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CF Premiere: CHAM – Perspective of Nowhere
From Lille, France, comes someone worth knowing right now: CHAM, a young and promising live techno artist and DJ with a proposition that makes clear from the very first second that there’s something serious behind it. We had the opportunity to premiere one of his tracks —and we didn’t let it pass.
The track is called Perspective of Nowhere, and the title already anticipates the territory it inhabits. Created entirely from his studio in Lille, with live analog machines as the central axis of all the creation, the result is an ambient sound track with a very particular personality. There’s an immediate electricity in how it begins —something that happens ipso facto, without preamble— which quickly transforms into something more complex: gusts of the past made present, suspended amid uncertain realities and futures hanging by a thread. That’s not forced poetic description —it’s literally what you hear.
https://soundcloud.com/clubfuriess/cfp-cham-perspective-of-nowhere
What sets Perspective of Nowhere apart isn’t just its atmosphere, but the solidity of what lies beneath. Strong conceptual foundations, a well-structured sound design that doesn’t improvise carelessly but builds with intention. Throughout the entire track, CHAM manages to sustain a well-anchored effect of nostalgia —a nostalgia that doesn’t wallow in itself but constantly dissolves, as if each present it constructs has the capacity to safeguard all existing anxiety without denying it. That’s a difficult balance to achieve, and here it’s achieved.
At Club Furies, we’ve had our eyes open for some time toward what’s happening in the French scene —a scene that continues to produce artists with their own sensibility and a relationship with analog sound that very few places in the world can match. CHAM fits perfectly within that tradition, and at the same time sounds like something new. Get a feel for his pulse now.
Artist: CHAM
Title: Perspective of Nowhere
Master: DerodeCHAM
Club Furies
Website | SoundCloud | Instagram | Threads | TikTok | Facebook | Bandcamp | Linktree
#CHAM #DarkTechno #Electronic #Electronica #France #HypnoticTechno #Lille #techno -
CF Premiere: CHAM – Perspective of Nowhere
From Lille, France, comes someone worth knowing right now: CHAM, a young and promising live techno artist and DJ with a proposition that makes clear from the very first second that there’s something serious behind it. We had the opportunity to premiere one of his tracks —and we didn’t let it pass.
The track is called Perspective of Nowhere, and the title already anticipates the territory it inhabits. Created entirely from his studio in Lille, with live analog machines as the central axis of all the creation, the result is an ambient sound track with a very particular personality. There’s an immediate electricity in how it begins —something that happens ipso facto, without preamble— which quickly transforms into something more complex: gusts of the past made present, suspended amid uncertain realities and futures hanging by a thread. That’s not forced poetic description —it’s literally what you hear.
https://soundcloud.com/clubfuriess/cfp-cham-perspective-of-nowhere
What sets Perspective of Nowhere apart isn’t just its atmosphere, but the solidity of what lies beneath. Strong conceptual foundations, a well-structured sound design that doesn’t improvise carelessly but builds with intention. Throughout the entire track, CHAM manages to sustain a well-anchored effect of nostalgia —a nostalgia that doesn’t wallow in itself but constantly dissolves, as if each present it constructs has the capacity to safeguard all existing anxiety without denying it. That’s a difficult balance to achieve, and here it’s achieved.
At Club Furies, we’ve had our eyes open for some time toward what’s happening in the French scene —a scene that continues to produce artists with their own sensibility and a relationship with analog sound that very few places in the world can match. CHAM fits perfectly within that tradition, and at the same time sounds like something new. Get a feel for his pulse now.
Artist: CHAM
Title: Perspective of Nowhere
Master: DerodeCHAM
Club Furies
Website | SoundCloud | Instagram | Threads | TikTok | Facebook | Bandcamp | Linktree
#CHAM #DarkTechno #Electronic #Electronica #France #HypnoticTechno #Lille #techno -
“Quantum computation is … nothing less than a distinctly new way of harnessing nature”*…
As the tools in the world around us change, the world– and we– change with them. The onslaught of AI is the change that seems to be grabbing most of our mindshare these days… and with reason. But there are, of course, other changes (in biotech, in materials science, et al.) that are also going to be hugely impactful.
Today, a look at the computing technology stalking up behind AI: quantum computing. As enthusiasts like David Deutsch (author of the quote above) argue, it can have tremendous benefits, perhaps especially in our ability to model (and thus better understand) our reality.
But quantum computing will, if/when it arrives, also present huge challenges to us as individuals and as societies– perhaps most prominently in its threat to the ways in which we protect our systems and our information: We’ve felt pretty safe for decades, secure in the knowledge that we could lose passwords to phising or hacks, but that it would take the “classical” computers we have 1 billion years to break today’s RSA-2048 encryption. A quantum computer could crack it in as little as a hundred seconds.
The technology has been “somewhere on the horizon” for 30 years… so not something that has seemed urgent to confront. But progress has accelerated; a recent Google paper reports on a programming and architectural breakthrough that greatly reduces the computing resources necessary to break classical cryptography… putting the prospect of “Q-Day” (the point at which quantum computers become powerful enough to break standard encryption methods (RSA, ECC), endangering global digital security) much closer, which would put everything from crypto-wallets to our e-banking accounts at risk.
Charlie Wood brings us up to speed…
Some 30 years ago, the mathematician Peter Shor took a niche physics project — the dream of building a computer based on the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics — and shook the world.
Shor worked out a way for quantum computers to swiftly solve a couple of math problems that classical computers could complete only after many billions of years. Those two math problems happened to be the ones that secured the then-emerging digital world. The trustworthiness of nearly every website, inbox, and bank account rests on the assumption that these two problems are impossible to solve. Shor’s algorithm proved that assumption wrong.
For 30 years, Shor’s algorithm has been a security threat in theory only. Physicists initially estimated that they would need a colossal quantum machine with billions of qubits — the elements used in quantum calculations — to run it. That estimate has come down drastically over the years, falling recently to a million qubits. But it has still always sat comfortably beyond the modest capabilities of existing quantum computers, which typically have just hundreds of qubits.
However, two different groups of researchers have just announced advances that notably reduce the gap between theoretical estimates and real machines. A star-studded team of quantum physicists at the California Institute of Technology went public with a design for a quantum computer that could break encryption with only tens of thousands of qubits and said that it had formed a company to build the machine. And researchers at Google announced that they had developed an implementation of Shor’s algorithm that is ten times as efficient as the best previous method.
Neither company has the hardware to break encryption today. But the results underscore what some quantum physicists had already come to suspect: that powerful quantum computers may be years away, rather than decades. “If you care about privacy or you have secrets, then you better start looking for alternatives,” said Nikolas Breuckmann, a mathematical physicist at the University of Bristol, who did not work on either of the papers.
While the new results may provide a jolt for the policymakers and corporations that guard our digital infrastructure, they also signal the rapid progress that physicists have made toward building machines that will let them more thoroughly explore the quantum world.
“We’re going to actually do this,” said Dolev Bluvstein, a Caltech physicist and CEO of the new company, Oratomic…
[Wood unpacks the history of the development of the technology and explores the challenges that remain; he concludes…]
… If any group succeeds at building a quantum computer that can realize Shor’s algorithm, it will mark the end an era — specifically, the “Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum” era, as Preskill dubbed the pre-error-correction period in a 2018 paper. Each researcher has a vision for what to pursue first with a machine in the new “fault-tolerant” era.
[Robert] Huang said he would start by running Shor’s algorithm, just to prove that the device works. After that, he said he would try to use it to speed up machine learning — an application to be detailed in coming work.
Most of the architects building quantum computers, whether at Oratomic or other startups, are physicists at heart. They’re interested in physics, not cryptography. Specifically, they’re interested in all the things a computer fluent in the language of quantum mechanics could teach them about the quantum realm, such as what sort of materials might become superconductors even at warm temperatures. Preskill, for his part, would like to simulate the quantum nature of space-time.
The Caltech group knows it has years of work ahead before any of its dreams have a chance of coming true. But the researchers can’t wait to get started. “Pick a cooler life quest than building the world’s first quantum computer with your friends!” said a jubilant Bluvstein, reached by phone shortly before their paper went live, before rushing off to celebrate…
Eminently worth reading in full: “New Advances Bring the Era of Quantum Computers Closer Than Ever,” from @walkingthedot.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
* David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality
###
As we prepare, we might take a moment to appreciate just how vastly and deeply the legacy systems challenged by quantum computing run, recalling that on this date in 1959 Mary Hawes, a computer scientist for the Burroughs Corporation held a meeting of computers users, manufacturers, and academics at the University of Pennsylvania aimed at creating a common business oriented programming language. At the meeting, representative Grace Hopper suggested that they ask the Department of Defense to fund the effort to create such a language. Also attending was Charles Phillips who was director of the Data System Research Staff at the DoD and was excited by the possibility of a common language streamlining their operations. He agreed to sponsor the creation of such a language. This was the genesis of what would eventually become the COBOL language.
