Today's Links

Tony Benn, veteran Labour politician, dies aged 88

Former cabinet minister dies at his home in west London surrounded by family members

The Setup / John McAfee

My accessory tools are mostly extremely strong espresso and research chemicals from China that are classed as “Smart Drugs”. They allow me to solve 2nd order partial differential equations in my head and to spontaneously create 4 dimensional images of software structures that I can mentally manipulate.

Amazing. The whole thing reads like 4chan copypasta.

I am Tim Berners-Lee. I invented the WWW 25 years ago and I am concerned and excited about its future. AMA.
Great stuff, if you can cope with Reddit’s godawful threaded comment format (see below).
Interviewly

Interviews with interesting people, pulled from Reddit, organized, and made prettier.

The Web is 25

It’s not that well-known that certain Netscape people reached out to Playboy, convinced them to do this Web thing, and helped them build the site.

Your Name in Life

Your Name in Life allows you to create a unique Game of Life based on your name.

Grind Your Enthusiasm
A grindcore tribute to Larry David!
Neil Young launches new music player based on magic beans and unicorn poop.

Neil Young has unveiled at SXSW a new $400 pocket music player that only plays one specific file type, encoded at “high resolution”. The file type will only be sold through a single proprietary store.

High resolution audiophile nitwittery. Solving the wrong problem, too: ‘loudness wars’ mastering and compression–as in dynamic range, not data–is the reason so much music sounds a bit rubbish.

Profits Of Doom
From the new Popbitch magazine, educated guesses on the profitability of the Daily Mail website (spoiler: they’re probably not raking it in, despite the huge readership).
GDS becomes political as Labour launches digital government review

Labour is also critical of GDS’s apparent hostility to large IT suppliers.

Huh?

8 pronunciation errors that made the English language what it is today
I didn’t know that ‘[w]asp used to be waps; bird used to be brid and horse used to be hros’. Time to jump on the aks for ask bangwagon‽
Multi-digit Number Recognition from Street View Imagery using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
The house numbers that fox the neural network are identified by humans via ReCAPTCHA.