Best of 2013: The Man Who Invented Modern Probability - Issue 8: Home - Nautilus http://nautil.us/issue/8/Home/best-of-2013-the-man-who-invented-modern-probability

Is It Time to Redesign Scrabble? http://nautil.us/issue/67/reboot/does-scrabble-need-to-be-fixed

The Dark Truths Behind Our Obsession With Self-Care - Tonic https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/zmdwm4/the-young-and-the-uncared-for-v25n4

‘User empowerment’ is a useful idea that gets abused to glorify user-hostile design. It’s usually used to refer to situations where the user is empowered to do as we (devs or PMs) tell them, or where the empowerment is too abstract to be proven.

The Internet Doesn’t Need Civility, It Needs Ethics - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pa5gxn/the-internet-doesnt-need-civility-it-needs-ethics

📚 Finished reading How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

Why You Should Never, Ever Use Quora – Waxy.org https://waxy.org/2018/12/why-you-should-never-ever-use-quora/

We Asked 105 Experts What Worries Them Most About the Future - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/yw755b/we-asked-105-experts-what-worries-them-most-about-the-future

Reidl on that export control on AI tech I talked about a couple weeks ago: https://medium.com/@mark_riedl/us-export-control-of-artificial-intelligence-research-considered-harmful-fb2986fb3f14

What the dip in US life expectancy is really about: inequality - Vox https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/1/9/16860994/life-expectancy-us-income-inequality

23: battered, but has actual any key. produces random character when pressed, useful for generating passwords. shift+any produces •, have yet to find a password box that didn’t accept it. useful, will keep.

What’s a useful programming language feature or concept that a lot of languages don’t have? - DEV Community ‘‍”‍’ https://dev.to/cathodion/whats-a-useful-programming-language-feature-or-concept-that-a-lot-of-languages-dont-have-2ep1

Fairly reliable indicator of a bad/naive post or project: the title or short description contains the name of the implementation language, but that language is conventional, commonly-used, or ‘general-purpose’.

Girlfriend Roleplay videos are racking up millions of views on YouTube, here’s why - i-D https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/gy7v9w/meet-the-whispering-girls-of-youtube-who-pretend-to-be-your-girlfriend?utm_source=idtwitter

Hot take: until there is a convenient way to express regular expressions to a conversational voice interface, use of such interfaces will remain limited to mere consumtion

The Credit Card Daredevils Who Risk It All for the Points Game - MEL Magazine https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/the-credit-daredevils-who-risk-it-all-for-the-points-game

Github is putting up a banner saying that the version of firefox I’m using is no longer supported. That’s fuckin’ wild to me. It’s 2018: if your website doesn’t work on Mosaic & Lynx, it’s broken.

The Most Damaging Election Disinformation Campaign Came From Donald Trump, Not Russia - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mbyg3x/the-most-damaging-election-disinformation-campaign-came-from-donald-trump-not-russia

The Story of Lenny, the Internet’s Favorite Telemarketing Troll - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d3b7na/the-story-of-lenny-the-internets-favorite-telemarketing-troll

Hot take: things aren’t changing more quickly than they used to; it’s just that it is easier to become aware of distant events before they have been aggregated and summarized into the status of ‘non-event’.

Heads up, apparently there are gonna be export restrictions on neural net, reinforcement learning, computer vision, NLP, & similar research done in the US: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/11/19/2018-25221/review-of-controls-for-certain-emerging-technologies

Jonestown’s Victims Have a Lesson to Teach Us, So I Listened – Mother Jones https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/11/jonestowns-victims-have-a-lesson-to-teach-us-so-i-listened-peoples-temple-anniversary-40/

Democracy Shouldn’t Be About Brand Recognition “ Member Feature Stories ” Medium https://medium.com/s/story/in-1967-a-student-known-only-as-black-bag-showed-us-all-how-democracy-would-end-3af7a526c461

The Internet Needs More Friction - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3k9q33/the-internet-needs-more-friction

Discovered how to set use_abs_time to show absolute times in a timeline.

