Friday 31st May, 2019 #

• Map of the shipping forecast places
• The Shipping Forecast - Suprised that the shipping forcaste isn't findable on the iOS podcast app
• How do I open the Git GUI from a command window? - How can it be that all this time I've been reading about git that I never read anywhere about git gui?
• Squashing Commits with an Interactive Git Rebase - Handy but when an interactive rebase bails half way through for one reason or another and you don't notice and list the commits and see the last week's work has disappeared, can be quite traumatic, thankfully there is a way to abort the rebase, happened to me twice in the past two days
• Stokes and Archer star as England beat South Africa in Cricket World Cup
• Ben & Jerry's announces plans to make CBD-infused ice-cream
• Huawei beneficiary of China subsidies to the tune of $1.6 bilion, it does seem like quite a lot, it would be interesting to see a comparison with some large US based tech companies like for example Amazon was getting some state benefit the reloaction of it's main offices
• Apple, Google and WhatsApp condemn UK proposal to eavesdrop on encrypted messages
• It's still a bit cunty
• Generate diff file of a specific commit in git

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Thursday 30th May, 2019 #

• The cunt unverse continues to attack, although in somewhat diminished bouts, I cut my hand while doing the dishes the day before yesterday, noticed that last night a mysterious cut/deep scrape of exactly the same dimensions had appeared on my right anckle just below the sock line, I went out once to the shops down the road in between washing the dishes and discovering the injury, definitely didn't walk through any barbed wire
• Chernobyl - horrifying, masterly television that sears on to your brain - based on the description this sounds like it could be a good documentary, it's also quite timely coming right after I posted about Elon Musk's Neurolink/Starlink venture, if we are to develop such technology we better be darn sure that we don't cunt it up, we won't be able to re-evolve our brains using natural selection, that could take a while (approx 2-4 billion earth years), how would we get out of a Chernobyl type situation? How would we plan and navigate a Chernobyl type situation if we were already in it?

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Wednesday 29th May, 2019 #

• SpaceX Starlink satellites won’t outshine science insists Elon Musk - Another question for Elon, will your Neurolink brain computer interface tech run on free and open source software, inlcuding firmware? How will people be able to verify whether they have an implant? These imo are quite relevant questtions in the light of the fact you will have 100% earth coverage with your satellite array
• The preachers getting rich from poor Americans, his name is Todd Coontz, gee that sounds a lot like a word I have been using a lot in the past few days, the algorithmic world works in mysterious ways
• Google’s Chrome Becomes Web ‘Gatekeeper’ and Rivals Complain
• Browser vendors win war with W3C over HTML and DOM standards - "Today's announcement is a huge change in the web standards landscape because it effectively means that browser vendors will be solely responsible for the most important web standards today, and not the W3C and the hundreds of its members"
• Jodie Kidd - ‘It was a wonderful, terrifying moment when everyone was under my skirt’ - Well I hope they've stopped being cunts and started feeding her, holy cunt she looks like a cunting skeleton in that photo, that's not a fashion house, that's a starvation school, the question we should ask is why are they starving these women? Do they not have enough money to feed these women? FYI if there ws a hidden holocaust going on in plain site, this is what it would look like
• John Bercow defies Eurosceptics with vow to stay on as Speaker - Removing the speaker at this time could indeed be very traumatic, like swapping out the home button on your iphone for a completely different home button that functions in a possibly totally different way, but it's not just one person that needs to get used to it, it's a collective of people, plus it would be very difficult to find someone who could shout "order" so well, but on the other hand maybe the house has gotten too used to Bercow and have turned into non-aware, non-thinking zombies because he is just too good at his job
• ‘We need everyone’ - Greta Thunberg calls on adults to join climate strikes
• Labour expels Alastair Campbell from party - Labour has a rather hard line approach to handle members who express a different point of view, quite cuntish imo
• It just occured to me that there is another meaning for "cunt universe" - I was just saying it as way to say "expletive universe" but in fact much like dark matter in the universe maybe there is an actual cunt universe, a sort of cloud where all people in it freely use the word cunt in the same way as the word dick, where the imbalance either does not exist or is reversed, it would explain why the crazy imbalance is possible, and if that cunt universe exists, in parallel to the non-cunt universe, then there could be a sort fo multiverse of these type of "universes" existing throughout the population, anyway just a stupid cunt thought for the day
• The cunt universe appears to have backed down somewhat as all 8 remaining of my toe nails have survived the night intact, however in what appears to be either a change in tactic or a childish taunt a rather nasty spot has appeared on my lip right under the second of the mysterious moustache undercuts that have been appearing under my moustache
• Total and utter cunt of a day today, really universe you can do a lot better than this

