Using Visual Studio Code in fullscreen on my main monitor while looking at other things on the other monitor. I did not expect to turn into one of John Siracusa’s millenial co-workers.
Twenty-Five Useful Thinking Tools | Scott H Young https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2018/12/04/25-thinking-tools/
When YouTube Red-Pills the Love of Your Life - MEL Magazine https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/youtube-red-pill-men-right-wing-hate-radicalization
The Rise and Demise of RSS - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3mm4z/the-rise-and-demise-of-rss
How experimental psychology can help us understand art | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/how-experimental-psychology-can-help-us-understand-art
Can Scientists Do TV? http://nautil.us/issue/68/context/how-well-forget-john-lennon
Slaying the Snark: what nonsense verse tells us about reality | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/slaying-the-snark-what-nonsense-verse-tells-us-about-reality
The World through the Eyes of the US https://pudding.cool/2018/12/countries/
I am also thinking about using a gopher url for that…
The Genius Person Has Always Been Sort of an Illusion http://nautil.us/blog/-the-case-against-geniuses
Periodic reminder that, by using third party trackers, you are paying somebody to grep their http access log instead of greping your own. So, like, maybe roll your own analytics if you need them?
Facebook and Google’s Targeted Advertising Is Ruining the Internet and Breaking the World - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xwjden/targeted-advertising-is-ruining-the-internet-and-breaking-the-world
New repository: aquilax/colorcount - Command line tool to count colors used in image
A History of Flavoring Food With Beaver Butt Juice - MUNCHIES https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/article/a3m885/a-history-of-flavoring-food-with-beaver-butt-juice
Spotify’s ‘release radar’ seems to use artist name instead of artist ID, which is annoying now that there are mediocre french soundcloud rappers named Devo and Rush
Create a Basic HTTPS Server (using TLS) ⌘ Read more…
I Used The Web For A Day With JavaScript Turned Off “ Smashing Magazine https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/05/using-the-web-with-javascript-turned-off/
I Used The Web For A Day With Just A Keyboard “ Smashing Magazine https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/07/web-with-just-a-keyboard/
I Used The Web For A Day Using A Screen Reader “ Smashing Magazine https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/12/voiceover-screen-reader-web-apps/
We Should Replace Facebook With Personal Websites - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vbanny/we-should-replace-facebook-with-personal-websites
Higher education in the US is driven by a lust for glory | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/higher-education-in-the-us-is-driven-by-a-lust-for-glory
Google isn’t the company that we should have handed the Web over to | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/the-web-now-belongs-to-google-and-that-should-worry-us-all/
This Eccentric Academic Thinks the Zodiac Killer Is a Hoax - MEL Magazine https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/this-eccentric-academic-thinks-the-zodiac-killer-is-a-hoax
Hacker Banner Ads Are Totally Wild - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pa5vwb/hacker-banner-ads-are-totally-wild
gods use passworlds
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