• Steve Albini Was Proof You Can Change - The Atlantic

    When you realize that the dumbest person in the argument is on your side, that means you’re on the wrong side"

    the complementary guardian article

    yeah, he was always that caustic producer guy, but he was brilliant and he clearly matured and openly atoned for his offenses. it’s sobering to realize as an X-er just how many of my favorite albums he produced.

    also, it was sad to discover that i’m just not plugged into music like i used to be and there’s a shellac album coming out next week. (and … i missed the album purchase window.)

  • The death (again) of the internet as we know it

    Anecdotally, when I meet people in their early to mid 20s, they don’t want to connect over Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook Messenger, like young people did in the 2010s. They just exchange phone numbers, like people did in the 2000s. Everyone is still online all the time, but “online” increasingly means group chats, Discord, and other small-group interactions. As a society, we are re-learning how to center our social lives around a network of people we know in real life, rather than around a performative feed in which we broadcast our actions and thoughts to a bunch of strangers

    • this is encouraging … signal and iMessage are where you catch up with folks.
    • the discussion of slop in this article is … spot. on.
    • the discussion re: deepfakes is obvious but worth the time.

  • Solar Storm Knocks Out Farmers’ Tractor GPS Systems During Peak Planting Season

    perhaps we’ve overrotated on our dependence in GPS for some things. is there a market/space for high precision farming without GPS dependencies? i suspect not, in that doing something along these lines would likely require physically deploying well sited infrastructure on a farm, likely with line of sight, but perhaps the costs for doing this are:

    • low enough given the relatively low cost of computing, electronics and solar power.
    • simply worth it to ensure you have the necessary redundancy in the event of solar storms, hacks, etc.?

  • Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression – The Creative Independent

    head scratchin'