‘Worse is better’ is a very insidious way of saying ‘give up and stop caring’, and should never be used as an excuse for anything. Anything that can be defended with ‘worse is better’ is worse & shouldn’t be tolerated.

The Vacuum Tube’s Many Modern-Day Uses https://tedium.co/2018/11/13/vacuum-tubes-modern-day/

We will never know what it’s like to be the person the K-Mart PA system’s 1994 holiday playlist wants us to be.

“Let us Calculate!”: Leibniz, Llull, and the Computational Imagination – The Public Domain Review https://publicdomainreview.org/2016/11/10/let-us-calculate-leibniz-llull-and-computational-imagination/

​Miranda July and Paul Ford Cyberstalked Me - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/aekk3b/miranda-july-and-paul-ford-cyberstalked-me

Apparatus: A hybrid graphics editor and programming environment for creating interactive diagrams http://aprt.us/

Getting Started - Multics Wiki http://swenson.org/multics_wiki/index.php?title=Getting_Started#Using_the_Multics_QuickStart

GitHub - uliwitness/Stacksmith: An intuitive software erector kit targeted at people new to programming, but with enough potential to stay useful once they’ve learned, inspired by HyperCard. https://github.com/uliwitness/stacksmith/

Bad idea of the day: to combat writer’s block, use automatic writing as a divinatory method to predict what you would have written if you didn’t have writer’s block

Goddess save us from ‘sensible business decisions’. Business is not the appropriate framework for evaluating decisions.

US elections didn’t do great, but they didn’t do half bad

@sdk@codevoid.de Thanx for the link. I will try this. So far I always used fgallery: https://www.thregr.org/~wavexx/software/fgallery/

The presumption that current popularity is a predictor of value – or even of future popularity – prevents us from doing interesting things.

@71m@timmorgan.org: why web when it is local? I use sxiv for local browsing and llgal to generate a static gallery from a directory: https://github.com/bgoglin/llgal. If you want something more CGI-ish, you could build it with a few lines of perl: https://metacpan.org/pod/CGI::Application::PhotoGallery

Science Fiction Is Not Social Reality - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43pxjd/science-fiction-is-not-social-reality

You’ve heard about ghost kanji, but what about yokai kanji – hapax legomemna that, if they don’t occur enough times in the modern corpus, come to life and play tricks on us, drinking lamp oil & jumping backwards over corpses to ressurect them.

In one sense, ‘the computer revolution is over’ because the period of exponential growth behind the tech ended 10 years ago. In another sense, it hasn’t begun: we have sheltered ourselves from the social and intellectual ramifications of computing. Documents are still simulations of paper, & capitalism still exists. So it’s like that period where printing presses existed but everybody used a faux-calligraphic font.

Periodic reminder: nothing has prepared us for The Strange Times

further uses include:↵* psychoforensics: finding out which of your experiences are the bad ones, and editing them out↵* forcing subpersonalities: maybe you want to share a brain with that artist whose mind you found on a torrent site↵* mind tattoos

Hot take: any command that a user might want to use regularly should be short, memorable, and built-in; any command that a user might really NEED to use should be documented & included in the examples in built-in documentation.

The project I’m working on went “live” this morning. Even though most us developers think we shouldn’t have.

Because of the use of ‘rune’ to refer to unicode codepoints in go, a fulthark transliteration program might have somewhat confusing source…

Multilingual crews can take shortcuts between the alphabets by codeswitching, but it’s a risky business - a Lojbanist crew was once a bit too clever and lost the train in a parallel universe for months. Still, philologists sometimes use it to travel Europe in the original Basque.

