link roundup, oct. 2024 edition
I'm not sure why I haven't thought to do link roundups before but I've seen a few people I follow doing them, and, like. Isn't "sharing links and talking about what I thought was interesting about them" basically like half of what I liked about Google Reader? (The other half is other people sharing links and talking about what they thought was interesting about them, and the third half was the conversations we could then have about those things.) So, without further ado, a link roundup. Expect more of these at irregular intervals.
Always Use An Adblocker
- uBlock Origin. Running a good adblocker is simultaneously one of the easiest and one important things you can do to keep yourself safe online; it's not just about avoiding the inconvenience (but it also does that). The internet is better and safer without ads. I asked some infosec people who are much more knowledgeable than me, and they recommended uBlock Origin. It's what I've been using for years and I have no complaints.
The Youtube Section
- The narwhal wikipedia talk page is an abyssal mess by HGModernism. Ten minutes of talking about that one time Hendry found a dubious claim about Narwhals on Wikipedia, tried to find the source, and couldn't. I wasn't expecting this to make it onto the link roundup but it's kind of an interesting look at what goes into the Wikipedia sausage, and by extension how misinformation can spread on the internet. Fun!
- REFORM! by Secret Base. This is a three-part series (here are parts two and three) and each video clocks in at about an hour, so you're looking at about three hours of your time. It's looking at the history of Ross Perot, the Reform Party he founded, its brief moment in the sun, and its spectacular collapse. I came here for the story about a bunch of certified weirdos, but I think there are things that we can learn from this story and use to give us perspective on the world we live in now.
- Generative AI in Creative Fields – Paula Clare Harper and Ada Palmer - by the University of Chicago. About twenty minutes. Ada Palmer is a historian and sci-fi novelist whose work I am very fond of and whose perspective is reliably interesting, and it's interesting to see academic perspectives on the subject of generative AI. (I also found it very funny how the interviewer asked Prof. Harper, a musicologist, something like "how is AI changing music?" and her response was, not in so many words, "well it's really good at producing schlock that you don't really listen to.)
Things That Aren't Videos
- Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student by Max Alper. A letter from a music professor to a former student who is feeling like a failure as an artist because they can't make a living doing it, this is some very good advice for artists in general: your worth as an artist is not measured by whether you can sustain yourself by doing it. Worth reading.
- The Calm Before the Storm by Madeline Wu. I don't know how to describe this other than to say that with this short post Maddie manages to perfectly capture the poetry of this moment just before a typhoon hits. I love this.
- gdpr and the indie web by Ava. I have given very little thought to GDPR (as a reluctant American and someone who has long since stopped paying for any hosted content of my own) but this is an interesting thing to think about!
- Eye on the Storm. I love weather, as well as having some family in hurricane country, so I have of course been on the lookout for a good websites for hurricane monitoring for a while now. I don't really trust, for example, weather.com's hurricane forecasts, and while. This seems to be the ticket! It's thoughtfully written meteorological and climatological analysis of hurricanes, useful for understanding the forecasts and projections and for understanding the risks that a given storm might pose. Interesting and useful, you love to see it.