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Thursday 28th February, 2019 #

  • Just ran the "open browser, open techmeme" test on Safari, and there is hardly even a blip on the cores utilisation, the laptop hardly even notices that an app was opened and a page was loaded - I will be mostly browsing using Safari for the next few days
  • Everyone keeps writing about how latest Firefox (65.0.1) has fixed all the performance issues, yet in my unscientific tests of "open browser then open techmeme.com" it maxes out all processor cores on my laptop for 20secs, entire laptop goes into slowmotion, Chrome has the page loaded and all cores back to normal in around 4-5 seconds and the cores never go above 85% utilisation (measured using htop)
  • EastEnders' pub faces losing it's license after supervisor told PC investigating complaints of late-night lock-ins to "Have a fucking drink, it will help you fucking relax for fuck's sake" - Maybe each time Google force log's in a user it should send the user a 6 pack of beers to have while they are locked in, delivered via drone, we are living in the future after all
  • Today I have been mainly dealing with major internet connectivity issues and listening to this Cure track over and over and over, fyi the album version is better than the youtube version
  • Really fucking dull article about China doing face recognition on pigs - well done guys, just fantastic, we are living in the future (no flying cars yet though)
  • What a linkblog would have looked like in the original WorldWideWeb browser - none of the javascript works, but surprisingly it's mostly readable - Document->Open from full document reference :)
  • We Need Chrome No More - I note while reading this that Chrome has forced logged me into the browser yet again - test several times now when I log into Gmail I get force logged into Chrome, for fuck's sake Google
  • 'Centuries of entitlement' - Emma Thompson on why she quit Lasseter film - Lasseter is the ex-creative director of both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios and his downfall had been one of the key landmarks of the Me Too and Times Up campaigns
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Wednesday 27th February, 2019 #

  • xkcd - Plutonium
  • Diversity and Inclusion - A Tech Story A description of the inclusion activities at Microsoft in Israel that has increased the number of Arab employees by 10x - I think this great, I'm interested to know if there are similar activities happening in companies based in Arab countries, also are the people that make it through the selection process representative of Arab society and the hiring company's composition or is it only specific personality types that get selected
  • Nginx 1.15.9 adds support for dynamic certificate loading - I can see this being a very interesting feature for some deployments
  • Cloudflare expands its government warrant canaries
  • Facebook wants up to 30% of fan subscriptions vs Patreon’s 5%
  • Spotify launches in India - Ad-supported free tier and $1.67 monthly subscription
  • Hexbot Robot Arm - All-in-one robot arm that turns your desktop into a workshop
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Tuesday 26th February, 2019 #

  • Copyright really is a weird idea when you think about it, imagine there were equivalents in other professions, I bet a lot of other professions would like to have "copyrights" - You spend some time doing a thing that you get paid for, then for a set amount of time afterwards others are not allowed to do the same thing you just did
  • The trauma floor - The secret lives of facebook moderators in america
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Monday 25th February, 2019 #

  • When Big Tech and Big Content make a meal of creators, it doesn't matter who gets the bigger piece - With less choice artists will get even worse deals from big media companies, blackmailers will use the copyright laws to hurt artists, with less competition big tech will get even bigger and badder - The thing I'm noticing is that it's only artists that we are supposed to be worried about, yet the copyright laws will affect everyone, there is a whole ecosystem that could become unbalanced overnight, why do the artists get to decide the shape of the ecosystem?
  • Should You Still Allow Comments On Your Blog?
  • Pinstagram? Instagram code reveals Public Collections feature
  • Meet the Man Behind Brooklyn's Pinball Speakeasy
  • Patreon’s future and potential exits
  • ICANN warns of “ongoing and significant” attacks against internet’s DNS infrastructure
  • As expected, the EU has advanced the catastrophic Copyright Directive without fixing its terrible defects
  • Huawei launches the Mate X, joining Samsung's Galaxy Fold in the new foldable phone category - Interesting that it's also Huawei's first 5G phone
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Sunday 24th February, 2019 #

