@teau/a-universe-explodes-a-blockchain-book-ab75be83f28?source=ifttt————–1

via https://medium.com/@teau/a-universe-explodes-a-blockchain-book-ab75be83f28?source=ifttt————–1

solarpunks:

mostlysignssomeportents:

UC Berkeley’s Omar Yaghi invented MOFs (“porous crystals that form continuous 3D networks”) in the 1990s, and more than 20,000 MOFs have been synthesized since; each one binds to a different type of gas.

The zirconium-based MOF-801, introduced in the paper, binds to water vapor even in extreme low-humidity environments. Run continuously, it “pulls” 2.8l of water out of desert air per 24-hour cycle.

At $150/kg, zirconium is too expensive to use for a mass-produced product intended to be distributed to people living in arid environments, but Yaghi proposes further work that would swap in aluminum, which costs 1% of the cost of zirconium.

https://boingboing.net/2017/04/14/metal-organic-frameworks.html

Can’t wait till i can be a real moisture farmer like Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen.

““found design fiction” is stuff already lying around (“the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed” ==> some future stuff is lying around).”

–Venkatesh Rao

What I mean by micro-macro is trying to get a better understanding of the world by accessing it on two levels: for one, there’s the micro-level of anecdotes where we get the good feeling of looking at actual, concrete aspects of the world instead of abstract mathematical descriptions. But we combine this with the macro-level to understand how these relatable anecdotes fit into the whole. This dual approach enables us to estimate if a given example represents normalcy (a stand-in for how things “usually” are) or is an outlier and does not allow conclusions for all cases.

via https://medium.com/@dominikus/the-superpower-of-interactive-datavis-a-micro-macro-view–4d027e3bdc71

When we open up data, are we empowering people to come together? Or to come apart? Who defines the values that we should be working towards? Who checks to make sure that our data projects are moving us towards those values? If we aren’t clear about what we want and the trade-offs that are involved, simply opening up data can — and often does — reify existing inequities and structural problems in society. Is that really what we’re aiming to do?

via https://points.datasociety.net/toward-accountability–6096e38878f0

So, will there still be enough jobs for everyone a few decades from now? Anybody who fears mass unemployment underestimates capitalism’s extraordinary ability to generate new bullshit jobs. If we want to really reap the rewards of the huge technological advances made in recent decades (and of the advancing robots), then we need to radically rethink our definition of “work.”

via https://medium.com/world-economic-forum/a-growing-number-of-people-think-their-job-is-useless-time-to-rethink-the-meaning-of-work–5f0b11f08d57

rjzimmerman:

Excerpt:

Solar power met roughly half of California’s electricity demand for the first time on March 11, according to new estimates from the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA).

EIA estimated that almost 40 percent of electricity on the grid between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. came from California’s large-scale solar plants, with smaller solar installations on homes and businesses supplying the rest. When factored with other sources of clean energy in the state, renewable energy accounted for more than 55 percent of power on the grid on March 11.

The abundant supply of solar in California this winter and spring has driven wholesale prices near zero or into the negative during certain hours.

“In March, during the hours of 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., system average hourly prices were frequently at or below $0 per megawatthour (MWh),” the EIA said in its report.

“In contrast, average hourly prices in March 2013–15 during this time of day ranged from $14/MWh to $45/MWh. Negative prices usually result when generators with high shut-down or restart costs must compete with other generators to avoid operating below equipment minimum ratings or shutting down completely.

California Reaches Solar Milestone, Electricity Prices Turn Negative

rjzimmerman:

Interesting story, but it’s complicated. Complicated in reading and understanding, so, take your time and read and think as if the pop quiz follows tomorrow in school. Basically, with soil and carbon, how can we entire plants to feed more people and, at the same time, not release carbon into the atmosphere but store it in the soil? Another version of “have your cake and eat it too.”

Excerpt, but the excerpt is just a taste:

Janzen has the rare ability to explain complicated things with such clarity that, when talking to him, you may catch yourself struck with wonder at an utterly new glimpse of how the world works. Plants, he explained, perform a kind of alchemy. They combine air, water, and the sun’s fire to make food. And this alchemical combination that we call food is, in fact, a battery — a molecular trap for the sun’s energy made of broken-down CO2 and H2O (you know, air and water).

Sugars are the simplest batteries. And sugars are also the building blocks for fat and fiber, which are just bigger, more complicated batteries. Ferns, trees, and reeds are the sum of those parts. Bury these batteries for thousands of years under conditions of immense heat and pressure, and they transform again — still carrying the sun’s energy — into coal, oil, and gas.

To feed our growing population, we keep extracting more and more carbon from farms to deliver solar energy to our bodies. Janzen pointed out that we’ve bred crops to grow bigger seeds (the parts we eat) and smaller roots and stems (the parts that stay on the farm). All of this diverts carbon to our bellies that would otherwise go into the ground. This leads to what Janzen dubbed the soil carbon dilemma: Can we both increase soil carbon and increase harvests? Or do we have to pick one at the expense of the other?