To this day COBOL is still the most common programming language used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments, primarily on mainframe systems, with around 200 billion lines of code still in production use… all of which are in question and/or at risk in a world of quantum computing.
#COBOL #computerSecurity #computers #computing #crypto #cryptocurrency #culture #GraceHopper #history #MaryHawes #quantum #quantumComputing #Science #security #Technology -
“Quantum computation is … nothing less than a distinctly new way of harnessing nature”*…
As the tools in the world around us change, the world– and we– change with them. The onslaught of AI is the change that seems to be grabbing most of our mindshare these days… and with reason. But there are, of course, other changes (in biotech, in materials science, et al.) that are also going to be hugely impactful.
Today, a look at the computing technology stalking up behind AI: quantum computing. As enthusiasts like David Deutsch (author of the quote above) argue, it can have tremendous benefits, perhaps especially in our ability to model (and thus better understand) our reality.
But quantum computing will, if/when it arrives, also present huge challenges to us as individuals and as societies– perhaps most prominently in its threat to the ways in which we protect our systems and our information: We’ve felt pretty safe for decades, secure in the knowledge that we could lose passwords to phising or hacks, but that it would take the “classical” computers we have 1 billion years to break today’s RSA-2048 encryption. A quantum computer could crack it in as little as a hundred seconds.
The technology has been “somewhere on the horizon” for 30 years… so not something that has seemed urgent to confront. But progress has accelerated; a recent Google paper reports on a programming and architectural breakthrough that greatly reduces the computing resources necessary to break classical cryptography… putting the prospect of “Q-Day” (the point at which quantum computers become powerful enough to break standard encryption methods (RSA, ECC), endangering global digital security) much closer, which would put everything from crypto-wallets to our e-banking accounts at risk.
Charlie Wood brings us up to speed…
Some 30 years ago, the mathematician Peter Shor took a niche physics project — the dream of building a computer based on the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics — and shook the world.
Shor worked out a way for quantum computers to swiftly solve a couple of math problems that classical computers could complete only after many billions of years. Those two math problems happened to be the ones that secured the then-emerging digital world. The trustworthiness of nearly every website, inbox, and bank account rests on the assumption that these two problems are impossible to solve. Shor’s algorithm proved that assumption wrong.
For 30 years, Shor’s algorithm has been a security threat in theory only. Physicists initially estimated that they would need a colossal quantum machine with billions of qubits — the elements used in quantum calculations — to run it. That estimate has come down drastically over the years, falling recently to a million qubits. But it has still always sat comfortably beyond the modest capabilities of existing quantum computers, which typically have just hundreds of qubits.
However, two different groups of researchers have just announced advances that notably reduce the gap between theoretical estimates and real machines. A star-studded team of quantum physicists at the California Institute of Technology went public with a design for a quantum computer that could break encryption with only tens of thousands of qubits and said that it had formed a company to build the machine. And researchers at Google announced that they had developed an implementation of Shor’s algorithm that is ten times as efficient as the best previous method.
Neither company has the hardware to break encryption today. But the results underscore what some quantum physicists had already come to suspect: that powerful quantum computers may be years away, rather than decades. “If you care about privacy or you have secrets, then you better start looking for alternatives,” said Nikolas Breuckmann, a mathematical physicist at the University of Bristol, who did not work on either of the papers.
While the new results may provide a jolt for the policymakers and corporations that guard our digital infrastructure, they also signal the rapid progress that physicists have made toward building machines that will let them more thoroughly explore the quantum world.
“We’re going to actually do this,” said Dolev Bluvstein, a Caltech physicist and CEO of the new company, Oratomic…
[Wood unpacks the history of the development of the technology and explores the challenges that remain; he concludes…]
… If any group succeeds at building a quantum computer that can realize Shor’s algorithm, it will mark the end an era — specifically, the “Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum” era, as Preskill dubbed the pre-error-correction period in a 2018 paper. Each researcher has a vision for what to pursue first with a machine in the new “fault-tolerant” era.
[Robert] Huang said he would start by running Shor’s algorithm, just to prove that the device works. After that, he said he would try to use it to speed up machine learning — an application to be detailed in coming work.
Most of the architects building quantum computers, whether at Oratomic or other startups, are physicists at heart. They’re interested in physics, not cryptography. Specifically, they’re interested in all the things a computer fluent in the language of quantum mechanics could teach them about the quantum realm, such as what sort of materials might become superconductors even at warm temperatures. Preskill, for his part, would like to simulate the quantum nature of space-time.
The Caltech group knows it has years of work ahead before any of its dreams have a chance of coming true. But the researchers can’t wait to get started. “Pick a cooler life quest than building the world’s first quantum computer with your friends!” said a jubilant Bluvstein, reached by phone shortly before their paper went live, before rushing off to celebrate…
Eminently worth reading in full: “New Advances Bring the Era of Quantum Computers Closer Than Ever,” from @walkingthedot.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
* David Deutsch, The Fabric of Realityy
###
As we prepare, we might take a moment to appreciate just how vastly and deeply the legacy systems challenged by quantum computing run, recalling that on this date in 1959 Mary Hawes, a computer scientist for the Burroughs Corporation held a meeting of computers users, manufacturers, and academics at the University of Pennsylvania aimed at creating a common business oriented programming language. At the meeting, representative Grace Hopper suggested that they ask the Department of Defense to fund the effort to create such a language. Also attending was Charles Phillips who was director of the Data System Research Staff at the DoD and was excited by the possibility of a common language streamlining their operations. He agreed to sponsor the creation of such a language. This was the genesis of what would eventually become the COBOL language.
To this day COBOL is still the most common programming language used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments, primarily on mainframe systems, with around 200 billion lines of code still in production use… all of which are in question and/or at risk in a world of quantum computing.
#COBOL #computerSecurity #computers #computing #crypto #cryptocurrency #culture #GraceHopper #history #MaryHawes #quantum #quantumComputing #Science #security #Technology -
“Quantum computation is … nothing less than a distinctly new way of harnessing nature”*…
As the tools in the world around us change, the world– and we– change with them. The onslaught of AI is the change that seems to be grabbing most of our mindshare these days… and with reason. But there are, of course, other changes (in biotech, in materials science, et al.) that are also going to be hugely impactful.
Today, a look at the computing technology stalking up behind AI: quantum computing. As enthusiasts like David Deutsch (author of the quote above) argue, it can have tremendous benefits, perhaps especially in our ability to model (and thus better understand) our reality.
But quantum computing will, if/when it arrives, also present huge challenges to us as individuals and as societies– perhaps most prominently in its threat to the ways in which we protect our systems and our information: We’ve felt pretty safe for decades, secure in the knowledge that we could lose passwords to phising or hacks, but that it would take the “classical” computers we have 1 billion years to break today’s RSA-2048 encryption. A quantum computer could crack it in as little as a hundred seconds.
The technology has been “somewhere on the horizon” for 30 years… so not something that has seemed urgent to confront. But progress has accelerated; a recent Google paper reports on a programming and architectural breakthrough that greatly reduces the computing resources necessary to break classical cryptography… putting the prospect of “Q-Day” (the point at which quantum computers become powerful enough to break standard encryption methods (RSA, ECC), endangering global digital security) much closer, which would put everything from crypto-wallets to our e-banking accounts at risk.
Charlie Wood brings us up to speed…
Some 30 years ago, the mathematician Peter Shor took a niche physics project — the dream of building a computer based on the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics — and shook the world.
Shor worked out a way for quantum computers to swiftly solve a couple of math problems that classical computers could complete only after many billions of years. Those two math problems happened to be the ones that secured the then-emerging digital world. The trustworthiness of nearly every website, inbox, and bank account rests on the assumption that these two problems are impossible to solve. Shor’s algorithm proved that assumption wrong.
For 30 years, Shor’s algorithm has been a security threat in theory only. Physicists initially estimated that they would need a colossal quantum machine with billions of qubits — the elements used in quantum calculations — to run it. That estimate has come down drastically over the years, falling recently to a million qubits. But it has still always sat comfortably beyond the modest capabilities of existing quantum computers, which typically have just hundreds of qubits.
However, two different groups of researchers have just announced advances that notably reduce the gap between theoretical estimates and real machines. A star-studded team of quantum physicists at the California Institute of Technology went public with a design for a quantum computer that could break encryption with only tens of thousands of qubits and said that it had formed a company to build the machine. And researchers at Google announced that they had developed an implementation of Shor’s algorithm that is ten times as efficient as the best previous method.
