McFilter

Music for Mass (Bike Rides)

Russell has written about some of his recent ambient explorations and thoughts about performances of them.

Listening to some of the work reminds me of the music we had to one of the JoyRides a while back. The ethereal soundtrack to a night ride through the woods in Croxteth, adding to the other-worldly experience of cycling through the woods with just the lights from the bikes.

It's something that Danny (who organises the JoyRides) has experimented with more too. There was the time we added a projector to put crazy patterns onto the trees as we rode the Loop Line; and he and I have also talked about the overlapping soundscapes when, once or twice, we've had two soundsystems running at the same time at the front and back of a ride, and how they blend (or interfere) in the middle.

We're also always wondering about having lots of small speakers on many bikes, rather than one or two big soundsystems trying to cover the whole ride. What if we leant into that more, and gave each speaker something different to play? That would solve the perennial problem of trying to wirelessly sync so many speakers, and the "piece" would morph and adapt as riders moved around the pack.

So if you ever fancy coming for a ride Russell...

Interesting Things on the Internet: June 24th 2024 Edition

• A Transcender Manifesto – for a world beyond Capitalism. A seed. Dil, who wrote this, is a regular visitor to DoES Liverpool. It echoes lots of my thinking.
• I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again. Wondering how I could get all the local innovation and regeneration folk to read, and more importantly understand, this before the grifters move onto it.

Interesting Things on the Internet: April 22nd 2024 Edition

• Dance Dance Revolution? Music isn't activism on its own, but activism needs a fun soundtrack.
• We Need To Rewild The Internet.
• The free software commons. "To be perfectly clear, I am not arguing against paying maintainers. I'm arguing that paying maintainers is a narrow response that will have detrimental side effects unless it goes hand-in-hand with other measures. The most critical of those is governance. I view this as the next step that the Free Software movement needed to take years ago. That didn't happen, and I would mostly be speculating if I tried to give reasons why not. But that's in the past and we're in the present. It still needs to be done, and the second best time is now."

Interesting Things on the Internet: April 8th 2024 Edition

• What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?. The Tories are not qualified to run a country. The Conservative Party, whose history goes back some three hundred and fifty years, aids this theory by not having anything as vulgar as an ideology. “They’re not on a mission to do X, Y, or Z,” as a former senior adviser explained. “You win and you govern because we are better at it, right?”. Narrator: they were not.
• Rebecca Solnit: Slow Change Can Be Radical Change. We need stories in which getting where you’re going—individually or as a society—mostly happens step by step with maybe some backsliding, muddle, and stalling, not via one great leap. Reminding myself that DoES Liverpool is a long-term project, and that's okay.
• Searchable transcripts of the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry hearings. At some point (hah!) there'll be enough digital literacy in Government that this sort of things won't be needed; until then, folk like Matthew Somerville will continue making important information more accessible.
• ‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza. This is the risk with so-called AI. Not that the machine will become sentient and take over, but that evil people will use it as cover for committing atrocities.
• Jon Stewart on the false promises of AI. Facebook's "AI" assistant: "your toast is ready" [...] Jon Stewart: "why don't you get to work on curing the diseases and the climate change and we'll hold down the fort on toast"

Interesting Things on the Internet: March 18th 2024 Edition

• Pivot to AI: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. What do you do if there's a surplus of computing power from mining bitcoin? Find a new grift that needs lots of computing power...
• Software Has Eaten The Media "all to show the world that they're "innovative" and "pushing boundaries" without being able to explain how."
• Post Office Scandal - Ian Hislop on Peston -10th Jan 2024. Ian Hislop on superb form about the travesty of Horizon.
• Notes: trust and cultural angles on AI; internet stuff; climate response. Excellent set of notes and jumping off points from Laura.
• “When Is Inequality Taken Seriously And When Is It Dismissed As A Trick Of The Light?”: What Diane Abbott’s Treatment Reveals About The State Of British Politics. "none of this parliamentary rhetoric about extremism and MP safety has been mobilised to protect Diane Abbott after the Conservative’s biggest donor said he wanted to shoot her. Quite the opposite". The increasingly authoritarian and rightward acceleration of the Tory party is worrying. The sooner their power ends, the better.

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 15th 2024 Edition

• Finally (hopefully, we'll see) something seems to be happening about the shameful Horizon scandal. Private Eye have made their special report on it free to download. I haven't watched Mr Bates vs The Post Office yet, but this is a great backgrounder on the whole fiasco.
• How to Fold a Julia Fractal. A fantastic website with great animated visualisations to help explain the beauty of maths. Gave me some new ways to think about and understand imaginary numbers.
• Let’s make the indie web easier. Giles is right. If (/when?) I had more spare time I'd run some #IndieWeb workshops or hackdays or something (which would also likely give me the nudge to update/migrate this website to Jekyll)
• How the legal system made it so easy for the Post Office to destroy the lives of the sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses – and how the legal system then made it so hard for them to obtain justice. Excellent blog post from David Allen Green on the failures of the UK legal system and the professional classes that allowed the Horizon scandal to flourish. "But a saddening thing is that if it were not those particular identifiable individuals who were culpable (and they certainly should be held to account) then it would have been other individuals doing the same things. And this is because of legal and corporate contexts that facilitated this wrongdoing. [...] these were not exceptional individuals – they were individuals doing what they (wrongly) believed to be their job or performing what they (wrongly) believed to be their function or protecting what they (wrongly) saw to be legitimate interests."

