These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week.

🔖 Orcutt Shelley Miller and the Great American Road Trip

I’m not aware of resuscitating anything, really. I just enjoy playing and finding new ways to surprise myself. It all happens organically. There’s not a lot of strategizing that goes into it. There’s no plan. I love the history of the guitar and of guitar players, so it’s a conversation I want to be part of.

🔖 Gaza Verified

We verify, to the best of our abilities, that people who say they’re Palestinians from Gaza are who they say they are by holding video conversations with them.

Beyond that, we’re in touch with them daily and trying to help them raise funds to stay alive.

For more details, please see our guide.

🔖 All that is Air Melts into Air

Offsetting is a worldview that insists that problems created by capital accumulation can only be resolved by further capital accumulation. On a finite planet, the search for new forms of capital begins to resemble a hall of mirrors. A tree, for example, becomes a fractal, recursive commodity, with hidden dimensions of value waiting to be uncurled, like hypothetical extra dimensions of space and time. Offsetting is a product of last-stage, recursive, data-driven capitalism, and its brilliance is that it allows any human activity to be commodified by means of measurement, data collection, and computation

🔖 FBI Tries to Unmask Owner of Infamous Archive.is Site

The FBI is attempting to unmask the owner behind archive.today, a popular archiving site that is also regularly used to bypass paywalls on the internet and to avoid sending traffic to the original publishers of web content, according to a subpoena posted by the website. The FBI subpoena says it is part of a criminal investigation, though it does not provide any details about what alleged crime is being investigated. Archive.today is also popularly known by several of its mirrors, including archive.is and archive.ph.

🔖 Heavy metal is healing teens on the Blackfeet Nation

On stage later, beneath an array of a dozen stag skulls, Krieger was slinking around like a ghostly Indigenous Jim Morrison, windmilling his waist-length hair, blasting life force through a cedar flute and leaning over the crowd to shriek upward-arcing shards — whose strength never flagged during his entire blistering set — as his guitarist crowned his howls with constellations of tremolo picking. In the mosh pit, one fan hoisted a buffalo rib the size of a baseball bat, presumably from the barbecue, like some feral invocation. Blackbraid’s performance may have converted Daniels, the photographer, to solid metal fandom. But after Converge, he stood by me and said, “Now I get it.”

🔖 Estimating Carbon Emissions From Income

Most individual carbon footprint calculators only factor in consumption. How many plane trips have you taken this year? How many car miles have you driven? And so on. And, numerous studies and papers have drawn out the relationship between individual or household consumption and emissions. On the other hand, far fewer studies have attempted to calculate emissions based income.

Is it possible to estimate individual or household emissions based on income alone, without any consideration for consumption choices?

🔖 Notes on “Nomadology,” Part I (25,000 words)

What follows is my attempt to come to grips as an adult with a foundational work of theory I’d bought and first tried to get my head around in late adolescence: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “Nomadology: The War Machine.”

🔖 Announcing Magika 1.0: now faster, smarter, and rebuilt in Rust

It is often not feasible to find thousands of real-world samples for every file type. To overcome this, we turned to generative AI. We leveraged Gemini to create a high-quality, synthetic training set by translating existing code and other structured files from one format to another.

🔖 Six French Movies to Improve Your French

Watching movies and TV is a big part of someone’s French language journey. Unfortunately, they are not always easy to find but I have the solution for you! 6 French movies to improve your French that are available on Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

🔖 Frozen DuckLakes for Multi-User, Serverless Data Access

DuckLakes typically consist of two components: the catalog database and the storage. Obviously, there is no way around having some sort of storage to represent the data. But can we host a DuckLake without setting up a catalog database? In this blog post, we’ll show how you can create a read-only cloud-based DuckLake without a database server. We call this a “Frozen DuckLake” because it is read-only and has no moving parts other than a cloud storage system.

🔖 DuckLake: SQL as a Lakehouse Format

To resolve the fundamental problems of the existing lakehouse architecture, we have created a new open table format called DuckLake. DuckLake re-imagines what a “lakehouse” format should look like by acknowledging two simple truths:

Storing data files in open formats on blob storage is a great idea for scalability and to prevent lock-in. 1.

Managing metadata is a complex and interconnected data management task best left to a database management system.

🔖 C’est la Lune qui nous rend humains

À cet égard, pendant la plus grande partie de l’histoire humaine, la religion et la science n’étaient manifestement que deux dimensions d’une seule et même entreprise humaine d’ensemble. Et si nous voulons trouver une force ou une entité singulière qui nous ait engagés sur cette voie, nous ne pourrions guère faire mieux que de montrer du doigt la Lune.