Neither company has the hardware to break encryption today. But the results underscore what some quantum physicists had already come to suspect: that powerful quantum computers may be years away, rather than decades. “If you care about privacy or you have secrets, then you better start looking for alternatives,” said Nikolas Breuckmann, a mathematical physicist at the University of Bristol, who did not work on either of the papers.
While the new results may provide a jolt for the policymakers and corporations that guard our digital infrastructure, they also signal the rapid progress that physicists have made toward building machines that will let them more thoroughly explore the quantum world.
“We’re going to actually do this,” said Dolev Bluvstein, a Caltech physicist and CEO of the new company, Oratomic…
[Wood unpacks the history of the development of the technology and explores the challenges that remain; he concludes…]
… If any group succeeds at building a quantum computer that can realize Shor’s algorithm, it will mark the end an era — specifically, the “Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum” era, as Preskill dubbed the pre-error-correction period in a 2018 paper. Each researcher has a vision for what to pursue first with a machine in the new “fault-tolerant” era.
[Robert] Huang said he would start by running Shor’s algorithm, just to prove that the device works. After that, he said he would try to use it to speed up machine learning — an application to be detailed in coming work.
Most of the architects building quantum computers, whether at Oratomic or other startups, are physicists at heart. They’re interested in physics, not cryptography. Specifically, they’re interested in all the things a computer fluent in the language of quantum mechanics could teach them about the quantum realm, such as what sort of materials might become superconductors even at warm temperatures. Preskill, for his part, would like to simulate the quantum nature of space-time.
The Caltech group knows it has years of work ahead before any of its dreams have a chance of coming true. But the researchers can’t wait to get started. “Pick a cooler life quest than building the world’s first quantum computer with your friends!” said a jubilant Bluvstein, reached by phone shortly before their paper went live, before rushing off to celebrate…
Eminently worth reading in full: “New Advances Bring the Era of Quantum Computers Closer Than Ever,” from @walkingthedot.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
* David Deutsch, The Fabric of Realityy
###
As we prepare, we might take a moment to appreciate just how vastly and deeply the legacy systems challenged by quantum computing run, recalling that on this date in 1959 Mary Hawes, a computer scientist for the Burroughs Corporation held a meeting of computers users, manufacturers, and academics at the University of Pennsylvania aimed at creating a common business oriented programming language. At the meeting, representative Grace Hopper suggested that they ask the Department of Defense to fund the effort to create such a language. Also attending was Charles Phillips who was director of the Data System Research Staff at the DoD and was excited by the possibility of a common language streamlining their operations. He agreed to sponsor the creation of such a language. This was the genesis of what would eventually become the COBOL language.
To this day COBOL is still the most common programming language used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments, primarily on mainframe systems, with around 200 billion lines of code still in production use… all of which are in question and/or at risk in a world of quantum computing.
#COBOL #computerSecurity #computers #computing #crypto #cryptocurrency #culture #GraceHopper #history #MaryHawes #quantum #quantumComputing #Science #security #Technology -
“Quantum computation is … nothing less than a distinctly new way of harnessing nature”*…
As the tools in the world around us change, the world– and we– change with them. The onslaught of AI is the change that seems to be grabbing most of our mindshare these days… and with reason. But there are, of course, other changes (in biotech, in materials science, et al.) that are also going to be hugely impactful.
Today, a look at the computing technology stalking up behind AI: quantum computing. As enthusiasts like David Deutsch (author of the quote above) argue, it can have tremendous benefits, perhaps especially in our ability to model (and thus better understand) our reality.
But quantum computing will, if/when it arrives, also present huge challenges to us as individuals and as societies– perhaps most prominently in its threat to the ways in which we protect our systems and our information: We’ve felt pretty safe for decades, secure in the knowledge that we could lose passwords to phising or hacks, but that it would take the “classical” computers we have 1 billion years to break today’s RSA-2048 encryption. A quantum computer could crack it in as little as a hundred seconds.
The technology has been “somewhere on the horizon” for 30 years… so not something that has seemed urgent to confront. But progress has accelerated; a recent Google paper reports on a programming and architectural breakthrough that greatly reduces the computing resources necessary to break classical cryptography… putting the prospect of “Q-Day” (the point at which quantum computers become powerful enough to break standard encryption methods (RSA, ECC), endangering global digital security) much closer, which would put everything from crypto-wallets to our e-banking accounts at risk.
Charlie Wood brings us up to speed…
Some 30 years ago, the mathematician Peter Shor took a niche physics project — the dream of building a computer based on the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics — and shook the world.
Shor worked out a way for quantum computers to swiftly solve a couple of math problems that classical computers could complete only after many billions of years. Those two math problems happened to be the ones that secured the then-emerging digital world. The trustworthiness of nearly every website, inbox, and bank account rests on the assumption that these two problems are impossible to solve. Shor’s algorithm proved that assumption wrong.
For 30 years, Shor’s algorithm has been a security threat in theory only. Physicists initially estimated that they would need a colossal quantum machine with billions of qubits — the elements used in quantum calculations — to run it. That estimate has come down drastically over the years, falling recently to a million qubits. But it has still always sat comfortably beyond the modest capabilities of existing quantum computers, which typically have just hundreds of qubits.
However, two different groups of researchers have just announced advances that notably reduce the gap between theoretical estimates and real machines. A star-studded team of quantum physicists at the California Institute of Technology went public with a design for a quantum computer that could break encryption with only tens of thousands of qubits and said that it had formed a company to build the machine. And researchers at Google announced that they had developed an implementation of Shor’s algorithm that is ten times as efficient as the best previous method.
Neither company has the hardware to break encryption today. But the results underscore what some quantum physicists had already come to suspect: that powerful quantum computers may be years away, rather than decades. “If you care about privacy or you have secrets, then you better start looking for alternatives,” said Nikolas Breuckmann, a mathematical physicist at the University of Bristol, who did not work on either of the papers.
While the new results may provide a jolt for the policymakers and corporations that guard our digital infrastructure, they also signal the rapid progress that physicists have made toward building machines that will let them more thoroughly explore the quantum world.
“We’re going to actually do this,” said Dolev Bluvstein, a Caltech physicist and CEO of the new company, Oratomic…
[Wood unpacks the history of the development of the technology and explores the challenges that remain; he concludes…]
… If any group succeeds at building a quantum computer that can realize Shor’s algorithm, it will mark the end an era — specifically, the “Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum” era, as Preskill dubbed the pre-error-correction period in a 2018 paper. Each researcher has a vision for what to pursue first with a machine in the new “fault-tolerant” era.
[Robert] Huang said he would start by running Shor’s algorithm, just to prove that the device works. After that, he said he would try to use it to speed up machine learning — an application to be detailed in coming work.
Most of the architects building quantum computers, whether at Oratomic or other startups, are physicists at heart. They’re interested in physics, not cryptography. Specifically, they’re interested in all the things a computer fluent in the language of quantum mechanics could teach them about the quantum realm, such as what sort of materials might become superconductors even at warm temperatures. Preskill, for his part, would like to simulate the quantum nature of space-time.
The Caltech group knows it has years of work ahead before any of its dreams have a chance of coming true. But the researchers can’t wait to get started. “Pick a cooler life quest than building the world’s first quantum computer with your friends!” said a jubilant Bluvstein, reached by phone shortly before their paper went live, before rushing off to celebrate…
Eminently worth reading in full: “New Advances Bring the Era of Quantum Computers Closer Than Ever,” from @walkingthedot.bsky.social in @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
* David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality
###
As we prepare, we might take a moment to appreciate just how vastly and deeply the legacy systems challenged by quantum computing run, recalling that on this date in 1959 Mary Hawes, a computer scientist for the Burroughs Corporation held a meeting of computers users, manufacturers, and academics at the University of Pennsylvania aimed at creating a common business oriented programming language. At the meeting, representative Grace Hopper suggested that they ask the Department of Defense to fund the effort to create such a language. Also attending was Charles Phillips who was director of the Data System Research Staff at the DoD and was excited by the possibility of a common language streamlining their operations. He agreed to sponsor the creation of such a language. This was the genesis of what would eventually become the COBOL language.
To this day COBOL is still the most common programming language used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments, primarily on mainframe systems, with around 200 billion lines of code still in production use… all of which are in question and/or at risk in a world of quantum computing.
#COBOL #computerSecurity #computers #computing #crypto #cryptocurrency #culture #GraceHopper #history #MaryHawes #quantum #quantumComputing #Science #security #Technology -
@slcw Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli (signed Nov 4, 1796):
"Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America ***is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion***; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen (Muslims); and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan (Mohammedan) nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."