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Tuesday 28th May, 2019 #

• Here is what I was trying to do, quite standard, re-arrange some commits and squash them into 1 commit, well when I did exactly what was described in this stack overflow post, git just deleted the commits I didn't squash, deleted some of the squashed commits, and slung everything left back into the working directory, total cluster cunt - Update: I was able to abort out of the rebase, few
• It's much worse than initially thorught, upon investigation it's apparent that a whole selection of the my previous week's work has been deleted, but it's non-obvious even to figure out what has been deleted and what hasn't, worst case is that the cunt universe just kicked me back about a week, but even just to get out of the nightmare is going to be very non-trivial
• Just when I thought things were starting to get a bit better the universe turns into a total and utter mega cunt and forces me through a git nightmare and I lost a lot of code I wrote yesterday including a very hard to debug memory bug - Hey universe stop being cunt will ya? Thanks
• Just discovered that another one of my cunting toe nails has bitten the dust during the night, hey cunt universe you should already be thinking of what you are going to do when you run out of toe nails, 8 more to go
• The universe still has quite a cuntish vibe about it today, hopefully it will manage to get out of it's cunt grump some time soon
• Handy Keymaps in Vim - I do like using vim, but it takes too long to get all the pieces together for an actual setup, I wish some company created for example a javascript/nodejs web developer minimal set of plugins that would get 90% of what a typical dev would need to write and debug code - Then once you are up and running you can do any customizing you want to - It's all just too fragmented at the minute - code editors / ide's are like quicksand, they are all traps, every single one, and vim could very well be the trap you never are able to get out of, software that is designed to be a trap is very poor craftmanship, it's a real problem
• Coward cunt universe strikes again - Just discovered a toenail has been so badly smashed up that it's a gonner, I checked all finger nails and toe nails a couple of days ago and they were all fine, so must have happened during the night because I definitely haven't stubbed any toes in the past few days

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Monday 27th May, 2019 #

• Almost had a cunting catastrophe of a moment where I momentarily made some movements with what I can only describe as reckless abandon, which resulted in my ipod flying through the air directly towards the ground, but on reflex I caught the device between my index and thumb, pretty close call
• Another European elections article, I'm linking to it because there are some pictures of Farage where he looks a bit different to usual
• How we found the source of the mystery signals at The Dish - There is nothing quite like the creepy synchronicity of an astronomy mystery, that turns out to be a caused by a microwave, to show you how totally and completely you are surrounded by the cunt universe, and cuntroaches
• I just totally cunted my head on the shower tap, completely unintentionally, there is definitely something to this cunt curse thing, maybe it takes the brain a while to get used to using the word cunt, such is it's power over us, it's just a silly word
• European elections 2019 - Brexit Party dominates as Tories and Labour suffer - I can't play the video in this article becaus it's flash, but even in the still image 2/3 of the people in it look like they are in a nightmare - That's britain at the minute "2/3 people are in a nightmare"
• An example of life as a computer programmer - I have spent the past 2 weeks or so setting up a new code editor because the last one I was using was using all kernel resources making my entire laptop unusable, so it's been challenging because a lot of things are different but anyway eventually I have found ways to do most things I need to do, well a few days ago the debugger watch panel stopped working, so debugging is basically broken, or severely limited, but this only happened after I set everything up - This is the life of a computer programmer, this happens over and over and over again, for ever apparently - Thought that this knownledge is important to share to the universe, I'm not intending to offend anyone, but for cunts sake, you're not making it very easy for us, just trying to live a normal life, computing is really a prison sentence in disguise - It's Linkblog or Death for me on Cunt Row
• Cuntroach update - safely cupped it and relased it back ino the wild, it flew into a tree, the cuntroach is now leading a normal cuntroach life, happy ever after, lucky cunt, the end
• Following on from the strange things that might be happning during the night, I discovered last night additional mustache undercuts - 2 more small chunks have been plucked out of my moustache just above the lip line, but under the main mustache so you only see it if you lift up the moustache, these are 100% new since a couple of days ago, not sure what to say about it apart from the obvious cuntballs
• I just found a cuntroach trying to get into my fridge, first one in several months, the cunt is now hidding under the cuntng microwave
• This short gif is a pretty good approximation of what it feels like to be a computer programmer, it's actually a lot worse than this
• There’s now a museum dedicated to Robert Moog and synthesis called the Moogseum
• Elton John says he refused to tone down the sex and drugs in Rocketman
• Nigel Farage looks ready to win big at EU elections - May departing could start a "clear out Number 10 so that the PM’s advisers do not see Brexit as a problem to be solved but an opportunity to be grasped"
• Ian McShane has been doing a lot a swearing lately, sweaing is cool again, he's given me some new material - cuntsucker, mothercunter, cunt off!
• FX Is Remaking Peep Show With Women - This would be brillant, US version of Peep Show but with 2 women in the leading roles, it goes without saying that if it does happen I hope they say cunt a lot, come on yanks you really could do it
• I’m contemplating changing all my swears to be cunt based, so for instance I would say what a load of cunt, or stop bullcunting - I’m not a big swearer but I think it might be a good thing todo, it might take the edge of it a bit with more usage, I don’t think it’s a very offensive word personally
• On the visual miracle of "slit-scan" video
• Took my iPod out of its cover to troubleshoot dodgy audio and discovered the entire device has become detached and no longer actually fits in the apple casing as if something has been jammed in under all the electronics - could be another case of the curse of the word cunt, I’m going to keep using this under used phenomenal and great word

