– A black American man has applied for refugee status in Canada, citing unjust treatment by the police.
– I think I mentioned HOPSCOTCH, a mobile opera in 24 cars, before, but it sure is worth a mention again.
– The gyli continues to be amazing. That’s SK Kakraba.
– Saw the words “Long String Instrument” at Academy, was not disappointed by Ellen Fullman, who is the wizard behind it.
What a time we have, up here in Heaven.
– My man Stefan Maier turned me on to the music of Elaine Radigue, which is lovely.
– He likewise pointed me to the arcane folk at MSHR, who do…well, many things. “Ritual techno”? “Witch-house-hackathon”? Take a gander. (and think about LaMont Young, while you’re at it).
– Fugue Machine, by Alexandernaut, basically won the internet this week. Multiple play heads! Variable pitch / speed / direction! Amazing!
– While we’re here, Sonic Pi looks pretty great, as far as livecoding goes.
– GCHQ remain evil bastards who have no love. They’re watching you, now.
– But, China trumps the West: new “credit scores” in China are going to include social data, behavioural data, and the same data from your friends. Yes, that is as bad as it sounds.
– In slightly better news, some people are working on a mesh network for New York.
Once more with feeling!
– This Is My Jam is gone, but in the best way. Big love.
– Experiment.com is super interesting, and filled with some tricky things around conflict of interest and proof-of-expenditure, but has a bit of a huge ceiling.
– Novelty classical music performances generally hurt my teeth, but this Bach is … sort of amazing.
– Bret Victor is, as ever, not wrong.
– Say “forest megaphone“. See? (More to the point, the acoustic amplification of the tiny sounds of nature is super rad.)
– Always talk about nightclub history.
– I think these cats may have gotten blown up in the time between me reading this and me posting it, but a BitTorrent backed rogue / free streaming service has…lots of potential. (And some amazingly hard problems, but hey, c’est la vie)
– “Immerse yourself in synaesthetic alien vistas and control them like an ambient disco-god.” Well, sign me up for Panoramical.
– Stephanie Shirley on women and programming. Another amazing woman that I didn’t know about.
– More places doing the self-hosting thing: Known and Sandstorm.
– Went by Control today, and saw some gear by Mutable Instruments, and instantly fell in love. What’s not to like about a ‘Topographic Sequencer’?
– At the well-named Neocities, some neat words about IPFS and the “permanent web” – which is what I would call the distributed web, but a rose by any other name would be as much of a git / bitorrent backed filesystem.
– XENOFEMINISM. I mean, that’s an instant click, right?
– Some clever bunnies can do really scary good things with synthesizing photos from sketches.
– Twenty women who shaped electronic music. There will be a quiz.
– Wurrly is a bad name, but a machine that makes cover songs is…more compelling that you might think. There’s a future sneaking around here, somewhere, around hyperpersonalized music, edit culture, etc.
– If you’re the kind of person who is not instantly excited by a book called ABOUT TREES, well, I can’t help you.
Powers of two.
– I went to a PS1 Saturday show, and was really impressed by Rabit and JLin, who you can get hammered by here. PS1 also has the strangest, most awkward dancefloor setup of all time, for better or for worse.
– Libraries are running Tor nodes. Cue comments about tactical urbanism, etc
– James Holden famously made a patch for generating human timings from sequencers, which is black magic, but it got me thinking about the wow and flutter of real turntables. Do they have a similar impact on how rigidly sequenced music was heard?
– There are mics that can capture electromagnetic fields. Yessssss.
Polish, polish, hustle, hustle.
– Great articles on the current zeit by good people: https://medium.com/hand-brain
– The Pico-8 is a fantasy console that saves things in .PNG. It might be the best thing I’ve seen all year.
– Omenana is a magazine for African science and speculative fiction.
Busy times in New York City.
– My friends Peter Sobot and Matt Ogle made a dreamer. Is it just me, or is it somewhat creepy that a “dreaming” neural network produces images straight out of Lovecraft?
– “In his house in a Google datacenter, dead Cthulhu lies dreaming.”
– Lightyear.fm is keeping track of all of our radio emissions.
– Persistent Surveillance is just that, and was tested in Ohio, but thankfully not adopted, because some people don’t like living in a police state. Remember , “keeping us safe is a never-ending task.”
– Some of the wizards at Spotify mapped the world’s music. An amazing, amazing thing.
– The End Of Capitalism, question mark?
Went to a Monthly Music Hack Day, reinstalled Ubuntu, worked on The Future of Music. Also learned about Hip Hop Transcriptions, which made my day.
I’ve been thinking about music on the internet, which is sort of the area where I’ve made my living. It feel like the high wave that began in 1999 when Napster became the killer app for the internet has finally* broken and rolled back. We still, in 2015, have record labels. Everyone thought that they were dead – and then they invested in Spotify, and Jimmy Iovine is fronting Apple Music, and somehow nothing has changed.
In music, the workers have long since controlled the means of production. But distribution on The Internet requires that you own your hosting**, which is a pain even for nerds.
Is there a way to elide the hosting process (maybe through AWS?), allow people to upload their music, give them a gorgeous player, and make it embedable? If I am paying for my hosting, no one can tell me to take it down….and AWS offers a year free, as I recall.
* Yes, I am fully aware that I’m an old and nostalgic person.
** Bandcamp may save us all. Or Drip, for that matter.
What’s a bug? And is it a glitch? Or an error? Well.
It was Grace Hopper, who, before inventing the compiler, popularized the term “bug” (though Edison may have coined it).
When I was a callow youth testing video games for money, a “bug” was defined as something contrary to design, and we were instructed to never use the word “glitch” to refer to something going wrong with the software in question. “Error”, as a term, never came up, and “Exception” has its own meaning.
We don’t have “bug” art, though, or “error art” – we have glitch art. Glitch is a good German/Yiddish word, from “glitschen” and” gletshn” – which mean “slip”, in those two fine languages. It was, apparently, used in the US space program: John Glenn said that “Literally, a glitch is a spike or change in voltage in an electrical current.”
You can recover from a spike, or from a slip – whereas you may or may not recover from a bug, either in software or in your immune system. An error, on the other hand, is generally thought of as a permanent thing, whereas a glitch comes and goes, often seemingly of its own volition.
Glitch, for whatever reason, has come to indicate a visual or sonic error: the results of a glitch are apprehendable by the senses, and instantly recognizable as glitches. It would be rare to refer to, say, a subtle mistake made by a video game’s AI as a “glitch”, rather than a bug.
Bugs, of course, are legion. “There’s a bug in the system”, not “we introduced a bug into the system”, and almost never “There’s an error in our code”. The definition I was given of a bug as being contrary to design meant that the superclass of “bug” included both critical programming errors like memory leaks, and typos that caused a character’s hat to be the wrong colour.
Neither of those problems are a glitch, perhaps because they’re both easy to repeat. Both glitches and bugs, however, allow the programmers in question to sidestep responsibility for the errors that they introduced into the code. I’ve put lots of things out into the world, and seen them fail in some way, and waved it off by saying “oh, there are still some bugs”, when what I am actually saying is “I didn’t write good software”. If I see a glitch, I’ll probably be excited: “I didn’t know it could do that!”, for example.
Finally, “bug” may exist because “error” refers to an error in user input: sending in a credit card number that is only 12 digits, say. That will cause an exception in the code, which will hopefully be caught. It is thus by design that the code does something erroneous. So, rather than say “there was an error in my error-catching code”, it’s clearer to say that there was a bug.