#RuleOfLaw #JusticeMatters #FirstAmendment #SeparationOfChurchAndState #InvestigateLeonardLeo #InvestigateOpusDei #MikeJohnson #Extremism #Insurrection #Rebellion #EnemiesOfTheConstitution #BanTheGOP
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Megatrend **#21** - Career Obsolesence and Creation: "As technology redefines work, our most valuable skill becomes our uniquely human ability to learn, adapt, and create."- Futurist Jim Carroll
(Futurist Jim Carroll is writing a series on 30 Megatrends, which he first outlined in his book Dancing in the Rain: How Bold Leaders Grow Stronger in Stormy Times. The trends were shared in the book as a way of demonstrating that, despite any period of economic volatility, there is always long-term opportunity to be found. The book is now in print - learn more at dancing.jimcarroll.com)
We are witnessing the simultaneous elimination of traditional roles and the emergence of entirely new professions. Organizations that can navigate this transition, focusing on re-skilling existing talent while attracting new capabilities, will have extraordinary advantages. The trend is being accelerated to a ridiculous speed as the impact of AI takes hold.
It's "The Great Rebalancing" of the global workforce, and here's the full PDF report.
https://pdf.jimcarroll.com/Megatrend21-CareerRebalancing.pd
We all know that jobs and careers are changing, but do we know how much? And how fast?
Hint: It's bigger than you think, and will happen faster than you are prepared for.
We've all become familiar with this trend, but suddenly, with the arrival and acceleration of AI, the speed of the change is now picking up the pace. What we thought might have been decades away - the disappearance of many careers and the rapid emergence of new careers - will now take years rather than decades. What's happening is this: there are now several simultaneous, accelerating trends at work involving demographics and technology:
- a demographic crisis in developed nations (a shrinking workforce)
- this creates a powerful incentive for technological adoption
- labor shortages are counteracted by AI productivity gains
- resulting in a desire or need to accelerate AI adoption to maintain economic viability
- which fundamentally challenges society to reskill the human workforce to effectively collaborate with machines!How big a trend is this? Let's quantify the crunch. There are a tremendous number of studies and reports, but one rough estimate suggests that between 2025 and 2030, we will see:
- 170 million new jobs created globally
- 92 million existing roles displaced
- That's a net increase of 78 million jobs (a 7% expansion)
- This "labor-market churn" equals 22% of today's employment
- This means that early 1 in 4 existing jobs will be part of this massive rebalancing!So what do you do?
Buckle up! Get involved! Keep learning!
**#Workforce** **#Transformation** **#AI** **#Reskilling** **#Jobs** **#Automation** **#Learning** **#Adaptation** **#Skills** **#Future**
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Learning interrupted
"Climate shocks are disrupting children’s education, putting their learning and their futures at risk."
"A new UNICEF analysis reveals that at least 242 million students in 85 countries or territories had their schooling disrupted by extreme climate events including heatwaves, tropical cyclones, storms, floods and droughts in 2024, exacerbating an existing learning crisis."
>>
https://www.unicef.org/reports/learning-interrupted-global-snapshot-2024
#FossilFuels #climate #impacts #disruption #education #children #floods #droughts #heatwaves #bushfires #storms #hazards #Intergenerationaljustice #UNICEF -
Greetings, #Mastodon! I'm #newhere :)
"In order to #change an existing paradigm you do not #struggle to try and change the problematic model. You #create a new model and make the old one obsolete."
"The #purpose of our lives is to add #value to the people of this generation and those that follow." ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
#smallbiz #quote • #community #interdependence • #smallbusiness #networking
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I still have a lot I need, and nearly all of my accompanying staples ie, seasonings can goods my potatoes and onions which are a semi required filler are depleted, I never seem to be able to actually get caught up on keeping my supplies at a viable level, along with everything else I am in need of right now, your continued support and compassion are both very much a lifeline for me and very much appreciated;
I have a cart full of #food to eat but lack the $350 to buy it, I have a cart full of personal care, hygiene, and household supplies but lack the $200 to buy it, I have a cart full of clothing that I need but lack the $400 to buy it, not to mention the rest of what I need to deal with, it is sad really, that in one of the wealthiest times in human history and in one of the wealthiest nations on earth, that anyone would be struggling with #poverty and #disability, and do so with so very little support at all, it really is sad that I have to beg for help that I most certainly never actually receive in any capacity to actually resolve the gapping growing hole of needs;
This Disabled Man Existing In Poverty, Is $2310 Away From Being Able To Afford To Take Care Of Myself And The Things I Still Need To Take Care Of This Month. Your support today could mean the difference between nourishment and starvation and some kind of stability.
This is not a request for luxury. This is a cry for dignity.
🔗 Donate here: paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=… 💸 CashApp: $woctxphotog
Please share. Please help. Every dollar matters. Every act of compassion echoes.
#MutualAid, #Disabled, #Poverty, #Help, #Survival, #Compassion, #Pain, #MentalHealth, #Food, #Groceries, #Hygiene, #Anxiety, #PTSD, #Bipolar, #Dignity, #fundfriday, -
I still have a lot I need, and nearly all of my accompanying staples ie, seasonings can goods my potatoes and onions which are a semi required filler are depleted, I never seem to be able to actually get caught up on keeping my supplies at a viable level, along with everything else I am in need of right now, your continued support and compassion are both very much a lifeline for me and very much appreciated;
I have a cart full of #food to eat but lack the $350 to buy it, I have a cart full of personal care, hygiene, and household supplies but lack the $200 to buy it, I have a cart full of clothing that I need but lack the $400 to buy it, not to mention the rest of what I need to deal with, it is sad really, that in one of the wealthiest times in human history and in one of the wealthiest nations on earth, that anyone would be struggling with #poverty and #disability, and do so with so very little support at all, it really is sad that I have to beg for help that I most certainly never actually receive in any capacity to actually resolve the gapping growing hole of needs;
This Disabled Man Existing In Poverty, Is $2310 Away From Being Able To Afford To Take Care Of Myself And The Things I Still Need To Take Care Of This Month. Your support today could mean the difference between nourishment and starvation and some kind of stability.
This is not a request for luxury. This is a cry for dignity.
🔗 Donate here: paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=… 💸 CashApp: $woctxphotog
Please share. Please help. Every dollar matters. Every act of compassion echoes.
#MutualAid, #Disabled, #Poverty, #Help, #Survival, #Compassion, #Pain, #MentalHealth, #Food, #Groceries, #Hygiene, #Anxiety, #PTSD, #Bipolar, #Dignity, #fundfriday, -
The servers for the #Bose #SoundTouch system are shutting down today.
Open-source replacements to keep existing functionality are available at https://github.com/deborahgu/soundcork/ (backend server), and https://github.com/krahl/soundcork-stockholm-app (app replacement).
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The servers for the #Bose #SoundTouch system are shutting down today.
Open-source replacements to keep existing functionality are available at https://github.com/deborahgu/soundcork/ (backend server), and https://github.com/krahl/soundcork-stockholm-app (app replacement).
-
The servers for the #Bose #SoundTouch system are shutting down today.
Open-source replacements to keep existing functionality are available at https://github.com/deborahgu/soundcork/ (backend server), and https://github.com/krahl/soundcork-stockholm-app (app replacement).
-
The servers for the #Bose #SoundTouch system are shutting down today.
Open-source replacements to keep existing functionality are available at https://github.com/deborahgu/soundcork/ (backend server), and https://github.com/krahl/soundcork-stockholm-app (app replacement).
-
The servers for the #Bose #SoundTouch system are shutting down today.
Open-source replacements to keep existing functionality are available at https://github.com/deborahgu/soundcork/ (backend server), and https://github.com/krahl/soundcork-stockholm-app (app replacement).
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@mike805 Fair points. They didnt make stuff up out of whole cloth; they found existing fracture lines and drove wedges into them. That said, their efforts on the right during the Cold War were basically just marginal extremists--just as the FSB's efforts on the left today are. Their main effort just switched sides.
And that was kind of the point I was making (and why i talked in terms of the social order) about the demise of the Soviet system there. Yes, the siloviki still came out on top--but the social order OF SOVIET COMMUNISM perished, and a new one of Russian Nationalist MAFIA CAPITALISM rose in its place. #VladTheInvader is most accurately though of not as a new Soviet Premier under a different title, but rather as their Oligarch-in-Chief--and coordinator of a global #BillionairesInsurgency...which, while it is clearly MODELED ON the old Communist International (COMINTERN) is also just as clearly a different beast.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/harry-potter-internet-trolls-putin-reimagines-global-jim-ellsworth
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@mike805 Fair points. They didnt make stuff up out of whole cloth; they found existing fracture lines and drove wedges into them. That said, their efforts on the right during the Cold War were basically just marginal extremists--just as the FSB's efforts on the left today are. Their main effort just switched sides.