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Sunday 26th May, 2019 #

• Sightings of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites spark awe - and astronomical angst - Oh well it was nice while it lasted, the stars are no longer the stars anymore, not much point in looking upwards now, I didn't really like looking at those star c*nts anyway
• Poland files complaint with EU's top court over copyright rule change
• In Baltimore and Beyond, a Stolen N.S.A. Tool Wreaks Havoc
• In The Loop - The Full Tucker (Best of Malcolm Tucker)
• This part rings true - "The country now feels stuck in the mud, humiliated by Brussels and incapable of finding a way forward" - Perhaps they need a really strong leader, a sort of conservative party version of Farage, but even tougher, who isn't going to be pushed around, someone who could win in a bar fight with Trump or Putin - It's pretty clear that the politicians underestimated the leadership necessary to complete the exit, if you needed a Farage to get to the point where the vote happened, then it's likely that you would need at least a Farage to complete the process, possibly an army of Farages
• RX-101 - "Dopamine" (Suction Records, Canada)

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Saturday 25th May, 2019 #

• Infiniti cunt
• Abortion providers report 'alarming' rise in picketing, vandalism and trespassing - It seems to me that being able to detect a pregnancy early is very crucial, I don't know the details of how this is done, but if there was some tool like one of those smartwatches, something that women could use to self monitor that might go a long way to making the situation better
• SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket deals out a deck of 60 Starlink internet satellites - This is pretty cool, though I do wonder about the long term goals when the same person Elon Musk, will have 100% earth coverage with Starlink and also have a company called Neuralink that does "implantable brain–computer interfaces", and on the Rogan podcast where he famously smoked a blunt (not a bg deal imo) he was talking about software that you can't turn off, also surprised that I haven't seen any news publication discuss this yet
• Possible repurcussions to using the c-word I think are worth mentioning - I've woken up 3 days in a row with slightly wierd things that might have happened during the night - day 1: very small moustache undercut above lip, a small chunck has disapeared like it's been plucked out, day 2: small knuckle on my ring finger has been quite badly internally bruised, as if hit by small hammer, day 3: today really crook neck after waking, hopefully unrelated is the massage sign outside my accomodation building has been moved several feet yesterday - Anyway once again an example of the power of the magic c-word, and it's a bit like buses, none for ages and then 3 of the cuntz come along at once
• Theresa May quits - UK set for new PM by end of July - I told you it was powerful, say it a few times and 24 hours later the UK PM is gone

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Friday 24th May, 2019 #

• Facebook - Another three billion fake profiles culled (population of earth is 7.55 billion people)
• Elon Musk just ignited the race to build the space internet
• What the U.S. charges against Julian Assange mean for press freedom and some reactions from news reporters and observers on Twitter
• Richard Ashcroft - "They play it before England play. So I can sit back and watch England... and finally just enjoy the moment"
• The Bitter Sweet Symphony dispute is over - "One of rock music's most famous injustices has finally been resolved"

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Thursday 23rd May, 2019 #

• Announcing GitHub Sponsors - a new way to contribute to open source
• Teenage Engineering debuts an affordable entry into modular synthesis - The promo video is kind of neat
• Eurovision 2019 - UK's last-placed entry has score lowered - Hey EU stop kicking the UK in the teeth! Using the Eurovision as a political tool is horrible behavior, the UK singer had a really good attitude about it though - "I'm so thankful to the fans... as well as my whole team who have supported me throughout this whole amazing journey"
• Study Pinpoints Source of Banned CFC-11 Gas That Saps Ozone Layer: Eastern China
• Japan Begins Experiment of Opening to Immigration - Having a diverse population is difficult, many countires in the EU have been doing it for years but there are still a lot of integration and racism problems, so it will be really interesting to see how asian coutnires fair with the same problems and dilemmas that immigration introduces

