The rising popularity of vinyl has also led to “listening parties” which ban phones and other distractions. CC-licensed photo by Tom Collins on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Groovy. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Why listening parties are everywhere right now • Dazed
Josh Crowe:
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Listening parties [for new albums] have rapidly evolved from industry-only previews into a central pillar of modern album rollouts. Artists from Billie Eilish and Frank Ocean to independent collectives are increasingly favouring immersive listening experiences over traditional launches. In an era where listening to music largely happens via streaming services, these in-person events offer an alternative which demands time and attention – and, crucially, fosters community.
Streaming has transformed how music is consumed, but in doing so, many argue it has also flattened the album format. While access has never been easier, depth of engagement has become harder to sustain. Listening parties push back against this logic. They ask audiences to slow down, to sit with an album in its entirety, and to experience it collectively.
For fans, the collective element can be as powerful as the music itself. Lysette, who attended Rosalía’s LUX listening party the day before the album’s release, describes the event as a rare space for connection. Listening to the record together heightened that sense of shared experience. “We could see everyone’s reactions to each song. They’re all so different on this album, so it was really special to experience that collectively, then talk about it afterwards.” For Lysette, the palpable attention to detail – from the organisation to the atmosphere – only deepened the emotional impact. “It really built excitement for the album. It’s such a great way to connect, not only with the music but with other people who love that artist in similar ways.”
She also points to the scalability of these events. “It felt unique, but also doable. It’s not a long event, but it supports fan communities in cities all around the world — especially places that aren’t physically close to where the artist is based.” In that sense, listening parties offer global reach without sacrificing intimacy. And intimacy is increasingly important: for Gen Z especially, these events tap into a broader desire for ‘analogue’ experiences.
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Taking phones completely out of the equation – as is demanded at listening parties – makes a huge difference. But there’s definitely a hunger for the analogue experience among younger generations. In the town where I live there’s a vinyl record shop, and many of its most regular customers are under 30. One of them, the owner told me, comes in with his (parents’?) pop albums, sells them to the shop (which can resell them – that’s where most vinyl comes from now), and buys prog rock albums from the 1970s and 1980s. Everything old is new again.
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Home secretary says she has no confidence in West Midlands police chief • BBC News
Susie Rack and Alex McIntyre:
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At appearances on 1 December and 6 January, [West Midlands police chief constable Craig] Guildford told the Home Affairs Select Committee the force “do not use AI”, rather that it was a Google search that provided the erroneous information [that Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans had rioted in a match against West Ham – a fixture which never happened].
In his letter to the chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee published on Wednesday, Guildford said the information “arose as a result of a use of Microsoft Copilot” and offered a “profound apology” for the mistake.
A Microsoft spokesperson told the BBC: “We are not able to replicate what is being reported. Copilot combines information from multiple web sources into a single response with linked citations. It informs users they are interacting with an AI system and encourages them to review the sources.”
[Police and Crime Commissioner] Sir Andy [Foster’s] review found eight inaccuracies in a report from the force to Birmingham’s safety group, including a reference to the non-existent Tel Aviv-West Ham game.
Others included overstating the number of Dutch police officers deployed during a Maccabi match in Amsterdam and claims Muslim communities had been intentionally targeted by Tel Aviv fans.
The decision on the ban from the safety group – which is made up of representatives from the council, police and other authorities – prompted political outrage, including from Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.
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This is surely the first time that AI, and specifically Microsoft CoPilot, has been held responsible for a policing mistake. Or should one say – the first time that we know of.
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Bandcamp’s mission and our approach to Generative AI • Bandcamp blog
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Bandcamp’s mission is to help spread the healing power of music by building a community where artists thrive through the direct support of their fans. We believe that the human connection found through music is a vital part of our society and culture, and that music is much more than a product to be consumed. It’s the result of a human cultural dialog stretching back before the written word.
Similarly, musicians are more than mere producers of sound. They are vital members of our communities, our culture, and our social fabric. Bandcamp was built to directly connect artists and their fans, and to make it easy for fans to support artists equitably so that they can keep making music.
Today we are fortifying our mission by articulating our policy on generative AI, so that musicians can keep making music, and so that fans have confidence that the music they find on Bandcamp was created by humans.
Our guidelines for generative AI in music and audio are as follows:
• Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp.
• Any use of AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles is strictly prohibited in accordance with our existing policies prohibiting impersonation and intellectual property infringement.
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The proof is in the pudding, of course, but the expectation will be that the community will report suspicious content.
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Getting data out of a PDF figure • Adam Kucharski on Substack
Adam Kucharski:
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Want to get the data out of a PDF figure? As in, the actual data – not a rough trace-along-the-lines version?
A few years ago I made a somewhat popular R package that allowed users to extract the underlying geometry of a PDF figure, so they could get the exact data points that went into the original figure. (Which came in handy for public health emergencies, when governments often release crucial data buried in PDF figures.)
But the user experience was still a bit clunky – it required ghostscript to be set up, and there were some intermediate output files that required manual edits.
So I rebuilt it with Claude Code. Everything runs locally in the browser, and hopefully now a much smoother experience!
Try it out here: https://adamkucharski.github.io/pdf2plot/.«
This is sure to come in useful for some people, even if increasingly one might think that this capability will be sucked natively into chatbots. (This is the first time of quoting a Substack Note rather than Substack article, I think.)
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How London finally cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground • Ian Visits
Ian Mansfield:
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Dotted around London, there are a number of private hotels that aren’t the sort of hotel you might expect – they’re needed to make mobile phones work on the London Underground.
They’re not for humans, but for huge racks of computer and electronics equipment – and each of the UK’s mobile networks is renting space inside them, as this was one of the innovations that allowed phones to work underground in the first place.