  • Elon Musk should definitely consider getting a haircut and dare I say it perhaps even a shave at this Hanoi barber shop, also how does he feel about algorithms controlling our information diet - hard not to notice the timeliness of this considering the Radiolab podcast from yesterday
  • YouTube's Latest Child Exploitation Controversy Has Kick-Started A War Over How To Fix The Platform - Personally I think it's better that the problem has been highlighted publicly
  • When algorithms think you want to die - It's those creepy algorithms again!
  • Women’s viewership of e-sports grew from 23.9 percent of all watchers in 2016 to 30.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2018
  • 51% Of Tech Industry Workers Believe President Trump Has A Point About The Media Creating Fake News
  • Independent - "not influenced or controlled by others in matters of opinion, conduct, etc.; thinking or acting for oneself"
  • "We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. At The Independent, no one tells us what to write." - Pretty much any other 21 word phrase would be better than this as the slogan for the Independent newspaper, IMO
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Saturday 23rd February, 2019 #

  • You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information - Then They Tell Facebook
  • Twitter co-founder Ev Williams is leaving the company's board
  • Abjects - Global Garage Punk Trio Play Optimistic Anthems For Uncertain Times
  • Seven Steps to Perfection - A Guide Towards the Afrofuture in Music
  • Radiolab podcast - Loops
  • Bash - How to redirect output to a file and stdout
  • Google is organising a training series to support journalists covering the indian elections, they plan to train 10 000 journalists across 40 cities in India during 2019
  • Trump calls for 6G cellular technology, because why the heck not?
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Thursday 21st February, 2019 #

  • Social Media killed the Radio Calling Card - Some pretty cool HAM radio communication history and artwork
  • The war on makeup - USA TODAY editor apologizes for racist yearbook image run on her watch - I'm wondering how long approximately the makeup ban/embargo will last
  • Technology Is Threatening Our Species’ Survival
  • Twitter opens applications for its ‘prototype’ program, first tests to focus on fixing conversations
  • When Kids Realize Their Whole Life Is Already Online
  • On YouTube, a network of paedophiles is hiding in plain sight
  • Samsung’s foldable phone is the Galaxy Fold - Seems like it could be the year for foldable phones
  • What if an evil Sam Beckett army is some day created? I should really stop worrying about these sorts of things
  • The Best & Boldest Beauty Looks From London Fashion Week
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Wednesday 20th February, 2019 #

  • A brief history of bob haircuts in French movies (and why they do it best) - Be transported momentarily into the world surrounding the bob haircut in french film and fashion
  • Assholes
  • Under poaching pressure, elephants are evolving to lose their tusks - There is concern that this could be affecting the African ecosystem, also there is evidence this might have already happened in Asia where elephants are often tuskless
  • Why do I love React Hooks?
  • Of Mice and BEM - Getting Past Common Problems With CSS Organization
  • Karl Lagerfeld, iconic Chanel fashion designer, dies
  • Phonetically consistent English - This broke my brain, had to rewind several times, I thought the final result sounded like a cross between danish and jamaican - It would be interesting if we discovered that people learning english found it much easier to learn creole based versions of the language, perhaps there are improvements that could be made to how sounds are encoded into their written form
  • “Rebuilding a local news ecosystem” - Knight pledges $300 million to local news, free speech, and media literacy organizations
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Tuesday 19th February, 2019 #

  • Using Wordpress with React js - Tutorial on how to use React with headless Wordpress, also has some suggestions as to deployment options
  • WorldWideWeb - The full write up of the recently completed CERN project to restore the web's first browser
  • What I Don't Like About React Hooks
  • People in Germany are organising and demonstrating against the EU copyright directive
  • Baseball card vandals - The most ardently irreverent, beautifully nonsensical, brilliantly gross and sometimes surprisingly sublime thing on the internet
  • Uganda loses 5 million internet users as a result of Social Media Tax
  • ‘Sophisticated state actor’ hacks Australia’s political parties months before election
  • Getting over Privacy - Discusses the currently controversial idea that privacy might be incompatible with technological progress, and whether privacy is a strategy rather than a core value - My initial reaction to the idea is that no privacy might be very dangerous in ways we can not know until it is too late, it could be like closing a door that you can't open again, you'd want to be really sure there wasn't something fundamental to how humans are that wasn't on the other side of the door
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Monday 18th February, 2019 #