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Wednesday 22nd May, 2019 #

• Thought I'd get a quick cunt in before midnight, so aparently it only became a taboo word at the begining of the century, I wonder if it was something to do with the industiral revolution, a rather difficult time, anyhow I'd like to see gender equality, and that's not going to happen until saying dick and saying cunt holds vaguely the same weight, the current imbalance is stupid
• My laptop just rebooted with no warning and no error message and nothing in the logs, pretty weird, happens very very infrequently, almost never, so worth making a note of that here
• African samurai - The legacy of a black warrior in feudal Japan - The Japanses have the coolest names, Yasuke, Nakamoto, just the coolest
• Today it's all about area codes, local media and, of course, the cuntz
• China, Leverage, and Values - Article highlights what a lot of reviews of the present US-China tech war have over-looked, namely that the war started about 10 years ago and that China has been emposing many blocks on US products both software and hardware for a long time now, also makes an interesting obvervation that president Xi Jinping visited a rare earth mining and processing center yesterday, China supplies 90% of the world's rare earth elements used in the manufactoring of electronic components - Translation: "All your rare earths belong to us"
• AZEALIA BANKS - 212 FT. LAZY JAY - This is such a phenomial example of use of the c-word and which the later part of the video fits in quite nicely with today's bitcoin news, how does one 4 letter word have so much power? It's baffelling to me, and the energy in this music video is something else, but will probably offend a lot of people, no doubt there are other use cases for this magic word
• Craig Wright Attempts to Copyright the Satoshi White Paper and Bitcoin Code
• Why is everyone suddenly using the C-word? - A history of the word cunt and it's bretheren cunted, cunting, cuntish and cunty, and how the taboo that these 4 letters cast is slowly fading

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Tuesday 21st May, 2019 #

• Shriekback - All Lined Up (Y Records, Arista, Island, Capitol, 1983) - Some groovey post punk that jumped out at me from my data feeds today
• EU Blocks 'Brexit Beer' Trademark, First As 'Offensive', Then As Non-Distinctive - This does seem rather sketchy of the EU, possibly illustrating some classic EU institution dysfunction, on the other hand I reckon there could be more to the sotry than what is published here, why for instance is a US based company trying to get a Trademark on Brexit?
• Huawei says it is a victim of U.S. bullying - "This is not just an attack against Huawei. It is an attack on the liberal, rules-based order. This is dangerous"
• A set of short "visual stories" that look at the problem of trust in data that the scientific community is currencly facing - there are a lot of similarities with the issue of link-rot on the internet - The visual story is very effective and with an elegant style
• Nigel Farage hit by milkshake during Newcastle walkabout
• Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2 drops to $999 and adds Qualcomm’s XR1
• I like the newsletter feature of this link based web tool

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Monday 20th May, 2019 #

• HN Thread - Linux distros without systemd - Some intresting comments, and systemd related links, hopefully I'll get some time at some point to read/watch some of them, I'd like to know more about systemd
• Linux distros without systemd - I don't have a big dislike of systemd, when it was first introduced it was a bit annoying because some of the commands I was used to running often had their args swapped around and by default the output gets jammed into a pager which is a bit jaring, but I mostly got used to it eventually - I don't spend that much time with systemd so perhaps if I was using it all the time I would feel similar to the no systemd crowd, anyhow the cool thing about Linux is that when there are differences of opinion on how things should be eventually some new distros emerge
• Can “Indie” Social Media Save Us?
• 5G networks could throw weather forecasting into chaos
• How to do hard things - Seems like relatively good generalized advice on how to approach difficult problems
• Can you trust your earliest childhood memories? - On a similar level of wtf is how the brain interprates the present moment and how much stuff is just filtered out - "Wait has that sound always been there or did that just start happening" - Reality has A LOT of hidden rooms in the most unnexpected and improbable places
• Korean government might be moving from Windows to Linux
• Top U.S. Tech Companies Begin to Cut Off Vital Huawei Supplies
• Google suspends Huawei's Android license, forces switch to open-source version

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Sunday 19th May, 2019 #

• Think I finally figured out how to do the internet archive properly - 0 7,14,21 * * * curl https://web.archive.org/save/http://links.markjgsmith.com
• Jim Carey and his use abortion to save abortion wierd art humour - It does highlight something that might be important that I hadn't thought of until now - Since abortion is essentially legal murder, if you were to use Facebook-like targeting and behaviour modification, you might be able to target very specific demographics and bump up the abortion rates, and if you have some powerfull AI that could give you better than average predictions of political party affiliation (for example), it might be possible to serupticiously setup a situation where a lot more of a certain type of people get born and raised - Probably quite outlandish, but then again the future is very uncertain in these times of fast development, seems to me that this sort of thing might be worryingly hard to detect
• I just discovered Sinon matchers yesterday, really useful in unit tests to do either more fuzzy or more specific matching of expected values
• Police ask McDonald's to halt milkshake sales during Farage rally
• Googlers fighting to keep ‘Old Google’ and say in decision-making - I think a lot of people, myself included are worried about how the big tech companies seem to repurpose software so for example advertising software becomes surveiilance software, but that wasn't what we were suporting when these companies started out
• There are a lot of similarities between snowboarding/skying and writing code using a version control system - Everytime you start writing files that aren't checked in you are going off-piste, most of the time you just go a little off piste to catch a jump or scoop around a cool set of trees, but occasionally you find yourself properly off-piste, in the middle of nowhere, really really far away from the main piste, files everywhere, it's dangerous, in the worste caes you delete files you needed by accident and all your tests stop working, and when it's really bad you are completely out of energy stuck in 3 feet of snow, you have to take off your board and walk back to normality - Occasionally it's unnavoidable because you haven't built the chair lift for this part of the software yet and so it's not possible to check in nice little chunks of changes, you got to just plough through the trees and deep snow until you get to where you got to get to, and deal with the added strain on your brain - When you do get to the other piste it's pretty cool though, you have some lunch and then it's back to regular coding again - Also snowboarding and skying is a lot more fun than programming, don't let silly analogies like this one make you think that sitting in a chair on front of a computer is in some way cool
• Eurovision’s voting system is totally broken. Here's how to fix it - But the bloc / political voting is all part of what makes eurovision eurovision, it wouldn't be as fun if you didn't have that to shout at the TV screen about, the fact that it's just a song competition means that it doesn't really matter, but it gets you thinking about how politics works in quite a visual and literal way
• ‘Boycott Apple’ movement gains new traction in China as US trade dispute continues - Having an iphone is in some places becomming unpatriotic, Huawei is preferred the alternative
• A Times Square Billboard Went Up in Flames and Somehow Continued to Display Ads
• Rocket scientist explains how we could move our planet
• Grumpy Cat RIP - A look back at the life of famous cat
• Grumpy cat's death marks the end of the joyful internet

