Band name of the day: superflat!

Band name of the day: fashionable paranoia

Baby‘s On Fire~Brian Eno - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5fezBnvkiU

Bad idea of the day: bibliomancy by generating random sentences in toki pona

Band name of the day: a fascinating disaster

Two Fans‘ Obsessive Quest To Redeem The Super M… https://kotaku.com/two-fans-obsessive-quest-to-redeem-the-super-mario-bros-1823073769

Anime‘s Dead Horse - Why We Keep Coming Back to SAO - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNDC8ieiirc

Band name of the day: the brotherhood of sleep

H.P Joelcraft - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKKTqB_Lzv0

The moral arc of the universe only bends toward justice so long as we’re up there hammering on it. When we stop, it tends to arc toward power consolidation.

Clone Wars — Real Life http://reallifemag.com/clone-wars/

Lonely Road — Real Life http://reallifemag.com/lonely-road/

Almost-Classics: SF Concepts and S… https://www.tor.com/2018/01/29/almost-classics-sf-concepts-and-settings-that-deserve-better-execution/

The Short and Brilliant Life of Ernest Matthew Mickler… http://bittersoutherner.com/the-short-and-brilliant-life-of-ernest-matthew-mickler

Band name of the day: bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction

Band name of the day: revolt of a counterproject

Band name of the day: passive reception

Band name of the day: the empire of signs

No Alternative — Real Life http://reallifemag.com/no-alternative/

David Bowie - Cygnet Committee - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKMSgZo9c8s

Consumer Reports History: How a Union Battle Birthed a Magazine https://tedium.co/2018/02/15/consumer-reports-history-origin/

A look at the J languag… https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2012/09/18/a-look-at-the-j-language-the-fine-line-between-genius-and-insanity/

Blockchain Just Isn’t As Radical As You Want… https://longreads.com/2018/02/15/blockchain-just-isnt-as-radical-as-you-want-it-to-be/

The Great Stink https://longreads.com/2018/02/14/the-great-stink/

How I Cracked Facebook’s New Algorithm And… https://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopoulos/how-i-cracked-facebooks-new-algorithm-and-tortured-my

I Learned the Nerdy Cooking Secrets of Modernist Ch… https://gizmodo.com/i-learned-the-nerdy-cooking-secrets-of-modernist-chefs-1822747790

OPERATI… https://medium.com/@StealThisSingul/operation-mindfuck-was-too-successful-r-u-sirius-interviewed-by-douglas-rushkoff-6607e4edc522

The Good Room – Frank Chimero https://frankchimero.com/writing/the-good-room/

Band name of the day: a tantalizing typology of personality

Bad idea of the day: A bot that iterates over one-syllable verbs, saying, for each verb X, ers gonna , , , , ,

My Friend, The Bot https://vector-bsfa.com/2017/12/16/my-friend-the-bot/

The offloading ape: the human is the beast that automates… https://aeon.co/essays/the-offloading-ape-the-human-is-the-beast-that-automates

Is the gun the basis of modern Anglo civilisation? | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/is-the-gun-the-basis-of-modern-anglo-civilisation

The tech bias: why Silicon Valley needs social theory | Aeon I… https://aeon.co/ideas/the-tech-bias-why-silicon-valley-needs-social-theory

Samurai, spy, commando: who were the real ninja? | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/samurai-spy-commando-who-were-the-real-ninja

In Leaked Chats, WikiLeaks Discusses Preference for … https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/julian-assange-wikileaks-election-clinton-trump/

What Danganronpa… https://medium.com/@urbanfriendden/what-danganronpa-and-my-hero-academia-say-about-school-as-an-institution-e4b9632bb624

The Sound and the Fury: Inside the Mystery of the Havana… — ProPublica https://www.propublica.org/article/diplomats-in-cuba

Neural network AI is simple. So… Stop pretending you are a… https://www.kdnuggets.com/2018/02/neural-network-ai-simple-genius.html

Deep Reinforcement Learning Doesn’t Work Yet https://www.alexirpan.com/2018/02/14/rl-hard.html

GitHub - WorldBrain/Memex: Browser Extension to full-text search your browsing history & bookmarks. https://github.com/WorldBrain/Memex

‘Doki Doki Literature Club’ Fits i… https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/kzp7gy/doki-doki-literature-club-history-visual-novels

Episode 46: Allison Parrish — Commonplace: Conversations with Poe… https://www.commonpodcast.com/home/2018/2/14/episode-46-allison-parrish

Band name of the day: animal vigour

Invisible Algorithms, Invisible Politics | Public Books http://www.publicbooks.org/invisible-algorithms-invisible-politics/

A Matter of Mind - A Chaos;Head, Chaos;Child Comparison - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPiyo7t29BQ

Extended Director’s Cut: Ted Nelson on Hypertext, Douglas Englebart, Xanadu and More - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i67rQdHuO-8

Letting neural networks be weird • More candy hearts by… http://aiweirdness.com/post/170820844947/more-candy-hearts-by-neural-network

Absurdist Dialogues with Siri https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/02/12/absurdist-dialogues-siri/

We Don’t Need New Laws for Faked Videos, We… https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/we-dont-need-new-laws-faked-videos-we-already-have-them