And that was kind of the point I was making (and why i talked in terms of the social order) about the demise of the Soviet system there. Yes, the siloviki still came out on top--but the social order OF SOVIET COMMUNISM perished, and a new one of Russian Nationalist MAFIA CAPITALISM rose in its place. #VladTheInvader is most accurately though of not as a new Soviet Premier under a different title, but rather as their Oligarch-in-Chief--and coordinator of a global #BillionairesInsurgency...which, while it is clearly MODELED ON the old Communist International (COMINTERN) is also just as clearly a different beast.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/harry-potter-internet-trolls-putin-reimagines-global-jim-ellsworth
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@mike805 Fair points. They didnt make stuff up out of whole cloth; they found existing fracture lines and drove wedges into them. That said, their efforts on the right during the Cold War were basically just marginal extremists--just as the FSB's efforts on the left today are. Their main effort just switched sides.
And that was kind of the point I was making (and why i talked in terms of the social order) about the demise of the Soviet system there. Yes, the siloviki still came out on top--but the social order OF SOVIET COMMUNISM perished, and a new one of Russian Nationalist MAFIA CAPITALISM rose in its place. #VladTheInvader is most accurately though of not as a new Soviet Premier under a different title, but rather as their Oligarch-in-Chief--and coordinator of a global #BillionairesInsurgency...which, while it is clearly MODELED ON the old Communist International (COMINTERN) is also just as clearly a different beast.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/harry-potter-internet-trolls-putin-reimagines-global-jim-ellsworth
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@mike805 Fair points. They didnt make stuff up out of whole cloth; they found existing fracture lines and drove wedges into them. That said, their efforts on the right during the Cold War were basically just marginal extremists--just as the FSB's efforts on the left today are. Their main effort just switched sides.
And that was kind of the point I was making (and why i talked in terms of the social order) about the demise of the Soviet system there. Yes, the siloviki still came out on top--but the social order OF SOVIET COMMUNISM perished, and a new one of Russian Nationalist MAFIA CAPITALISM rose in its place. #VladTheInvader is most accurately though of not as a new Soviet Premier under a different title, but rather as their Oligarch-in-Chief--and coordinator of a global #BillionairesInsurgency...which, while it is clearly MODELED ON the old Communist International (COMINTERN) is also just as clearly a different beast.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/harry-potter-internet-trolls-putin-reimagines-global-jim-ellsworth
-
@mike805 Fair points. They didnt make stuff up out of whole cloth; they found existing fracture lines and drove wedges into them. That said, their efforts on the right during the Cold War were basically just marginal extremists--just as the FSB's efforts on the left today are. Their main effort just switched sides.
And that was kind of the point I was making (and why i talked in terms of the social order) about the demise of the Soviet system there. Yes, the siloviki still came out on top--but the social order OF SOVIET COMMUNISM perished, and a new one of Russian Nationalist MAFIA CAPITALISM rose in its place. #VladTheInvader is most accurately though of not as a new Soviet Premier under a different title, but rather as their Oligarch-in-Chief--and coordinator of a global #BillionairesInsurgency...which, while it is clearly MODELED ON the old Communist International (COMINTERN) is also just as clearly a different beast.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/harry-potter-internet-trolls-putin-reimagines-global-jim-ellsworth
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ScreeGo: "It allows you to share your screen with good quality and low latency. Screego is an addition to existing software and only helps to share your screen. Nothing else"
Das hat neulich der @rannug entdeckt. Spannend ist, dass mehrere gleichzeitig ihren Bildschirm teilen können und man selber zwischen ihnen switchen kann.
Evtl. auch nützlich bei Schulungen, um bequem Ergebnisse in der Gruppe zu teilen & zu besprechen. -
@benpate @bengo @strypey @EUCommission @nlnet
When it comes to Conway's Law then, what do we have today in terms of alternative #SocialNetworking environment, here on #ActivityPub fediverse?
If I squint my eyes so the details become vague, I see more or less a copy/paste of existing #SocialMedia that we are all familiar with, and as #BigTech forces it through our throat. BUT! Decentralized.. a great achievement. We can now build our own roads, instead of being forced to take the highway.
The observation that we "copy/pasted" may or may not be an indicator of the risk that Conway's Law does its work. I leave that as part of my call-for-reflection. Same holds for the risk of corporate capture, who can quickly pave over with asphalt any 'desire path' that became popular, and perhaps make it a toll road.
More interesting it gets when it comes to #ethics: dealing with tech externalities. See: https://social.coop/@smallcircles/116316524763055082
And #sustainability: Go from #FOSS to Sustainable open social systems.
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Hakzing achieved 🔥
It has ~400KB SRAM so that will be tight but there is a big SD card and existing firmware has a good cashing algorithm to be inspired from. #AtomVM will definitely fit - it's a lot easier to write fancy logics in #ElixirLang 🧪
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CW: Bowie's Blackstar at 10 - A Fedi-sourced celebration of a masterpiece [CW'd for length]
Bowie’s ★ at 10
Our next spotlight is on number 299 on The List, submitted by HillardHouseDan. And because this is a big anniversary for an even bigger album, some Fedi friends[1] will be joining me today to collectively share our thoughts on its impact, and our memories of its release. For, on January 8, 2016 – David Bowie’s 69th birthday – Bowie released his 26th studio album, making today the 10th anniversary of the experimental jazz/rock masterpiece ★ aka Blackstar.
rothko: “TENTH?!”
daria: “…10 years???? HOW 😭“
blogdiva: “Shit. It’s already been 10 years?!?!?”
austinross: “Hard to believe it’s already been 10 years.”
peach: “As the general quality of modern music has decayed, one of the last great albums has reached a decade.”
And, as we all know, 2 days later, January 10, 2016, Bowie left us, succumbing to a cancer we didn’t know he had been fighting, making Blackstar – whether intentionally crafted to be or not – his swan song.
harriolkn: “I remember reading the news when I was at work and barely kept it together for the rest of the day. When I finally got home, and saw my partner at the time, we both just burst into tears and embraced each other without saying a word.”
buffyleigh: “When KEXP celebrated the release of ★ with ‘Intergalactic Bowie Day’ [on Friday, January 8, 2016], I instantly fell in love with the album, the first entire Bowie album I had listened to from beginning to end…I listened to the entire 12-hour tribute and planned on working my way through his discography, starting with picking up ★ on vinyl as soon as I could get down to my local record store, seeing as it felt wrong listening to the full album on YouTube, which someone had already posted. When I saw the news on Monday morning, I was stunned and disoriented…called in sick and went to my local record store to stand there and be sad with everyone else.”
The summer of 2014 was both when Bowie first received his diagnosis and when he began demoing songs that would appear on Blackstar and in his musical Lazarus. During the 2015 recording sessions, the cancer was treated, went into remission, and – in November, around the making of the music video for “Lazarus” – returned with a status of terminal. And so, though Bowie had continued writing and recording, planning both a follow-up to Blackstar and another musical, he was facing his mortality head-on the entire time he was creating this album, living with the knowledge that this could very well be the last album he made, that it could be the last statement from an artist known for making a statement with everything he did.
Given this context and the fact that many heard the album for the first time literally just before or just after hearing the news, it’s essentially impossible for the listener to separate their experience and interpretation of Blackstar from Bowie’s death. Even without over-analyzing it all, it’s easy to notice that the album’s lyrics are full of references to death and dying, and that its atmosphere is melancholic and existential at the very least, if not downright foreboding. And the brilliant music videos for the singles “Blackstar” (single and video released November 19, 2015) and “Lazarus” (single released December 17, 2015; video released January 7, 2016)? Well, they’re both chock-full of more symbolism and self-referential imagery a Bowie fanatic could shake a stick at, simply encouraging – nay, inviting – the viewer to read absolutely anything and everything into them.
billyjoebowers: “When the ‘Blackstar’ video came out I remember talking with a friend about how interesting but weird it was, and being kind of amused and confused by it. Then he died, and the ‘Lazarus’ video, and it was like ‘Oh shit!’. Like a punch in the gut. An amazing work, I listened to it non-stop for months, but not for several months after, it was too raw.”
Anomnomnomaly: “To me, the album felt like he was writing his obituary in a lot of the lyrics. So when he passed away shortly after, the whole album started to make a lot more sense for me.”
BackFromTheDud: “@Anomnomnomaly Agree. He knew the end was near, and it shows.”
But, even if our experience of the album is coloured by this context, that by no means takes away from the brilliance of this album.