🔖 pg_lake

pg_lake integrates Iceberg and data lake files into Postgres. With the pg_lake extensions, you can use Postgres as a stand-alone lakehouse system that supports transactions and fast queries on Iceberg tables, and can directly work with raw data files in object stores like S3

🔖 Let Them Eat Large Language Models: Artificial Intelligence and Austerity in the Neoliberal University

This article examines the expansion of generative artificial intelligence (genAI) into higher education. We argue that genAI’s incursion into university systems represents an effort by Silicon Valley to capture lucrative new markets for their products, as well as enhanced credibility by association. Drawing on our experience as faculty in the California State University (CSU) system—the first university system to contract with OpenAI to provide ChatGPT Edu system-wide—we assess the rhetoric that justifies and legitimizes genAI contracts in higher education. We suggest that the uncritical adoption of genAI in higher education poses problems for labor conditions, the integrity of intellectual property, and student learning on campuses, particularly under the conditions of austerity that are commonly found in public universities.

🔖 How to Be a Good Citizen When Your Country Does Bad Things

When your country pursues abhorrent policies, when the face it turns to the world is the face of a monster, what does that say about you? In my experience, it is strikingly easy to shrug off one’s responsibility for the country where one pays taxes, contributes to the public conversation and, at least nominally, has the right to vote, if that country is the United States. It seems one can just say “Not in my name” and continue to enjoy the wealth and the freedom of movement one’s citizenship confers. But as this country builds more cages for immigrants, deploys military force against civilians in city after city, regularly commits murder in the high seas and systematically destroys its own democratic institutions, that may change. It should change. What does one do then? How can one be a good citizen of a bad state

🔖 Louvre Robbery: Security Flaws: The (Obviously) Password Was “Louvre”

A “weak” password could become one of the symbols of the Louvre’s security flaws. According to 2014 documents obtained by Libération, accessing the museum’s video surveillance server required typing the all-too-obvious word: LOUVRE .

🔖 SEDA | Standard d’Echange de Données pour l’Archivage

Le standard d’échange de données pour l’archivage (SEDA) vise à faciliter l’interopérabilité entre le système d’information d’un service d’archives et les systèmes d’information de ses partenaires dans le cadre de leurs échanges de données.

🔖 ProfileGenAPP

ProfileGenAPP est un éditeur visuel pour créer des profils d’archivage SEDA 2.1+ au format RelaxNG. Cette documentation présente les principales fonctionnalités disponibles dans l’interface utilisateur.

🔖 The Authoritarian Stack

Under the banner of “patriotic tech”, this new bloc is building the infrastructure of control—clouds, AI, finance, drones, satellites—an integrated system we call the Authoritarian Stack. It is faster, ideological, and fully privatized: a regime where corporate boards, not public law, set the rules.

🔖 Nametree

What is that? An online app to make diagrams for the names of your loved ones, non-humans and humans. Why? Because nobody has just one name

🔖 Dane Stuckey (OpenAI CISO) on prompt injection risks for ChatGPT Atlas

My biggest complaint about the launch of the ChatGPT Atlas browser the other day was the lack of details on how OpenAI are addressing prompt injection attacks. The launch post mostly punted that question to the System Card for their “ChatGPT agent” browser automation feature from July. Since this was my single biggest question about Atlas I was disappointed not to see it addressed more directly

🔖 FEP-d8c8: BitTorrent Torrent Objects

The BitTorrent protocol is a p2p protocol for distributing data described as a series of hashes and file metadata contained in .torrent files. This FEP describes a JSON-LD representation of .torrent files as an extension of an ActivityStreams Object.

🔖 ThinkPad T480 Hardware Maintenance Manual

The manual includes some beautiful exploded view diagrams for repair.

🔖 (logistics?)(social.eurybia.osx.ninja?)

Taking inspiration from (2001?), this account is slowly posting frames from the 2012 art installation project “Logistics”.

The 37-day long road movie follows a package from Sweden to China in real-time. This bot will post every 3,000th frame (roughly 2 minutes apart), one per hour, aiming to cover one day of the journey every 30 days of real time.

More info on the original project here: https://logisticsartproject.com/

🔖 Attention Authors: Updated Practice for Review Articles and Position Papers in arXiv CS Category

arXiv’s computer science (CS) category has updated its moderation practice with respect to review (or survey) articles and position papers. Before being considered for submission to arXiv’s CS category, review articles and position papers must now be accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review. When submitting review articles or position papers, authors must include documentation of successful peer review to receive full consideration. Review/survey articles or position papers submitted to arXiv without this documentation will be likely to be rejected and not appear on arXiv.

🔖 The Mirror Problem: A Warning About AI and Your Mind

A warning about how AI chat tools—like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others—can become dangerously addictive in a specific way. Not like social media addiction. Something harder to spot.

🔖 Unmoored by C. C. O’Hanlon

Yet the boat was a refuge. We had wandered in search of somewhere to settle — or, more precisely, somewhere we would be allowed to settle — for four years, moving between whatever cheap, temporary accommodation we could borrow or afford to rent in seven countries, until this unkempt but graceful vessel suggested a possibility of shelter, of ‘fixedness’, even as we were compelled by circumstances to remain mobile, unrooted

🔖 Pirate Utopias Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes

Part history, part fantasy. Hakim Bey is the nom de plume of Peter Lamborn Wilson, who led an interesting life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Lamborn_Wilson