This is a linkblog written by Dante.
By 'linkblog' I mean this is a blog consisting of links to other sites or posts that I find interesting, noteworthy, or generally of interest. Occasionally I'll include my own thoughts on the links as well. You can subscribe by RSS to get all posts including commentary, or get daily, weekly, or even monthly updates if that is more your speed.
All links include comments sections, and you're welcome to leave your thoughts as well.
You can find my main blog here.
Attendees float outside their environment and consciousness, smoking opium and building a Xanadu pleasure-dome near the desert stream of Wadi Nahabir. Suddenly: a massive boom. Sirens. Cracks. Pops. Hisses. And screeches. A universe is broken and remade by the warfare that nurtured it into being.
Absolutely fantastic, heartbreaking, infuriating writing on the legacy of Israeli genocides, Palestinian resistance, raves, and EDM.
Music scenes often develop through the same dynamics of resource enclosure and commercial exchange that those who live through them typically ignore. For instance, it would be dishonest to speak of Chicago house music without some understanding of land theft, racial segregation, environmental neglect, and wealth inequality in the North American Great Plains. The same is true of Israeli rave and EDM. Culture never develops in isolation, and electronic music is a reflection of the political systems—in this case, colonization—that allows it to thrive. It is through that system, especially its security and policing guarantees, that land is stolen, reallocated, remade, and finally positioned to force permanent exile on its refugees living nearby.
I don't even know what more to say. If you're interested in the modern rave scene I think this has to be required reading.
Israeli electronica launders the reality of mass killing, managing the psyches of those whose lives are built through the violence of a racist system. It will be remembered for its fascistic utility like Wagnerian opera and Beethoven symphonies in Nazi Germany, and those who resist it will be remembered for their bravery and steadfast opposition to injustice. When the guns fall silent, and Zionist leaders like Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir are brought before a new version of the Nuremberg Trials, there must be a parallel discussion about Israeli raving and the roles it has played in the bloodshed.
“Since the beginning of the modern era, Black mobility has always been contained and policed,” Saucier says. “There is no one definitive form of segregation that has led to excluding black people from cycling—the whole problem is overdetermined by a host of historical and contemporary practices,” he adds. “The bike, and cycling in general, is really a microcosm of American society and global society in terms of access to things.”
Devolver said the unpredictable nature of indie publishing is not "readily compatible" with the reality of semi-annual public reporting, which places an emphasis on "predictable, sequential growth."
Good on Devolver for this one.
Equating wealth, especially generational wealth, with virtue and ability is a deeply American pathology. This country loves to believe that people get what they deserve, despite the abundant evidence to the contrary. Nowhere is this more obviously untrue than with our gentry class.
Good modern American class analysis.
This assistant provides the most important benefits of LLM assistants without the associated environmental costs, privacy risks, and economic brinksmanship.
The main thing I'd want to communicate is that the places where these signs go up are uniformly miserable. It sucks to be a person on foot in a place where the state has to warn you that it's too dangerous to cross a regular city street. These streets are terrible, loud, dirty, and they smell bad. A crowded urban street with a "no pedestrian crossing" sign is a place created by infrastructural and institutional failure and it sucks that we have any of them in these busy neighborhoods.
This is my claim: we, as a civilization, forgot how to center things.
Lovely blogpost/rant about centering in the modern UI landscape.
New York City may be part of a dying empire, but the USA is the dying empire. [..] The only reason DSA has gotten this far in the first place is that we are in an era of imperial decline, meaning the status quo will no longer be good enough. Normal methods of governance no longer suffice, not even from the standpoint of the elite.
The contemporary DSA is rife with arguments for and against supporting a hypothetical AOC run for president in 2028. The "inevitability" of AOC is often bandied about and I cannot say I am a fan -- we are many legislative sessions from that point and AOC has not had a flawless record on those. I consider it viable to run candidates that are outwardly identifying as Socialist/Communist, assuming that the goal is not victory for the candidate but victory for the party, and the party remaining the spearpoint of the people.
I do not believe that AOC, or the current incarnation of the DSA, fits that bill. The DSA is not (yet, perhaps) an electoral Communist organization. Even if it was, I would have some concerns about an electoral-first strategy (an extremely Kautskyist angle, if I may say so!).
