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The Independent Variable

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🎵 Albini Sessions (Benefit for Letters Charity), by Fugazi

Bandcamp

Letters Charity is a nonprofit organization on a mission to use Art as a conduit to transform passive compassion into immediate assistance through the distribution of money given, without expectation or judgment, directly to families experiencing poverty.

Holy moly! A second charity album and this one from Fugazi featuring recordings they did in Chicago at Electrical Audio Studio with Steve Albini back in ’92.

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🎵 HELP(2), by War Child Records

Bandcamp & War Child UK

In addition to the stellar cast of musicians involved, renowned filmmaker and Academy Award Winner Jonathan Glazer acted as Creative Director for ‘HELP(2)’, working with Academy Films to assemble a team of brilliant creatives and overseeing the filming and art direction for the project.

If there’s one album you pick up today on Bandcamp Friday, it should probably be this one. Following in the footsteps of the ’95 Brian Eno- produced HELP, proceeds from HELP(2) go to to benefit humanitarian efforts to aid, protect, and educate children in Gaza, Sudan, Yemen, and

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🏀 A handful of ex-ABA players hope for a last-second financial long shot from the NBA

Athletic

If these 23 old heads are having to gig for Uber and Amway at 80-years old, whatever pension they are getting from the NBA isn’t enough. Just give these guys $1k-a-month to help meet their basic needs, at least. The NBA just signed the biggest tv deal ever and can’t scrounge around the couch cushions for $2.7 million (which would cover $1k/month for 23 players for ten years)??? Hell, put $2mil in a savings account and between interest and guys passing away, it should be more than covered.

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🌍 World Monitor - Real-Time Global Intelligence Dashboard

World Monitor & WIRED

“The system ingests 100-plus data streams simultaneously,” Habib notes. The result is a constantly updating map of global tensions: conflict zones with escalation scores, military aircraft broadcasting positions through ADS-B transponders, ship movements tracked through AIS signals, nuclear installations, submarine cables, internet outages and satellite fire detections.

This is incredibly cool.

The visual is stunning, and the whole idea of just having a dashboard of all major events happening across the globe is insane.

From conflicts to extreme weather and other major events; having a complete view pulling from so many sources and doing multiple source

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🔊 How We Built Monologue for iOS

lucas.love

I just learned that friend of the Variable, Lucas, developer extraordinaire, developed the Monologue app for iOS, taking the initial concept and prototype that was vibe-coded based on the Mac app and turning it into an absolutely killer iPhone app. Still not a huge fan of the extremely AI bullish Every, but knowing that a developer like Lucas, who puts time, care, and attention into everything he does, is working on it now means this app should progress and only improve for the better. I’ve now switched to it from SuperWhisper for all my transcription needs.

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📱 The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

Politico

The fact that the Commission said TikTok should change the basic design of its service is “ground-breaking for the business model fueled by surveillance and advertising," said Katarzyna Szymielewicz, president of the Panoptykon Foundation, a Polish civil society group.

Honestly, I really love this idea. It’s so easy to just fall into doom scrolling and go down a never-ending rabbit hole. So forcing some kind of decision-making to continue is a good idea, given some of the addiction we’ve seen arise from these types of apps.

I’ve also been thinking defaulting to an algorithmic timeline

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