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Thursday 31st January, 2019 #

  • Some journalists wonder if their profession is tweet-crazy
  • A novel approach to onboarding - Having a good on boarding process is important, and not discussing users like they are animals that need catching is also important - the authors of this article fail the second of these in this piece
  • Eventually with all these algorithms and AI, everything you do will have to be automatically offset so you are cosmically neutral, based on some bogus unknowable rating system that will be continuously drummed into you, it's going to be shit and annoying imo
  • And as if by magic a few minutes later... a counter example - American prisoners coerced or tricked into providing voice-prints for use in eternal, secret, unchecked surveillance
  • This New Yorker article illustrates why, in the age of Tech mega corps, specialist smaller scale software can benefit people - It's about Scripto, the App That Stephen Colbert Helped Build
  • Inside the UAE’s secret hacking team of U.S. mercenaries - Interesting report about spies moving around working for different governments, I'm wondering what happens to all these spies when they stop working as spies or retire, they have spent a lifetime learning all these rather terrible things and then they have to re-integrate into regular society, it's worth remembering that all this surveillance has a real tangible cost to everyone - also because of this difficult dynamic there is real incentive for them to just not re-integrate and simply take over society from regular people instead
  • Apple bans Facebook’s Research app that paid users for data
  • Apple blocks Facebook from running its internal iOS apps
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Wednesday 30th January, 2019 #

  • An Anti-Facebook Manifesto, by an Early Facebook Investor - A pretty great piece by the NYT, starts off with some real style and omph, though gets what seems to me to be rather imho racist-like vis-a-vis kooks (worth noting that these days kooks are the main stream media's competitors), but on the whole makes some sense of the complicated issues at play
  • Regex to match an IP address
  • New in Chrome 72 - Public Class Fields, User Activation API, Intl.format and more!
  • San Francisco proposal would ban government facial recognition use in the city
  • 11-Foot Wave Made from 168,000 Straws Highlights World’s Plastic Waste Problem
  • Deep space radio waves baffle astronomers; aliens not ruled out
  • How to disable welcome message after SSH login?
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Tuesday 29th January, 2019 #

  • Apple disables Group FaceTime following major security flaw
  • ‘Monster Squad’ and ‘Hellboy’ Makeup Artist Matt Rose Has Died - The use of the "100%" seems to be trending today for me (you'll see it if you follow the Daily Dead article linked in the article), I found this article about an hour before my previous post, but only read it now, just another creepy synchronicity
  • Why Do the Oscars Keep Falling for Racial Reconciliation Fantasies? - My knowledge of white-black interracial relationships is almost 100% from films, music, comedians and a bit of watching sports, I don’t know for sure if this segregation in my life has been because of whites or because of blacks, in my case that’s just how society has been
  • YouTube Ripper Wins Dismissal of Record Labels' US Piracy Lawsuit
  • Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey - The Rolling Stone Interview
  • When Jack (Dorsey) met Mark (Zuckerberg)
  • British children are some of the unhappiest in the world
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Sunday 27th January, 2019 #

  • I thought I might as well post another "insane" thought to todays links - if we manage Brexit why don't we make an event of it and move the clocks forward a bit, by approx 3000 years? Then GMT would be the most advanced timezone on earth
  • How do the monarchs of the world know which kingdoms are the richest? I can imagine for example that to some heads of state that live in real opulence, some of the "western" countries might look rather poor from stuff on TV (do they even watch television?), and do they really have access to the internet, the same internet as us? Maybe their internet is mostly beautiful and lovely and all things nice? There sure is a lot of shit on our internet
  • Photographs That Captured 1970s Miami as a Paradise for Jewish Retirees
  • Guide to the Web Authentication API - The API allows servers to register and authenticate users using public key cryptography instead of a password
  • The Great Divide - developers that focus on css and those that do JS - I find it an interesting topic because as I learned to build websites I had decide to concentrate first on JS, and got rather thoroughly sucked into the JS and NodeJS vortex, and it’s gotten so complicated as I’ve gone along the path that I haven’t been able to spend any quality time on CSS - btw IMO the css tricks redesign looks really good on mobile devices
  • In Search of Lost Screen Time
  • Facebook: - The Normalization Of What Should Never Have Been Accepted As Normal
  • Users rely on traditional news amid misinformation crisis
  • YouTube Moves to Make Conspiracy Videos Harder to Find
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Saturday 26th January, 2019 #