If we had been fortunate enough to get another Bowie album or two or six after it, Blackstar would remain an absolute standout in his eclectic discography. It was unlike anything Bowie had ever done. Even just Bowie’s decision to not have any familiar faces in the backing band but rather to hire a pre-existing group (i.e., Donny McCaslin’s quartet with Jason Lindner, Tim Lefebvre, and Mark Guiliana) – and a jazz quartet at that! – was a stunning move. That move alone, particularly given what must have been a strong sense of urgency to realize the music Bowie still wanted to get out before it was too late, could’ve made them all rush, cut corners, make compromises. But, instead, the gamble of working with musicians who were new to Bowie’s processes and methods – musicians from a corner of the music world that Bowie had not yet visited – paid off in spades. The result was that the album showcased once again Bowie’s awe-inducing drive to always push himself further and further, even when just shy of 70 years old – never afraid to try something new, never calling it in, and never wanting to rest on his long-before well-earned laurels, all for the love of music, art, and artistry.
Its context simply drew deserved attention to Blackstar much sooner than it might’ve in other circumstances, immediately cementing its status as a masterpiece rather than it taking people a beat or two to grasp what this genius had just dropped into our laps. Indeed, its context ultimately made David Bowie-the-performer the most human he had ever been, in some ways making this album – an otherwise rather experimental if not challenging musical work – perhaps the easiest in his entire oeuvre for people to instantly connect with, in one way or another.
AnxietyDescending: “Released at the same time of Bowie’s passing, Blackstar was a bittersweet release. At first listen it was obviously a masterpiece but that joy was tempered by the fact that it would be Bowie’s last.”
mathzy: “It was going to be one of his masterpieces anyway. And then it was released virtually on the date of his death. My reaction was this was a legend and he put all his legendary artistic endeavour into it. Gorgeous, dark, brooding, triumphant.”
soulforgotten: “Blackstar was a really hard one for me to listen to. Bowie passed away before I got the chance to listen to the album and his death was especially crushing for me and my wife. As much as I wanted to take the album for a spin, I just couldn’t at the time. It was years later that I finally took the opportunity to listen to it, and it was an almost 50/50 split of regret (leaving so long to hear it) and admiration for his final album. It is a solid bookend to an amazing legacy.”
okohll: “Bowie at his best, I’m really glad he managed to pull off a master-work to bow out with. Evokes something strange, extra-worldly, profound yet at the same time can’t escape the Bowie-like elements of fun. He had the gift of being able to make something both unique and banging. Mention must be made of the collection of musicians he pulled together – the drumming is absolutely amazing for example. The success is that the whole is even greater than the sum of the parts.”
serpicojam: “I had been a fan of Mark Giuliana’s (and the rest of the folks on the LP who’d worked with Donny McCaslin) long before Blackstar was released, and I really appreciated his influence on the songs. ‘Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime)’ is so dark, but it’s such a masterpiece. I should probably revisit the whole album again.”
evilchili: “Blackstar is astonishing in its ambition: here is a record that is both polemic and meditation, defiantly rejecting endings while saying goodbye, a grand finale and also the start of a new creative direction we will never get to follow. Throughout his career Bowie never told us everything, but he would give us glimpses, and Blackstar is no different: deeply personal, but only to a point. It’s true, but it’s an ambiguous truth. It’s wry and winking and earnest all at once. And full of swagger! It’s a considered, intentional final work by a dying man who is not afraid to remind us precisely how good he is.
‘You’re a flash in the pan
I am the great I AM'”No matter the whys and wherefores, upon its release 10 years ago, Blackstar became an important album for many of us, whether it changed how we approached the rest of Bowie’s discography, how we approached or viewed modern music in general, even how we played our own music.
NoRestfortheWicked: “Personally, it opened for me more of the David Bowie albums like Low. Also I like the aesthetic of this album and videos. ‘Blackstar’ like a sci-fi film, ‘Lazarus’ has an almost prophetic feeling of a dying man on his bed. For me, it was something new to find, and it expanded my musical taste a lot.”
RobeeShepherd: “I know some huge Bowie fans, so I’ve been exposed to his work, but for me whilst I love his earlier stuff he felt irrelevant to me as a music fan after ‘Absolute Beginners’. I’ve dipped in a little since then and nothing grabbed me, until Blackstar. That didn’t pull me in, it sucked me in and I played it on repeat for months.”
buffyleigh: “I became a fan THE DAY Blackstar came out, listened to Bowie all that Friday and weekend. And then Monday happened. So I was a fan of all of 3 entire days and yet it totally knocked the wind out of me. And I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that changed how I approach music. I listened to ONLY Bowie for months after that, only broken by Prince dying and then I only listened to Bowie and Prince for another few months. I never did deep dives before that, or re-evaluated my feeling on artists I had written off long before. And now that’s what takes up most of my listening time.”
billyjoebowers: “I worked with a band and thought I heard something with the drummer. ‘Have you listened to Blackstar?’ He laughed and said ‘Yeah, non stop’. I could hear it in the change in his playing.”
And, for some, it remains an album that still profoundly affects us in one way or another, even when it’s not playing. It’s approached reverentially, not just as a memorial for its artist but perhaps of something larger that we’ve all lost.
daria: “I can’t remember when I heard it last time, it’s an emotionally difficult album for me.”
avi_miller: “Blackstar is an album like no other. It will forever be tinged with emotions for me from Bowie’s passing, and I don’t think that is a bad thing. Sometimes I put it on and cry a little.”
harriolkn: “Blackstar is probably my favourite Bowie album but I can’t listen to it very often because it makes me feel more sad than any other music.”
buffyleigh: “I will never get over this album, and feel like every single note of it is totally ingrained in my brain. I literally have never listened to this without crying…is perhaps the first/only record in my collection I would consider sacred (in a non-religious sense). It’s also my least listened to favourite album because I never want it to become background music, and each listen is almost a rite. I essentially only put it on for Bowiemas/Bowienalia.”
austinross: “It is a life-changing album.”
theotherbrook: “I wish I could come up with something meaningful to say, but when I think about that album the nerves are still too raw for me to touch. I know I’m not alone in having an irrational sense that our collective orbit entered a state of rapid decay with Bowie’s death. It is — it must be — coincidental. But still. Leaving us Blackstar wasn’t just writing his own epitaph, but also leaving us a marker for that moment when we could no longer ignore how unstable the trajectory we were on had become. I don’t know… I meant to say I have nothing to say but then I said that.”
At the very least, whether Blackstar is among your favourite Bowie albums (or favourite albums, period) or not, for 40+ years the release of a new Bowie album was a cultural event, and this album was certainly among the biggest of them all if not THE biggest. In the age of the Internet (and so, Bowie’s last five albums, starting with the 1999 release ‘hours…’), such events have brought together people from literally all over the world, from all walks of life, to share in a piece of sonic art that brought beauty, comfort, wonder, and escape. Given the times we live in, where connection is perhaps more important than ever, that this was the last Bowie event we could ever share in, could bond over, could disappear into, is in itself something to be remembered and mourned.
satsuma: “Back in the day, Twitter used to be a friendly place where you could connect with a group of friends to chat about anything that took your fancy. You would accumulate loose networks of common interests with people across the internet, and occasionally closer bonds would form. One such group consisted of people who had realised that if we picked an album and all hit play at the agreed time, then that meant we could share our experiences of listening to music together, even though we might be worlds apart. We started with the odd album at lunchtime, then came up with some rules to add to our choices – the idea was to pick 5 albums by the same artist (their first, their last, the fans choice, the controversial choice and the wild card) and I coined the hashtag ‘5×1’ (for five by one) as a way of tying everything together. The comedian Michael Legge then suggested listening to every album by a particular group or artist at the rate of one a day, so we went through the discographies of Sparks, Gary Numan, Queen and eventually David Bowie, with the tag ‘BowieADay’ starting with ‘David Bowie’ and ending with ‘The Next Day’, the final album at the time.
We all loved Bowie, and so when we heard rumours that a new album was coming out we made plans to stay up after midnight to listen to it as soon as it was released. We laughed, we made jokes, we appreciated the joy of hearing something new and important from our Hero for the first time – it felt like a message from him straight to us and we all knew that we would be puzzling over the lyrics for a long time to come. What was with all of the references to him dying? What was a Blackstar anyway?
We went to bed happy that night, and then woke up two days later to the awful news that David Bowie was gone. We were numb with grief and clung together virtually to process how we felt.
I couldn’t face listening to Blackstar again for a long time – it was simply too painful to think that he knew he was dying as he wrote it. It took almost a year before we undertook another ‘BowieADay’ journey, knowing that this one had a final ending point.