  • I Think I’ve Identified Email’s Fundamental Flaw - A short exploration of emails features, highlighting the subtleties of software design
  • Incredible free museums around the world
  • Brexit news latest - Nigel Farage claims 100,000 people have signed up to new Brexit Party
  • How the US has hidden its empire - This is a really great piece of journalism, well written and informative, looks at an aspect of the modern USA that is not talked about, I knew there were a lot of US military bases, I had no idea the USA had so many foreign territories - It makes sense, with so many foreign nationals living in the US they are going to want to have a presence in other territories themselves
  • UK says Huawei is manageable risk to 5G - Huawei are turning the situation into a feature which illustrates that they are missing the point of the concern - “Some say that because these countries are using Huawei gear, it makes it harder for US agencies to obtain these countries’ data”
  • UK parliament calls for antitrust, data abuse probe of Facebook - “Companies like Facebook should not be allowed to behave like ‘digital gangsters’ in the online world, considering themselves to be ahead of and beyond the law”
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Sunday 17th February, 2019 #

  • Going Solo, Successfully - Some interesting tips for self-employed / freelancers
  • Machine learning 'causing science crisis'
  • The real reason America is scared of Huawei - internet-connected everything (5G)
  • Why CISA issued our first Emergency Directive - "Mitigate DNS Infrastructure Tampering"
  • Justin Bieber song slowed down 800% and pitch corrected - I'm sort of blown away with how much I like this track, listened to it while programming today
  • The team working at CERN on the historical restoration project to rebuild the web's first web browser have finished, and they've documented their collaboration via video, I'm looking forward to trying it out
  • The Cloud Is Just Someone Else's Computer - Jeff Atwood's writeup of the colocation setup he uses to host the Discourse website, lots of great benchmark testing tips, as well as cost analysis compared to a similar cloud setup
  • Bruno Ganz, actor who played Hitler in Downfall, dies aged 77
  • Cycling and survival on the streets of London - Some great journalism, we need more of this type of media about communities, documenting positive things that are happening
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Saturday 16th February, 2019 #

  • Why Does The BBC Keep Losing Its Top Male Presenters?
  • Google famously encourages and pays for it's employees to spend 20% of their time on their personal projects, what if all companies had to pay for their employees to spend 20% of their time as citizen journalists, researching and writing about whatever interests them?
  • Following on from yesterday's boobs based Brexit story, today - A semi-Brexit, with just England and Wales leaving the EU, is the solution (strange how information flows isn't it)
  • 'I know what it feels like to be hunted' - Brigitte Bardot on life in the spotlight - I'm glad for Brigitte Bardot that she found a way out and a passion, it's worth remembering that gang stalking exists outside of the world of celebrity too
  • What would happen if Facebook were turned off?
  • don’t get clever with login forms
  • Twitter Just Removed A Tweet From An Account Linked To Iran’s Supreme Leader - Looks like the Ayatollah Khamenei was restating the Salman Rushdie verdict from 1990 that condemned him to death via fatwa, is that what Twitter is being used for these days? Yikes
  • Amazon Doubles Profits, Pays $0 in Federal Income Taxes
  • tcpdump - Monitor ALL eth1 Traffic Except My Own SSH Session
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Friday 15th February, 2019 #

  • Chrome will Soon Let You Share Link to Specific Word or Sentence on a Page - Could be a cool new browser feature
  • How to enable debug logging in nginx
  • Re-posting the link to the story about the journalists in France carrying out gang-stalking via social media harassment gangs, as it is relevant to today's stories
  • Before there was internet paranoia, there was Lyndon Larouche - What if for liberal leaning societies, conspiracy "nuts" play an important role in reminding us that a large proportion of the world do not share their liberal views and could very well use technology in nefarious ways - For example high tech gang-stalking - we now know that happens for real in France, carried out by actual journalists of major news organisations organised in secret on private forums
  • India Proposes Chinese-Style Internet Censorship - Feels like in the past few months everywhere there is a massive crack down on online freedoms, from linking, to quoting, to data storage, is there anything that will not be limited in some way? Must be that the big wigs are starting to dig their heals in somewhere
  • Rendering on the Web - A pretty good summary of all the techniques available to render web pages, sort of illustrates why building websites is not that straight forward after all
  • British News Host Strips Naked On Live TV Because Of... Brexit?
  • AI can write disturbingly believable fake news - Oh well, there goes the neighbourhood
  • Instrumenting HTTP requests in node - Makes some good arguments as to reasons to use the node core libraries for making HTTP requests, the crucial idea is that in practice what is important is to be able to debug a live infrastructure, and some of the HTTP request libraries, though convenient, limit your ability to debug
  • Back-off and retry using JavaScript arrays and promises - Concise summary of how to handle calling APIs that have rate-limits, I've done this previously using caolan/async but this post uses promises
  • Pika/Pack - A bit like webpack or Parcel but specifically for building npm packages
  • Why no output is shown when using grep twice?
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Thursday 14th February, 2019 #