While many newer underground railways have had mobile coverage in their tunnels for years, fitting it into the London Underground kept running into the same problem – it costs a lot of money and needs a lot more space in the stations than is available.
Classically, each of the mobile networks would install its own kit in each station and manage it, but there simply wasn’t enough space for that in London’s old tube stations, many of which were built before the wireless telegraph was even invented.
However, as radio equipment has become smaller and cleverer, it’s now possible for several networks to share the same equipment, and in 2021 Boldyn Networks (then BAI Communications) signed a deal to build a “neutral network” that can be leased to mobile networks.
Bodyn has a 20-year concession with Transport for London (TfL) to build and operate the network, and, aside from internal staff time spent managing the project, it’s being delivered at no cost to TfL.
…Although it’s taken four years to get about half of the London Underground covered with a phone signal, they now expect the rest to take just a year to complete. That’s in part thanks to experience speeding things up, and also because a lot of the equipment has already gone in over the past four years. All they need are the final bits to complete the job and switch it on… So, most of it should be live by the end of 2026.
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CreepyLink
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CreepyLink: the URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible.
Normal links are too trustworthy. Make them creepy.
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I pasted in a search term and it yielded https://netflix.c1ic.link/urgent_8yvNSS_photo_viewer_update.zip which, despite appearances, does actually go to the search page. (I checked with curl because you want to just be careful, don’t you.)
Nice to see that people can still have fun online.
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Australia’s march toward 100% clean energy • WIRED
Julian Spector:
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Australia has put itself on a realistic path to achieving what climate activists around the world have long dreamed of: running its power grid entirely on renewable energy.
The Australian Energy Market Operator oversees the nation’s power markets. Chief among them, the National Electricity Market serves about 90% of customers, minus remote areas and the west coast. At its peak, the system uses 38 gigawatts of power—more than New York state’s peak consumption. Over the last five years, AEMO has rigorously studied how the country, whose coal fleet is aging and which banned nuclear energy decades ago, can run this grid on renewables alone.
“This is not a climate-zealot kind of approach,” AEMO CEO Daniel Westerman told Canary Media. “Our old coal-fired power stations are breaking down; they’re retiring,” he said. “They’re getting replaced by the least-cost energy, which is renewable energy, backed with storage, connected in with transmission. We’ll have a bit of gas there for the winter doldrums. That is just what’s happening.”
Australia’s efforts could offer a proof of concept for how a nation with a bustling, modern economy can rapidly shift its electricity from fossil fuels—mostly coal with some gas—to wind, solar, storage, and other renewable sources like hydropower.
“There’s nothing impossible about 100% renewable supply,” said Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton University professor who has studied net-zero pathways for the US. “Australia has a better chance of this than almost anywhere.”
So far, renewables have surged to about 35% of annual electricity production, while coal still leads with 46%, according to the International Energy Agency. Because this transition is primarily driven by market forces, rather than a legislative or regulatory requirement, Westerman couldn’t say for sure when Australia will hit the 100% mark. He does expect 90% of Australia’s coal generation will be gone by 2035, and the rest could shutter later that decade.
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Westerman was in charge of the UK National Grid when it began running without coal in 2017; seven years later the last coal-powered power station shut down. Gradually and then suddenly.
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Digg launches its new Reddit rival to the public • TechCrunch
Sarah Perez:
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The reboot of the early internet online community Digg, a one-time rival to Reddit, is moving forward. The company, which is today back under the ownership of its original founder, Kevin Rose, along with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, is launching its open beta to the public on Wednesday.
Similar to Reddit, the new Digg offers a website and mobile app where you can browse feeds featuring posts from across a selection of its communities and join other communities that align with your interests. There, you can post, comment, and upvote (or “digg”) the site’s content.
Originally a Web 2.0-era news aggregation site, Digg was once valued at $175m in 2008 but was ultimately outpaced by Reddit. That earlier version was split up in 2012, with its largest stake sold to the incubator Betaworks, while LinkedIn and The Washington Post picked up other pieces. This iteration of Digg drew additional investment in 2016 but was later sold to a digital advertising company in 2018.
…the rise of AI has presented an opportunity to rebuild Digg, Rose and Ohanian believe, leading them to acquire Digg last March through a leveraged buyout by True Ventures, Ohanian’s firm Seven Seven Six, Rose and Ohanian themselves, and the venture firm S32. The company has not disclosed its funding.
They’re betting that AI can help to address some of the messiness and toxicity of today’s social media landscape. At the same time, social platforms will need a new set of tools to ensure they’re not taken over by AI bots posing as people.
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So this is at least the third incarnation (at least) of Digg, which fell away from its original success due to a mistaken redesign in 2010 which lost out to Reddit. This feels like another attempt to get the band back together, but nobody’s interested in the songs they’re playing.
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Experts predict major shift in global energy production: “[it] will dominate the future” • The Cooldown
Cody Januszko:
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Within the next few years, renewable energy sources are expected to surpass coal, oil, and gas on a global scale.
According to the International Energy Agency’s 2025 report, “Global renewable power capacity is expected to double between now and 2030, increasing by 4,600 gigawatts.”
The agency observed that this is roughly equivalent to the combined power generation of China, the European Union, and Japan.
However, the outlook isn’t entirely rosy. The 2025 World Energy Outlook considers three scenarios. The first considers current policies, the second considers policies that have been spoken about in the political arena, and the third considers countries aiming for net-zero emissions by 2050.
In the first scenario, the IEA projected the highest increase in demand for energy sources like oil and natural gas. While the other two scenarios saw less of these energy types, all three predicted that the threshold of 1.5ºC (2.7ºF) of warming by 2050 set forth in the Paris Climate Agreement will be surpassed.
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So, good news and bad news.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 