Rocks Under Water
Gizmodo
"I’d start with, at most, 10 news sites to subscribe to. This will give you a feel for how fast you want the feed to move. Too slow? Add more. To fast? Delete a few. I try to narrow things down even further: Instead of subscribing to the New York Times, which publishes dozens of items per day, I subscribe specifically to the Times’ tech section, which means I get a much more curated selection."Seconded. And hey, I could have written this. This article has great advice for embracing the decentralized lifestyle. I personally use a self-hosted Tiny Tiny RSS with Reeder on iOS which costs about $8/month at AWS. Instead of limiting feeds, I subscribe liberally and put them in folders by subject. Then I browse by subject periodically instead of the full list of feeds and tune from there.
null program“This program opens a socket and pretends to be an SSH server. However, it actually just ties up SSH clients with false promises indefinitely...”Discouraging bots is a fun hobby I approve of. I like this simple Python script that exploits an RFC loophole.
Spring Sign
Rocks
forbes.com 
"The decentralized web is a mindset and a belief in an alternative structure that can address some of the afflictions that have risen from data pollution."This article raises more questions than it answers but it’s a good summary of why some of us prefer decentralized web tools and recreation. Re-decentralization feels like a lost fight but I’m glad people are working on it.
Google Arts & Culture
This Google site is a fun tour of some of the details in Vermeer's paintings. It works well on a small phone screen too. I also use the Google Arts & Culture new tab extension that shows me a new painting when I open a blank browser tab.
AirVūz
Drone footage is dead. Racing drone footage is all I want to see from now on! This is a thrilling highlight reel by a drone racer/cinematographer. (I didn't know drone racing is a thing!)
Link Pattern: Music
Generative.fm was at the top of the link charts this week. It's a site that offers endless computer generated ambient music. The crisp design pairs well with the sounds and it's fun to explore. It's also disquieting in light of some other articles I read this week:
A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music is a concise history of popular music by Ian Tamblyn. He argues that simultaneous advances in technology and labor rights helped fuel a golden age of music craft that has ended.
Another article I ran across about the end of music as we knew it from September, 2018: No more heroes: how music stopped meaning everything. This one describes the end of music as a countercultural force and describes the current age as musical wallpaper. (ouch.)
And just to put too fine a point on all of these, we had Mother Jones with: What Will Happen When Machines Write Songs Just as Well as Your Favorite Musician? It's an oddly unsettling discussion of using machine learning to aid or directly compose music. It argues that music could be affected by AI like photography has been by Instagram. The idea of musicians being replaced by musicgram influencers is bleak.
On a positive note I discovered some fantastic new (to me) music this week by King Buffalo. Check out Morning Song. It was not composed or played by computers. It is similar to music I love from the height of the golden age of recorded music but what are you going to do?
A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music is a concise history of popular music by Ian Tamblyn. He argues that simultaneous advances in technology and labor rights helped fuel a golden age of music craft that has ended.
Another article I ran across about the end of music as we knew it from September, 2018: No more heroes: how music stopped meaning everything. This one describes the end of music as a countercultural force and describes the current age as musical wallpaper. (ouch.)
And just to put too fine a point on all of these, we had Mother Jones with: What Will Happen When Machines Write Songs Just as Well as Your Favorite Musician? It's an oddly unsettling discussion of using machine learning to aid or directly compose music. It argues that music could be affected by AI like photography has been by Instagram. The idea of musicians being replaced by musicgram influencers is bleak.
On a positive note I discovered some fantastic new (to me) music this week by King Buffalo. Check out Morning Song. It was not composed or played by computers. It is similar to music I love from the height of the golden age of recorded music but what are you going to do?
Shepard Hall
Snell Hall Sculpture
1927