A crucial climate mystery is just under our feet

coolthingoftheday:

While this photograph of a seemingly regular house may look unassuming to you, located twenty-six feet beneath this modest two-story suburban house in Las Vegas, Nevada lies a 5,000 square foot doomsday bunker.

It comes complete with a four-hole golf course, a sauna, a jacuzzi, a barbecue, and a swimming pool, and was designed to be able to withstand a nuclear explosion.

The bunker was commissioned by businessman Girard B. Henderson in the 1970s, who feared attack from the Soviets.

It was purchased by a mysterious group called the Society for the Preservation of Near Extinct Species for $1.15 million in March 2014.

(Source)

The strangest thing about visiting the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago during the 24-hour darkness known as polar night is that you can’t see the island you’re on. I was surprised, when I flew into Longyearbyen this past January, how unsettling an experience it was. The fact that I was there for an island studies conference compounded the sense of absurdity: though I talked about islands all week, I never actually saw the island I was on. It was pitch black when we landed – nearly everyone arrived on the same afternoon flight from Tromsø and climbed out of the cabin to go blinking across the runway moonscape – and blackness followed us from morning till night. It was still dark when we boarded the return flight at noon on the day of the US presidential inauguration. I was ready for the cold (the temperature hovered around -15, often with a strong wind chill), but I was not prepared for the disorienting feeling of being on an island built largely from my own imagination.

via http://theislandreview.com/content/journey-into-night-january-in-svalbard-julian-hanna

solarpunk-hellscape:

watsons-solarpunk:

solarpunk-hellscape:

watsons-solarpunk:

solarpunk-hellscape:

You know, even if I was interested playing the Solarpunk setting as straight as possible, it would still probably come out looking like a pretty unpleasant place to live, and that has everything to do with the kind of character I enjoy writing.

See, I think even the most idyllic society would have people who Just Aren’t Happy There. Who feel trapped, or don’t fit in, or fall through the cracks, or whatever. And that there are more explanations for why than just “these people are wrong and probably not very nice either.” Those outliers are the people I like writing about, and who I keep returning to again and again, in every setting, no matter how objectively good/okay/shitty the wider world is. Hell, I even (sometimes especially) like writing about them when they are Wrong or Not Nice.

I like creating and consuming stories about these people trying to carve, scrape, or smash a space for themselves in worlds that never seemed to hold them. Or smashing themselves/turning liquid to fit. Even if they don’t succeed. Even if they don’t survive. (Again, maybe especiallyin those latter cases.)

I’ve always been less than uninterested in fiction that only asks  “how do we make an ideal world?” I want fiction that takes it for granted that “ideal” and “world” barely belong in the same sentence, and then asks,  “what then?”

And I guess that’s my favorite thing about writing. Taking any kind of world, and asking it, “what then?”

This kind of stuff is why I don’t like the formulation of solarpunk as utopic. A space in which people are generally trying to do things better, with limited resources in every sense, is a space where people willfail to fit in, will suffer, sometimes unjustly, will make mistakes. 

I think your sense of “solarpunk played straight” and stories about these kinds of characters would be fantastic, because it gets precisely to the point that there’s a never-ending supply of nuance and exception that will always result in conflicts and will always feature people worthy of an exceptional effort of compassion and understanding. Sometimes their communities will fail them, and that’s worth exploring too. I think what would make a story like that solarpunk is when it’s clear that the community could have, and should have, done better. What’s less so is when the community’s failure is inevitable, based on immutable prior conditions.

There’s no such thing as a singular ideal world. There aren’t even going to be singular ideal communities, but to even get close to that we need to accept that the precise mechanics of improvement will vary wildly from place to place, time to time, people to people. 

Solarpunk doesn’t hope to depict a world with no suffering, because that’s an unachievable goal and efforts to reach it converge on fascism. Solarpunk hopes to build widespread conventions of compassion and innovation that mean fewer people suffer, and that people suffer less. 

It sounds like you’ve got exactly the attitude necessary to tell compelling stories about a world that is trying to improve and succeeding, but is still a world made of people with all the variety and pain that that will always entail.

It’s not quite solarpunk but for a good example of this kind of thinking I recommend Cory Doctorow’s “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom,” which is about a post-scarcity civilization in which everybody’s needs are comprehensively met, but in which the protagonist suffers because he’s an asshole and he makes bad decisions. It’s possible to read that story, empathize with the protagonist, and still recognize that almost anybody would choose that world over this one and be better off for it.

Another good one is “Pacific Edge,” in which the major emotional conflict involves heartache – which certainly isn’t going anywhere.

