Long Links

Another Long Links curation (the 31^st!); substantial pieces of reading (or watching or listening) that you probably don’t have time to take in all of. One or two, though, might reward your attention. The usual assortmet of music, geekery, and cosmology.

Galactic clusters · Ever heard of Laniakea? Neither had I. It’s another word for our home. This 7-minute YouTube video, The Laniakea supercluster of galaxies, is graceful and mind-expanding; highly recommended. ¶

Atom Heart Mother · I was sitting up late, pretty mellow, and Google Music showed me Atom Heart Mother as performed by Japanese tribute band Pink Floyd Trips in 2016. It woke me right up. The Japanese hipsters are instrumentally strong and use keyboards for the acoustic-instrument parts. As for the vocals, well, oh my oh my, definitely next level. Good stuff. ¶

Which made me curious about other performances of Atom Heart Mother. Turns out Floyd recorded a 1971 performance, coincidentally also from Japan. Obviously they’re competent, but they’re just four guys and the keyboard technology was way more primitive back then, so they’re at a disadvantage compared to the resources they had in the studio when recording it, or the technology deployed by PF Trips. A lot of the visuals are of the band arriving in and traveling around Japan, which is OK, because their performances in that era weren’t particularly visually stimulating. Credit to Gilmour for hitting the high notes (albeit with some electronic assist), but once again, he’s at a disadvantage compared to the awesome Japanese singers.

The arrangement is quite a bit different than the original on the eponymous album and, within the limitations, is good.

There’s a cover by “Pussycherry et l'Orchestre d'harmonie de Clermont Ferrand” which I abandoned partway through because the orchestra just isn’t very good, clumsy and harsh. There is a nice little cello part though.

I will link to Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France with Ron Geesin at the Théâtre du Chatelet, once again an orchestra and a chorus. Ron Geesin is the guy that Floyd hired to do all the orchestral stuff after they’d recorded the basic tracks and went on tour. The orchestra is way better but disappointingly equals neither Geesin’s original take on the album, nor PF Trips. And the big choir doesn’t come close to those two Japanese women.

There are more performances out there, but I had to go to bed.

C2PA C2PA C2PA · I have written quite a bit about C2PA and other “Content Authenticity” initiative stuff. Recently, Adobe has released more C2PA-enabling technology in several of its apps, and there is commentary from DPReview and PetaPixel. ¶

If you care about this stuff like I do you’ll probably enjoy reading both pieces. But they (mostly) miss what I think is the key point. The biggest value offered by this stuff is establishing provenance, and the most important place to establish provenance is on social media. Knowing that a pic on Fedi or Bluesky was first uploaded by @joe@somewhere.example is highly useful in helping people decide whether it’s real or not, and would not require a major technical leap from any social-media provider.

Less attention · Joan Westerberg’s excellent Notes from the Exit: Why I Left the Attention Economy is full of passion and truth. About stepping off the “content creator” treadmill, she writes: ¶

Leaving the attention economy doesn’t mean vanishing. It means choosing to matter to fewer people, more deeply. It means owning the means of distribution. It means publishing like a human being instead of a content mill. It means you stop playing to the house odds and start building your own game.

And the rest is just as good. For what it’s worth, what she’s describing is what I’ve been trying to do in this space for the last 22 years.

Defective outlook · I don’t read The Register often enough; for many years they’ve been full of fresh takes and exhibited a usefully belligerant attitude. For example, When even Microsoft can’t understand its own Outlook, big tech is stuck in a swamp of its own making excoriates “the weird cruft that happens when Microsoft saws bits of our limbs off to make us fit into whatever profit center is running strategy today.” I actually disagree with some of the article, as I often do with the Reg, but I enjoyed reading it anyhow. ¶

A billion times a second · Time to put on your hardcore-geek hat and look at Formally verified cloud-scale authorization. A group at AWS replaced a single heavily-used API call implementation with formally-verified code, simultaneously making it smaller and faster. The link is to an overview piece, the full PDF is here. ¶

These are not lightweight technologies and this was not a cheap project; a lot of people did a lot of work and these are not junior people. But when what you’re working on is this call:

Answer evaluate(List<Policy> ps, Request r)

That call is at the core of where AWS grants or denies access by anything to anything, and it’s called more than a billion times a second. That’s billion with a B. A situation where this kind of investment isn’t merely justifiable, it’s a no-brainer. I know a couple of the people on the authors list, and I offer all of them my congratulations. Strong work!

Decarbonization at sea · Regular readers know that my family has a boat, that we’re trying to decarbonize our lives, and that the boat has been the hardest part of that. ¶

So, I pay close attention to the latest news from the electric-boat scene. I’m starting to gain confidence that in a single-digit number of years we’ll be using a quieter, cheaper, more environmentally praiseworthy vessel of some sort. So, in case anybody has similar worries, here are snapshots from a few of the more viable electric-boat startups: Navier, Torqueedo, X Shore, Candela. Also, here’s Aqua superPower, which wants to bring dockside charging to the electric-boat scene. And finally, here is the Electric boats category from the always-useful electrek electric-mobility site.

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