Blog
A brief history of maps
From archdaily:
When in what was called Junior School at the time, ages 7 to 10, our teacher took us to a small village and got us started on a project to map the surroundings.
We drew the roads (there were two, a crossroads), the stream, buildings, and plenty of distinguishing features (trees, postbox, etc.) and added any relevant information we could think of.
We visited several times, adding more and more data to the documents we were collecting and drawing by hand. We even did a topology study using basic tools, but it was enough for us to get a rough 3D model of the village built as the final conclusion to the project.
I’ll never forget that experience. During the project and again at the end, my teacher told me I would make a good Cartographer. I didn’t know what that word meant at the time, so I looked it up in the dictionary. The definition in my crappy dictionary was “Map Maker”.
I didn’t turn out to be a “map maker”. However, I have continued to enjoy maps, and these articles are catnip. Enjoy.
7 January 2023 — French West Indies
The more social, social network
There’s a number which is called Dunbar’s Number. It’s around 150 or so.
It’s a significant number in that it seems to indicate that, as humans, we are incapable of having a meaningful discussion and keeping personal links with other humans if we have to do that for a group larger than this number.
Think about how many friends you have, no not Instagram acquaintances, real friends? Now think about how many of them you can keep in touch with in a meaningful way. It’s probably much less than Robin Dunbar’s suggestion.
I’ve started to see discussions about having a much more sociable social network, prompted by not just Elmo’s destruction of Twitter but the abject fatigue surrounding the use of social media that sucks you dry and intentionally disconnects you emotionally from a human being on another smartphone. Connecting more people was supposed to bring us together. Instead, it has succeeded in doing the exact opposite. For example, suggestions discuss limiting follows and followers to around 300 people or so and making them mutually agreed upon.
I don’t know the solution, and I don’t think it is Mastodon in its current guise. Still, I think it is a good starting point for people, organisations, institutions and even governments to see how they can build more community rather than more division.
Community centres and youth clubs were everywhere before. They weren’t perfect, nor do I expect Social Media to be. But I think there’s an opportunity to build something more localised and connected simultaneously. And that is what I think the value of something like Mastodon may inspire.
5 January 2023 — French West Indies
Key Bitcoin developer calls on FBI to recover $3.6M in digital coin
Via Ars Technica:
The irony!
Oh, wait. We need a centralised system to police the blockchain thieves now!
Seriously, why do they think the banks and regulators exist? Is it some kind of conspiracy against the world?
Grow up FFS.
4 January 2023 — French West Indies
Exodus, movement of Jah people
The mass exodus to Mastodon continues.
Over 9 million accounts were created, with 113,393 new users last week (see bot):
4 January 2023 — French West Indies
The Dark Risk of Large Language Models
From Wired:
Unless you’ve been hiding, in a coma, or purposefully ignoring Social Media, you will have seen the explosion of the use of GPT-3 through a website called ChatGPT.
The above is a transcription of what transpired when the model was used for interactions of a health-related matter.
Quite extreme and clearly nothing a human would do —sociopaths notwithstanding.
Please read the article to get the context. It’s not that long and is quite informative about some of the risks of Large Language Models (LLMs).
3 January 2023 — French West Indies
“what the fuck happened to my FTX account”
Poor guy woke up from a 5-month coma after a car accident to find that FTX had shit the bed.
Anecdotal and to be taken with a pinch of salt.
2 January 2023 — French West Indies
What Can We Learn from Barnes & Noble's Surprising Turnaround?
From The Honest Broker:
So many businesses and industries could learn a lot from this. Every time you go into a big chain store, you feel that everything that put it in that position has been sucked out.
I remember loving going to Dixons in the UK when it first got some notoriety. It died several years ago from Rigor Mortis, and being the most absolutely shitty experience in the UK.
I also love this line in the article:
I now have a rule of thumb: “There is no substitute for good decisions at the top—and no remedy for stupid ones.”
2 January 2023 — French West Indies
Simple pleasures
I’m sitting here listening to music at a volume I deem perfect, with a freshly brewed espresso.
The house is empty, apart from me. And it is sheer bliss.
I don’t get a chance to do this very often, and when I can, I’m not always in the mood, but today is perfect. I hear things I don’t usually hear in the music because I am engaged in the experience.
What a lovely way to end the year.
Take time to find the thing that you love, and enjoy it.
31 December 2022 — French West Indies
I don’t make predictions …
… but I do think that Social Media, in general, will come to a reckoning over the next year or so.
There’s building evidence of it being a net negative for society.
It may even be called a WMD one day. It is weaponised. It has a mass reach and is indiscriminate (despite the bs the likes of Meta et al. tell you about micro-targeting). We only need to establish the destruction it causes.