That’s all not to mention the fruitful territory for stories about people fighting and winning against the neoliberal hellscape that is the world as it exists today, which is where on the timeline I think the heart of solarpunk is, but even best-case scenario, post-solarpunk worlds where the communities of the world are generally collaborating toward peace and sustainability, there will be people who are unhappy.

That’s okay. Almost good, even – in the sense that pursuits toward the alternative, again, converge on fascism. 

I really hope you don’t feel like your interest in exploring experiences of othering, alienation, and exclusion mean that you can’t write stories that fit comfortably in with solarpunk. These realities – that better isn’t perfect, that there are painful steps in between here and better, that any system has margins and therefore marginalization – they’re all extremely important, core complexities, and I think exploring these real life complications, with which all optimistic movements have to grapple, is one of the highest kinds of meaningful storytelling solarpunk can aspire to.

The world around your protagonist doesn’t need to be an expansion on, or reflection of, their inner state. Solarpunk says it shouldn’t be. The world goes on around you in all its nuance and complexity as you, in all your nuance and complexity, move within it. You don’t need an empty world to show a person who’s lonely. You don’t need a horde of zombies to show someone who’s enraged. We all know it’s not the case that the world getting better generally means we personally are each guaranteed a proportionate and evenly distributed increase in baseline pleasure. We shouldn’t write like it has to be.

I’d really love to read your “Playing solarpunk straight” stories. 

My reply got pretty long, so it’s under the jump!

Keep reading

This is a great response, and I really enjoyed reading it! 

I think the point I’m most interested in from your response is this one:

the only way to really keep things from going bad in the long term is to occasionally step back and figure out if what we’re doing is still working. But that’s another thing we’re kind of bad at, for all the reasons I mentioned… Well, in this entire post. 

It reminded me of the argument some philosophers have made that we’re at the “End of history” – that large Liberal Democracies are the final form of politics and we’re going to be living with them forever because we’ve “found the right answer.”

To my mind, frequently stepping back and asking “Did this work? Is it still working?” is vital for effective political movements. For example, I think of solarpunk as being a post-”is this working” revision to Original Flavor punk, because capitalism turned out to be more capable than expected of commodifying aesthetics that are hostile to commodification.

I also want to add that I don’t think most solarpunks think all fiction needs to be optimistic. Cautionary views are important and valuable. Solarpunk emphasizes optimism because we got frustrated that “things get worse for everyone” seems to be the onlynarrative going right now in speculative fiction.

Hey, no problem! I love discussing and pontificating and whatnot.

End of History! One of those things I always forget has its own name, argh. And yeah, I guess that’s something I always have at the back of my mind when I’m doing worldbuilding. That any given type of setting is just another link in the chain, and the center won’t hold forever. And there probably isn’t any kind of stable end we’re heading towards, and that’s probably okay.

Oh, I didn’t mean Solarpunk specifically! I just meant it’s something that gets knocked around in certain Internet Writer circles, and it gets on my nerves a little because I don’t really find light! and uplifting! fiction particularly fun or satisfying to read or write.

I also don’t think downbeat things have to be cautionary, and actually prefer it when they aren’t. I think I mentioned before on here that “do that!” and “don’t do that!” in fiction usually come from the same, fairly obnoxious place, and are often in complete agreement with each other. I don’t really like stories that tell you how to think of them, or telling people how to think about my stories in-text. I like when the narrative/setting/characters re just presented as they are without comment, so the reader can draw their own conclusions.

So yeah, “everything will get worse for everyone!” is as heavy-handed as “FUTURE GOOD!” I’m more fond of “people will always be people,” or, if I’m quoting song lyrics “change will surely come, and be awful for most but really good for some.” (With the caveat that most changes are about the same that way, within reason. Basically, the relevant example is that a Solarpunk will have just as much inconvenience and bullshit as our own, but it’ll be different inconvenience and bullshit.)

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video link

newdarkage:

officeforappliedcomplexity.com

(via Keith Tilford on Instagram: “Some older diagram work for officeforappliedcomplexity.com”)

rjzimmerman:

Excerpt:

The recent declassification of tens of thousands of images from Cold War spy satellites is helping climate scientists compare Siberian terrain between then and now, and they’re showing some obvious signs of climate change.

It was common practice during the Cold War for the U.S. and Soviet Union to spy on each other using any means necessary, which included satellite and aircraft images from space to find military bases and possible signs of invasion. After the Soviet Union was broken apart, the U.S. released their images from Corona and Gambit, two reconnaissance satellites that were decommissioned in the 1980s.

The University of Virginia is now using those images to study the remote area of the Siberian tundra. By using images from current satellites, they are able to create a time lapse of the terrain. They found that the shrubbery and forested areas expanded by 26 percent since the 1960s images were taken.

“These spy images are a gold mine as a reference point,” said Howie Epstein, coauthor of the research. “We know from Earth-observing satellite data that the Arctic generally has been greening for 35 years or so. But the Siberian tundra had not been as closely observed until relatively recently.