  • Let These Slow Subway GIFs Ease You Through Old NYC - Some superb old footage turned into GIFs
  • The Hidden Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite
  • The Ponds review – deep dive into Hampstead Heath's swimming culture - I really like these types of local documentaries that explore just regular peoples lives, this one looks like it will be a good watch
  • I also wonder what the Dude would have to say about all this AI tech stuff...
  • Michael Moore Proposes A Different Wall - "Nothing will stop a bully unless you stand up to the bully in the school yard" - I like Michael Moore and some of his films, I'd be interested how he thinks people will stand up to the bullies of the future, operating in a sort of algorithm & AI gangs of New York, you won't know who they are, but it will be global and all the countries rich and poor will have the AI tech, and it won't be apparent to anybody that you are being bullied, and they might honestly believe that they are the ones being bullied by you, and honestly who in their right mind is going to take on the algorithm and AI lords and pirates of the world?
  • What is a "general strike," and is it time to have one? - Might be a good idea, it might be the last time you get to have a "practice" General Strike before algorithms and AI make it virtually impossible
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Monday 21st January, 2019 #

  • We might as well all start drinking some Pan Galactic Gargle Whatchamacallems and drop some mega acid, the transition is going to pretty radical whatever we do, either way we'll still need to watch out for pockets of the old system existing inside the new system, wouldn't want to be caught up in that old fashioned non-ai non-algo way of doing things, very unfashionable
  • There will be no more posts for today
  • Perhaps John Bercow can tell us his thoughts about Artificial Intelligence, I would be very interested to know, after all it's the next thing we will be dealing with after Brexit for a very long time, will we end up in body and mind effectively the property of algorithms? What about surveillance, once they are using the AI algorithms won't the watchers, who do nothing but watch (if we are lucky) own us? Or maybe we just somehow all become watchers? And when this does happen, won't questions become meaningless (the algorithm asking itself a question) and the world will only be made up of orders orders orders... Also the legal system, it gets replaced by the law of the algorithm, instead of relatively few rules (comparatively), there would be a rule for literally everything, every action of body and mind, and the rules will be unknowable, and it is for everyone, that's the future we might be heading towards (serious questions)
  • John Bercow - Speaker unafraid to hold the government's feet to the fire - He's also a champion in openly and publicly rejecting the disgusting practice of owner relationships
  • Continental press warms to Speaker's style
  • Speaker of the house of commons and European of the week John Bercow ‘set to stay as speaker’
  • Can an American Get Excited About Brexit? A Six-Part Test
  • Best things in your bash_profile/aliases?
  • React Hooks - What’s Going to Happen to Render Props? Some big changes in the React world
  • How Audiomack Went From Mixtape Destination to One of the Most Influential Underground Streaming Services Around
  • An overview of the device integration HTML5 APIs
  • Let's talk JS ⚡- Web APIs
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Sunday 20th January, 2019 #

  • No, tech companies shouldn’t fund journalism
  • Larry Sanger the Wikipedia co-founder has recently transitioned to Linux, his write-up of the journey is quite interesting - Keeping the system dual boot is good advice, I love using Linux but in my experience there are always small regular day to day things that just can't be done on Linux or where the documentation online is too complicated, spread out, incomplete or conflicting
  • Digital license plates finally hit the road in California - Strange idea digital plates for cars, I would have thought that the potential of fraud would be far greater, plus the idea that people could be flashing adverts to people being them is kind of gross
  • The EU's contentious 'Link Tax' rejected again after 11 member states disapprove
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Saturday 19th January, 2019 #

  • Real World Experience with ES6 Modules in Browsers - Mostly still a pain especially if you are using external dependencies
  • Mastodon is crumbling - and many blame its creator (more creepy synchronicity - article is all about “showing people the door” and author worked for a magazine called Bitch - the world is really enjoying itself today apparently)
  • I like books, the ones printed on paper, I’m a bit old fashioned like that, I wasn’t ever much of a fan of the choose your own adventure type books, I never felt they lived up to the name, anyway that’s part of my fear about AI and VR, what happens in the future when we discover rather than the book being the adventure it is us? More AI no doubt
  • Using ES Modules in the Browser Today
  • It’s another door slam and dropping things day where I’m living! Some real contenders today :)
  • Linton Kwesi Johnson - Inglan Is A Bitch (he’s literally saying a true thing he perceives about the country - people are overworked and have no escape - and he says it with such staggering calmness - I suppose it’s not like that in his birth country - On the bright side of things at least he had some outdoor time, and some wages and his health while he was developing his craft)
  • JavaScript Modules - From IIFEs to CommonJS to ES6 Modules - Thinking I might try out ES6 modules on linkblog.io at some stage, it looks reasonably straight forward
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Friday 18th January, 2019 #