The second time around was more poignant than the first, and I saw more of the connections that had always been there right from the very beginning to the bitter end. Of course there were Low points on the way and the second hearing of Blackstar was both agonising and cathartic, and the beginning of appreciating how much we lost on the day he died.
Of course, I’ve listened to Blackstar again in the ten years since then, but every time has felt like an occasion. It’s not an album to be streamed at random or added to playlists. It demands attention and ritual. To be listened to on the best speakers, with the lights dimmed and with full attention.
Our original ‘5×1’ group is now dispersed across different platforms, only sometimes reconnecting, but it’s not quite the same now. I have new friends in different places, but we still have common bonds in a love of music, and especially with this album that still holds a special place in my heart.
Rest in peace, Starman.”
If you haven’t yet heard this album, it’s waiting for you, whenever you’re ready. And, if you haven’t yet listened to Bowie’s full discography and aren’t sure where to start, perhaps check out our continuation of satsuma’s BowieADay that a few of us did last year, complete with a suggested schedule for what to listen to from January 8 through to the end of the month, including all the studio albums and some extras. I, for one, will be hiding in my Bowie playlist for the remainder of the month.
Thank you, Bowie.
- Mastodon/Fediverse usernames shown alongside their quotes. Nearly each participant submitted a single blurb, so some quotes have been split up to fit sections, and some have been very lightly edited for spelling/punctuation/capitalization. Many thanks again to the 20 Fedizens who took part (in alphabetical order): Anomnomnomaly, AnxietyDescending, austinross, avi_miller, BackFromTheDud, billyjoebowers, blogdiva, daria, evilchili, harriolkn, mathzy, NoRestfortheWicked, okohll, peach, RobeeShepherd, rothko, satsuma, serpicojam, soulforgotten, and theotherbrook. (For those with keen eyes but who may not know who is behind the keyboard, I don’t thank buffyleigh simply because that is me. And I know quoting myself is a bit hokey, but I am quoting what I’ve written elsewhere.) ↩︎
#Bowie #DavidBowie #DonnyMcCaslin #experimental #JasonLindner #jazz #ListenToThis #MarkGuiliana #music #musicDiscovery #rock #TimLefebvre
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CW: Bowie's Blackstar at 10 - A Fedi-sourced celebration of a masterpiece [CW'd for length]
Bowie’s ★ at 10
Our next spotlight is on number 299 on The List, submitted by HillardHouseDan. And because this is a big anniversary for an even bigger album, some Fedi friends[1] will be joining me today to collectively share our thoughts on its impact, and our memories of its release. For, on January 8, 2016 – David Bowie’s 69th birthday – Bowie released his 26th studio album, making today the 10th anniversary of the experimental jazz/rock masterpiece ★ aka Blackstar.
rothko: “TENTH?!”
daria: “…10 years???? HOW 😭“
blogdiva: “Shit. It’s already been 10 years?!?!?”
austinross: “Hard to believe it’s already been 10 years.”
peach: “As the general quality of modern music has decayed, one of the last great albums has reached a decade.”
And, as we all know, 2 days later, January 10, 2016, Bowie left us, succumbing to a cancer we didn’t know he had been fighting, making Blackstar – whether intentionally crafted to be or not – his swan song.
harriolkn: “I remember reading the news when I was at work and barely kept it together for the rest of the day. When I finally got home, and saw my partner at the time, we both just burst into tears and embraced each other without saying a word.”
buffyleigh: “When KEXP celebrated the release of ★ with ‘Intergalactic Bowie Day’ [on Friday, January 8, 2016], I instantly fell in love with the album, the first entire Bowie album I had listened to from beginning to end…I listened to the entire 12-hour tribute and planned on working my way through his discography, starting with picking up ★ on vinyl as soon as I could get down to my local record store, seeing as it felt wrong listening to the full album on YouTube, which someone had already posted. When I saw the news on Monday morning, I was stunned and disoriented…called in sick and went to my local record store to stand there and be sad with everyone else.”
The summer of 2014 was both when Bowie first received his diagnosis and when he began demoing songs that would appear on Blackstar and in his musical Lazarus. During the 2015 recording sessions, the cancer was treated, went into remission, and – in November, around the making of the music video for “Lazarus” – returned with a status of terminal. And so, though Bowie had continued writing and recording, planning both a follow-up to Blackstar and another musical, he was facing his mortality head-on the entire time he was creating this album, living with the knowledge that this could very well be the last album he made, that it could be the last statement from an artist known for making a statement with everything he did.
Given this context and the fact that many heard the album for the first time literally just before or just after hearing the news, it’s essentially impossible for the listener to separate their experience and interpretation of Blackstar from Bowie’s death. Even without over-analyzing it all, it’s easy to notice that the album’s lyrics are full of references to death and dying, and that its atmosphere is melancholic and existential at the very least, if not downright foreboding. And the brilliant music videos for the singles “Blackstar” (single and video released November 19, 2015) and “Lazarus” (single released December 17, 2015; video released January 7, 2016)? Well, they’re both chock-full of more symbolism and self-referential imagery a Bowie fanatic could shake a stick at, simply encouraging – nay, inviting – the viewer to read absolutely anything and everything into them.
billyjoebowers: “When the ‘Blackstar’ video came out I remember talking with a friend about how interesting but weird it was, and being kind of amused and confused by it. Then he died, and the ‘Lazarus’ video, and it was like ‘Oh shit!’. Like a punch in the gut. An amazing work, I listened to it non-stop for months, but not for several months after, it was too raw.”
Anomnomnomaly: “To me, the album felt like he was writing his obituary in a lot of the lyrics. So when he passed away shortly after, the whole album started to make a lot more sense for me.”
BackFromTheDud: “@Anomnomnomaly Agree. He knew the end was near, and it shows.”
But, even if our experience of the album is coloured by this context, that by no means takes away from the brilliance of this album.
If we had been fortunate enough to get another Bowie album or two or six after it, Blackstar would remain an absolute standout in his eclectic discography. It was unlike anything Bowie had ever done. Even just Bowie’s decision to not have any familiar faces in the backing band but rather to hire a pre-existing group (i.e., Donny McCaslin’s quartet with Jason Lindner, Tim Lefebvre, and Mark Guiliana) – and a jazz quartet at that! – was a stunning move. That move alone, particularly given what must have been a strong sense of urgency to realize the music Bowie still wanted to get out before it was too late, could’ve made them all rush, cut corners, make compromises. But, instead, the gamble of working with musicians who were new to Bowie’s processes and methods – musicians from a corner of the music world that Bowie had not yet visited – paid off in spades. The result was that the album showcased once again Bowie’s awe-inducing drive to always push himself further and further, even when just shy of 70 years old – never afraid to try something new, never calling it in, and never wanting to rest on his long-before well-earned laurels, all for the love of music, art, and artistry.
Its context simply drew deserved attention to Blackstar much sooner than it might’ve in other circumstances, immediately cementing its status as a masterpiece rather than it taking people a beat or two to grasp what this genius had just dropped into our laps. Indeed, its context ultimately made David Bowie-the-performer the most human he had ever been, in some ways making this album – an otherwise rather experimental if not challenging musical work – perhaps the easiest in his entire oeuvre for people to instantly connect with, in one way or another.
AnxietyDescending: “Released at the same time of Bowie’s passing, Blackstar was a bittersweet release. At first listen it was obviously a masterpiece but that joy was tempered by the fact that it would be Bowie’s last.”
mathzy: “It was going to be one of his masterpieces anyway. And then it was released virtually on the date of his death. My reaction was this was a legend and he put all his legendary artistic endeavour into it. Gorgeous, dark, brooding, triumphant.”
soulforgotten: “Blackstar was a really hard one for me to listen to. Bowie passed away before I got the chance to listen to the album and his death was especially crushing for me and my wife. As much as I wanted to take the album for a spin, I just couldn’t at the time. It was years later that I finally took the opportunity to listen to it, and it was an almost 50/50 split of regret (leaving so long to hear it) and admiration for his final album. It is a solid bookend to an amazing legacy.”
okohll: “Bowie at his best, I’m really glad he managed to pull off a master-work to bow out with. Evokes something strange, extra-worldly, profound yet at the same time can’t escape the Bowie-like elements of fun. He had the gift of being able to make something both unique and banging. Mention must be made of the collection of musicians he pulled together – the drumming is absolutely amazing for example. The success is that the whole is even greater than the sum of the parts.”
serpicojam: “I had been a fan of Mark Giuliana’s (and the rest of the folks on the LP who’d worked with Donny McCaslin) long before Blackstar was released, and I really appreciated his influence on the songs. ‘Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime)’ is so dark, but it’s such a masterpiece. I should probably revisit the whole album again.”
evilchili: “Blackstar is astonishing in its ambition: here is a record that is both polemic and meditation, defiantly rejecting endings while saying goodbye, a grand finale and also the start of a new creative direction we will never get to follow. Throughout his career Bowie never told us everything, but he would give us glimpses, and Blackstar is no different: deeply personal, but only to a point. It’s true, but it’s an ambiguous truth. It’s wry and winking and earnest all at once. And full of swagger! It’s a considered, intentional final work by a dying man who is not afraid to remind us precisely how good he is.
