Substrate

It's very US-centric, but then much of AI discourse is. What I like about this piece from Matt Stoller is that it gets to the heart of what's going on here: corruption.

We no longer live in a land where people are “innocent until proven guilty,” the actual rule of law as practiced is “guilty until proven wealthy.” The Supreme Court even gave Wall Street an exemption from the Constitution in securing bankers their own independent regulator, even though no one else gets a regulator free from Presidential demands. Oh, and let’s not even talk about laws that purport to constrain illegal wars or war crimes.

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In 1997 nobody could explain why you would want a gigabit connection, because the honest pitch was that your email would arrive faster, and that wasn’t worth the money. Everything that eventually made the bandwidth worth having hadn’t been built yet. There was no bandwidth to build it for.

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As I'm sure most people with even a passing interest will have heard by now, the new Apple Watch has a feature called "Live Rewind". Before we get into this properly, let's just see how Apple describes the feature:

This is going to be a long-ish note, primarily because I'm going to be quoting at length from Jay Springett's excellent INTERNET OPERATOR zine. As you can see from the gif above, I've given it the highlighter treatment, pulling out things which resonate with me.

Source: Are.na

We ought to observe also that even the things which follow after the things which are produced according to nature contain something pleasing and attractive.

For instance, when bread is baked some parts are split at the surface, and these parts which thus open, and have a certain fashion contrary to the purpose of the baker's are, are beautiful in a manner, and in a peculiar way excite a desire for eating.

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Thank goodness for people like Claus Wilke, who writes so eloquently, unpretentiously, and reasonably about a subject he knows inside-out. Unlike, for example, Noah Smith, who apparently should stick to being an economist:

It's now 16 years since I've been in the classroom, but you never really get out of the mindset of being a teacher. As one mug I saw put it "Teachers don't get old, they just lose their class" 😅

I loved teaching History, and particularly 1066 and the Battle of Hastings. This new online resource from the British would have been so great to use with very enthusiastic Year 7's (11-12 years old).

I'm not sure how I've only just heard about it (perhaps because I forgot to renew my SCiO membership) but the SysPrac26 conference is the week after next. I've decided go, rearranging my existing commitments on Monday 21st and Tuesday 22nd September.