“We now know that a lot of greening has been going on there, too, with tall shrubs and woody vegetation. The vegetation has been getting both taller and expanding in space and range.”

Though this may sound normal or even natural, Siberia has been widely affected by this expansion. Increased vegetation means an increase in carbon dioxide uptake or heat absorption, leading to a warmer regional climate and less snowfall overall. This has altered the ratio of plants to animals and affected the food web in the area.

Spy Images From Cold War a ‘Gold Mine’ for Climate Scientists

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

–Aboriginal activists group, Queensland, 1970s

“Most people who work in tech – 99% – don’t want to look at the implications of what they are doing. They just want to hit their milestones and that’s it.” But there’s no turning back. The internet is here to stay and will continue to profoundly change societies and the workplace. “If the internet stopped one day, can you imagine the chaos? What would we call that scenario? It’s called 1995 – that’s how far we’ve come.”

via https://www.theguardian.com/small-business-network/2017/mar/30/douglas-coupland-the-nine-to-five-is-barbaric

video link

“It shows some of the unreasonable effectiveness and strange inner workings of deep learning systems. The unique characteristics of the human voice are learned and generated as well as hallucinations of a system trying to find images which are not there.”

(via http://areben.com/)

thesublemon:

Fiction has two modes: the imaginative and the speculative. The mode that has to do with pure, unbridled invention and the mode that tries to think logically about rules and consequences. So the imaginative parts of Lord of the Rings have to do with the whole-cloth contrivance of things that don’t exist: ents, hobbits, dwarves. The speculative parts have to do with how, given the rules of Tolkien’s universe, his characters might behave. What would it take for a homebody hobbit to leave home? This principle goes for stories that lack ‘fantastic’ elements as well. The imaginative part of Huckleberry Finn is Huck and Jim and their life circumstances. The speculative part is what it might take for Huck and Jim to bond and run away. Imagination is Jim finding a dead body. Speculation is Jim preventing Huck from seeing it.

(That good speculation requires a good imagination is a given. But it is still different, for my purposes, from the act of creating something from nothing.)

In order for speculation to be concerned with what mighthappen though, it has to be concerned with what is. Every act of speculation speaks as much about what rules a writer thinks govern a fictional world as it does about how those rules might manifest. And if a writer is trying to speculate about how reality could go, as many writers are, then they are proposing hypotheses about the way reality is. In a third season storyline of The Wire, for example, the show imagines that Baltimore establishes a zone for the legal use and exchange of drugs. It then speculates how the government, police, and citizens would react—revealing general principles about what motivates these people and why.

But fiction is weird. Fiction usually isn’t concerned with either a fictional reality or a real reality—but both, simultaneously. So in a satirical movie like Election, the story is at once attempting to distill a supposedly real phenomenon (what happens when unscrupulous people butt up against cowards and innocents) and be consistent within a necessarily heightened movie reality. Which means that fiction, in order to feel ‘correct,’ has to scan according to both realities. If you don’t think that automatons of ambition exist, or you don’t think that they succeed in the end, or you think using Tracy Flick to depict that kind of person puts unrepresentative blame on the heads of teenage girls—the speculation doesn’t track for you. On the other hand, based on what the movie establishes about Tracy Flick, we would also consider it ‘illogical’ or bad speculation if she suddenly behaved selflessly.

Interestingly, the more metaphorical or satirical a work is—in other words, the more it is attempting to have meaning—the more, I would argue, it becomes concerned with ‘real’ reality. The more, that is, its implications about reality affect whether or not it works. If I’m watching Transformers, it doesn’t actually matter that much whether it makes sense that a giant alien robot would pal around with a teenage kid. Because Transformersisn’t trying to claim much about reality.* But if I’m watching a production of Rhinoceros, it sure as hell matters whether I think fascistic impulses exist, or whether they colonize people in the absurd, virulent way Rhinocerosdepicts. It matters less whether Rhinocerosestablishes complicated rules for its fictional world. Though it should be (and is) self-consistent.

*(Insofar as Transformersis trying to distill a reality, one might claim it is trying to distill what a certain attitude or fantasy looks like. So it is consistent with the reality of the terms of that fantasy—cars, heroism, hot girls— rather than whether or not that fantasy is especially likely to happen. “ IfI were trying to make the perfect heterosexual boy fantasy movie, what would I include? In other words, what is the perfect heterosexual boy fantasy movie? What defines a heterosexual boy?” In a thoughtless execution of the het boy fantasy genre— XXX? Crank? I don’t know—this kind of consistency would matter even less.)

What am I getting at? I want to set aside the definition of ‘speculative fiction’ that acts as a euphemism for science fiction. And I want to examine what makes good or bad speculative fiction, and what counts as ‘speculative fiction’ in the first place. Right now, the terms ‘science fiction’ and ‘speculative fiction’ are a confusing conflation of three different genres:

1. Fantasy with tech or futuristic trappings. Star Wars, Transformers.

2. Speculation about the consequences of a scenario that doesn’t exist (a technological innovation, a social innovation, a crazy circumstance). Looper, A Handmaid’s Tale, Asimov, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Contact.

