Notices by mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)

1 AM thoughts: I wonder who is the human who has circumnavigated the globe the most times. Like, left London travelling east and arrived back at London from the west.

I want to be difficult and say it only counts one way (like if you travel west London->London that's +1 but then if you travel east London->London that's -1) but that sounds unfair so let's say as long as you go 360 degrees of longitude one direction you get a point and the measurement resets.

Probably an airline pilot I guess

Can bugs smell. What is the simplest animal that has a sense of smell

If someone embodies all the evil and unpleasantness of the world, does that make them a Synecdouche

Do I feel like this computer is mine, or The Company's? Do I feel like The Company is trying to manipulate me? Do I feel like The Company feels that they own me? Does the computer feel like a sort of interloper, in my life, something that's wormed its way into my home, something I can't get rid of, something that will use this foothold someday to hurt me?

I like my Linux laptop that crashes once or twice a day. I like my Mastodon account where you can't really talk to anyone about anything but webdev or Rust. I like my Lenovo tablet that sometimes switches into Japanese for no reason. I like my Steam Deck that needs unique settings fiddling per game. I'm willing to put up with some friction & frustration from my computers & software. But what I can't ~abide~, and will twist my life into pretzels to avoid from my computers & software, is *malice*.

This was something I wrote into my drafts earlier this week and then yesterday I saw this news item that just. Really demonstrates the problem. Google is moving to a model where if you won't pay for YouTube they continually interrupt your listening with ads, and if you do pay for YouTube they interrupt your listening with injected bursts of "AI". These should both, fundamentally, be viewed as "ads", and the solution for both should be the same: Client-side adblockers. https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/09/youtube-music-is-testing-ai-hosts-that-will-interrupt-your-tunes/

Adblockers should block "AI" buttons and features and I don't understand why they don't

@evan I enjoyed my stay in Montreal.

Alright as soon as I get Situated on this train I'm gonna start asking a whole buncha questions about CSRF

@erincandescent @cwebber but at least it exists, right? which is more than you can say for did:plc

Question: "how infeasible/impossible is a hybrid server that satisfies both protocols [AtProto PDS and ActivityPub] simultaneously?" https://xoxo.zone/@clarity/115306161120635648https://xoxo.zone/@clarity/115306161120635648

Answer: M. Kasprzak already did this, in June of this year https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:svpym4ujks7qxczscyzq7fuy/post/3lr5iki7sf22a

in response to this post, i have been contacted by many members of mastodon who assure me that, in fact, they hardly know her

oc tober with your cock tober

@cwebber But also, WordPress is a horrible, security-vulnerability-infested nightmare to maintain, and the BlueSky PDS is easy and resource-cheap to maintain, so I'd rather have (and eventually, will write) PDS with a wordpress-like frontend than WordPress with a PDS-like frontend

@cwebber also the thing I see the PDS as providing at root is "a standard API for requesting data objects by key". a blog isn't that, you can address it by key (URL) but it returns formatted HTML not a data representation. RSS isn't that either, RSS is a linear recency-biased stream, and anyway we don't want RSS we want ActivityPub. You could expose the PDS xrpcs from Wordpress with a plugin the same way you can add ActivityPub to WordPress with a plugin.

@cwebber the important thing is not that it's new it's that they built it

What I'm listening to today: "What Does Your Soul Look Like?, Pt. 3", DJ Shadow

DJ Shadow followed up his major-label "debut" with an (incomplete) overview of his pre-"debut" indie releases. The information economy of the late 90s was less developed than that of today & getting into DJ Shadow in 1998 was a *little* confusing. Whatever! Here's the most rocking track from "preemptive strike". This *fucking* piano

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9VIDrDXJmc

PS: Shadow fans listen to the Mighty Atom Endtroducing mix

What I'm listening to today: "Small drops 2025-08-02", atnr

"Minimal Ambient". Giant reverb landscapes. Sitting on a dark hill, your hair mussed by gentle breeze, watching on the horizon the spaceships take off.

Made by combining Yamaha's modern DX7 revival, an original Game Boy, and three guitar pedals, one of which only exists to simulate the sound of cassette tape; someone probably *could* have made this exact music in 1989, in principle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSBqiEHJmH0

What I'm listening to today: "Durationplex", Sevish

This musician describes this track as an exercise in golden-ratio "maxxing"; the (xenharmonic) tuning scale is based on ϕ, the (polyrhythmic, constantly shifting) rhythms are based on ϕ, the FM timbres are based on ϕ. Experientially all you can tell is that the musician was doing something *very specific*, which you can grasp the shape of but not understand

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXMqkyVbFmI

( This track is also on Bandcamp: https://sevish.bandcamp.com/track/durationplex )

What I'm listening to today: "Speciation", Passepartout Duo

An old technique in ambient music is "phasing", where you play two loops of different lengths and let them go in and out of sync, creating different interesting patterns. It's a truism this requires electronics or tape, because two humans trying to play out-of-sync tempos would confuse each other. These two seem to be actually doing a live phase performance, dueling xylophone and gameboy-style squarewave loops

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bejBCgHHAmE