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Saturday 18th May, 2019 #

• How can spies from democracies compete with spies from autocracies? - A topic that I've vaguely been thinking about recently
• UK-based Poles call for revolt against having to apply for settled status - I didn't realise that applicants have to declare any criminal convictions, presumably then these could cause people that have lived in the UK for many many years to get kicked out of the country, and perhaps for something relatively minor like a drug offense and one that may have happend 10 years previously
• Trump takes war on abortion worldwide as policy cuts off funds - "US money is being switched from the big family planning providers to faith groups that have a specifically anti-abortion stance"
• Your internet data is rotting - I just checked the internet archive, it's still not making backups of my linkblog, is there some magic html I need to add to my site? I can't find any info on this
• Archaeological Mystery Deepens as More ‘Jars of the Dead’ Uncovered in Laos - A couple of thoughts on this - burial pratices in the olden days were so much cooler than today, also the computer programmer in me is intrigued by the fact that they made miniatures of the grave jars that they burried with the larger real grave jars, it's quite recursive / fractal like, I wonder what it would have symbolized back then
• How Twitter Became Ubiquitous in Japan
• NASA details Ultima Thule in first profile of Kuiper Belt object - It's a massive 22 mile high statue of E.T. that is very red orbiting the sun, what are the chances eh?
• Google Knows That I Seamlessed Chicken Fingers Last Night
• The struggles of an open source maintainer - Antirez developer of Redis shares some thoughts about maintaining open source projects - every login and almost every linkblog page load involves Redis in someway, it's really wonderful software and I am very thankful to Antirez for writing the code, building the project, and for sharing it with the comunity with an open source license

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Friday 17th May, 2019 #

• Grumpy Cat internet legend dies - The E.T grumpy is a classic, sorta bummed about this internet worthy moment, I'm gonna go make myself a grumppuccino
• Acording to this article, supposedly about the EU elections next week, fake news is not the problem - "The rhythmic, regular sharing of true stories that, taken together, present a startlingly one-sided narrative. One account shared stories from Reuters, from the Financial Times, the Metro, the BBC, from Sky News, with every single story focusing on immigration and knife crime. Taken together, it’s a Bayeux Tapestry of far-right talking points, pieced together from a patchwork of factually-accurate stories from reputable outlets" - I guess based only on this article, the problem then is the "subtle" sharing of links on the internets, hey here is an idea, how about you spend some time reading articles you like and share your one sided view of the world?
• Facebook says it will restore groups infiltrated by saboteurs - Lots of groups on Facebook have been changing from private to seret as some popular groups got shutdown
• Russian bots rigged Voice Kids TV talent show result
• DJI Osmo Action, new GoPro competitor with front-facing selfie screen, works with most GoPro mounts, waterproof, shockproof, screwable lens covers and easily replaceble lenses
• As San Fransisco bans facial recogition, the NYPD police officers ahave been routinely using photoshoped images, and pictures of actors as input to it's facial recognition system
• Huawei’s has been stockpiling parts for almost a year in case of a ban, it depends currenty on U.S. suppliers Intel and Qualcomm, it is looking now to shift parts of it's supply chain to other countries
• Trump may stop Huawei in U.S., but the underseas cable race continues - "China wants to dominate the global market"