3. A technology or a fantastic setting as a metaphor for a real world phenomenon. The Forever War, Metamorphosis, Frankenstein, Xenogenesis.

There are good and bad executions of all of these genres. And of course they tend to overlap. But in order to talk about whether a given work is failing or succeeding, we have to talk about which realities the works are trying to make claims about (or take as a given), and therefore whether or not the claims are accurate or convincingly depicted.

The first category mostly only needs to scan according to its fictional reality. When this kind of story makes a claim about real reality, it usually tends to be a claim about human emotion or human values (what is tragic, what is virtuous, what is cool). The questions you ask about Star Wars are things like “Is this fun?” or “Does it make sense that Luke is sad here?” The last category, in turn, mostly needs to scan according to its real reality. Something like Xenogenesismakes you ask questions like “Is this effectively evoking the conflicted, shell-shocked experience of cultural assimilation?” Frankenstein is more of a story about hubris rather than a story primarily about the actual consequences of reanimating the dead. Stories in this category can be tremendously complex on the narrative level, and care about being consistent and exciting on that level, but the speculation part tends to exist primarily in the service of a concept rather than itself.

I think of it this way: speculation in service of a concept will be closed, rather than open. The Wire’s Hamsterdam storyline is open because there was no way it really hadto go, other than the way that the writers thought logically sprang from the state of Baltimore’s citizens and civic institutions. But something like District 9is trying to convey a pre-established position about the mechanics of prejudice and othering. District 9is more effective if its narrative logic is sound, but there was also no way District 9’s plot was going to depict any fallout from alien contact other than xenophobia. Top-down rather than bottom-up storytelling. Evidence-based versus theory-based. This isn’t inherently a good or bad thing, for the record, just a distinct difference in genre. In metaphorical stories, the logic of something is considered more or less known to the author; the problem is how to get other people to internalize the logic.

True speculative fiction (category 2) and true narrative fiction (category 1) seem to resemble each other more than they do metaphorical fiction (category 3) because they both take the bottom-up approach. What is something like a sitcom ( situational comedy) other than putting characters in a scenario and asking what will happen? Beyond approach, what Friendsand Star Warsand Game of Thronesand Isaac Asimov all have in common is a curious paucity of thematic content (that is: it’s difficult to say what they are “about”), but not in a bad way. Extremely hard speculation like The Wire tends to not be terribly thematic because theme requires a certain amount of artistic control that epistemically honest speculation doesn’t lend itself to. When works of hard speculation are thematic, and when they’re good, they seem to mostly lend themselves towards themes about the complexity of systems. Which makes perfect sense. Hard speculation is also different from “hard science fiction” that mostly applies its hardness to its setting and not to its narrative. Only occasionally, like in things like The Silmarillion,does a hard worldbuilding story understand that its worldbuilding isthe story and put the focus there accordingly.

All this said, most works of speculation are in-between things. Things like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Brazilor Heror Children of Men or Contactor Snowpiercer. Eternal Sunshineis fairly honest speculation about how people would use a memory-altering technology, but the only reason the story proposes that technology is to explore things about romantic relationships. Most stories, in other words, choose their speculation in a thematically pointed way, even if they’re not transparently allegorical.

The thing I want to figure out is why the way that something like Eternal Sunshinespeculates thematically is so much better than the way that something like Herdoes, despite the fact that they have similar subject matter and approach. While both pure narrative and pure metaphor and pure speculation can all, to a certain extent, get away with ignoring one or both of the above, blended works seem to ignore the other categories at their peril. The absolute worst executions I can think of are the metaphorical stories that are undermined by a refusal to speculate. Stories that have such a poor understanding of consequences or such a lack of curiosity about them that it ruins the metaphorical and literary power of the reality they are trying to convey (see: what it means for a work of art to take itself seriously). A good metaphor will not simplify reality, but will open it up, and this is impossible to do without a good understanding of what reality is (or a respect for the fact that understanding reality is overwhelmingly difficult).

Works like Herand Snowpiercer seem weak to me because their artistic reach extends their grasp, but in a lazy way rather than a forgivably ambitious way. They imagine overly wholesale fictional circumstances: allthe people fall in love with their computers, allof society is trapped on this train. These are huge statements about the pervasiveness of both loneliness and the stratification of society, yet neither of them are convincing on the individual character or narrative level, and so their huge claims fall flat. Theodore mostly seems to be lonely because he’s an almost inhumanly stunted person. I found myself wishing the movie were just a simple story about an individual in the real world that falls for a catfisher. Similarly, I felt that Snowpiercerwould almost be more convincing as a story set in an actually oppressively stratified country. Those “realistic” stories would be less symbolic, but far richer. Although movies like The Matrixand Children of Menalso have overly ambitious speculative conceits, both put considerable effort towards the complexity and excitingness of their narratives and also make much smaller claims about reality. The Matrixis a metaphor for a more generic feeling of unreality and aimlessness, while Children of Men tries to be a thriller in a speculative circumstance, but makes few sweeping, moral claims about society that it has to prove. Poor speculation, in other words, takes its ideas as “given” and uses metaphor as a kind of autotune to conceal a lack of work.