30 December 2022 — French West Indies
“There is only one Pelé”
From the Guardian:
João Saldanha, the coach who helped shape that 1970 side, once said: “Ask me who is the best right-back in Brazil, and I’ll say Pelé. Ask me about the best left-back or midfield man, or the best centre-forward. Always I must say Pelé. If he wants to be goalkeeper, he will be. There is only one Pelé.”
Indeed.
29 December 2022 — French West Indies
“What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine.”
Buying Instagram is best understood as part of a long pattern of Mark Zuckerberg coercing others into giving him power. From his days as a 19 year old designing a sexual-harassment-as-a-service website that exploited his female classmates to the Instagram acquisition, Zuckerberg — and thus Facebook’s — overwhelming ethos is “What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine.”
This a must-read from Cory Doctrow.
In my opinion, the key to getting out of this rut of division and extremism is related to the end of Facebook, sorry, “Meta”.
29 December 2022 — French West Indies
AI-Created Comic Has Been Deemed Ineligible for Copyright Protection
The United States Copyright Office (USCO) reversed an earlier decision to grant a copyright to a comic book that was created using "A.I. art," and announced that the copyright protection on the comic book will be revoked, stating that copyrighted works must be created by humans to gain official copyright protection.
This is so interesting on several levels.
The USCO says that works “must be created by humans” but doesn’t seem to define what “created” means clearly.
At what point in the creation process does the USCO determine that computer-enhanced artworks are no longer “created by humans”? Could Photoshop be too much AI? What about auto-generated insights on BI platforms producing visualisations? Where is the line drawn?
The artist pleads that “prompting” the AI is the artwork, and I sympathise with that argument.
However, where this argument is a little weak is that the AI in question is drawing from human-produced work —as are many AI systems— from other artists and does not necessarily have permission to be included in the model to create “copy writable” works. And as we’ve recently discovered, there’s a growing dispute about whether or not there is a legal basis for training an AI model using images etc., without the owner’s consent.
28 December 2022 — French West Indies
Ask, and ye shall receive
File this under “I did not know that.”
If you’re a researcher and you happen upon a scientific paper that you’re interested in reading, and it’s found on one of those scientific publisher sites, you’ll be asked to pay anything from a few dollars to hundreds to get a pdf.
From what I can tell, virtually (or literally), nothing goes to the author/s. Do this instead:
I’m starting to think scientists should have a Patreon account so I can bung them a cup of coffee or something.
26 December 2022 — French West Indies
That Steph Curry Video
I don’t know if you’ve seen the video, but it is damn impressive. But I had doubts. Turns out, for a good reason:
How to Use Physics to Tell If That Steph Curry Video Is Real
I’m not going to spoil it for you, but the ending is just as impressive when you think about it.
25 December 2022 — French West Indies
Oops. It wasn’t just account information… It was your passwords too!
The Verge:
If you have an account you use to store passwords and login information on LastPass, or you used to have one and hadn’t deleted it before this fall, your password vault may be in hackers’ hands. Still, the company claims you might be safe if you have a strong master password and its most recent default settings. However, if you have a weak master password or less security, the company says that “as an extra security measure, you should consider minimizing risk by changing passwords of websites you have stored.”
If I were a LastPass user, I’d be very worried.
I’d probably move to another service, or find an on-premises solution that doesn’t rely on trusting someone’s ability to implement security correctly.
Whether or not they had played fast and loose with the security of their customer’s data or not is irrelevant —unless you are an EU Citizen, and perhaps you should look at provisions under the GDPR for redress. I’m not a lawyer, yada yada…— their slow drip feed of disclosure is unforgivable.
They either knew and were withholding information (did someone mention GDPR?), or they didn’t know that they had put customer password data on backups, albeit encrypted. Both are dreadful examples of management.
There are a number of commentators speculating that cracking this data will take millions of years. I doubt it. Quantum computing, for one, is likely to solve that problem soon. Two, that estimate only holds true if we are static and don’t progress. A hundred years ago, we couldn’t imagine that we would have things we take for granted today in less than a million years.
23 December 2022 — French West Indies
It’s only going to get worse
According to the Guardian, “Cheating in professional exams is still a ‘live’ issue at the UK’s biggest audit firms, the accountancy watchdog warned.”
Just wait till ChatGPT or its successor gets good.
I’m a teacher, and I’m already trying to find ways to understand how to test that makes it harder for AI models like ChatGPT to provide coherent answers. I fear I may be losing that battle.
21 December 2022 — French West Indies
Another “End of Era”: Terry Hall
His voice and the Specials were part of the sound when we were growing up.
Saddened to hear of his passing.
The story behind Gangsters is interesting and totally Terry Hall.
Enjoy.
19 December 2022 — French West Indies