Last month definitely has been something, huh? Globally and also personally because, man, time has been flying these past few weeks. What started as a small list of links at the beginning of November morphed into whatever will happen in this post, welp!

playing

• Webfishing!! What a lovely little game.
• UFO 50, which has been made so much more enjoyable by my recent purchase of an 8bitdo Pro 2 controller
• Tetrachroma.

I think I want to use my upcoming Christmas break to play more video games, especially ones I've had on my "backlog" for a hot minute 😤

listening

November was great for music, at least!

• The new Kendrick Lamar album has been on heavy rotation for me. I need to dig into more West Coast rap...
• I finally found what the fuss was all about and checked out Mercurial World and Imaginal Disk by Magdalena Bay and, man, music rules, y'all.
• The year is 2024, and I only now found out about Together's (Thomas Bangalter and DJ Falcon) version of "Call On Me" and watched this excellent documentary about the whole situation about this track.
• I also listened to a lot of Justice and Gesaffelstein because they both released banger albums this year, so I'm allowed to be normal about both. It will happen again.

And now, the links.

politics (oof)

Consolations of the Damned, and It's the End of the World As We Know It.

It's one of the triumphantly insipid parts of humanity - that some of us never can quite give up, even when all signs point to our personal immiseration. For some fool reason, even when sinking into mire, some humans try to plant seeds.

For many white left-libs and rad-libs across the USA, it was the end of the world as they knew it. For me, someone who hasn’t stopped seeing the face of every martyr I held in my arms ‘til they died in Gaza, it was another fucking Wednesday.

These two posts have been resonating in my head for a minute, I think you could see them as polar opposites, but I feel they're two sides of the same coin?

I think it's fair to say that: shit sucks, shit will suck, but hope is necessary. I know I'll try to keep this in mind for the next few years as I try to do whatever I can at my own level.

The Pervocracy: Resistance is not an emotion

Bottom line was, I cared about the things happening in this country. And the angrier I got, the more the anger itself felt like caring. They say “if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention,” right? Well, I sure was paying attention! I was paying so much attention I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t enjoy anything!

Yup, felt that one. The first set of Trump years were maddening as an immigrant who had (at this point) "just arrived" in the U.S., it was very easy to fall into the "god I need to at least pay attention because who knows what that bozo will do/say" trap and drive myself insane over things I had no control over.
Not doing that again!
I'm still pissed, and I doubt I'll be less so anytime soon, but it feels healthier to try to channel that into actions that actually help people around me. Like Natalie said: "There's so much that needs doing, and even if you just do a bit of it you're helping.".

that nerd shit

cathode ray dude: linux on the steamdeck lol

one of the great things about humans is our ability to communicate, to share experiences so that we don't all have to learn things “the hard way.” why people online, particularly linux people, are so quick to discard that basic tenet of our existence is beyond me. all you have to do is say “yep, it works,” without the “obviously” at the end - or just say nothing at all. that one's incredibly easy. possibly the easiest choice

The Steam Deck part of this post isn't really what I'm interested in, hehe.

ben-mini: IMG_0416

That the iPhone had a "Send to YouTube" feature is one of these things that I knew about because I remember it being announced at the time, but reading this article felt like digging a core memory, in a good way.

AI-3: There is no road from here to there

AI is doing the same thing, except we are bewitched by a simulacrum. Human attention worldwide has been transfixed, our thoughts and fears and hopes and fantasies magnetized by the appearance of something so alien that seems somehow like us. We want it to be real. We want to be it. In doing so we long for the erasure of our own subjectivity.

It won't surprise you to learn that I never really believed in the "we will be able to make a superintelligence" claims from the AI industry, but this post tackling the question by using Buddhist texts as framing is fascinating.

Tom MacWright: On not using copilot

LLM assistants are chat interfaces. You beg the computer to do something, it does something wrong, you ask it to fix the problem. You’re managing. You’re acting as a manager, and chatting.

Sometimes that’s a useful arrangement. Heck, ELIZA was occasionally useful even though it was a tiny, scripted experience. Talk therapy can be good, and chat interfaces can be productive. But at least for some of us, the need to keep asking for something, trying to define the outputs we want and clarify and re-clarify: this is managing, and sometimes it’s nicer to write in solitude than to beg the computer like an micromanager.

Big same.

Mathew Duggan: Self-Hosting Isn't a Solution; It's A Patch

What people actually need are laws. Regulations like the GDPR must become the international standard for platforms handling personal data. These laws ensure a basic level of privacy and data rights, independent of whether a judge forces a bored billionaire to buy your favorite social network. Suggesting self-hosting as a solution in the absence of such legal protections is as naive as believing encrypted messaging platforms alone can protect you from government or employer overreach.

I self-host probably more than the average person, and I'm thinking about ways to self-host/control more stuff in the future but this article raises a lot of good points.

arno.org: On the origins of DS_store

Finishing this section with some extra nerd trivia.

miscellanea

Nat Clayton (someplace elsewhere): (Almost) Every Cat I Met This Year

Cats are good as hell.

That's what I have for you this time. I also recently rambled about Websites™️, maybe it might be interesting to you? Who knows.

See you in the next one!
- damien