It really pisses me off when people use ‘infinite’ to mean ‘really big’. If something’s actually infinite, adding more to it produces the same number (like in Hilbert’s hotel)

The Final Days of ‘Netrunner’ - Waypoint https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/zm9989/the-final-days-of-netrunner

iPhones are hard to use https://blog.fawny.org/2018/10/22/hardtouse/

Every slack channel ever: the topic says ‘Don’t use @here or @channel’; nevertheless, ~100% of notifications are from @here or @channel

God Help Us, Let’s Try To Understand Friston On Free Energy | Slate Star Codex http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/04/god-help-us-lets-try-to-understand-friston-on-free-energy/

Why You Should Read Fiction http://nautil.us/issue/65/in-plain-sight/why-doesnt-ancient-fiction-talk-about-feelings-rp

Scammers Are Uploading Tutorials on How to Fool Facebook with a False ID - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/53d5gk/scammers-are-uploading-tutorials-on-how-to-fool-facebook-with-a-false-id

THE MEDIA BUSINESS: Encountering The Digital Age – An occasional look at computers in everday life.; Potboiler Springs From Computer’s Loins - The New Yor… https://www.nytimes.com/1993/07/02/us/media-business-encountering-digital-age-occasional-look-computers-everday-life.html

Robin “Sourdough” Sloan is using a machine-learning autocomplete system to write his next novel / Boing Boing https://boingboing.net/2018/10/19/t9-for-auteurs.html

Cops Are Set Up to Be Dangerously Bad Shots - MEL Magazine https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/cops-are-set-up-to-be-dangerously-bad-shots

Bad idea of the day: Use mechanical turk to do a novel-length exquisite corpse, one sentence at a time.

What duelling can teach us about taking offence | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/what-duelling-can-teach-us-about-taking-offence

Bad idea of the day: An algorithm that creates textual descriptions of images watches TV, creating a description from each frame, which is then used to generate a new image & the video is resynthesized

Detecting the use of “curl | bash” server side | Application Security https://www.idontplaydarts.com/2016/04/detecting-curl-pipe-bash-server-side/

Meet Bill Wurtz, the Internet Musical Genius You’ve Never Heard Of - MEL Magazine https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/meet-bill-wurtz-the-internet-musical-genius-youve-never-heard-of?curator=MusicREDEF

It’s really odd trying to downsize your stuff. Even with stuff you haven’t used in years or use very little, it’s hard to get rid of stuff you have acquired over time.

A use for text-to-smell devices: In the morning, it cooks up a smell digest for each of your backlogs and if one smells of stress and sweat instead of food, forest or rain, you may opt to skip it

The Internet’s keepers? “Some call us hoarders”I like to say we’re archivists” | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/10/the-internets-keepers-some-call-us-hoarders-i-like-to-say-were-archivists/

The network uses the latest in content generation to cover for the user when they don’t feel like updating. Or haven’t logged in months. Or have tried to delete their account for the seventh time now.↵The Content must flow.↵(belated #invisiblenetworks, day 30)

So, the GCHQ has released a statement backing up Amazon & Apple’s denials. What do you bet the implant is 5eyes tech and not chinese at all? https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-cyber-britain/uk-cyber-security-agency-backs-apple-amazon-china-hack-denials-idUSKCN1MF1DN

Periodic reminder that Apple is a predatory rent-seeking company that hasn’t done anything innovative since 1980: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/yw9qk7/macbook-pro-software-locks-prevent-independent-repair

James Stanley - Someone used my IPFS gateway for phishing https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/hardbin-phishing.html

Fastly supports NixOS
We are happy to announce that we have moved our binary cache to Fastly. Fastly
is a big supporter of open source projects and now NixOS is one of them! Fastly provides us with CDN capability,
which previously was running on AWS CloudFront. Big thanks go to Fastly, in particular Tom Denniston and Elaine
Greenberg, our friends at Infor and Packet.com
and Graham Christensen for making this possible. ⌘ Read more

Bad idea of the day: a machine that uses oscillators to manufacture high-quality sand

Psychologists Shouldn’t Cite That Famous Hungry Judge Study http://nautil.us/blog/impossibly-hungry-judges

Meet the Community Keeping Obsolete Supercomputers Alive - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qvajn7/meet-the-community-keeping-obsolete-supercomputers-alive

The Socialist YouTuber Using Cities: Skylines To Explain Politics https://kotaku.com/the-socialist-youtuber-using-cities-skylines-to-explai-1829245653

@freemor@freemor.homelinux.net I also always try to have a few ssh servers with several ports available for me to use. My favorite port is 443. Once had a firewall that wouldn’t allow SSH on 22 but 443 was acceptable because it expected encryption on it.