[C redit both to Peli Grietzer for autotune as a figurative concept, and Gabe Duquette for this specific usage].

There’s nothing resembling a “sharing economy” in an Uber interaction. You pay a corporation to send a driver to you, and it pays that driver a variable weekly wage. Sharing can really only refer to one of three occurrences. It can mean giving something away as a gift, like: “Here, take some of my food.” It can describe allowing someone to temporarily use something you own, as in: “He shared his toy with his friend.” Or, it can refer to people having common access to something they collectively own or manage: “The farmers all had an ownership share in the reservoir and shared access to it.” None of these involve monetary exchange. We do not use the term “sharing” to refer to an interaction like this: “I’ll give you some food if you pay me.” We call that buying. We don’t use it in this situation either: “I’ll let you temporarily use my toy if you pay me.” We call that renting. And in the third example, while the farmers may have come together initially to purchase a common resource, they don’t pay for subsequent access to it.

via https://howwegettonext.com/reversing-the-lies-of-the-sharing-economy-a85501d14be8?source=ifttt————–1

This is the first attempt I’ve seen at a decentralized alternative to major social networks that feels like a modern, well-designed, user-friendly competitor, actually surpassing the native UI for Twitter in some areas. There are still some bugs, rough edges, and server downtime issues, but overall it cleanly passes the bar for “minimum viable UX”, and this inspires hope for me that open-source alternatives don’t always mean a precipitous drop in user experience quality.

via https://medium.com/@thejohnhenry/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-water–888c10e8abb1

stacktivism:

Containers is an 8-part audio documentary about how global trade has transformed the economy and ourselves. Host and correspondent Alexis Madrigal leads you through the world of ships and sailors, technology and tugboats, warehouses and cranes. At a time when Donald Trump is threatening to toss out the global economic order, Containers provides an illuminating, deep, and weird look at how capitalism actually works now.

Containers

There are few pictures of us together. Very few were taken by us; neither of us are much for selfies. Those that do exist, we ask our friends to keep offline. We know that the vague and soft anonymity of our relationship probably won’t last forever. And I doubt there will ever be a surfeit of digital connections between us. Our phones trace the paths we walk together, existing in telecom databases (and more recently, in WhatsApp’s logfiles) long after we’ve moved on. Their cell tower and GPS logs are like a pair of maze paths with no walls, lines coming together and parting, and coming together again. But what we said on those walks is lost, even to us. Only the feelings, memories, and paths remain.

via https://backchannel.com/love-in-the-time-of-cryptography-dd3a74193ffb

via https://medium.com/@memoakten/fight-virtual-reality-binocular-rivalry–89a0a91c2274?source=ifttt————–1

The concept of ‘Evolutionary purpose’ — a central theme from Laloux’s Reinventing Organisations — is a deeply flawed conceptual model. There’s convincing evidence that it doesn’t even exist, and even if you try to implement it anyway there are major flaws including ‘creative entropy’ — a gradual loosening of an organisation’s focus — which may be the opposite of what’s needed to realise a big idea.

via https://medium.com/thingsflux/creative-entropy-a-killer-problem-with-lalouxs-evolutionary-purpose–892e067ad2db

This new zeitgeist is less interested in the old social influences of authority and social obligation, and more concerned with demonstrable legitimacy and guaranteeing universal access to the common wealth. Today we are more interested in opt-in/out ways of participation than with committed and consistent roles. We are empowered by communities of practice and peer-to-peer connectivity rather than social status and statutory reputation. We are a generation exploring real abundance in nature and ingenuity that flows from human spirit when it is set free. This shift in attitude signals a reckoning with old ways of power which instrumentalizes the earth, and institutionalizes and bureaucratizes human activity.

via https://medium.com/open-participatory-organized/a-manifesto-for-open-participation–60b62d327684

I’m here and interested because I’m fascinated with collective intelligence and have been studying and researching it for the last 7 years or so, mostly from a consciousness and identity oriented angle. I undertook a two year research project for my Master’s Degree focusing on what is called “We Space” — Intersubjective Awareness Practices, which you can find here. We Space is one name for the more directly contemplative practices of ‘Collective Intelligence’ though I also include organizational practices such as Theory-U in the rubric.

