Charles Mingus: Cumbia and Jazz Fusion (excerpt)

a few minutes of super swinging AAVE

Template-based interactions—"Je voudrais un hot dog, s'il vous plaît … merci!"; "Où est le WC? … merci!"—where you more or less treat your interlocutor as a machine, are navigable for precisely the reason that they are of almost no cultural or experiential value. Even if your interlocutor's response is surprising or interesting, you might miss it. Wielding language's magic is intoxi-cating; becoming susceptible to it, even more so.

[Inormation entropy as "how unique or surprising is this?" threads through: text prediction, text generation, autocorrect, search, cloze tests, data compression and transmission, encryption, memory, summarization, random noise, language learning, language evolution…]

["They lived happily ever after" in information entropy terms means "Nothing noteworthy happened for the rest of their lives".]

[People ask "how did you meet your spouse?" and not "how did you stay married?" because the latter is a story of struggle and pain.]

[Entropy is why we place more value on advice from someone whose response is less predictable.]

[Pithy marketing phrases are "cliches with a diff".]

[Drug dealers and their clients have to constantly invent new language as if they were poets when referring to substances, because known euphemisms or cliches can mean jail.]

[Latin speakers naming those with whom they break bread "com-panis" ("with bread") led to our word "companion".]

[People are always changing as you get to know them—partly due to your presence: they are never still.]

[Neurons change their connection structure each time they fire. Functional brains change. Experience changes you or it didn't happen. Relating is risky because you can't get to know someone without changing them or somewhat becoming them.]

[We can't actually touch anything: our perception of contact is really body atoms and table atoms exerting electromagnetic force on each other—dynamic exchange rather than static contact.]

Individual practice without the intensity of group training may seem less "intense" or "focused" as you find your way, but it also takes extra energy to self-organize and adapt so that sessions are possible in environments that are fluctuating, noisy, less private, not purpose-built, or adverse for other reasons.

G.R. Mocidade Independente De Padre Miguel: Repique Reza Forte

plucky old-time guitar solo on a groovy samba

My dinner with Andre

[New York is the new model for a prison that's built by the inmates themselves. The inmates are also the guards and very proud of what they've built. Having been lobotomized, they have little capacity to leave the prison they've made or even see it as a prison.]

Pharoah Sanders: The Creator Has A Master Plan

impressive vocal control with this rapid falsetto breaking; nice n' crazy free jazz before and after

ศักดิ์สิทธิ์ เวชสุภาพร [Tor Saksit]: ปรากฏการณ์ [Phenomenon]

catchy Thai melody I stumbled upon in 2023 but never got around to learning; some cliche jazzy chords with nice surprises

Why are you obsessed with US?

[Profit from environmental exploitation wastes tangible resources to generate hypothetical value in the form of money, which derives its vaue from the resources being wasted; like a system that consumes itself by merely existing.]

Comedian Harmonists: Mein Kleiner Grüner Kaktus

more silly German music suggestions in response to my question, this one about "my little green cactus".

also, some vulgar Mozart in Good night, You are quite an ox and one I won't translate.

Mussorgsky/Ravel: The Great Gate Of Kiev

bone-chillingly majestic as it is, but it probably feels stronger to listen to the 11 parts before. from Pictures at an exhibition

[The deaf] can comfortably sign while watching someone else sign. In large groups it still makes sense to have one "speaker" at a time, because people cannot look in more than one direction at a time, but conversations between pairs [have more overlapping communication than spoken conversations, as if they talk and listen simultaneously.]

[Conversation is best as duet over duel: each positioning the other to say great things, playing for the game and assist rather than the score.]

[Debate features adversarial "zero-sum" conversation, where weakening their position is as good as strengthening yours, and largely militaristic metaphors of] defending a statement, attacking a position, falling back to a weaker version of a thesis, countering one accusation with another.

[An alternative to the debate game could be one where two sides are given seemingly incompatible objectives for an upcoming legislation and scored on how well they argue that it supports their side. The score of each side added up and given to both sides, so they rank higher by collaborating more.]

Susso: Keira (2016)

music inspired by, and directly sampling, the magnificent sounds of the Mandinka people, recorded during a recent trip to Gambia.

3. Bani: glitchy sampling and splicing of former words.
4. Son Kunda: hip-hop electronic beat overlayed with tribal singing that's nicely unrelated to the instrumental tonality

[Answering questions about my book can mean: "short sound bites", "short anecdotes", "long considered reflections", or "long comprehensive explorations". I leave "pores" or pauses in my response to let the listener interject, hint at continuation, or change topics, and then gauge how deep to go based on that feedback.]

[Usage patterns show speakers using "uh" before shorter pauses of less than a second and "um" to indicate that a longer pause is ahead.]