  • How to setup Nginx on Linux to stream and publish video over HTTP
  • NYT piece on the guys that founded Atlassian, a software company building developer tools based in Australia
  • French freelance marketplace Malt raises $25 million to expand across Europe
  • Apple is also launching a subscription news service, and publishers are up in arms about the proposed 50-50 revenue share
  • JP Morgan is rolling out a cryptocurrency for large businesses to settle payments, main benefit over wire transfers. which can take days, is instant settlement
  • Apple is launching a new video service, which would be free for device owners, but a lot of the large content creators are not onboard yet
  • Millennial-Bashing Is Class Warfare - "It’s not funny or cute - it’s classism, and it’s destroying our economy"
  • Apparently all the faces on this website are generated using AI, fake synthetic people faces (refresh page for next)
  • The Final Version of the EU's Copyright Directive Is the Worst One Yet - I wonder how many people currently running websites in the EU are considering relocating to non-EU territories, it's sort of like a modern day potato famine on the horizon, and most people are completely unfazed by it, shows how much people care about the online industries
  • Despite Khashoggi, Saudi Arabia unlikely to lose U.S. investments (via Softbank)
  • Dealership Makes Woman Sitting Right In Front Of Them Confirm She's Not A Robot
  • Why can’t a bot tick the "I'm not a robot" box?
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Tuesday 12th February, 2019 #

  • CERN day 1 - Remy Sharp is in CERN rebuilding the first web browser, called WorldWideWeb and originally built by Tim Burners-Lee in 1990, as part of a sort of historical restoration project
  • It's not just Jeff Bezos that is experiencing extorsion, it's happening to a lot of people for example YouTubers are being targeted by anonymous scammers threatening to shut down channels, extorsion and it's cousin intimidation happens all the time
  • Why data, not privacy, is the real danger - An article highlighting that the bigger danger to all the surveillance is the ability to compromise your personal autonomy via the creation of digital voodoo dolls, my worry is what happens when this is done not by the big tech firms, but every random person / stalker out there, with big tech there is at least some possibility of accountability
  • I can confirm that anonymous cowards who cut holes in your clothes when you leave them out to dry is a real problem
  • Chasing That Feeling - Business Of Dreams
  • Jeff Jarvis - "Journalism’s mission is to convene communities into civil, informed, and productive conversation"
  • Techdirt piece that seems to agree with my observation that the EU copyright reforms might be a controlled demolition of the internet as we know it, they suggest by the big media companies - The reality is that either way, we need a system that can support and sustain a lot more people than in the past, more participation, more variety
  • Starting to think that eventually people will all just talk via the mediums of bugs and pull requests rather than actual conversation, for the record I quite like the old fashioned mouth based way of communicating
  • "Don't be evil" motto predates DuckDuckGo foundation by around 8 years
  • Thought of this DuckDuckGo search earlier, sort of put me off using the search engine a bit, also adds a new layer to the other famous search engines famous motto that I hadn’t seen before
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Monday 11th February, 2019 #

  • Noticed that Google Chrome is still force logging me in periodically, so I tried to use Firefox, first site I open was broken, the button I needed was greyed out and unclickable, back on Chrome it's clickable - Choice is a wonderful thing, when you can get it
  • Brigitte Nielsen on giving birth at 54 - ‘I was trying until there were no embryos left’ - All day yesterday I was dealing with an IP address that ended in .54, this modern world and all it's strange co-incidences
  • Journalism should be free - The piece explores some options that people are finding to fund journalism to make it accessible to larger numbers of people
  • Our Brains Aren’t Designed to Handle the Trump Era
  • Automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) are now available to civilians and are being bought up by casinos, schools, car parks, but also housing associations and just about anyone that wants one (including criminals), and they are being networked together creating secret monitoring networks that have no government oversight
  • US military equipped with tiny spy drones - Black Hornets are nano-drones able to perform reconnaissance during combat operations.
  • Paris seeks $14 million from Airbnb for illegal adverts
  • Spike Lee on Liam Neeson racism row - 'It's bad all around'
  • 83% Of Consumers Believe Personalized Ads Are Morally Wrong, Survey Says (6,000 adults in Europe and America were included in the survey)
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Sunday 10th February, 2019 #

