Incredible. Here is the direct link to the archive: https://wholeearth.info
Links I like
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Likes Weeknotes, revival.
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Ryan Barrett’s comparison of IndieWeb, ActivityPub, ATProto, and Nostr protocols.
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I’m quoted in this article!
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9-year-old blogger on why neighborhoods should have speedbumps, and the real-world difference it made for her freedom:
when construction workers installed speed bumps on the street in front of our house it was very useful to me because my parents decided to let me cross that street, and now I can go to the park and my friends house and a bunch of other places without my parents having to walk me there.
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Unfortunately, there’s also a race to the bottom, and you get a lot of junk. It’s the junk that people don’t like. Marketing that they like, people don’t call junk.
A lot of car heads will say, “No, no, no, I just buy the best car.” And I would say to them, “No, you buy the car that tells your story the best way possible.”
Anybody who has actually done marketing — not worked in a marketing department and gone to meetings, but actually done marketing — has found that the only thing that matters is empathy.
COWEN: Jeff Koons — how does his work strike you? Genius, fraud, something else?
GODIN: Anyone who’s willing to go that close to bankruptcy that many times cannot be a fraud.
You don’t teach them the history of baseball, give them the baseball encyclopedia, quiz them about Abner Doubleday, and if they do well on the test, let them go to a game. What you do is get them enrolled in the journey of being a baseball fan because five minutes of it was fun, and they want it again. The next thing you know, they’re learning statistics because they want to. They’re learning facts because they want to, not because there’s going to be a test.
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Likes Adactio: Journal—Crawlers by .
I like the idea of using a rewrite rule instead of robots.txt, though that still assumes the crawlers are actually their own useragent rather than emulating a regular user.
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The heart of this fight boils down to whether we accept that generative AI training on copyrighted material is an inevitability. This is the stance Stephen King recently took after finding out that his work is in Books3. “Would I forbid the teaching (if that is the word) of my stories to computers? Not even if I could. I might as well be King Canute, forbidding the tide to come in. Or a Luddite trying to stop industrial progress by hammering a steam loom to pieces,” he wrote.
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This was a good project to work on and I’m proud of it.
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Rising 11 stories, it wasn’t the tallest tower in the city. Nor did it win praise for how it made the most of its 21.5-foot frontage with a graceful Romanesque arched entrance. And it wasn’t financed by a Gilded Age business that planned to move in and make it company headquarters.
But the Tower Building, steps away from Bowling Green at 50 Broadway, has a singular distinction: it’s considered by many historians to be New York’s first skyscraper—defined as a building of 10 or more stories supported not by exterior masonry walls but by metal cage construction, according to the Skyscraper Museum.
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Likes Brilliant | Halfsies.
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What makes the discovery so striking isn’t the technique itself, but the age of the craftsmanship: a technique called luminescence dating indicated that the wood was roughly 476,000 years old. By comparison, the oldest fossilized Homo sapiens remains date back to 300,000 years ago, and the first record of wooden tools by an earlier human ancestor dates back 400,000 years.
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Likes What Elon Musk's X is getting right by .
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You can’t ignore when Jony Ive jumps into something.
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Likes Glorious Tomato Water … by .
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Likes A weekly note – Jeremy Felt by .
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Likes A weekly note – Jeremy Felt by .
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Likes A weekly note – Jeremy Felt by .
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Likes The Forever Home by .
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Likes https://jeremyfelt.com/notes/d7a31693268019/ by .
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Likes https://jeremyfelt.com/notes/12fb1693089303/ by .
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Frank Lantz makes some good points on the “AI deep fakes are going to doom society” handwringing.
This quality of language, its infinite plasticity and our capacity to navigate its mercurial meanings, is one of the reasons I’m not all that worried about the impact of deep fakes. Our world is heavily mediated by language, it governs our social, practical, institutional, and personal interactions, and it is trivially easily for anyone to use it to generate illusions that are perfectly indistinguishable from reality. I can make up something from whole cloth and tell you that I saw it with my own eyes, or heard it from a friend, or read it in a paper, and there is absolutely no way to tell, from the text itself, that it is fake. I can put quotation marks around any statement and tell the world you said it, and this illusion will have perfect fidelity – there are no possible forensic tools that could ever, simply by looking at the text itself, show it to be fake. This is the world we already live in, and we do OK.
Another reason that deep fakes won’t, in my opinion, cause that much trouble is the fact that, for the most part, humans don’t reason by looking at evidence and drawing conclusions from it. Mostly, we start with conclusions, based on what feels right, and then use our reason to construct plausible explanations for our beliefs and actions. The idea that we would look at a really convincing, high-res picture of William Shatner shoplifting and then conclude that he was a thief is based on a naïve theory of how our minds work that doesn’t bear close scrutiny. We are far more likely to arrive at that conclusion if a good friend mentions it casually as a well-known fact.
Even then, imagine hearing that statement. Don’t imagine a hypothetical “poor helpless stupid internet person” hearing it; picture famous smart person you, yourself, hearing a friend say “William Shatner is a thief”, and think about what your reaction might be…
When you think about it, the whole system is a real mess, but it sort of works. It could definitely be improved, but overall it’s probably working better now than it was a few thousand years ago when complete nonsense was even more rampant. And even those dark times were probably better than 150 thousand years ago, when, limited to pointing and grunting, we couldn’t lie at all.
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Likes /.well-known/feeds by .
This is a great idea. I set one up here: https://cagrimmett.com/.well-known/feeds/
I use a managed host and do not have access to nginx, so I used a quick and dirty mu-plugin: https://gist.github.com/cagrimmett/2d1af12e8f95677394ac319c998c8d9c
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iodine lets you tunnel IPv4 data through a DNS server. This can be usable in different situations where internet access is firewalled, but DNS queries are allowed.
Giving this a try next time I’m out in public and see some random open Xfinity network with a captive portal.
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Likes PubKit.
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Likes Book notes by .
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Likes Bridgy Fed status update by .
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Likes The Drupal Open Web Manifesto by .
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Likes The Two Camps of Mastodon.
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Likes Eating the Sun by .
Given how well astrophysicists understand the evolution of stars, I wonder if anyone has counted white dwarfs to see if there’s the expected number? It might be lower if there’s a lot of life out there.
So maybe we don’t need to try to spot a Type II exocivilisation directly, with our big telescopes. Instead we could detect their presence statistically.
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Likes ARG for thee and me by .
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Likes Some blogging myths.
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Likes Daring Fireball: Facing Reddit’s Exorbitant API Pricing, Christian Selig Is Shutting Down Apollo.
What do you think Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz would say about this if he were still alive?