via https://medium.com/@andrewvenezia/intro-to-rally-point-alpha-fa001c532c14

Badiou notes that the positive programme of Inventing the Future is organised around three points — full automation, universal basic income, and a “post-work” society — and that the first two of these points are really dependent on the third (automation as the means, UBI as the necessary consequence). He therefore addresses his critique to this nexus of ideas

via https://medium.com/@poetix/badious-four-objections-to-the-idea-of-a-post-work-future–80b3984b243d

The ever mind-bending @Perimeter Institute has a new theory linking black holes, dark matter & gravitational waves:

via http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/02/spinning-black-holes-could-fling-clouds-dark-matter-particles

The Open Philanthropy Project’s mission is to give as effectively as we can and share our findings openly so that anyone can build on our work. Through research and grantmaking, we hope to learn how to make philanthropy go especially far in terms of improving lives.

via http://www.openphilanthropy.org/

“The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.”

–Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

lewisandquark:

In a previous experiment, I let a neural network trained on the complete works of H. P. Lovecraft finish phrases from cookbook recipes. Now, I tried it the other way around, in which I gave phrases from Lovecraftian horror to an innocent neural network trained on 30MB of cookbook recipes.

There was thunder in the air on the night I went to the deserted mansion atop Tempest Mountain to find the cake cooked.

I was not alone, for foolhardiness was not then mixed with the ham slices.

Now and then, beneath the brown pall of leaves that rotted and festered in the antediluvian forest darkness, I could trace the sinister outlines of some of the cooking pancakes.

For I, and I only, know what manner of fear lurked on a cookie cutter.

The pitiful throngs of natives shrieked and whined of the unnamable powder served with the flour and red pepper.

Everything seemed to me tainted with a loathsome contagion, and inspired by a noxious alliance with the steamed chicken.

All was in vain; the death that had come had left no trace save the steamed red peppers and chicken broth.

Sometimes, in the throes of a nightmare when unseen powers whirl one over the roofs of strange dead cities toward the grinning chasm of Nis, it is a relief and even a delight to make the soup.

lewisandquark:

Here’s what you get when you give incomplete cookbook recipes to a neural network trained on the complete works of H. P. Lovecraft:

Bake at 350 degrees for 30 to 32 minutes. Test corners to see if done, as center will seem like the next horror of Second House.

Whip ½ pint of heavy cream. Add 4 Tbsp. brandy or rum to possibly open things that will never be wholly reported.

Cook over a hot grill, or over glowing remains of tunnel mouth.

With blender on high speed, add ice cubes, one at a time, making certain each cube is the end.

Dice the pulp of the eggplant and put it in a bowl with the vast stark rocks.

NOTE:  As this is a tart rather than a cheesecake, you should be disturbed.

This may be one of the most exceptional souffles you’ll ever serve. The beet color spreads upward from the noisome Great Ones.

Coat apple slices with strange things.

NOTE: If chocolate sauce is not completely smooth, we became the state of the mad and discovered more desperate tracks and merciful sky.

Cook over medium heat until thickened and bubbly. Spoon over bizarre eyes.

Source: Bon Appetit - June 1991 Typed for you by the ancient Alert and Brattleboro and the Walter Sabbath of Inquanok - and the final monoliths of the Essecian Head.

While many things have changed in the world in the past two years, 2016 saw what looks like a phase transition in the political domain. While the overall phenomenon is global in scale and includes Brexit and other movements throughout Europe, I want to focus specifically on the victory of the “Trump Insurgency” and drill down into detail on how this state change will play out.

This war is about much more than ideology, money or power. Even the participants likely do not fully understand the stakes. At a deep level, we are right in the middle of an existential conflict between two entirely different and incompatible ways of forming “collective intelligence”. This is a deep point and will likely be confusing. So I’m going to take it slow and below will walk through a series of “fronts” of the war that I see playing out over the next several years. This is a pretty tactical assessment and should make sense and be useful to anyone. I’ll get to the deep point last — and will be going way out there in an effort to grasp “what is really going on”.

via https://medium.com/rally-point-journal/situational-assessment–2017-trump-edition-d189d24fc046

The origin of the expression is as follows. It was said that a group of fishermen caught a large number of turtles. After cooking them, they found out at the communal meal that these sea animals were much less edible that they thought: not many members of the group were willing to eat them. But Mercury happened to be passing by –Mercury was the most multitasking, sort of put-together god, as he was the boss of commerce, abundance, messengers, the underworld, as well as the patron of thieves and brigands and, not surprisingly, luck. The group invited him to join them and offered him the turtles to eat. Detecting that he was only invited to relieve them of the unwanted food, he forced them all to eat the turtles, thus establishing the principle that you need to eat what you feed others.

via https://medium.com/incerto/why-each-one-should-eat-his-own-turtles-equality-in-uncertainty-e2b2ee3bcddf

mostlysignssomeportents:

Amir Taaki is a well-known anarchist bitcoin hacker whose project, Dark Wallet, is meant to create strong anonymity for cryptocurrency transactions; when he discovered that anarchists around the world had gone to Rojava, a district in Kurdish Syria on the Turkish border, to found an anarchist collective with 4,000,000 members “based on principles of local direct democracy, collectivist anarchy, and equality for women,” he left his home in the UK to defend it.