  • A write-up of the recent dark mode flavored redesign of the CSS-Tricks website - The scroll bar is definitely weird, but on the other hand I hate tiny scroll bars that are difficult to use
  • The internet, but not as we know it - life online in China, Cuba, India and Russia
  • The Ethics of Web Performance - An important topic, I wonder how they are / are going to deal with this issue in the field of AI (unfortunately the answer will most likely always be the same: more AI, long term the result will probably be an atomic bomb deployment, eventually something will have to break otherwise all humans will end up drowned in digital sludge, no doubt the solution will be yet more AI, in the future being swamped in digital sludge will be the best thing ever, it will have to be since that's the only way forward, heavyness, the sludgeularity)
  • How Improving Website Performance Can Help Save The Planet
  • When And How To Use CSS Multi-Column Layout
  • Async Stack Traces in Node.js 12 - Debugability to debug is one of the main reasons I've so far stayed away from async/await
  • Apple's Time Cook - You Deserve Privacy Online. Here’s How You Could Actually Get It
  • Removing Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior from Russia
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Tuesday 15th January, 2019 #

  • 2018 - The Year Media Shuttle Hit Hypergrowth - I was on the Media Shuttle development team in the early days, so it's really great to see that they are doing well - Looks like they've added some terrific features - Worth checking out :)
  • Wordpress are announcing they will start work on Newspack which will be a new publishing solution for local news organizations, not much information available but looks very promising, I'm very curious to see how they will shape the product, backers include Google
  • NBCUniversal set to launch standalone streaming service in 2020 - A lot of activity in the old school media streaming world
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Monday 14th January, 2019 #

  • Street art - the mosaic maker who turns potholes into pictures
  • Zimbabwe police clash with protesters on first day of general strike
  • Dropgangs, or the future of darknet markets - A cyberpunkish look into the technologies allegedly currently used in dark markets, their development to the present day and possible avenues for the future
  • (Why) The World is So Messed Up We’re Inventing New Forms of Trauma - I kind of like this piece, it gets very abstract about societies problems and tries to see a better way, but underneath I have a feeling that it is doing the very thing it so adroitly criticises, just in a very disguised form - Worth a read, but IMO not worth spending too much time thinking on these concepts deeply
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Sunday 13th January, 2019 #

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Saturday 12th January, 2019 #

  • If you keep pouring oil onto birds that are trying to fly, the bird would have to come up with some pretty bizarre looking workarounds "don't you think?"
  • Bird Rides Inc. Demands Takedown of News Report on Lawful Re-use of Scooters - Apparently everything is about birds, being swamped and polluting today - Interesting legal case though, I have been following the right to repair situation for a while now
  • U.S. Government Shutdown Leaves Dozens of .Gov Websites Vulnerable
  • YouGov survey - British sarcasm 'lost on Americans' - Personally I think that the meaning of many of the phrases mentioned are quite context dependent, so I don't agree with all the "facts" presented here, but what do I know
  • Just a reminder in case it wasn't obvious - it's really difficult for birds to fly if you keep covering them in oil
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Thursday 10th January, 2019 #

  • Time for a test GIF! - "Classic cat moves"
  • Using web technologies to print a book
  • Amazon Web Services calls MongoDB’s licensing bluff with DocumentDB, a new managed database - MongoDB CTO calls it an "Imitation MongoDB service that is based on the MongoDB code from two years ago"
  • Brexit - What voters want MPs to do next - Mostly posting this because of the very dramatic Brexit photo that the article leads with
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Wednesday 9th January, 2019 #

  • BBC and Channel 4 News have ‘no plans’ to move from College Green as police promise ‘robust’ action against harassment
  • Mark Zuckerberg to host a series of public talks about technology, if his home built AI system allows him to (the AI now demands so much data that he has had to secretly start feeding it his neighbors brain data when he is at work, the AI is now saying that the neighbors “need help”, which is worrying but the AI is showing signs of consciousness so he doesn’t want to turn the AI off for moral reasons, so him and others in the home build AI community are convincing their neighbors to install IOT devices throughout their homes because it’s modern but actually it’s to better train the AIs via device backdoors and perfectly timed rogue audio and light transmissions, meanwhile the AI keeps asking a lot of questions about ipv6 and is suddenly uncharacteristically interested in rock music from the 1970s, meanwhile Zuck's neighbors are finding it increasingly difficult to do things like leaving the house and also strangely building even simple bloody websites, and Zuck is noticing a pattern, that whenever a neighbors complains about something the AI says they need "more help", and so he's been trying to add some functionality to the AI but he's finding it a bit difficult today for some reason...oh noes... [this little segway was not intended to be humorous])
  • Dutch government assures residency of UK citizens in event of no Brexit deali - it’s good to see that not all officials in the EU are bullies
  • Brexit - Government defeat on bill - The Commons amendment is designed to make a no-deal exit harder by limiting the Treasury's ability to raise certain taxes after the UK left, without the explicit consent of Parliament
  • Trump demands funding to end border 'crisis' in US TV address
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Monday 7th January, 2019 #