[The longer you analyze stocks, the more markets have time to change. Fashion seasons also change while you shop; most] bad fashion is simply good fashion at the wrong time]

[Bryan Ferneyhough deliberately composes unperformable music to force interpreters to break out of simple reproduction and instead involve themselves as co-creators of site-specific performances (that can't be repeated).]

[Being spontaneous means keeping up with the situation, but you can't be sensitive if it changes while you're making sense of it.]

ive been "promoting" things on the internet for 15 years now! here's my top tips

• show yourself having fun
• many consistent repeated small launches is better than one big launch
• someone needs to see something like nine times before it sticks
• reward people for following along with everything. you can never go too far with in-jokes
• let people feel part of something.
• never show off. never try to be cool
• be like a monster in a horror film - never show the whole thing. make it seem like there's more to discover by clicking through
• create drama and arguments by being fearless and stupid
• make it clear you dont need anyone - you're having fun on your own. its more infectious that way
• show how you feel. feelings are more powerful than information
• its a lot like rolling the dice. to go viral once, roll a thousand dice

We still have a choice!

[Aspiring tech overlords seek to remove people's ability to consent.]

[Destabilizing the developing world through stealing resources and destructive wars is a cause for mass displacement and migration. The spoils are used to build western tech infrastructure and mass surveillance is proposed as a solution to people's fears of scary migrants walking around.]

[The ruling class wants you to believe you shouldn't have a say in how your society's resources are used to shape the future of your society; it's necessary to convince you because it's actually not inevitable.]

[Computers may be one of the first tools to preceed their tasks: first build it, then figure out what to do with it.]

"There is no shallow end," a philosophy professor told me. Because any objection whatsoever, from any angle, can fell a theory, you can't carve out ace of philosophical territory, master it in isola-, and move on to the next.

My first day of class in the philosophy major, the professor opens the semester by saying that anyone who says that "philosophy is useless" is already philosophizing, building up an intellectual argument to make a point that is important to them, and therefore defeating their own statement in the very breath of uttering it.

You question the assumptions of physics and you end up in metaphysics—a branch of philosophy. You question the assumptions of history and you end up in epistemology—a branch of philosophy. You try to take any other discipline out at the foundations and you end up in philosophy; you try to take philosophy out at the foundations and you only end up in meta-philosophy: even deeper in than when you started.

There is Always Another Lunch

most daily choices are reversible, and because life presents an endless stream of future opportunities, spending excessive time and energy on minor decisions is inefficient and puts you at the end of the lunchtime rush of orders put into the kitchen.

we create a caste system at our companies that mimics the caste system we create with respect to our own bodies and selves. My hands are mine, we say, but my brain is me. This fits in nicely with our sense of an inner homunculus pulling the levers and operating our body from a control room behind our eyeballs.

[If a musician is constantly and fluidly inventive, it's partly because they refuse to bore themselves.]

[What you call "being stuck" is for me "composing".]

[Art resists scale.]

What I can do here, I cannot—I cannot do in another place.

[Chess openings and closings can be tabulated, whereas the middle is actual gameplay.]

human.json

a lightweight protocol for humans to assert authorship of their site content and vouch for the humanity of others.

Things lost in translation

In Western contexts, "martyr" carries a heavy political or theological weight—the idea that someone made a conscious choice to die for a cause. But that isn't how shaheed functions for Palestinians.

Calling a child playing in a yard, a sleeping family, or an elderly patient in a hospital bed a shaheed isn't claiming agency or choice. None of them chose to be targeted. Instead, shaheed is an act of love, sanctity, and honor. It is a communal refusal to let a life stolen by Israeli military violence be reduced to a cold, clinical statistic.

This creates a constant struggle in translation: In English, saying someone was "killed" feels completely inadequate—it strips away the honor owed to the victim and flattens the active, systematic violence taking their life.

What you get, the cobbling together of hundreds of thousands of prior conversations, is a kind of conversational purée. Made of human parts, but less than a human sum. Users are, in effect, chatting with a kind of purée of real people-the ghosts of real people, at any rate: the echoes of conversations past.

We once thought humans were unique for having a language with syntactical rules, but this isn't so; we once thought humans were unique for using tools, but this isn't so; we once thought humans were unique for being able to do mathematics, and now we can barely imagine being able to do what our calculators can.

each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not.

A Quirky Introduction To Number Systems

[Math is software for your brain: each concept is an app or approach with uses and limitations. Getting stuck on a problem often has more to do with our method than reality itself.]

A King In New York

Charlie Chaplin lectured by his son about freedom

Don't Make Assumptions

This is how learning works. Be interested. Don’t assume you know anything. That’s how you stay dumb. Be a beginner. Ask questions.