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Thursday 16th May, 2019 #

• An idea for Trump's new social media data collection drive - perhaps you could have some sort of website that allowed us to keep track of the total number of people killed by algorithms and also number of people held in debt bondage by algorithms
• Could abortion become illegal in America? All signs point to yes - It's amazing (not in a good way) how the language in these legal movements arrises, they introduce the "heartbeat bill" and then when they talk about it they call it a "heartbeat ban", but the heartbeat bill is expressly not aboud banning human heartbeats, it's about the opposite, it's about saving human heartbeats - If we named the parts of the software we develop like how they name the parts of the legal system, I'm not sure we would ever have any functional code - Of course there might very well be a reason this happens in the legal system that I don't see, many lawyers are very experienced in their profession, but I thought it was worth mentioning
• The five best Bob Ross pep talks - I watched the first one of these, peace, tranquility, paint
• Old Punk Rock and Hardcore Flyers - I really love the art work in these flyers, often gruesome but so much variety
• Fundamental design principles for non-designers - A pretty good list of high level design patterns that will make your websites look better in a lot of situaitons - As I read this article I was just thinking about website junk playgounds
• Trump signs an executive order barring U.S. companies from using telecommunications equipment made by firms deemed to pose a national security risk
• Making Playgrounds a Little More Dangerous - The article talks about a new type of playground which has the rather catchy name of "Junk Playgrounds" that are becoming popular - "Playgrounds have everything already but it’s funner to build whatever you want”
• Whitehouse opts not to sign the Christchurch Call to Action at this time - Given how much unstability there is in this area it could prove to be a wise move to wait a bit, interesting that it's also starting to build it's own social media data gathering tools, I think that the free speech concerns are very valid, this is a bit like trying to regulate the weather, except it might be very easy to make it worse long term without realizing it
• White House launches tool to report censorship on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter

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Wednesday 15th May, 2019 #

• The Groove Corporation Meet Original Rockers - Stoned Manali Cream Mix (The Cake Label, UK)
• 'What do you think happens when we die, Keanu Reeves?' - Saw this yesterday, lots of death in the air at the minute
• More Democrats are considering a breakup of Facebook
• How Much Did the Apollo Space Program Cost (about $145 Billion in today's money)
• NASA needs $1. 6 Billion more to send a human to the moon
• I've recently had to change code editor (and therefore git client also) and at the same time change browser, because nothing fucking worked anymore, total jam of everything, now the kernel at least isn't overloaded (most of the time) but nothing fucking works because literally everything is fucking different, I tried to find an amuzing gif to link to, but none of the gifs would render in the browser, so I am linking to this wikipedia page, but if you are in China I guess your out of luck because that's blocked - Fuck everything, everything is broken and it sucks, and also these fucking GDPR bullshit consent forms everywhere are driving me nuts
• While on the subject of death, Rachel from Hippie in Heels, a travel blog that I read, died a few days go (May 12th) - It's not clear what happened yet, but I'm saddened to hear this news, she spent a long time living in Goa and recently moved to Mexico, I always like to read about her travel adventures - death is rubbish
• A new Spectre like vulnerability in Intel based macs has been announced, there is a fix but the fix could be almost as bad as the vulnerability - it could result in up to 40% reduction in performance - Holy fucking shit, for older laptops the choice is heads or tails suicide or be hacked
• Mariana Trench - Deepest-ever sub dive finds plastic bag (10,927m - 11 Km)
• Wikipedia blocked in China in all languages

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Tuesday 14th May, 2019 #

• Apple would need to raise iPhone prices significantly to offset next tariffs
• Lenovo shows off a folding-screen laptop, coming some time in 2020 - "I'm very curious to know just what Microsoft has in store for the software part of the equation. I can't really offer any good reason as to why I want it. But I very much do"
• Supreme court deals blow to Apple in antitrust case
• Microsoft Launches Decentralized Identity Tool on Bitcoin Blockchain - This looks like it could be sort of interesting, but after 10 mins of searching and reading through various docs on github repos I still don't have much of an idea about what it is good for, we technologists do a really poor job of describing our work
• Britain risks heading to US levels of inequality, warns top economist
• Trump defends China tariffs as trade war leaves allies and opponents in bind

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Monday 13th May, 2019 #

• $1 Million Bitcoin Scavenger Hunt Attracts 60,000 people
• Privacy Rights and Data Collection in a Digital Economy - It's interesting to see how the US is responding to the EU's GDPR regulation, Maciej Cegłowski from Pinboard has publuhsed his testimony, the video is also worth watching if this topic interests you

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Sunday 12th May, 2019 #

• What does Archie tell us about mixed-race Britain?
• An example of an interogation interview style that has been causing a bit of a stir in the past few days
• I can hardly even read these Brexit artcles now, didn't manage to get through to the end of this one, but in case you wanted to know Farage is doing well, there are some colorful bar charts
• Uber's IPO got caught in a perfect storm
• #BlueMoon - Jeff Bezos says Blue Origin will land on Moon by 2024
• The link to the Bali Gamelan music in the previous article is broken so here is another that works - It sounds a bit wierd at first if you haven't heard this type of music before, but it's more like standing under a waterfall of music notes than listening to music that is in the pop charts where there is singing and a specific melody - I like how the musicians in the piece every now and then bounce their eyes up and down with their drum hammers
• David Attenborough WLTM trance producer - "At the age of 93, Sir David Attenborough is taking a belated detour into dance music" - It's no suprise that I'm pretty into this
• Super SIM allows IoT devices to connect to multiple operators. Get instant global connectivity on a single SIM
• MIT Scientists prove adults learn language to fluency nearly as well as children