They used Saint Pepsi as hold music, not Macintosh Plus. No one noticed.

a drug suppressing unconscious volition so that every decision is deliberate, used in small doses by judges to debias verdicts - large doses are possible but considered an expert’s trip, not everybody can breathe manually for hours even if it is to survive

but then, more and more wake up, poke the glitches, form theories↵↵the simulators have left but not cleaned up properly, given us just enough to get root, and we hide what’s left of our world in spare cycles, sidechannels, unused memory

I’m getting used to OpenBSD rather fast. I’s really very consistent and joyful to work with. #openbsd

The Joe Rogan Experience Is a Safe Space to Launder Bad Ideas - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kv9qd/the-joe-rogan-experience-is-a-safe-space-to-launder-bad-ideas

Underrun – Making Of
I participated in this year’s js13kGames, a JavaScript game development competition with a file size limit of 13kb, including code, assets and everything else. My entry was Underrun, a twin stick shooter using WebGL.

Image

For this competition I set out to produce something with a dense atmosphere – which is inherently difficult to do with so little … ⌘ Read more

The global economy: gamblers betting on the effectiveness of bad assumptions made based on wide but shallow surveillance in influencing the distribution of ads that don’t work for products that nobody wants and nobody can afford to people who are using adblock.

Hot take: a thick skin is a really useful skill to develop, but having it isn’t really correlated with other useful skills, so we shouldn’t use it as a proxy for who gets to contribute to things.

…when you realize that the automated API you’re using is really just sending an email to someone who will perform the task.

@mdom@domgoergen.com my own custom client I wrote, I use cron to run the update my timeline every 20 mins. My update process also processes 10 curl calls at time. I did that to save time when I poll everyone.

And we still could use range requests to just get updates, if everybody uses sorted twtfiles.

And we still could use range requests to just get updates, if everybody uses sorted twtfiles.

@sdk@codevoid.de Although i’m a gopher fanboy, I wouldn’t use it for twtxt. It’s really a optimal fit.

@sdk@codevoid.de Although i’m a gopher fanboy, I wouldn’t use it for twtxt. It’s really a optimal fit.

@mdom@domgoergen.com Or limit the the amount and use random 10 followers or so…

@mdosch@mdosch.de: Yes, #txtnish uses curl and can therefore handle all curl supported protocols.

Cowards and Trolls Log Off: Dril’s New Book Is Awesome - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qvmqew/dril-new-book-tweets-interview

Valve: ‘It Really Does Seem Bad Games Are Made by Bad People’ - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kmej7/valve-it-really-does-seem-bad-games-are-made-by-bad-people

@nblade@nblade.sdf.org: Check my tw.txt file. The specification does not allow a comment. I’ve added this now: 1970-01-01T01:00:00.000000Z▸FF:https://codevoid.de/tw.following.txt. I’d use the special date/time + FF: comment as trigger. This is backwards compatible and shouldn’t really come up in anyones’ timeline.

@sdk@codevoid.de That’s an interesting thought. I Know most are text files but at one time there was someone that used a python CGI Script. That person would have had to make a script for the follows.

Confirming the intelligent designer’s existence, and using its intelligence to solve otherwise intractable problems by making them look like niches for life to settle

mind over matter works a lot better if you use a hammer

While certainly not a solution to everything, I find I’m using temporary SQLITE database a bunch to solve problems with a few lines of sql and less then 50 lines of code (to insert data into the SQLITE DB) instead of several hundred of lines of code and a bunch of arrays.

Migration successful. My page (http version) is now running on gopherproxy-c. Unfortunately not without functionality loss. If you used my site as search engine, you need to replace the smiley with “q”. The redirect is now handled by nginx and nginx can not read emoji variables.