  • Gordon Ramsay Savagely Critiques Spicy Wings
  • Ibiza - Spring Breakers Of Europe
  • What happens when you pass an image through a guitar pedal? Any article that has this description has got to be interesting, the code is a bit messy (making it a bit difficult to clearly understand) and the diagrams are hard to read, but I like the general idea and the result
  • New pictures from NASA’s New Horizons show a pancaked peanut
  • The United States's Theoretical Plan If It Ever Went To War With The UK - I'm always impressed at how the guy from the Half As Interesting youtube channel always manages to effortlessly segway into the advert at the end of the episode
  • No plastic bottles, utensils or cups? That’s what some lawmakers are proposing
  • Bait review - hypnotic take on tourists ruining Cornwall - This film looks interesting
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Saturday 9th February, 2019 #

  • Steve Buscemi's Face Transferred To Jennifer Lawrence's Body - I’m starting to think this might be kind of great, I could completely replace my face in all my home videos, kind of bored of my stupid face at this stage, hopefully human memory is as good as we think it is and isn’t dependent on the boundaries of reality
  • No thank you, Mr. Pecker – Jeff Bezos - I just read the Bezos post, I wouldn’t call myself a massive Bezos fan but I like that he’s standing up to these AMI assholes
  • I Cut the 'Big Five' Tech Giants From My Life - It Was Hell - The author goes on a digital detox and makes some really interesting discoveries and observations
  • Jeff Bezos Protests the Invasion of His Privacy, as Amazon Builds a Sprawling Surveillance State for Everyone Else
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Friday 8th February, 2019 #

  • Boards of Canada - An eagle in your mind (First song that started playing this evening on my iPod which is set to shuffle)
  • Another mostly boring article about Bezos apart from this quote: "Looking for a better planet than Earth is misguided, let me assure you, this is the best planet”
  • Evil Things I Did as a Kid (ft. SomeThingElseYT)
  • Some news from the controlled demolition otherwise known as the EU copyright reform - A lot of people hate the reform and also hate the compromises to the reform, sort of feels like that bit in the Titanic where the band is still playing even though the ship is sinking, except no one really believes that the ship is sinking, hey maybe the ship isn't sinking, maybe there is no ship, I should stop reading all this depressing 'reality' crap
  • In what is no doubt completely unrelated news, where I am living today there has been an influx of what can only be described as "slow coaches" - People that walk unbelievably slowly, so slowly they are almost walking backwards - Many many groups of them, all up and down the very long street I live on, and on both sides of the street, also white, black, asian, many different nationalities - Notably different to usual, where did they all come from? Maybe there is some sort of slow coach convention on, what a bizarre day today
  • Thought it's useful to link to the other big story of the day, film director Woody Allen, who's name is now somewhat synonymous with sexual abuse and pedophilia is suing Jeff Bezos' Amazon for film deal breach - What a cauldron of nasties today's news stories are, and to think that this is likely just the surface layer - What a world we live in
  • Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless Broadband Than Countries Without It
  • nginx-quick-reference - This notes describes how to improve Nginx performance, security and other important things
  • Conan O’Brien and Nick Kroll Teach the Children About S-E-X
  • Now is the time to fix the EU copyright directive - Open letter from Kent Walker Google SVP to raise awareness of issues relating to the EU copyright reform that is ongoing
  • Jeff Bezos’ investigator suspects 'a government agency' intercepted Amazon CEO's text messages - Wow the Bezos dick pick story is turning into a spy government conspiracy bonanza, maybe this is a distraction from the UK royals family punch up distraction? The timing sure is a bit weird
  • Jeff Bezos accuses National Enquirer of blackmailing him - and publishes the details himself - Interesting that US tabloids are having a bit of a field day this week too
  • Everything Wrong With Trump’s America Was in Steven Seagal’s Only Novel - I think I might have discovered the origins of Evgeny Lebedev's beard
  • First thoughts on Deno, the JavaScript/TypeScript run-time
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Thursday 7th February, 2019 #

