Fascinating Bandcanp Daily post on the pioneers of computer music via Bruce Sterling https://daily.bandcamp.com/lists/computer-music-album-guide https://mastodon.social/@bruces/114366199656187748
Which Australian members of parliament consistently voted for compulsory income management for welfare recipients?
Interesting list. https://theyvoteforyou.org.au/policies/298
Turmoil has engulfed the Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying nations is in dispute. https://benhr.xyz/2025/04/15/turmoil-has-engulfed-the-republic.html
“The problem is, these code suggestions often include hallucinated package names that sound real but don’t exist. I’ve seen this firsthand. You paste it into your terminal and the install fails – or worse, it doesn’t fail, because someone has slop-squatted that exact package name." https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/12/ai_code_suggestions_sabotage_supply_chain/
How people (on reddit) are using A.I. in 2025 https://benhr.xyz/2025/04/13/how-people-on-reddit-are.html
An interesting discussion about the pitfalls Big Tech geopolitics and alternate futures that might be possible https://benhr.xyz/2025/04/11/an-interesting-discussion-about-the.html
>Their ambulances were crushed and partly buried. Nearby were their bodies – also buried, en masse, in the sand. Our dead colleagues were still wearing their Red Crescent vests. In life, those uniforms signalled their status as humanitarian workers; they should have protected them. Instead, in death, those... benhr.xyz https://benhr.xyz/2025/04/09/their-ambulances-were-crushed-and.html
“It’s one part of a very cruel puzzle.”
Inhumane prison hulks return from Australia’s past to its present. https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/law-crime/2025/04/05/australias-inhumane-floating-prisons
Visiting other studio photographers in Lagos, he kept getting the same response: they had all destroyed their negatives. Digital photography had rendered them expensive and obsolete. Even knowing that, learning of their burning was jarring.
Outstanding work from The Continent. Its arrival is the most welc... benhr.xyz https://benhr.xyz/2025/04/05/visiting-other-studio-photographers-in.html
On murmuration 
https://archive.is/WZPBg
I rewatched V for Vendetta for the first time since it was in cinemas. I wondered “what did old mate Roger Ebert’s make of it”. Not quite what I was expecting. 
Technical and lengthy but super-interesting:
Cryptocurrency and Extremism: How Social Network Analysis is Used to Track Extremist Cryptocurrency Donations https://gnet-research.org/2025/03/24/cryptocurrency-and-extremism-how-social-network-analysis-is-used-to-track-extremist-cryptocurrency-donations
"The point here is that the artificial intelligentsia is dragging us into an archaic future where intelligence is quantified, fixed, and ranked, and smartness is fetishized. We would do well to remember that IQ is, above all, a eugenic concept, concocted to sort winners from losers and to justify the rules of the game. Eugenics … in the 21st century … among those who fancy themselves futurists?"
The New Artificial Intelligentsia - LARB https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-new-artificial-intelligentsia/
Police broke into a Quaker Meeting House last night (27 March) and arrested six young people holding a meeting over concerns for the climate and Gaza https://www.quaker.org.uk/news-and-events/news/quakers-condemn-police-raid-on-westminster-meeting-house
This was mooted but the detail seems even worse than feared. It’s not really about DEI per se - it’s really about any research that recognises any health inequalities at all.
NIH to terminate hundreds of active research grants - Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00703-1
“The IndieWeb doesn’t need to go mainstream to be meaningful. It’s a celebration of a more personal, decentralised, and creative world wide web. For those of us who still care about these values, it is already meaningful.” https://susam.net/indieweb-does-not-need-to-take-off.html
"What’s the Matter with Abundance?" Malcolm Harris' worthwhile critique of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's "Abundance" https://benhr.xyz/2025/03/20/whats-the-matter-with-abundance.html
The two-lane road to hell is paved with good intentions: why an all-or-none approach to generative AI, integrity, and assessment is insupportable https://benhr.xyz/2025/03/19/the-twolane-road-to-hell.html
The $1m cactus heist that led to a smuggler's downfall https://benhr.xyz/2025/03/19/the-m-cactus-heist-that.html
Best sentence I’ve read in a while, courtesy of A S Hamrah:
"British movies these days—from good ones like The Old Oak to OK ones like Bird to wretched ones like Saltburn—present British people as ruthlessly mean to each other, petty, conniving, classist, vulgar shits who add “innit?” at the end of sentences that aren’t questions but insults."