✱ Bulletins

The fate to which you are condemned as the one who brings a nice camera and takes nice photos of gatherings is to be the one person missing from all the photos of all the gatherings.

A good Bandcamp Friday.

Experiments in the letter شين (sheen) from a few years ago.

The fine folks over at deeplearning.ai openly saying they prefer AI companies just ignore robots.txt files and hope the courts back them in this.

The Batch Issue 260

What’s new: Researchers at MIT analyzed websites whose contents appear in widely used training datasets. Between 2023 and 2024, many of these websites changed their terms of service to ban web crawlers, restricted the pages they permit web crawlers to access, or both.
…
Yes, but: The instructions in robots.txt files are not considered mandatory, and web crawlers can disregard them. Moreover, most websites have little ability to enforce their terms of use, which opens loopholes. For instance, if a site disallows one company’s crawler, the company may hire an intermediary to scrape the site.
…
We’re thinking: We would prefer that AI developers be allowed to train on data that’s available on the open web. We hope that future court decisions and legislation will affirm this.

(Highlight mine).

💿

…

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Edgar Allan Poe, “A Dream Within a Dream”

Remember Ello.co?

Andy Baio’s blog post The Quiet Death of Ello’s Big Dreams is a good, sad, predictable telling of what happened to the site. Predictable, although I think Paul Budnitz (initial founder and CEO) ends up looking way worse than I expected. Not surprising given his later NFT/metaverse ventures.

We know that the universe is infinite, expanding and strangely complete, that it lacks nothing we need, but in spite of that knowledge, the tragic paradigm of human life is lack, loss, finality, a primitive doomsaying that has not been repealed by technology or medical science. The arts stand in the way of this doomsaying. Art objects. The nouns become an active force not a collector’s item. Art objects.

Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery by Jeanette Winterson, 1996, p. 19.

You know, it hasn’t been the breeziest of weeks, but thankfully I’ve received my monthly email reassuring me that I’m “on a roll on LinkedIn!”, and boy does it make it all worth it.

I’ve had Aquamarine by Danger Mouse and Black Thought (featuring a beautiful chorus by Michael Kiwanuka) on repeat for days. I’m stuck on the track, and I’m stuck on the music video, both of which I find very moving.

[Chorus: Michael Kiwanuka]

Everything’s burning down
When I close my eyes and pretend
Enemies all around
I don’t understand, my friend, my friend

[Black Thought]
…

Twilight is a message for me to write as a confession
The matrix, a dominatrix seeking to be served
Ever patiently waiting with the demons we deserve
Better be willing to pay with every dream that you deferred
If the vehicle should swerve, learn to lean into the curve

All of Cheat Codes is honestly… it’s very good.

Happy National Burrito Day to those who observe.

I wanted to be sure of the quiet gentle reason that I bear
And the honest waves of wonder, here lay gone
And in their place a sadness big and wide

So as to swallow up my joy, and long may be my life
This anger I can’t tame
And the fire that burns inside; yeah, I’m alive

So close up my eyes, cause I don’t want to see that I still feel the same after all this time
In the bathroom, in the mirror, in the light
Have you ever felt so bad you cannot cry?

I bear the mark, I am sigil to the spirits and the sprites
But I promised not to listen and stay in my life