monkϵyborg 🦾🐵

@monkeyborg@triangletoot.party
634 Followers
594 Following
705 Posts
The inside of my brain is like one of those 80s montages where somebody is flipping through the channels on a tv and you see all kinds of weird stuff for like half a second and then I post that here. Sorry
avatar creditTakashi Minamimura, “Death Battle with Robot Kong”
pronounshe/him
cityDurham, NC, US
18+I say terrible things

Anna's Archive backed up Spotify. They got 99.9% of metadata, and 300TB of music representing 86 million tracks - original 160kbps OGG for tracks with popularity>0, and re-encoded 75kbps for popularity=0. absolutely wild project.

the metadata in particular is a hugely useful data source. MusicBrainz catalogues 5 million unique ISRCs (like ISBNs but for music releases), whereas this archive has a whopping 186 million.

https://annas-archive.li/blog/backing-up-spotify.html

Backing up Spotify

We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB). It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens.

🌱 NC State’s Agroecology Education Farm is a living lab where students learn soil regeneration, biodiversity, water care & climate-smart farming—working with nature, not against it 🌍🐝. A hands-on hub shaping future food systems.

🔗 https://agroecologymap.org/l/400

#Agroecology #Permaculture #FoodSystems

Excerpt from a book I'm reading, Slow Poison, by Mahmood Mamdani, father of Zorhan Mamdani.

"FBI agents knocked on
my door...they asked what I thought of Marx. I said I had
never met him. Not surprisingly, this Ugandan Muyindi had never heard of Karl
Marx. “He’s dead.”

I said, “I'm sorry, what happened?”

“No, he died long ago.”

I wondered why, then, the question. “Why, then, are you asking me?”
Later, I would remind myself: the FBI introduced me to Karl Marx! "
#books #bookstodon #book

Every time I fold laundry I get mad at generative AI because if it was as capable as its proponents claimed, robots would be folding my laundry and you wouldn't have to force it on me.
Just found out that apparently a lemon isn't naturally occurring in nature.
It's a hybrid by crossbreeding a bitter orange and a citron!

Do you know what that means?!
Do you know what implications this has?!!

LIFE NEVER GAVE US LEMONS
WE INVENTED THEM ALL BY OURSELVES

- Reads about “the Patriot Games”

- Goes to do a post referencing that one young adult novel/movie franchise. You know the one

- Recoils in shame because that’s low-hanging fruit even for me

i don't want firefox to be a "modern AI browser." i want firefox to be a '70s AI browser. i want to open up a little side panel and watch an expert system solving the towers of hanoi

"Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library will be made open access. This change reflects the long-standing and growing call across the global computing community for research to be more accessible, more discoverable, and more reusable."

https://dl.acm.org/openaccess

# Democratic National Committee blocks release of its 2024 election autopsy

> The decision marks an about-face for a coalition that’s at odds over what went wrong last year, and still registering record-low approval ratings even among its own voters. Several outside groups, from the progressive Way to Win to the center-left Welcome nonprofit, released their own in-depth audits of the party’s missteps with differing diagnoses for how to fix its problems.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/18/dnc-kills-its-own-public-2024-autopsy-00697403

# UNC cuts all six area studies research centers, effective 2026

> The Center for European Studies, the African Studies Center, the Carolina Asia Center, the Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies, the Institute for the Study of the Americas and the Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies are all slated to close.

> These centers are the first of 14 total UNC centers and institutes to be cut.

https://dailytarheel.com/article/university-breaking-area-studies-centers-closing-20251217