@b
You've been reading about agent-based models through the whole pandemic (it's how epidemiologists do their work), and they're even how your city grid was designed. Here's a piece about the person who designed and ran the first agent-based model---with a checkerboard, in his dissertation about his time in Japanese-American internment camps.
You want Markov chain generated content that sounds like it was written by a person? Sure, here's a suite for string quartet written via a constrained Markov Chainâin 1956. It's really not bad at all, even the more 'adventurous' pieces. I'd rather listen to this than Schoenberg. [Scroll down a bit to hear the experiments.]
Illiac Suite â Musica Informatica
The Illiac Suite is the first musical composition for traditional instruments that was made through computer-assisted composition by Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson.
musicainformatica.org
Some great research on researchers by Andy Baio.
AI Data Laundering: How Academic and Nonprofit Researchers Shield Tech Companies from Accountability - Waxy.org
Tech companies working with AI are outsourcing data collection and training to academic/nonprofit research groups, shielding them from potential accountability and legal liability.
waxy.org
I had trouble picking one article out of everything this person has written about, so here's the index page on obsolete technology: on using hot water bottles instead of running the furnace (which I do), using kilns to generate lime (which I don't do), human-powered cranes... See also the meta-article about building web pages low-tech enough to serve up via a solar-powered server: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/how-to-build-a-lowtech-website.html
LOWâTECH MAGAZINE
Low-tech Magazine refuses to assume that every problem has a high-tech solution. A simple, sensible, but nevertheless controversial message; high-tech has become the idol of our society.
solar.lowtechmagazine.com
Mechanical Watch â Bartosz Ciechanowski
Interactive article explaining how a mechanical watch works.
ciechanow.ski
in 1924 tax returns were public, and the taxes paid by the wealthiest individuals (Carnegie, Ford, et al) would be in the newspapers. In `26 the rich people won and made returns private again. Nice writeup in this link, including lots of pithy 1920s humor.
Americans' taxes used to be public â until the rich revolted
As Americans send off their tax returns by Monday's deadline, they don't have to worry about their neighbors knowing how much they earned or paid. But for a while in the 1920s, everybody's tax payments were public records for all to see.
stripes.com
The original title was: "It's like Twitter, but a revolutionary rejection of the Internet's Oligarchs".
Mastodonâand the pros and cons of moving beyond Big Tech gatekeepers
Standards-based interoperability makes a comeback, sort of.
arstechnica.com
Just finished a short story collection by Raphael Bob-Waksberg. Here's his best among the briefer pieces, where it was originally published---Craigslist.
best of craigslist: Missed Connection - m4w
craigslist.org
