The Web as filtered (and hopefully enriched ;-) by Adrian McEwen
April 22, 2024
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."
April 08, 2024
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"