is that what we're calling Bob Dylan now?

But there's definitely a fun George Kaiser Family vs Henry Kaiser Family project to be done.

absolutely wild to see multiple Howard Rheingold references into contemporary work on digital media. Not in a historicising sense, just like "let's see what ol' Howard has to say about TikTok."

@celrae.bsky.social see!
Next year in NYC.

In Berkeley for less than 10 min, at original Peets, a stranger is telling me about a girlfriend sleeping with Bob Weir, tweaking machine language code to port millipede for Atari when working there in the 80s, and significance of discrete cosine transformation in making jpgs of his b&w photographs.

“ investors worry a lack of insurance could leave them exposed to risks such as natural disasters, which could cause major damage to data centres that cost tens of billions of dollars to build. Others are struggling to secure sufficient cover for costly future disruptions in power or water supply.”

Lenders struggle to find insurance cover for mega data centre projects Lack of sufficient cover means some investors are walking away from deals

FT over here going “gee, would be a real shame if something were to unexpectedly happen to your data centre…”
www.ft.com/content/5ba0...

@marxist.af

the mac?

Once we started letting people do the geography of outerspace, it was over.

8 am AAG session and once again can't keep track if we're talking about NDVI or NVIDIA

Screen grab of 1984 "Silicon Valley" illustrated map showing several technology companies, a western themed sheraton, pendleton windery and the Chuck E Cheese corporate headquarters. https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s/stq9h8

Sometimes I am still amazed Silicon Valley has become what it has become.

Revealed: UK’s multibillion AI drive is built on ‘phantom investments’ Exclusive: Rented datacentres and unrealised supercomputer site raise questions for Starmer’s push to ‘mainline AI into veins of economy’

theyre not gambling on data centres so much as playing 3 card monte?

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Forum on Climate change and urban agrarian solidarities.

From food, water, and energy to social reproduction, the forum asks: how do we move from urban agrarian opposition to political solidarity?

Read: tandfonline.com/toc/ccit20/current

MOSS — A Painting Toy Where Every Brush Is a Tiny Program A 128x128 pixel canvas with programmable brushes. Code a brush, see what it does, share it with your friends.

hello! meet MOSS, the newest painting toy from @brainfruit.bsky.social

MOSS is a pixel art creator with programmable brushes and shareable pads. it's kind of like if procreate and asesprite got together and made something weird together.

www.moss.town

Yes.
But the real villain all along was the "learning management system"
... and the entire neoliberal for-profit, ed-tech, text-book-publishing, anti-intellectual, anti-union, "efficiency" and metrics driven apparatus behind it. This is the last nail?
Calling it 'Einstein' is a low blow though.

This is great! I was just searching for Jill Lepore’s bit on the national data center from “If/then” for students, and this Acker piece is even better for driving home the “this all could be different” point.

Happy annual re-reading of George Lipsitz’s seminal 1988 essay “Mardi Gras Indians: Carnival and Counter-Narrative in Black New Orleans” to all who celebrate.
(it is admittedly gets more dated by each passing year, but remains such a point of departure in my life)

The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K Le Guin YouTube video by AA School of Architecture

"When Ursula K Le Guin was writing a new story, she would begin by drawing a map. The Word for World, a book co-published by Spiral House + AA Publications, brings Le Guin’s maps together with poems, stories, interviews, recipes and essays" — video of AA launch (via @the-syllabus.bsky.social)

Replacing all social media with RSS feeds would fix the internet immediately.

"A budget is a statement of our values..."

Would be nice to hear this reflected in how we discuss financial modelling in UK HE. Currently, we seems to stuck at "number go up, number go down" rather than what kind of institution are we and why?

Grace Hopper holds up a piece of wire representing how far an electron can travel in one nanosecond.

For years I've relied on Grace Hopper's explanation that sending data via satellites is inherently slow because of the distances information has to travel up and down... but all the StarLink hoopla and NASA's TBRID, realising I may not really have a good grasp on this. Anyone have a good primer?

A bing news update on my work computer has informed me that the Victorian era ended on this day in 1901.
So you can stop debating that point at least.

1950s advertisement for CAMEL cigarettes with a smiling doctor holding a cigarette, modified to read "More Doctors prompt CHATGPT than any other generative ai." The doctor has six fingers as if made by an ai.

have reached a moment where friends and colleagues fully know their use of gen AIs is bad for everyone but the corporations who make them, but unprompted are pre-emptively defensive about it. Getting a lot of the same vibes from cigarette smokers in the 90s, "everyone does it, why am I the bad guy?"

I’m sure it was much more nuanced in the original French.

more like they're Bored of Peace?

the meme of Fred from Scooby Doo unmasking the villain—text above villain in masked frame says "infrastructure", text above villain in unmasked frame says "the means of production"

thinking about this some more

is this a question or an imperative?

not me on the BART website checking if they still run trains before 8 am

Could really use more reporting on the geography of why US companies 'need' Venezuelan oil. i.e. FT mentions in passing Gulf Coast refining infrastructure is built for crude they can't access now, so hundreds of billions in fixed capital not producing expected profits. Fix those spatial problems!

I mean, it'll definitely bias the audience towards jet-lagged nerds and help filter out the dudes who just show up to conferences to behave badly with their old pals 🤷‍♂️