  • World's Weirdest Tube Map Spotted In Trondheim Airport
  • How to Create a Markdown Table
  • There sure is a lot of activity in the UK tabloids about the royals this week, I wonder what they (the press) are trying to distract people from?
  • China is worried an AI arms race could lead to accidental war - Good to see that officials are starting to examine the tip of the iceberg
  • Liam Neeson says he is not a racist in wake of rape comments - Life is complicated, people have bad experiences and they react, sometimes badly - It's positive to see how much progress we've made in the past 30-40 years though, there has been a lot of progress, but there is still a long way to go, for all races on the planet - I know, I experience racism every single day
  • What Spotify needs in order to become a great podcast app
  • The Rise of the Robot Reporter - The end of typos
  • Slowing Down A Stock Exchange With 38 Miles Of Cable
  • Spotify finally made a profit and spent big on its podcast future
  • Time Traveler's Guide to Accessibility Mechanics - Léonie Watson
  • HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points - We need web development to be accessible to all
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Wednesday 6th February, 2019 #

  • WebExtensions v3 considered harmful - Google is proposing several big changes to Chrome's extensions architecture, people are saying that it's "not a safe development platform any more"
  • The News before the Storm - An exploration of the news before the news - I'm really into this, inspired use of media to convey aspects of a situation that are difficult to transmit
  • The Inter font family - Open source typeface specially designed for user interfaces with focus on high legibility of small-to-medium sized text on computer screens
  • HTTP/3 explained
  • As streaming surges, Vivendi is mulling a sale of Universal that could value the music group at $25 billion
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Tuesday 5th February, 2019 #

  • Cocaine Piss feat. Mette Rasmussen live@moers festival 2017
  • Police raids target 'hundreds of UK web attackers'
  • Slack confidentially files to go public
  • pnpm - the drop in npm replacement that saves you disk space
  • Americans Relieved to Learn That Trump Spends Sixty Per Cent of Time Not Using Powers as President - Maybe we should all just become president, it sounds like what it would be like to be retired, and with AI and automation that's going to be happening to a greater and greater amount of people ever more quickly - Note that the reality of this is that the majority of Americans would like to put Trump in a secret prison (Did I hear you say "Land of the free"?)
  • Firefox 66 to block automatically playing audible video and audio
  • Our Language Affects What We See
  • If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source - Interesting article, one of the comments highlights a big downside - it only works well if the governments keep their systems up to date to the latest patches
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Monday 4th February, 2019 #

  • It just occurred to me that in journalism when you "cover a story", I guess the origins are from print magazine journalism, but it's sort of unfortunate in other mediums because what you actually want is sort of the opposite of covering the story, you want to highlight it
  • Soak the rich? Americans say go for it
  • The world might actually run out of people
  • The infrastructural humiliation of America - "A dying empire, one beginning to visibly crack and crumble as it is slowly hollowed out from within"
  • The Perfect Rent-Controlled Apartment - A retired actor found what he thought was an ideal place to live in Greenwich Village in 1955, for $90 a month - He never left
  • Unsecured MongoDB databases expose Kremlin's backdoor into Russian businesses
  • Philippines tops world internet usage index with an average 10 hours a day
  • Why captchas have gotten so difficult - Capchas make me angry, they make us all angry, the bots are now immune to them so guess what, they're going to start doing continuous captchas! All captcha all the time, in a few years when the internet has stopped being functional it will be reframed as a feature...what do you mean it's broken, capchas are the internet! It's probably for the best, there's too much crap on the internet these days anyway
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Sunday 3rd February, 2019 #

