Microblog and feed from Aram Zucker-Scharff.
I'm not even going to bother linking to the latest article objecting to publicly-owned groceries. Like all the previous ones it offers no solutions to the underlying problem except that maybe the free market will get food to all the people it has thus far failed to get food to. The idea that the free market hasn't peaked for grocery stores is very disconnected from reality. Rich neighborhoods are…
Everything by Angela Collier is excellent but this dive into the weird cult that sprung up around techbro boosting of a clearly fraudulent room-temperature conductor is an amazing ride. This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: The Cult of LK99 by Angela Collier
This is the first Angela Collier video I stumbled on. Her work is much more broad and interesting than just this type of cultural criticism but as a Star Trek fan disappointed in Picard, it was very satisfying and engaging to watch her pick it apart (as it deserves). This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: How Star Trek: Picard Ruins Star Trek by Angela…
Jokes take a lot more work then you'd think and this exploration of the infinite setup and how jokes are designed, both in writing and delivery, is really interesting. One of the best things I've consumed about "The Slap". This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: Is a G I Jane reference worth a slap? | How comedy plays with your expectations by Chill Goblin
This deep dive into the history of gay marriage is super interesting. Everything you thought you knew doesn't even touch the surface of Matt Baume's account, which is so detailed because he was in the trenches for much of it. So much here to learn. A lot to keep in mind for the future too. This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: Inside the Marriage Wars by…
This deepest of deep dives into the history of food, manliness and meats incredibly fascinating. It is well worth the runtime as not only is the history interesting and rarely discussed, but the synthesis of it onto the growing phenomenon of political manliness and bad diets is really excellent. The politics of why you're eating too much protein, dairy and meat. This is an amplified story. Read…
I found this deep dive by Shanspeare into how the world is interpreting Erika Kirk, how that intersects with gender and grief, and the cultural expectations in the right extremely interesting and well worth a watch. This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: Erika Kirk and the Theater of Grief by Shanspeare
I love hearing about the history of little chunks of the web and this video, which dives into the history of Markdown, is a great dive into a fascinating topic. This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: # The **epic** story of Markdown | The Vergecast by David Pierce, John Gruber, Anil Dash
Sorry I can't believe the price of eggs was high because there was (allegedly but if they settled sure seems like actually) an egg cartel that was fixing prices for eggs. The multi-state coalition’s investigation found that Cal-Maine Foods, Hickman’s Egg Ranch and Versova, which manages Centrum Valley Farms, coordinated to influence a daily price index for eggs. For years, that artificially…
I've been a fan of Emperor X ever since the first time I heard the fascinating lyrics of Erica Western Teleport . It's exciting to see Emperor X drop a new album. I managed to find a great review of the album which goes into fascinating detail about Chad Matheny's work on this album, which was done in Ukraine during the war. On the Bandcamp for this album: This album was recorded in The Palace of…
"Commercial location data can be used to identify where U.S. troops congregate and their pattern of life, which can be exploited by adversaries to target attacks such as missiles, drones, and roadside bombs, as well as for counterintelligence purposes," the letter warned. Wyden said in a statement that it was time to "start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat." Looks like…
Well-written but extremely depressing. Physical library spaces have been important to me for most of my life. I spent so much time in libraries as a kid and in college. My whole life was changed through working with academic librarians and archivists. I would be doing something extremely different if it wasn't for my work in that space. Hearing that MIT, surely an extremely wealthy school, is…
"Claudia" is, just so we are aware, not conscious. It is computer software, trained on the entirety of internet text and knowledge, that assembles a collection of outputs that is probabilistically correct. It has no genuine human level awareness. Any human affect or humanesque attributes are a clever trick of the light. People have been explaining this for years. Here's Professor Gary Marcus…
Here's my presentation on what we can do about privacy and ad tech that I gave to the Brooklyn Web Workers .
A number of other major journalism organizations have also recently moved to restrict the Wayback Machine from archiving their stories, including The New York Times. According to analysis by the artificial-intelligence-detection startup Originality AI, 23 major news sites are currently blocking ia_archiverbot, the web crawler commonly used by the Internet Archive for the Wayback project. The…