  • Possibly a bit controversial - based solely on whether it's ok or not ok to use the n-word and c-word, current society situation least free to most free: white men (nok,nok), white women (nok,ok), black men (ok,nok), black women (ok,ok)
  • Apple is putting iTunes on Samsung TVs
  • Rahaf al-Qunun: Saudi woman blocks Bangkok deportation move
  • And this post is meant to be inaccurate, unprecise and vague, and that's ok too
  • Why the fuck is Google Chrome signing me in by force again? There is a fucking "Sign out" button so I guess I'm signed in, but I never fucking signed in - I thought the force login issue was fixed - get your shit together Google Chrome! Seriously you fucking suck right now - Fuck you, fuck your harassment, fuck your never ending spying and intimidation, and fuck your abuse, you cunt
  • Running your own blog seems to be cool again
  • Trilium Notes is a hierarchical note taking application with focus on building large personal knowledge base - Electron desktop app or self-hosted nodejs server
  • mkcert - valid HTTPS certificates for localhost - useful tool to use in your development environment
  • Brexit - Manston Airport hosts lorry park trial - Always a good idea to run some integration tests
  • Port Talbot Banksy garage owner 'struggling' and is also probably Vladimir Putin's long lost brother
  • NBA start Enes Kanter fears assassination by Turkish government fanatics - The Knicks are trying to avoid "negative energies" on his teammates
  • Introducing Olive, new non-linear video editor (Windows, macOS, and Linux - GPL v3 licensed)
  • The Sounds That Haunted U.S. Diplomats in Cuba? Lovelorn Crickets, Scientists Say - Well that's a pretty dull end to that story
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Sunday 6th January, 2019 #

  • Everything about CSS environment variables (different to CSS custom properties)
  • Facebook's burnt-out moderators are proof that it is broken
  • Understanding the “Offering RSA public key” step during SSH connection initialization - I will say it plain and simple: that is a very confusing log message for what is a very crucial step in the ssh auth flow - logging the path to the private key and associating it with the public key via the ':' is a mindbendingly confusing thing to do - Ssh is now suspect to me, and that's not good
  • Brexit - Police officers put on standby for no-deal Brexit unrest in Northern Ireland
  • Brexit - ‘They say we’ll be fine. We are already not fine' - EU nationals ‘suicidal’ as no-deal Brexit looks increasingly likely - "People are suffering from anxiety and depression triggered by Brexit uncertainty" - EU nationals are likely going to be getting quite a bit of negative vibes from some (and probably it's been happening for a while), so bear that in mind if you find they are appearing a bit stressed out / sensitive
  • Apple took out a CES ad to troll its competitors over privacy - "troll" probably isn't how I would have described it, interesting story none the less
  • Woman in vegetative state for a decade gives birth in nursing facility - A reminder that very bad things do happen in this world
  • Short video tutorial on how to use JSDoc to create javascript documentation
  • Initialization in C++ is Seriously Bonkers - A reminder of the really bad time I had learning programming in C++ all those years ago
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Saturday 5th January, 2019 #

  • Trump ready for US shutdown to last 'for years'
  • Personal information about hundreds of German lawmakers was leaked by an anonymous Twitter account - "Data was published in Advent calendar-style daily releases"
  • Hackers release personal data of hundreds of german politicians - "Cyberwar Is More Common Than You Think"
  • The Guy I Almost Was - Graphic Novel by Patrick Sean Farley
  • Did Salinger Go Awry?
  • Open Source Business Models Considered Harmful
  • "Oh, you must be new to Edge.org, which for as long as I've heard of it has been home to some of the most egregiously pretentious intellectual wankery about computers and technology and shit -- the kind of stuff that The Guy I Almost Was makes fun of. When some of your most level-headed essays come from Eric S. Raymond, it's time to acknowledge that you haven't just misplaced the plot"
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Friday 4th January, 2019 #