The Craft of Capitalism

‘Sterile’ is a word that accompanies the spread of modern corporate capitalism, precisely because of that process in which the rough edges of older, more informal markets are sanded away. In the midst of an accelerating capitalist economy, people operating according to its logic feel compelled to remove friction or ‘inefficiency’, but in doing so begin to scour away all the texture that gives a neighbourhood its soul. Inefficient snags are the very thing around which community collects, which is why efficiency can create malls but not community.

Gentrification appropriates the aesthetics of punk, anarchism, village life or immigrant culture, and uses it as a marketing tool while stripping away the substance of that culture.

The end result of a gentrification is an area that feels like a museum of itself. Your eyes catch glimpses of things that still look edgy, exotic or alternative, and yet your body does not feel it, because all those little cues that would be present in an authentic and alive space are missing. The honesty box by the beer fridge is gone. In its place is a Square terminal for cashless payments, plugging into the banking sector via Visa and Mastercard.

Ingo Insterburg: Ich liebte ein Mädchen

style seems quite specific or idiomatic to German or Germany, curious to know other examples that fit this description

Jacob Bessen on How Sicilians are Neighbouring with Migrants

what do you want to keep purely for yourself, and what would actually be more fun if it were shared or done alongside other people?

Modern houses, built for self-contained nuclear families, are sealed against the world, the smells and sounds and life kept in, and that seal is precisely what has to be broken. In Sutera, people actively mourn the older ways of living around piazzas and street corners, because they wish they could easily see and feel the presence of others nearby and invite them in and go to others without invitation.

In this context, small towns aren’t boring because people are brilliant at talking, storytelling, and joking. That art atrophies without practice. In contrast, much sociality in much of modern life is organised around consumption rather than presence.

To enjoy breathing can mean enjoying the rest of your life.

Just Pay the Subscription

Take your favorite indie developer out to coffee, look them in the eye, and tell them the $5.99 you just spent on them should be good to cover their work until they die.

Paulo César Pinheiro, Mauro Duarte: Nunca Mais

very brazillian to turn the same repeated phrase into flowy magic; melody works nicely as instrumental too

AI: Artificial Ingredients

Git search all diffs

git log -G "alfa" -p bravo/

Let's talk about Trump and the GOP’s red scare rhetoric failing on the youth....

[The right-wing managed to mainstream socialism, which socialists were never able to do, simply by using it as a "derogatory" label for every means of government assistance that helped people most in need.]

[Young people without Cold War experience of socialism embrace the political ideology without associating it with the Soviets.]

[Reading a physical book gives me a choice to turn the page, look away, put it down, and trust that it will be as I left it when coming back.]

He changed the job description of what a comedian could be.

[Selling to a satisfied person is hard.]

[Curiosity is an antidote to the fatigue and paralysis caused by information overload.]

[Listen to the ones who want you to think, not the ones selling you a team to join.]

[Listen to those who don't need anything from you.]

X: Claude Fable 5 will be available globally tomorrow!

X: But what about safety?

Me: First you must decide who you are focused on protecting? Users, citizens or existing power structures and specifically, which ones? The paths are not the same. Market benefit rarely coincides with social benefit.

kottke.org memberships

In an ideal world: I write for you, you pay me, I write some more. No middlemen.

[Surprising someone changes their world.]

Carney's financialization brought us Trump's fascism

[Carney represents and helped manifest the rules-based order that he admits was a lie (it never applied equally) and that he now mourns.]

[When we have been morphed by financialization into players within a cruel game of artificial scarcity, the feeling of being cheated out of the world we deserve becomes fuel for fascists to exploit in order to take control.]

[Capitalism produced (among others) a crisis of social reproduction that prevents a large portion of population from having enough material stability to start families. Fascists reframe this decline in population growth as caused by LGBTQ people attacking traditional family values.]

[Fascism today breaks with the anti-capitalism of Hitler and Mussolini to use markets as the arena to demonstrate strength and capacity to rule. Cronyism and bribes are common because they signal acceptance by the market.]

[When you move somewhere on your own, you might wonder if you'll ever "fit in" or feel at home. As long as you look honestly at yourself and your needs, be your truest form and give it generously to others, you'll find where you belong.]

👎🏽: talking about people you never met

👍🏽: meet them, talk with them

SpaceX IPO + Inflation

[Stock offerings have historically been a way for the public to generate wealth by participating in a company's growth, but they can limit people's returns via IPO after decades of operation. Microsoft's price today is 750x from 1986. SpaceX's $1.8 trillion valuation after 24 years of operation is ninety-two times its yearly revenue, which means they would need to be eventually be worth over a quadrillion dollars to achieve similar returns.]

ADVANCED AIRHORN TUTORIAL

so many rhythmic permutations from a single sound sample