status

Listened to this while cycling to the office:

And so we change this together. The issue is will and the issue is resources. The issue is not ideas right. We're not waiting for one genius to figure it out. We're waiting for a clear map and some space to examine it together and share insights and then figure out how to push forward to a world where it's you know, thousands of interesting projects that are all thinking together about creating much better tech and reshaping the industry and its incentives in order to nurture that.

Meredith Whittaker of Signal talking to Tech Stuff and it's been an inspiring listen, even though gloomy at times. Learnt quite some new things here, and still think she's got a lot things right in what she does.

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-techstuff-26941194/episode/the-story-ask-lots-of-questions-264421545/ 

Halfway through this, on the train that morning: Paris Marx and tante discussing open source, past and present, the wordpress mess, open-source AI, Richard M. Stallman and a few related aspects. As it says on the tin:

I think we have actually reached the limitations of what the Open Source term and concept can do for us and I am not sure it’s enough for the future. Because software projects for the commons and a sort of social good need to face the fact that they are political and therefore need to include actual political representation of all stakeholders as well as democratic and transparent modes of decision making (at least when reaching a certain traction/user base).

Worth checking out for sure, as always.

via https://tante.cc/2024/11/08/podcast-the-corruption-of-open-source-tech-wont-save-us/ .

Morning audio, longform edition:

In February, everyone who went to a concert in the old medieval town of Halberstadt, Germany, showed up 23 years late. This is also concert from which everyone walks out early. The performance is of a piece called ORGAN2/ASLSP. ASLSP stands for “as slow as possible,” which is how the composer meant for it to be played, and this particular day would involve a chord change. The last time ORGAN2/ASLSP had a chord change was in 2022, and this new chord will play until the next change, in August, 2026. There is a change the year after that, and the following year, and so on, until the year 2640. The full performance is meant to last 639 years.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/as-slow-as-possible/ 

Have to admit I've just briefly been to Halberstadt ages ago and quite before that project started. Yet, I've always had a thing for experimental music and drone stuff, and this seems to be as droney as it might get. And all along with the sounds, it brings up some quite interesting considerations regarding melodies and chords and the sounds in between and duration and time itself. (Even though I was a bit stunned the concept of a pipe organ apparently needs a deeper explanation.)

Interesting find, picked from one of my timelines

Cara.app is a relatively new social media platform: a kind of fusion between an Instagram timeline with a share button, and an Artstation portfolio layout on the user's profile. Almost every artist I know is opening a Cara.app profile right now and posting about it on every social media site. Some influencers, like industry veteran Bobby Chiu, even praise the platform and openly urge everyone to move to it.

https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1032/a-critique-of-caraapp-the-no-ai-instagram-and-artstation-copycat-child

As cara.app hit my circles before, too, I found this worth reading. Specifically I agree with most of the things mentioned in (8). Though this focus on "having instances" of something and  "decentralization" (...) in an ActivityPub understanding of things to me slowly seems to show all of its technical and conceptual drawbacks, introducing yet another platform that is essentially a walled garden with data stored on one system of one legal entity doesn't seem what one would expect in 2024.