In summary, to meet the minimum standard of "good governance," AOC would need to go well beyond liberal progressivism and embrace a radical socialism that she has thus far avoided.
I found this piece a good dismantling of some of the assumptions surrounding the electoralist, Kautskyist approach that favors Just Winning The Presidency as the be-all-end-all of American socialism. The goal is not the presidency, the goal is the world.
My argument, as laid out in both of the two relevant articles, is that a President AOC with DSA’s endorsement but no accountability to its program will not be willing or able to do what it takes to have a "successful" socialist Presidency, thus fatally discrediting the movement when she flounders. Hopefully the evidence already provided makes it clear which of the two futures is more likely.
This is a one (or two, perhaps) ingredient veggie burger made by growing mycelium on cracked sorghum groats. The mycelium binds the groats together, forming a patty that absorbs fat and moisture, becoming juicy and bouncy very much like a beef patty.
I am intrigued. I wonder if I could make this. Fungus burger.
The mycelium also contributes to the umami taste of the patty, and in combination with additional savory sauces like shoyu, garum, or yeast extract, it truly begins to taste and feel like biting into meat!
All eleven District Attorneys' offices run on a shared database called DAMION, which holds the record of essentially every criminal case in the state and is roughly twenty-five years old.
Interesting story if a bit AI-wonky, however what you really need to see in this piece is the screenshots of Win95-era justice department software that is apparently still in use. Wowie
The world is full of people who insist that "AI is changing everything" but who – when pressed – have to admit that what they mean is that they're pretty sure that AI will change everything. Eventually. After we allow it to consume all the planet's energy, carbon, water and financial resources.
Maybe.
After crossing the 100-gigawatt mark in 2012, it took the world 10 years to deploy 1 terawatt of solar power. An additional 1 terawatt, enough to meet all of US power demand at its peak, took less than three years to build. Not even two years later in 2026 — the precise timing is subject to debate among analysts — the 3-terawatt threshold was reached.
Some good news. And, naturally:
The first terawatt was mostly rich countries subsidizing the installation of solar, with China and poor countries still finding photovoltaics too expensive. That story changed going into the second and third terawatt, with China taking the baton from rich countries.
The current government of the United States is not going to get us out of climate change. The vanguard of modern communism, however, has a pretty good shot.
The first stop is removing the toolbar and the sidebar, and any other bars. The second is switching to the icon view, and picking the right window dimensions. What’s needed next is a link to the Applications folder. The last ingredient? A custom background that’s placed underneath and creatively uses the fact the size and the position of all the icons are known.
Lovely little collection of Mac install windows. h/t to waxy.org.
There is no “good” path in Tyranny which the player can take to extricate themselves from a crooked system. There is no happy ending for anyone in the game and certainly not for the player. If the player’s allies do not turn on and murder them during the game, it is sure to happen not long after the credits roll.
I am a huge fan of Obsidian's 2016 game Tyranny, and I think it's often overlooked. I don't think it's perfect but man when it hits it hits hard. A strange, unsettling little game.
It is, genuinely, a dramatically more empowering way to use your computer than the alternative, and it will enable to think about your computer as a tool in ways that are completely different.
This website was made with the command kind in Linux! Almost everything I do these days on The Computer includes using the command line and guess what? It's great. It's a really good way to interface with a computer as it turns out. I agree with Bruno.
Hard to say what my favorite cover song is, but this would be very high up there.
Audiences today are allergic to directness - they prefer stories to be about unfolding secrets, and they want convoluted Plots which involve them in a process of discovery. [...] Audiences have been trained by the last 20 years of high-budget television to analyze plot, but not to analyze theme. This stuff frequently makes me feel completely insane.
I think I'm warmer on The Odyssey than Laura is overall, but I agree wholeheartedly with this bit. What I like about Nolan is his bluntness, even when it's often the worst part of his movies. That worked for me in The Odyssey. But the way people are talking about it is, like Laura, also driving me insane.
This selective application of the term “authoritarian” reveals that Western discourse on “freedom” is designed to delegitimize resistance while legitimizing empire. By treating anti-imperialist struggle as equivalent to fascist tyranny, the so-called “collective West” erases the distinction between liberation and oppression.
I still think their latest album is probably their best overall but 'Beast of Carthage' is constantly stuck in my head and is an amazing track.