The scene on the ground is somewhat shambolic, and Taaki spent months fighting at the front, watching his friends die to jihadi machine-gun ambushes, before someone figured out that he had special skills relevant to the cause. He was finally transfered to Qamishli, Rojava’s capital, where he worked as a technologist before deciding to return to Britain to finish Dark Wallet in the hopes that strongly anonymous cryptocurrency could be a fundraising tool for anarchist free states.

However, he was arrested and accused of terrorism as soon as he landed. Now, he’s mired in a long, terrible fight with the British government.

https://boingboing.net/2017/03/29/rojava.html

The concept of liminality was first used to describe the structure of rituals like the one at the centre of The Encounter, but its application as a term for thinking about modern societies is connected to the study of theatre and performance. The anthropologist who made the connection, Victor Turner, distinguished the ‘liminal’ experiences of tribal cultures – in which ritual is a collective process for navigating moments of change – from the ‘liminoid’ experiences available in modern societies, which resemble the liminal, but are choices we opt into as individuals, like a night out at the theatre. This distinction comes with a suggestion that true liminality, the collective entry into the liminal, is not available within a complex industrial society. Now, perhaps this has been true – but here’s my next wild suggestion. The consequences of that very complex industrial society are now bringing us to a point where we get reacquainted with true liminality. To take seriously not just what Dark Mountain has been talking about, but what Monbiot and Harris are touching on, is to recognise that we now face a crisis which has no outside. The planetary scale of our predicament makes it as much a collective experience as anything faced by the tribal cultures studied by Turner and his colleagues. […] To navigate at these depths, you need a different kind of equipment. Facts alone don’t cut it down here.

via http://dark-mountain.net/blog/2016-you-want-it-darker/

Spiders mostly eat insects, although some of the larger species have been known to snack on lizards, birds and even small mammals. Given their abundance and the voraciousness of their appetites, two European biologists recently wondered: If you were to tally up all the food eaten by the world’s entire spider population in a single year, how much would it be? Martin Nyffeler and Klaus Birkhofer published their estimate in the journal the Science of Nature earlier this month, and the number they arrived at is frankly shocking: The world’s spiders consume somewhere between 400 million and 800 million tons of prey in any given year. That means that spiders eat at least as much meat as all 7 billion humans on the planet combined, who the authors note consume about 400 million tons of meat and fish each year.

via https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/28/spiders-could-theoretically-eat-every-human-on-earth-in-one-year/?tid=sm_tw

Approximately half of adult Americans’ photographs are stored in facial recognition databases that can be accessed by the FBI, without their knowledge or consent, in the hunt for suspected criminals. About 80% of photos in the FBI’s network are non-criminal entries, including pictures from driver’s licenses and passports. The algorithms used to identify matches are inaccurate about 15% of the time, and are more likely to misidentify black people than white people.

via https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/27/us-facial-recognition-database-fbi-drivers-licenses-passports

2016 was a year in which modern notions of identity were shut down for short-term political gain. Yet in actual rather than alternative fact, how we live and who we are continues to unfold, dovetail and joyously entwine. Already complex identities, drawn over millennia of trade, migration and social experimentation, become yet more complex with each passing day. Binding that glorious mess to anachronistic approaches to decision-making and identity, rooted in some mythical simpler times, it’s little surprise we are allegedly tearing ourselves apart. The 2016 American presidential election and Brexit referendum results reveal countries apparently rent in two, systems that carelessly allow an almost insignificantly small majority to be described as ‘clear mandates’, by shredding those rich tapestries such that they are perceived instead as crude, diametrically opposed camps. The seams of those political systems are badly misaligned with the reality of how and where we live, clearly foregrounding the concerns of rural voters over urban, a design derived from a previous age of feudal landowners yet still in place.

via https://medium.com/dark-matter-and-trojan-horses/for-more-identity-not-less-e5e85422e4e9

What we’ve found, over and over, is an industry willing to invest endless resources chasing “delight” — but when put up to the pressure of real life, the results are shallow at best, and horrifying at worst. Consider this: Apple has known Siri had a problem with crisis since it launched in 2011. Back then, if you told it you were thinking about shooting yourself, it would give you directions to a gun store. When bad press rolled in, Apple partnered with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline to offer users help when they said something Siri identified as suicidal. It’s not just crisis scenarios, either. Hell, Apple Health claimed to track “all of your metrics that you’re most interested in” back in 2014 — but it didn’t consider period tracking a worthwhile metric for over a year after launch.

via https://medium.com/@sara_ann_marie/dear-tech-you-suck-at-delight–86382d101575