There Is No Such Thing as a Smart City - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/stupid-cities/553052/

Let‘s talk about usernames https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2018/feb/11/usernames/

Metadata: Paper review. IPFS: Content addressed, versio… http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2018/02/paper-review-ipfs-content-addressed.html

Letting neural networks be weird • Candy H… http://aiweirdness.com/post/170685749687/candy-heart-messages-written-by-a-neural-network

Letting neural networks be weird • The n… http://aiweirdness.com/post/159302925452/the-neural-network-generated-pickup-lines-that-are

How Protein Conquered America - Eater https://www.eater.com/2018/2/12/16991634/muscle-milk-protein-culture

3Dfx History: The GPU’s Great Turning Point? https://tedium.co/2018/02/14/3dfx-history-failure/

Why Paper Jams Persist | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/why-paper-jams-persist

METAHEADCANON: Harmon’s Head - An 8 Circuit Model of Community http://www.metaheadcanon.com/2018/02/harmons-head-8-circuit-model-of.html

Discovering Types for Entity Disambiguation https://blog.openai.com/discovering-types-for-entity-disambiguation/

Band name of the day: screen hearthing

Lessons from Optics, The Other Deep Learning – arg min blog http://www.argmin.net/2018/01/25/optics/

Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand

5 recomm… https://mkdev.me/en/posts/5-recommendations-on-how-to-maintain-the-code-quality-and-keep-your-self-development-when-nobody-cares

Band name of the day: the snake oil standard

The Center for Humane… https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2018/02/09/the-center-for-humane-technology-doesnt-want-your-attention/

There are legitimate open questions: should we maximize minimum happiness? Should we maximize mean, or median, or total happiness? But, no existing social system optimizes for any of these metrics or any combination of them.

Optimizing for anything other than human happiness seems like a recipe for misery. Of course, no existing political system really seriously attempts to optimize for human happiness.

In an equitable society, social problems are a matter of individual choice. We don’t live in such a society, and never have. If we want to, we should be honest about this. Pretending to have achieved equity is a good way to amplify shitty power relations.

Of course, being driven by emotion, nostalgia, and other prejudices is a non-issue in emacs vs vi. But, in deciding how to structure power relations, it’s huge.

We’re really bad at being dispassionate about non-social technologies, but even worse about social technologies (by which I mean: political systems, power relations).

Social structure is a technology, but it’s one that most self-identified techies are ill-equipped to debug, mainly due to bigotry against properly studying it.

Band name of the day: the structured crowd

Band name of the day: added smashing power

Why hiring the ‘best’ people produces the least crea… https://aeon.co/ideas/why-hiring-the-best-people-produces-the-least-creative-results

Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature |… https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-1044-7

Every Deluze quote is relevant to every situation, given sufficient effort on the part of the reader.

Band name of the day: a principle of sufficient unreason

Band name of the day: the nine springs of our nature

Band name of the day: the germinal base of beatitude

Band name of the day: fantastic plenum

Band name of the day: the printing offices of confusion

Every Society Invents the Failed Utopia it… http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/every-society-invents-the-failed-utopia-it-deserves/

I am the very model of a New York Times contrar… https://slate.com/culture/2018/02/i-am-the-very-model-of-a-new-york-times-contrarian.html

People make the obvious comparison to Blade Runner, but seeing as how Blade Runner is a famously shallow & aesthetically-focused adaptation that strips the social & political elements from its source, Altered Carbon comes out the winner here

I feel like Netflix’s adaptation did a pretty good job of keeping that social & political focus, and even frontloading it a little bit by injecting backstory from the second and third books.

The second and third books are mostly about the political & social ramifications of resleeving technology over centuries. That is, after all, the point of the series.

The first book in the Altered Carbon series hews closer to standard hardboiled structure & is less ‘about’ resleeving but is very much about social inequality at scale.

I keep hearing the awful take that Altered Carbon is shallow aesthetic-centric cyberpunk devoid of social commentary. Did these people rush to skim the book when they heard about the TV show or something?

Slack is the opposite of organizational memory https://abe-winter.github.io/plea%27s/help/2018/02/11/slack.html

Recovery of an MMO Junkie - What Do You Want to Be? - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT729ReUCjM

MMO Junkie‘s Racist Director - Should We Hate the Work, or the Jerk? - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP2KATrNlbE

Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle on Vimeo https://vimeo.com/36579366

GitHub - vurtun/nuklear: A single-header ANSI C gui library https://github.com/vurtun/nuklear

song2comdemo https://sites.google.com/site/song2comdemo/

A reverse CAPTCHA designed to filter out humans / Boing Boing https://boingboing.net/2018/02/09/a-reverse-captcha-designed-to.html

Bad idea of the day: an extension that renders every word in a font chosen based on the hash of that word

Bad idea of the day: an extension that decreases the size of images based on how many copies of similar images are already in your browser cache

Bad idea of the day: an extension that runs term extraction on whatever web page you’re viewing and then increases the size and contrast of words based on their computed importance ranking

Bad idea of the day: a captcha system that shows you something that should be upsetting and then determines if you’re humane by checking your computer for signs of whether or not you were upset by it