#460 - Googly eyed AI, 19th century memes, and guerrilla gardeners
I saw both Deadmau5 and Stromae at Bill Graham this week (separately), and both were excellent. Stromae even had robot arms holding giant LED TVs, a robot dog, and dance move tutorials playing as he played.
Tech
De-platforming Is a Fix, But Only a Short-Term One — www.justsecurity.org
I somehow missed the fact that Google, Apple, and AWS all deplatformed (de infra'd?) right wing news app Parler after the Jan 6 insurrection. This article points out that deplatforming doesn't solve the problem and simply drives it further underground and more radical.
Someone made giant googley eyes for self driving cars so you know what they're paying attention to. Hilarious.
Lifehacks
Guerrilla gardening action on unclaimed Mission parcel draws joy, anger — missionlocal.org
There is a vacant parcel of land in the Mission District that nobody technically owns, so the neighbors have fenced it in as a parking lot. Other neighbors prefer to convert it to a garden, so added their own lock to the fence and did so guerrilla style. Angry local politics ensue.
This gets intersectional real fast - who gets to decide what is done with that land? Absent local governance it's whoever makes it their own - so I don't see why the parking lot crowd gets rights just because they got there first.
Clearly the authorities need to step in, and until then it's a little plot of whatever anyone who cares enough to get involved decides, as long as they can fight off the others
The Viral Texts Project — viraltexts.org
Project that identifies what text 'went viral' in the 19th century by looking at many printed texts. Fun to see that those copypasta email chains of puns and jokes go way back!
Fun
Emperor Norton — en.wikipedia.org
Some guy in 1859 proclaimed himself "Norton I., Emperor of the United States", and San Francisco just....went along with it, with shops giving him free stuff in return for his fake currency and police saluting him. He also called for a Bay Bridge, which was prescient.
Now that's the SF I know! Fun to see it goes way back.
Apparently Pig Latin is so cool in French that it's used as street slang, by inverting the first and last syllables of a word. Given its nonlogical pronunciations versus the written word, this ends up being rather tricky to decipher, or so I'm told.
Ex: Stromae is verlan for maestro.