Interesting Things on the Internet: December 26th 2023 Edition

These posts are all scheduled and so posted by a machine rather than requiring me to actually click "publish" at the exact time, but posting on Christmas Day still seems a bit odd, so this is a Boxing Day sale sort of Interesting Things. Happy holidays!

• What If by Benjamin Zephaniah. This poem is a quarter of a century old, yet sadly so, so relevant.
• Elon Musk’s Big Lie About Tesla Is Finally Exposed. "[Tesla] built a simulacrum of a self-driving system, a spectacle for consumers and Wall Street alike, that boosted profits and stock prices at the expense of anyone who happened to be looking at their phone when the system made a mistake." The computer science software ethics modules must be so much easier to teach these days, given the number of examples to draw upon. There were just a couple of aircraft fly-by-wire examples when I did my degree.
• 17776. A lovely bit of hypertext sci-fi.
• Warning: May Contain Non-Design Content. "Over the years, I came to realize that my best work has always involved subjects that interested me, or — even better — subjects about which I've become interested, and even passionate about, through the very process of doing design work."

Weak Signals Of Local Civic Democracy

Sharing this life hack* after a random lunchtime conversation with Zarino (who works for mySociety) made me realise it's not necessarily obvious behaviour but might be useful for others.

The What do they know website is an excellent tool to help people submit Freedom of Information requests to public bodies. The fact that the requests and responses are all shared on the web means that the information is shared more widely than it would have been if just shared with the original requester.

On the site there's a page for all requests for each public body. For example, this is the What Do They Know page for Liverpool City Council. More importantly, there's also an RSS feed (strictly speaking an Atom feed, but what do you think this is, 2004?!? ;-) for each body. Sadly it doesn't seem to be linked in the main text on the body's page, but it is in the metadata for the page so your RSS reader's autodiscovery should (hopefully) find it. I use the Want My RSS add-on for Firefox so it just shows up in the address bar on my browser.

That means I can add the feeds for the local council, the local enterprise partnership, universities and NHS trusts and the like to my RSS reader and then have a background source of information about what my fellow citizens care about and see when items I'm interested in float past.

And if you're RSS-curious, check out About Feeds for more details on what RSS is and how to get a reader (I use Thunderbird myself, but that's mostly because I also use that as my email client).

* It's obviously not a "life hack" but I don't have a useful term to describe it :-)

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 6th 2023 Edition

• Meta in Myanmar, Part III. The Inside View. Erin Kissane has written an excellent, if disturbing, set of essays (this is the third part, see here for the full series) into how Facebook enabled and wilfully ignored the genocide in Myanmar. They decided they'd rather keep the tens-of-billions of dollars profit than try to tackle the many problems with their platform and apps. They've also been deploying "AI" to try to solve the problem, which manages to flag at best less-than-5% of the hate speech and violent posts. We should bear that in mind when politicians are waving magic AI wands at all manner of problems. We should also shut down or break up Facebook, as they obviously aren't interested in the harm they're causing.
• Federated Ecovillages & Steps Towards a Modern Cybersyn. I think the Cybersyn angle isn't the right answer, but I think there are useful things we can do with tech to fold into such a solarpunk future.

Interesting Things on the Internet: October 23rd 2023 Edition

• High speed rail and what Britain can learn from the Baltics. I wonder if the "high speed" bit of HS2 has been part of the problem, focusing attention on how quickly we can get to London. The focus on London definitely has, as ever. I'm not especially bothered about getting to London more quickly; getting around the country, and having more freight travel by rail, would be great, and being able to catch a sleeper from Liverpool Lime St (or even Crewe) to the Continent would be excellent!
• Green Scared? Some Lessons From the FBI Crackdown on Eco-activists. "Those who consider obeying the law more important than abiding by one’s conscience always try to frame themselves as the responsible ones, but the essence of that attitude is the desire to evade responsibility. Society, as represented—however badly—by its entrenched institutions, is responsible for decreeing right and wrong; all one must do is brainlessly comply, arguing for a change when the results are not to one’s taste but never stepping out of line. That is the creed of cowards, if anything is" I'm not, I think, arguing particularly for breaking the law in choosing that quote—I haven't read How to Blow Up a Pipeline after all—but we do need more challenging of, and refusal to accept, the status quo.
• Why can't our tech billionaires learn anything new? There's been lots of talk on Mastodon, and elsewhere, this week about a whiny manifesto from a tech billionaire. I haven't read it. I have read this response to it, and it makes lots of sense. "What makes Andreessen’s 90’s retread so odd is the way he frames it as a challenge to the status quo. Technological optimism has been the dominant paradigm throughout my adult life. We have spent decades clapping for Andreessen and his buddies. We have put them on magazine covers. We stopped regulating tech monopolies. We cut taxes for the wealthy. We trusted that they had some keen insight into what the oncoming future would look like. We assumed that the tech barons ultimately had our best interests at heart. [...] The most powerful people in the world (people like Andreessen!) are optimists. And therein lies the problem: Look around. Their optimism has not helped matters much."
• How to Be a Better Reactionary: Time and Knowledge in Technology Regulation. Less worrying about imagined possible futures; more worrying about the existing problems we can see happening now.