Too:
... the fear that your society is breaking apart into factions that have nothing left in common with each other—each defending their own set of values, referring to their own cult figures, speaking in their own untranslatable language.
https://www.thedictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/word/anaphasia
Oh yes. Sigh.
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.
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.
Listening recommendation for the morning:
There are a lot of companies and ideas competing for space on the post-Twitter internet, and Jay makes a convincing argument that decentralization — the idea that you should be able to take your username and following to different servers as you wish — is the future. It’s a powerful concept that’s been kicking around for a long time, but now it feels closer to reality than ever before. You’ve heard us talk about it a lot on Decoder: the core idea is that no single company — or individual billionaire — can amass too much power and control over our social networks and the conversations that happen on them.
There are quite some reasons that leave me very cautious about Bluesky, one being for sure the fact there's one commercial entity currently backing this service / protocol, especially one that has risen from the same ecosystem that caused a lot of the trouble we do experience with current social media platforms. But, I've then and now been at odds with ActivityPub as a protocol, which gets worse the more I dig into it, and from that perspective, it seems the AT crowd gets a lot of things right, considered a lot of things that don't just seem obvious at least in the 2010s but actually surprising to see them missing from ActivityPub, a spec that has been established at roughly the same time: Full account portability (the idea of comparing personal data, conversations, comments, posts, ... to a github repository which "of course" you want to easily be able to take, backup, move around, ... seems both stunning and painfully trivial), support of custom domains for users (which Tumblr has already been supporting for years now), distributed curation and moderation (because most obviously community structures will be different to server or domain structures and not necessarily live on one instance exclusively) - in a way I really do hope they "show don't tell" by submitting that protocol to some standardization body anytime soon. Maybe this, too, could provide a good option for the "open" fediverse to counter the problems that might arise the very moment platforms like Meta / Threads fully embrace ActivityPub. (I also found it rather interesting to listen to what she had to say about why Meta might be more into ActivityPub than AT - being "server-centric" rather than "user-centric" - but that might just be a loose end of things.)
Learned:
As other neuroscientists picked up the thread, they discovered that a barn owl’s brain performs complex mathematical computations to accomplish this spatial specificity, not merely adding and multiplying signals but engaging in a kind of probabilistic statistical calculation known as Bayesian inference.
Owls are amazing.