  • Nick Offerman - Full Q&A - Oxford Union
  • The plan to send iphone sized space crafts to the nearest stars on flyby missions, could have photos back on earth by 2060 (we should defo do this imo), also earth’s star (the sun) will become uninhabitable in about 5 billion years
  • Review of the pretty cool story about the bizarre elongated interstellar object called Oumuamua
  • Kenyans Say Chinese Investment Brings Racism and Discrimination - Chinese bosses call their African employees monkeys, and say they are free like monkeys are free
  • Machine learning leads mathematicians to unsolvable problem - Pretty interesting idea, quite badly explained, I think the article might be saying that determining whether an algorithm has learned something or not is an undecidable problem (we manage to do it somehow though don't we) - Also mathematician/philosopher Gödel used to wear a black streak in his hair according to the photograph in this piece
  • XKCD on the dishonesty implicit in the sharing options in social media
  • Harassment, Transphobia, and Racism - A Look Inside Blind's Anonymous Chatting Forum for Google Employees - This is horrible stuff, as bad as it might be at least it's still possible to leave the social network that has this type of dynamic going on, I hope that that is always possible, in a world where you can't leave the network and everything you do is automatically added (when social networks become much more integrated into daily life), what do you do if the network is acting in a racist way towards you? Being racist might be your only way to fight back - I hope that day never comes
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Saturday 2nd February, 2019 #

  • The Turin Test is Bullshit
  • What we learned from net neutrality’s big day in court - I wonder what the super long term aim of both sides is, often rules that get implemented don't show their real intended use cases for many years, how will net neutrality concepts affect us in the future when the internet is even more integrated into the human experience, and AIs are everywhere? It's often a fight for the control of something important, what is it this time, intelligence perhaps?
  • Spotify is reportedly in talks to acquire podcast company Gimlet Media
  • Rewriting the past - do historical movies have to be accurate?
  • Forget privacy - you're terrible at targeting anyway - really on point article about the realities of machine learning, advertising, trackers and privacy
  • Snopes pulls out of its fact-checking partnership with Facebook
  • A curated list of remote jobs for workers based in Europe
  • Inside Roald Dahl's backyard writing "hut" - It occurs to me that computer programmers and literary writers have a lot in common, not least the many hours per day spent immersed in an entirely mental/imagined world - I hope it's not unhealthy
  • These were the 10 biggest European tech stories this week
  • London MET Police are testing out facial recognition cameras at several tube stations in the east-end - people have been arrested for covering up their faces
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Friday 1st February, 2019 #

  • greenlock-express.js - Free SSL and Automatic HTTPS (ACME / Let's Encrypt v2 client) for node.js with Express, koa, hapi, rill, etc
  • Streaming Music Royalties are Even Worse Than We Thought - At Least According to This Indie Label - I wonder how streaming compares to low/no tech busking, if it's really that bad then why don't the artists just tell the streaming companies to get stuffed and just go busking every evening?
  • Jay Penske gobbles up the remaining 49 percent of Rolling Stone - Giving the Penkse Media Corporaton (Interestingly has financial backing from the Saudis) full control of the legendary music brand, including its events, licensing rights, and international editions
  • Mystery offshore investor takes 20% stake in Evening Standard - Quite shocking that the investors of London's main newspaper are unknown (might be the Saudis), also shocking is the strangeness of Evgeny Lebedev's beard, I think that even the Yemenis soldiers in the photo are wondering about his beard, maybe it's some new style of beard I was not aware of before
  • Paying tribute to the web with View Source - Remember that looking to see how something works is one thing, but that hacking is apart so it is broken is something quite different
  • Forget everything you know about 3D printing - the ‘replicator’ is here
  • Also in the fuck with people's heads using laser audio department, a DIY project that does just that!
  • New Technology Uses Lasers to Transmit Audible Messages to Specific People - Has got to be in the top ten list of technologies that could be used to fuck with people
  • Uber experiments with integrating public transportation options into its app in Denver
  • Apple restores access for Facebook and Google to enterprise certificates so their internal apps are functional again
  • Apple blocks Google from running its internal iOS apps (Yesterday Apple did the same to Facebook)
  • Agenda - Lightweight job scheduling for Node.js
  • GraphQLess lets you write your GraphQL server almost exactly like you would with Express.js
  • thelounge - Modern, responsive, cross-platform, self-hosted web IRC client (nodejs)
  • Nobody Cares About OAuth or OpenID Connect - I've had similar experiences to those mentioned in this article, setting up OAuth and OIDC properly is way too complex
  • portable-node-guide - Practical guide on how to write portable/cross-platform Node.js code
  • Future JavaScript - what is still missing? My favourites of those listed: Comparing objects by value, decimal computations, destructuring switch, pipeline operator (useful but |> looks weird to me), better standard library, better support for date times, optional chaining, negative indices on Array.prototype.get(), enums
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