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Saturday 11th May, 2019 #

• Across seven countries, the average price for paywalled news is about $15.75/month (Netflix subscription across countries is €7.77)
• Joins In Steps - SQL joins explained visually
• In tip of iceberg news - Tenants win as settlement orders landlords give physical keys over smart locks
• WildDuck Mail Server - Open source email server that has a Nodejs/Mongo/Redis web interface, an API, pgp encrytption, this looks pretty interesting if you were thinking of self hosting your email
• U.S. regulators approve new Silicon Valley stock exchange
• Nearly all countries agree to stem flow of plastic waste into poor nations - This is a big win for the environment, but the plastics polution problem is massive and really needs to be solved worldwide, especially since plastic nano particles have now been proven to pass from blood into the human brain, so it's not just the environment that is suffereing it is our actual brains too, if we don't act now we might loose the ability to even think about the problem
• 'Reconstruction' begins of stone age lands lost to North Sea
• GitHub introduces GitHub Package Registry, a package management service - Support for npm, Maven, RubyGems, NuGet, and Docker
• The Cure - "A Forest" @ Werchter Festival (Belgium), July 1981 - Sometimes the YouTube up next video suggestions are rather good

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Friday 10th May, 2019 #

• A Popular History Of Signs - Crawling 4 U (Jungle Records, UK) - I'm kind of fascinated by this bit of 80s synth-pop
• Facebook sends Nick Clegg to rebut co-founder Chris Hughes' call for breakup - "To rebut the claim I am too powerful, I will have the former UK Deputy Prime Minister publicly disavow his prior anti-monopoly stance (now that he is paid by me) and promise to meet with other world leaders to painstakingly tell them what regulation suits me best" - Zephyr Rain Teachout
• Facebook is not a monopoly, and breaking it up would defy logic and set a bad precedent
• US raises tariffs on $200bn of Chinese goods - If both sides are just adding tariffs then doesn't it eventually just become a new way for governments to raise money?
• Markets Are 10X Bigger Than Ever - Makes a case for the fact that the internet has grown the software market by 10x since it's introduction
• The Global Attention Span Is Getting Shorter - "Organizations need to invest more heavily in technology and human capital to filter and process information"
• It's time to replace GIFs with AV1 video! - Everyone loves a good gif but the figures speak for themselves, that's a lot of saved bandwidth
• Why open source firmware is important for security - I think this is an important topic, especially since I still have on-going kernel performance issues (slightly better since I stopped using Webstorm, but they still occur, and I have no way to diagnose or troubleshoot properly) - I'd like to know more about how kernels operate
• Singapore fake news law polices chats and online platforms
• Google’s New Privacy Features Put the Responsibility on Users

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Thursday 9th May, 2019 #

• Holland & Barrett to stop selling wet wipes in fight against fatbergs (can weigh as much as 19 elephants)
• “Users want control” is a shoulder shrug - I think this article does a good job of pointing out that the recent "everything must be privacy" push by companies is in many cases miss-guided, and that just giving users privacy is in some cases a way to avoid problems with the software design
• Amazon S3 Path Deprecation Plan – The Rest of the Story

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Wednesday 8th May, 2019 #

• 'If you enter a camp, you never come out' - inside China's war on Islam
• Britain passes one week without coal power for first time since 1882 - It would be pretty amazing if the UK, the country to lead the industrial revolution, was the first country to to legislate for net-zero emissions
• WordPress introduces several security features including cryptographically-signed updates
• Google Maps is getting an Incognito Mode for private searches and navigation - I think this is an example of a good privacy feature that Google is introducing here

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Monday 6th May, 2019 #

• Record Label Minerva Music is going to be using blockchain tech in their distribution of remixes, there isn't much info in the article but it sounds like it could be an interesting use case
• Should These Clothes Be Saved? - I liked this artcile covering historical curation of clothes, clothes are such a integral part of living as a human in the world that any collection is in my opinion very valuable, I'd love to be able to see into the curration and renovation process as it happens
• Nature crisis - Humans 'threaten 1m species with extinction'
• Brussels poised to probe Apple over Spotify’s fees complaint
• Cybercrime organizations work just like any other business - Here’s what they do each day