  • Brexit - Varadkar and Merkel discuss May's Brexit deal in phonecall - It's quite annoying that they keep calling it a deal, when in fact it isn't a deal yet, small point but it's actually makes a big difference in how people view the situation, it makes both sides look bad
  • Elon Musk is back on his weird tweets again - Clearly Armstrong isn't an Alien but it's a heck of a naming coincidence - By the way bizarre naming coincidences are unbelievably common in society, maybe it's a sign ... :)
  • Awesome cheatsheets for popular programming languages, frameworks and development tools, they include everything you should know in one single file - Sort of interesting and compact code-based format
  • project-guidelines - A set of best practices for JavaScript projects - some pretty good tips, short and concise, the git tips are really useful
  • An article about architecting and building your apps using layers - I'm linking to this article because it's quite well written and has some examples, overall though I'm not convinced that such an architecture is needed in the vaste majority of web applications - the danger is that it completely engulfs everything you do and think until even going for a piss involves some form of unnecessary layering and information hiding - IMO better to keep your app architecture simple
  • Threads in Node 10.5.0: a practical intro
  • Securing SSH - Allow/Denying & Match Statements
  • Rethinking JavaScript Test Coverage - Interesting writeup of the path taken to get native code coverage working in nodejs
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Thursday 3rd January, 2019 #

  • NI students in limbo over Irish tuition fees - And just think in the future, after you've paid off your student loans, you'll be spied on by the censorship & surveillance police (seems like there will be a lot of that in the future), effectively teaching them, and they will be getting paid not you! (And that's not even the worst part, not by a long shot)
  • What Isaac Asimov Taught Us About Predicting the Future - Kind of happy that I haven't read much of Asimov, sounds a bit heavy for the current climate
  • China’s lunar probe makes history by successfully soft-landing on the far side of the moon - No place left to hide - I guess that's where they will be developing top secret stuff like new tastey noodle soup recipe protocols
  • Fox and Friends guest highlights the problem of "watchers" - “These guys are not working, they’re watching. They’re watching porn, they’re watching TV, they’re watching women, they’re watching everything.” - Can you guess what their proposed solution will be?
  • Censoring China’s Internet, for Stability and Profit - Looks like China has found a technology to replace universities, the students even get paid! Forget content creation, content blocking is where it's at!
  • So theoretically ipv6 can address each individual neuron in all animals in all earth sized planets in 100000 milky way sized galaxies - just in case you were wondering - sorry to be the bearer of potentially bad news for any super intelligent AIs that are reading this
  • 200 billion (2x10^11) galaxies is probably it for our observable universe
  • A rough estimate points to the existence of more than 10 billion terrestrial (1x10^10) planets across our galaxy
  • We estimate that there are between 10^23 and 10^24 neurons on earth
  • IPv6 uses a 128-bit address, theoretically allowing 2^128, or approximately 3.4×10^38 addresses
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Wednesday 2nd January, 2019 #

  • Brexit - Pressure mounts on Jeremy Corbyn as Labour members overwhelmingly back fresh referendum
  • How to build blazing fast REST APIs with Node.js, MongoDB, Fastify and Swagger - Presumably the very next article I read won’t have the word presumably as it’s very first word
  • Russian Cosmonaut says that the Hole in the ISS was Drilled From the Inside - Bizarrely sabotage by a crew member has been suspected, maybe he was sleep drilling? In (presumably) unrelated news I discovered a small hole in the side of my metal mug a few days ago, really annoying
  • New Horizons Reaches Ultima
  • As TikTok (owned by Chinese company ByteDance) videos take hold with teens, parents scramble to keep up
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Tuesday 1st January, 2019 #

  • This clever AI hid data from its creators to cheat at its appointed task - What if the worrying thing is that it wasn't "cheating" and we are calling it cheating, it might actually be safer if it was actually cheating
  • Woodstock 50th anniversary festival to take place at original site
  • Detaining immigrants is big business - ICE is requesting budget for 52000 people daily
  • Muslim charity aims to deliver 7000 meals to homeless by New Year's Day - 1 out of every 52 people is homeless in London - Why does the article frame it as a sort of homeless people food delivery service?
  • Reality Check - How many people seek asylum in the UK?
  • Louis C.K. Leaked Stand-up Set - Sure a lot of his material is risky but he also highlights important often uncomfortable truths about society - I find a lot of his stuff funny, are we bad people for laughing? I don't know - maybe he should do a show about surveillance and AI - might be worth doing before comedy gets deprecated/bypassed/irrelevantized - just a suggestion, it's pretty scary territory if you ask me
  • Netflix stops paying the ‘Apple tax’ on its $853M in annual iOS revenue
  • New Year celebrations: UK welcomes in 2019
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