| Name | Marco von Ballmoos |
|---|---|
| Member since | |
| [hidden] | |
| Home page | https://earthli.com/users/marco |
| Description |
The (only) developer at earthli.com. |
| 3752 | Articles |
|---|---|
| 113 | Comments |
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Published on in Technology & Engineering
The joke does not continue; my apologies. Unless the joke is that we will soon be even less able to comprehend, make sense of, or otherwise act on hypotheses about the world because we are accelerating our already advanced pollution of our information environment. What does that mean?
Actually salient information drowns in a sea of utterly meaningless noise. It’s been this way for a while, if you’ve been paying attention. Social media was the first booster rocket taking us further away from... [More]
Published on in Miscellaneous
I watched the first round of the semifinals but didn’t take notes. I was inspired to take notes for the second semifinals. It was a dumpster fire.
There were 16 contestants, but I’ve only reviewed fifteen below. Sue me.
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Published on in Miscellaneous
The article Found through Google, bought with Visa and Mastercard: Inside the deepfake porn economy by Kat Tenbarge (NBC News) described something I’d been only vaguely aware of.
“Most deepfake videos are of female celebrities, but creators now also offer to make videos of anyone. A creator offered on Discord to make a 5-minute deepfake of a “personal girl,” meaning anyone with fewer than 2 million Instagram followers, for $65.”
Customized porn of anyone is novel to me. I’d never read it hypothesized in any of the... [More]
Published on in Technology & Engineering
Drag-Drop Image Conversion by Simon Willison is a gist that contains the conversation that Simon Willison had with Ghat-GPT to build a drag-&-drop image converter.
First of all, he started working on it on April 1st, but it’s hard to believe that he’s pranking—he doesn’t seem the type—so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. Assuming that this is real, it’s impressive that it can turn those prompts into a working application.
Although … did it? If you copy/paste any of its examples into an HTML page,... [More]
Published on in Technology & Engineering
Why Are Lithium Prices Collapsing? (Hacker News)
The comments are full of people heralding the growth of Lithium mining, as if there being more of it available has come at no cost to anyone. Of course, they don’t think about the destroyed environment or the destroyed communities—they think only of their privileged, 1% future because they know they only ever benefit from increased extraction—in the form of increased availability or lower prices or both—and they never suffer any of the ill effects. Then... [More]
Published on in Miscellaneous
Why This Art Is In Every Hair Salon by Nerdwriter (YouTube)
Near the end, he shows a matrix of Nagel’s artwork, showing 25 skinny white women and then says
“They give the impression of real people—chic, fashionable, independent people—but still leave enough space for you to place yourself in them. For salons, Nagel-women served as aspirational images, though it has to be said that these women, all being of one complexion, it’s likely they were only aspirational for a certain segment of the population. This speaks to the warped priorities of 1980s... [More]”
Published on in Finance & Economy
DuoLingo is teaching my partner and I something about neoliberal capitalism.
She is in the Diamond League (very prestigious). It treats her like chattel. She has to do sooooo much work to stay in the league. I, on the other hand, am also in the Diamond League, but I have to do hardly any work at all to stay there. Sometimes I do one lesson a day for a couple, three days in a row. No biggie. No demotion. Nobody’s working too hard in my chapter of the Diamond League.
My partner, on the other... [More]
Published on in Technology & Engineering
I don’t think I’m an especially fussy user of software. I just can’t help noticing when it keeps doing stuff that it wants to do rather than what I want it to do. I also can’t help noticing how so much software manages to utterly fail to adequately do even the simplest tasks that are directly related to the thing they were built for doing.
Today, I had Apple Maps open in Schaffhausen. I searched for a route from Winterthur Bahnhof to a restaurant. I left... [More]
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Published on in Movies
These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1600 ratings... [More]
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Published on in Quotes
“I apologize for such a long letter—I didn’t have time to write a short one.”
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Published on in Quotes
“The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through the vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”
“Ultimately, the artist and the revolutionary function as they function, and pay whatever dues they must pay behind it because they are both possessed by a vision, and they do not so much follow this vision as find themselves driven by it”
Published on in Movies
These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1600 ratings publicly... [More]
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Published on in Miscellaneous
Would you like to buy a used Mercedes with 558HP for only CHF130K?
This car was sitting on a tiny, used-car lot near our home. They usually have only 3-5 cars on offer, usually more high-end stuff. This was much, much higher-end than usual, but I’m sure it will be snatched up by some eager young man who needs 558HP to get around town.
Published on in Fun
I was watching a video today—Everything Is Going to Be Fine: Preparing for the end of the world by Aeon Video (YouTube)—which featured the narrator and his wife in their apartment, shown below.
This is actually what they look like—like caricatures made up by conservative “comedians” making fun of hipsters. I know we shouldn’t make fun of people’s appearance—lord knows I have no idea what I’m doing—but this was just too good to pass up.
He has a pen in his pocket. What is that?
It was only later that I... [More]
Published on in Technology & Engineering
I was looking for a great movie called Oeconomia on YouTube.
Wie entsteht Geld? − Macht. Herrschaft. Geld. Über Staatsverschuldung, EZB & riesige Privatvermögen by MrMarxismo (YouTube)
It is excellent, but it is a dry movie in German about macroeconomics.
What it is not, is a movie you would watch on the offhand chance of seeing some nudity. YouTube felt that it needed to correct this oversight and spice things up in the search results.
The first link (included above) in the results is to the entire movie and is really the only result you need. If you’re not already sure you want to see it, then you can watch... [More]
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Published on in Technology & Engineering
I’ve taken a bunch of notes and read a bunch of essays and talked to a bunch of people since I wrote Yeah, sure, let’s talk about AI, so let’s see where we stand on the day after April Fool’s day[1], which is the day on which we used to not trust anything we read on the Internet. It turned out to be a harbinger of times when we would not trust any sources on any day of the year from human sources. And, now, because we are going to always suspect that we’ve been fooled into reading a 19-page... [More]
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Published on in Programming
The intended audience of this document is people interested in knowing which commands to execute to update submodules. The initial analysis section is intended for people interested in knowing how the commands work and what their strengths/weaknesses are.
The inspiration for this documentation was that I was wondering whether submodules were always cloned with detached heads and if there were some way to avoid that. The short answers to these questions are, respectively, “yes”... [More]
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
mkv with ffmpeg Published on in Programming
I’d watched an excellent movie[1] that was primarily in German but had some English parts, with hard-coded English subtitles and soft German subtitles plastered on top of that. I wanted to cite a bunch of interesting sections, so I looked for the subtitles online. Only the English subtitles are available, which I didn’t want. I liked the German formulation and wanted to cite that.
Well, I have the subtitles: they’re just trapped in the mkv file. I figured that there was some way of extracting... [More]
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Published on in Quotes
“If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.”
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
I’ve been following and reading Matt Taibbi’s journalism for quite some time. The first reference to an article of his I can find is from Lies, Damned Lies and The Media, in which I cited an article of his called Punish the Right-Wing Liars, published on AlterNet. He’s been on right side of justice for a long time. He’s been chastising the press for lying and forsaking its journalistic duties for just as long.
Whereas he used to hammer exclusively on the more right-wing press during the Bush... [More]