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Sunday 5th May, 2019 #

• Shuudan Koudou Is the Japanese Art of Synchronized Precision Walking - Humans are pretty amazing, we can do so much already, imagine what things are going to be possible when we start using AI to enhance our intelligence, how will we integrate the coming cambrian explosion of our minds into our societies? Will our societies be open, or hiden in a privacy dungeon? Will we have freedom?
• There's a Max Keiser piece on RT at the minute where he interviews a Bitcoin guy that is wearing a surgical mask, it's quite a segment (I can't find it so I'm linking to another video I found) - Max's approach is interesting, a bit like the music I just linked to, I don't understand all the concepts he talks about but he's essentially a software developer, like a Noam Chomsky of money, the way he handles higher level concepts is clearly done with a lot of experience and skill, but anyway the piece got me thinking about anonymity and how healthy it is in society in the long term, when the people organizing things are essentially virtual, will they still have our best interests at heart? If there is ever a longterm cyberwar lasting longer than a generation it would be very problematic to return to normality, how would we even teach our children what had happened?
• I've been hearing a lot of this type of music lately, for the longest time I only heard the cow bell and fake drums (not literally - I could hear the other sounds but my dislike of some of the sounds was drowning out the other interesting parts, so I effectively wasn’t able to hear all the sounds), but now it's all about the synths and noodley guitars, I have no idea what the words are about, but I like the music
• I walked past some interesting tomb stones today so this article struck a chord with me - Farage warns of the 'final betrayal' over Brexit
• Moon footage sped up - I liked the caption from swissmiss that accompanied the video - "This moon footage speed up is currently my favorite thing on the internet"
• Local-first software - You own your data, in spite of the cloud - I haven’t had time to fully read this article yet but the topic is interesting

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Saturday 4th May, 2019 #

• Indonesia's planning minister announces capital city move (from Jakarta)
• A hacker is wiping Git repositories and asking for a ransom

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Friday 3rd May, 2019 #

• Persecution driving Christians out of Middle East - The figures in this UK-commissioned report a quite sobering
• China will build string of military bases around world, says Pentagon
• Facebook bans Alex Jones and Laura Loomer for violating its policies against dangerous individuals - If there are hateful ideologies then that's a sign there are issues that need to be dealt with, I'm not convinced that outright bans make the situation better, they just make the issues less visible
• Deadly year for journalists
• UK Local elections - Main parties hit by Brexit backlash in polls - Smaller parties win big - "The Liberal Democrats are back"

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Thursday 2nd May, 2019 #

• The Internet Is Making You Less Free - There isn't a lot of hope in this article, sort of summarizes the global internet situation from a freedom perspective, I'd say it's just important to keep publishing, weather it's on the internet or on some other media, don't hate the media, be the media
• Some more details about the Facebook announcement - it's definitely a pretty radical change of direction for the company, whch means it's interesting, whether it's good or bad for the company and society at large is quite uncertain - I can't help thinking that several billion users, previously sharing lots of interesting things with each other in public, are about to be dragged underground into a privacy dungeon while being told privacy dungeons are the new coolness

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Wednesday 1st May, 2019 #

• An oligarch’s wife paid £135,000 to dine with Theresa May - Perhaps this is the only way she can get a night out, hopefully she'll get more invitations now, Instagram or it didn't happen - I'd like to see the pics from the disco they clearly went to afterwards
• Dead people are going to outnumber live users on Facebook by 2050 - Not something a lot of website builders have probably thought about - social media "peak aliveness"
• Instagram is trialing the removal of likes
• Julian Assange jailed for 50 weeks for breaching bail in 2012 - We are going to need a considerable increase in the facilites and protections for whistleblowers if Zuckerberg's privacy gangs tech is realised, whereas before it was just a few places where things happened behind closed doors (relatively speaking), the risk is that it will be pervasive across and throughout every part of human society
• I've noticed a lot of wierdly written articles in the NYT in tech, that appear to be news but are quite clearly some sort of soap opera version of the news, so it's interesting to read this article that is critical of how it handles other news topics that I am less familiar with - Also the author's stance on free speech is quite a good one IMO - It's always important to read these stories with a critical eye
• Intermediate vim - Some good tips in this article, my favorites are inserting text and start of end of line, and composnig the delete and change commands to made accurate deletions
• Huawei - US official warns 'no safe level' of involvement with tech giant - I'd like to see a report on how much western tech is in the Chinese network infra, I mean is there literally any?
• 'Instagram is like junk food' - the woman out to improve our visual diet - "Art books always provided me with a way to escape my own routine; they quickly became my door to new intellectual worlds full of exciting new ideas that were striking visually"
• Banksy artwork likely to remain in Port Talbot
• Facebook's Zuckerberg announces privacy overhaul at F8 anual developer conference - Judging by the picture they've made enormous progress when it comes to diversity at Facebook, though the picture might not be representative of the whole - As far as the announcement, personally I'm still a bit worried about the new focus on privacy for gangs, my current thinking is broadly "less secrets not more"

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