Ethan Plaut

feijoa hamantaschen, who knew

Congrats, you saved yourself zero time, but now everyone's mad at you

Of all the AI vs IP skirmishes, this is the one that gets a product pulled, hilarious… for context:

Screenshot of a chessboard with checkmate using bishops, a knight and a pawn

stay pretty, shapes

The @InternetArchive x @GrayAreaOrg Trillionth Webpage Commissions bring new net․art to life from the Archive’s collections.

Rodell Warner’s "Ghosts of the Internet Archive" creates generative “ghosts” from Web 1.0, layering lost materials.

More ⤵️
blog.archive.org/internet-arc...

#Wayback1T

“She had the gift of making silence as vindictive as speech.”

The graph spans 1580-1719 in 20-year periods. The script categories shown are "Secretary", "Mixed", and "Italic". Secretary script is at nearly 60% in the first period, falls to about 20% by 1620-1639, is below 5% by 1660-1679, and falls to zero by the end of the century. Mixed scripts occur throughout, with their heyday from 1620 to 1679, during which nearly 10% of the letters are written in Mixed hands. Italic starts at about 40%, but is nearly 50% by the second period, and dominates strongly thereafter.

Here's a graph showing the primary script used in early modern English letters plotted over time. This graph is based on 3,489 letters, 22% by women, with decent social coverage although lower ranks are underrepresented.

60x speed timelapse from the International Space Station doing an "orbital cartwheel" from Atlantic to Pacific

ᴄʀᴇᴅɪᴛ: ᴢᴇɴᴀ ᴄᴀʀᴅᴍᴀɴ, ɴᴀsᴀ 🧪

Supreme Court threatens contempt charges for litigants citing fake AI-generated authorities - Law News NZ Supreme Court warns litigants they may face contempt charges for citing fake AI-generated legal authorities in court submissions.

"The [NZ] Supreme Court has warned self-represented litigants who submit [AI]-generated 'hallucinations' to court that they could face contempt proceedings... [which] could be interpreted as the judiciary losing patience with the amount of AI-generated 'slop' reaching the courts..." ⚖️

Ursula K. Le Guin — Ursula on Writing: A Rant about "Techonolgy" Ursula K. Le Guin on the presence of technology in her work

One for the material culture fans: 'As if linen were the same thing as flax — as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers'. www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about...

Urban Construction Boom Threatens Climate Goals Cities are under pressure to build housing while also cutting emissions. Researchers say it is possible to do both, but only if we rethink current construction practices.

My latest for @forbes.com is on a fascinating study from @utoronto.ca. I'd really appreciate it if you'd consider reading it 🧪👩‍🔬⚛️ www.forbes.com/sites/laurie...

"Good point, somehow."

- my mom absolutely destroying me yesterday, in front of my wife and child, for no good reason, and in the process coining a phrase that will forever ring out in our family argot

Reckoning with Everything. The Becoming-Environmental of Computing › meson press Computation must and has always had to “reckon with everything.” This volume brings together contributions that seek to describe the environmentality of computation based on selected settings.

My new text on parallel processing and the financial nature of AI is online open source (along with a bunch of other killer texts) in the new volume Reckoning with Everything edited by Bernhard Siegert and Benedikt Merkle for Meson Press meson.press/books/reckon...

How fake NZ news pages are swamping Facebook with AI slop Analysis - "Fake NZ news" pages are bombarding social media with misleading slop, including using AI to animate photos of a teenage landslide victim.

This is a significant issue for democracy and trust in news media (already dismal, as we know). I'm so glad that Meta is taking action against this automated AI slop on their platforms by doing... *checks notes* nothing. #nzpol

www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

Screenshot of a chessboard

blunder leading to cute mate in 4 from a blitz game

Everyone should be following the digitization and posting of the Adam Jacobs Collection. A 10,000 live concert chronicle of rocknroll-live-in-Chicago between the mid-1980s and today. archive.org/details/aada...

First Monday's 30-year publication run saw some changes

💾 🫡

Really sad to hear that First Monday is shutting down after 30 years. It was one of the first journals devoted to internet research & fully open access: no fees, no paywalls, and authors retained copyright.

My very first publication was there in 2004. End of an era.

firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...

Yeah this looks great I’ll check it out thanks so much!!

It feels silly but I just bought enough stamps to send out my business’ mail for ~4 years since they hold their value. 10 years ago it was 80c to send a standard letter in NZ, now it’s $2.90.

“Each office within the skyscraper is a segment of the enormous file, a part of the symbol factory that produces the billion slips of paper that gear modern society into its daily shape”

- C. Wright Mills (1951)

Photo of green and purple streaked night sky with power poles in the foreground

By absolute dumb luck we caught this Aurora Australis a couple nights ago — the largest solar storm since 2003! — from Motupōhue, at the very southernmost tip of Aotearoa NZ’s South Island. I’m not a good photographer but I’m loving the power poles in the foreground of this pic? 🧪

Door to book shop with many “no camera” signs

legit iconoclasm at Dead Souls Bookshop

#Ōtepoti 💜

BECOME UNPUBLISHABLE!

Wait, no, that’s not right

Daiso brand keychain in the shape of a purple cassette tape

Raekwon fans at daiso HQ?

Here are some more examples of retronyms ⬇️

organic food
snail mail
British English
bike pedal
cloth diaper
scripted show
outdoor rock climbing
corn on the cob
live music
silent film
bar soap
conventional war
regular coffee

MTV REWIND - I Want My MTV Celebrating 44 years of continuous music videos. Stream classic music videos 24/7.

MTV recently shut down their 24/7 music channels, this project has relaunched them.

Stream the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s, 20s, Yo MTV Raps, or Headbangers Ball, without any ads or algorithm

wantmymtv.vercel.app

cop is rapping about history as he handcuffs you?

those are your lin manuel miranda rights

YouTube video by SubwayTakes with Kareem Rahma We need to abolish Wi-Fi on airplanes!! #airplane #wifi

“Wifi on planes has ruined everything that we know and love”