A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements and nobody knows how
What a wild story, almost like a surrealistic aside in dystopian fiction. #link
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Tag: tech
What a wild story, almost like a surrealistic aside in dystopian fiction. #link
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Filing this away for whenever I make the leap. #link
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Feeling mostly ill and cold and tired: the last four weeks in a nutshell. More…
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Because it’s 2019 and basic IT literacy means nothing anymore. (Stop embedding images in Word docs FFS.) #link
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This is a really useful round-up. #link
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I got a mini MIDI keyboard last Xmas precisely to mess around with SunVox and I’ve only just done so (it works great, as it happens). I want to treat myself to a cheap electric guitar this Xmas, too, and maybe one day soon I’ll have a free afternoon to make a track. #link
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Paul Ford with the best summation of the cryptocurrency phenomenon I’ve yet read. Paul's right about a lot of things. Except this. #link
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It was a different time, indeed. #link
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This is incredible stuff. But I’m not the only one given pause by the scale of detail here, am I? #link
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So much of T2 absolutely holds up today because of the vision and pride of everyone involved — something noticeably lacking from much CG in movies today, nearly three decades and countless incredible advances in technology later. [c/o Interconnected] #link
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Two electronic music nerds, geeking out over the artistic possibilities of hardware. See also: CDM takes a peek at Aphex Twin’s use of trackers. #link
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“This year especially there’s an uncomfortable feeling in the tech industry that we did something wrong, that in following our credo of ‘move fast and break things’, some of what we knocked down were the load-bearing walls of our democracy.” The collateral damage of building for the reality we hope to create, rather than the one we live in, to paraphrase my previous link. But Cegłowski goes a lot deeper that that in this tech conference talk from earlier in the year. And it doesn’t get more damning, more cyberpunk dystopian than this: “The algorithms have learned that users interested in politics respond more if they’re provoked more, so they provoke.” #link
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“The problem with connecting everyone on the planet is that a lot of people are assholes.” That’s it right there. I don’t subscribe to the notion that people in general are fundamentally decent; there’s too much evidence to the contrary. Social media — in ushering in an era where everyone is online, not just a self-selecting proportion — reveals that much. Does Facebook care about that? It’s a different kind of caring, to be charitable; rooted in head-in-the-sand techno-utopianism that strives for solutions to problems no one really has, while ignoring the actual problems people have right now. As Mat Honan writes: “You have to build for the reality we live in, not the one we hope to create.” #link
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A veritable treasure trove of techie tools, right here. #link
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The result is precision location represented by a simple string of three words, kind of like a Diceware passphrase. I tried it for my own home address and got a surprisingly memorable string, easier than Eircode; your own mileage may vary. Probably most practicable for predominantly rural locations without signposted roads or postcodes — like Djibouti, which recently adopted the system as its national addressing standard. #link
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As if the world wasn’t dystopian enough already. I mean, hacking a pacemaker is something straight out of a William Gibson novel. #link
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And it’s hilarious! (And yes I know it’s six weeks after Xmas.) #link
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