‘You’re a flash in the pan
I am the great I AM'”No matter the whys and wherefores, upon its release 10 years ago, Blackstar became an important album for many of us, whether it changed how we approached the rest of Bowie’s discography, how we approached or viewed modern music in general, even how we played our own music.
NoRestfortheWicked: “Personally, it opened for me more of the David Bowie albums like Low. Also I like the aesthetic of this album and videos. ‘Blackstar’ like a sci-fi film, ‘Lazarus’ has an almost prophetic feeling of a dying man on his bed. For me, it was something new to find, and it expanded my musical taste a lot.”
RobeeShepherd: “I know some huge Bowie fans, so I’ve been exposed to his work, but for me whilst I love his earlier stuff he felt irrelevant to me as a music fan after ‘Absolute Beginners’. I’ve dipped in a little since then and nothing grabbed me, until Blackstar. That didn’t pull me in, it sucked me in and I played it on repeat for months.”
buffyleigh: “I became a fan THE DAY Blackstar came out, listened to Bowie all that Friday and weekend. And then Monday happened. So I was a fan of all of 3 entire days and yet it totally knocked the wind out of me. And I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that changed how I approach music. I listened to ONLY Bowie for months after that, only broken by Prince dying and then I only listened to Bowie and Prince for another few months. I never did deep dives before that, or re-evaluated my feeling on artists I had written off long before. And now that’s what takes up most of my listening time.”
billyjoebowers: “I worked with a band and thought I heard something with the drummer. ‘Have you listened to Blackstar?’ He laughed and said ‘Yeah, non stop’. I could hear it in the change in his playing.”
And, for some, it remains an album that still profoundly affects us in one way or another, even when it’s not playing. It’s approached reverentially, not just as a memorial for its artist but perhaps of something larger that we’ve all lost.
daria: “I can’t remember when I heard it last time, it’s an emotionally difficult album for me.”
avi_miller: “Blackstar is an album like no other. It will forever be tinged with emotions for me from Bowie’s passing, and I don’t think that is a bad thing. Sometimes I put it on and cry a little.”
harriolkn: “Blackstar is probably my favourite Bowie album but I can’t listen to it very often because it makes me feel more sad than any other music.”
buffyleigh: “I will never get over this album, and feel like every single note of it is totally ingrained in my brain. I literally have never listened to this without crying…is perhaps the first/only record in my collection I would consider sacred (in a non-religious sense). It’s also my least listened to favourite album because I never want it to become background music, and each listen is almost a rite. I essentially only put it on for Bowiemas/Bowienalia.”
austinross: “It is a life-changing album.”
theotherbrook: “I wish I could come up with something meaningful to say, but when I think about that album the nerves are still too raw for me to touch. I know I’m not alone in having an irrational sense that our collective orbit entered a state of rapid decay with Bowie’s death. It is — it must be — coincidental. But still. Leaving us Blackstar wasn’t just writing his own epitaph, but also leaving us a marker for that moment when we could no longer ignore how unstable the trajectory we were on had become. I don’t know… I meant to say I have nothing to say but then I said that.”
At the very least, whether Blackstar is among your favourite Bowie albums (or favourite albums, period) or not, for 40+ years the release of a new Bowie album was a cultural event, and this album was certainly among the biggest of them all if not THE biggest. In the age of the Internet (and so, Bowie’s last five albums, starting with the 1999 release ‘hours…’), such events have brought together people from literally all over the world, from all walks of life, to share in a piece of sonic art that brought beauty, comfort, wonder, and escape. Given the times we live in, where connection is perhaps more important than ever, that this was the last Bowie event we could ever share in, could bond over, could disappear into, is in itself something to be remembered and mourned.
satsuma: “Back in the day, Twitter used to be a friendly place where you could connect with a group of friends to chat about anything that took your fancy. You would accumulate loose networks of common interests with people across the internet, and occasionally closer bonds would form. One such group consisted of people who had realised that if we picked an album and all hit play at the agreed time, then that meant we could share our experiences of listening to music together, even though we might be worlds apart. We started with the odd album at lunchtime, then came up with some rules to add to our choices – the idea was to pick 5 albums by the same artist (their first, their last, the fans choice, the controversial choice and the wild card) and I coined the hashtag ‘5×1’ (for five by one) as a way of tying everything together. The comedian Michael Legge then suggested listening to every album by a particular group or artist at the rate of one a day, so we went through the discographies of Sparks, Gary Numan, Queen and eventually David Bowie, with the tag ‘BowieADay’ starting with ‘David Bowie’ and ending with ‘The Next Day’, the final album at the time.
We all loved Bowie, and so when we heard rumours that a new album was coming out we made plans to stay up after midnight to listen to it as soon as it was released. We laughed, we made jokes, we appreciated the joy of hearing something new and important from our Hero for the first time – it felt like a message from him straight to us and we all knew that we would be puzzling over the lyrics for a long time to come. What was with all of the references to him dying? What was a Blackstar anyway?
We went to bed happy that night, and then woke up two days later to the awful news that David Bowie was gone. We were numb with grief and clung together virtually to process how we felt.
I couldn’t face listening to Blackstar again for a long time – it was simply too painful to think that he knew he was dying as he wrote it. It took almost a year before we undertook another ‘BowieADay’ journey, knowing that this one had a final ending point.
The second time around was more poignant than the first, and I saw more of the connections that had always been there right from the very beginning to the bitter end. Of course there were Low points on the way and the second hearing of Blackstar was both agonising and cathartic, and the beginning of appreciating how much we lost on the day he died.
Of course, I’ve listened to Blackstar again in the ten years since then, but every time has felt like an occasion. It’s not an album to be streamed at random or added to playlists. It demands attention and ritual. To be listened to on the best speakers, with the lights dimmed and with full attention.
Our original ‘5×1’ group is now dispersed across different platforms, only sometimes reconnecting, but it’s not quite the same now. I have new friends in different places, but we still have common bonds in a love of music, and especially with this album that still holds a special place in my heart.
Rest in peace, Starman.”
If you haven’t yet heard this album, it’s waiting for you, whenever you’re ready. And, if you haven’t yet listened to Bowie’s full discography and aren’t sure where to start, perhaps check out our continuation of satsuma’s BowieADay that a few of us did last year, complete with a suggested schedule for what to listen to from January 8 through to the end of the month, including all the studio albums and some extras. I, for one, will be hiding in my Bowie playlist for the remainder of the month.
Thank you, Bowie.
- Mastodon/Fediverse usernames shown alongside their quotes. Nearly each participant submitted a single blurb, so some quotes have been split up to fit sections, and some have been very lightly edited for spelling/punctuation/capitalization. Many thanks again to the 20 Fedizens who took part (in alphabetical order): Anomnomnomaly, AnxietyDescending, austinross, avi_miller, BackFromTheDud, billyjoebowers, blogdiva, daria, evilchili, harriolkn, mathzy, NoRestfortheWicked, okohll, peach, RobeeShepherd, rothko, satsuma, serpicojam, soulforgotten, and theotherbrook. (For those with keen eyes but who may not know who is behind the keyboard, I don’t thank buffyleigh simply because that is me. And I know quoting myself is a bit hokey, but I am quoting what I’ve written elsewhere.) ↩︎
#Bowie #DavidBowie #DonnyMcCaslin #experimental #JasonLindner #jazz #ListenToThis #MarkGuiliana #music #musicDiscovery #rock #TimLefebvre
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“You never change something by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
― R. Buckminster FullerClara Mattei ― Escape From Capitalism: Why Reform Won't Save Us
FREE (Forum for Real Economic Emancipation)
#WhiteSupremacist #Capitalist #Patriarchy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKlAjKlYHcc&t=29s -
“You never change something by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
― R. Buckminster FullerClara Mattei ― Escape From Capitalism: Why Reform Won't Save Us
FREE (Forum for Real Economic Emancipation)
#WhiteSupremacist #Capitalist #Patriarchy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKlAjKlYHcc&t=29s -
“You never change something by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
― R. Buckminster FullerClara Mattei ― Escape From Capitalism: Why Reform Won't Save Us
FREE (Forum for Real Economic Emancipation)
#WhiteSupremacist #Capitalist #Patriarchy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKlAjKlYHcc&t=29s