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Sunday 30th June, 2019 #

  • I'm kind of amazed by the versatility and variety of Boris Johnson facial expressions, just spend a few minutes cycling through them using you keyboard arrow keys, not that that is in any way an important factor in becoming PM...but it was definitely aliens
  • In response to mass shootings, some schools and hospitals are installing microphones equipped with algorithms - Setting up an AI adversarial network around our kids has to be a bad idea, sure it's just audio detection now, but how long until the operators want a way to infuence and poke the children stuck in the secret AI matrix? And then how long until the kids or parents decide they need to fight back, where does it end? How long until it's linked to a chinese style social credit system? How long until they move from audio tech to brain wave monitoring tech? And who knows what attrocities people might end up doing with such an oppresive system in place, there are already mass shootings, do we really want to know what the next worste thing could be?
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Saturday 29th June, 2019 #

  • Football's new laws - Penalties, backpasses, handballs and subs - New rules have been introduced including how handballs are adjudicated, no taking off shirts or celebrating with fans during goal celebrations, also something about a red card that gets dropped if the other team takes a quick free-kick, and a lot of others
  • Women's World Cup - France 1-2 USA - The USA will play Englna d in the Semi-finals on Tuesday
  • Women's World Cup 2019 - USA currently leading France by 1-0, winners play England in Tuesday's semi-final
  • Free Sex Pot Bust Rap – Introduction to Noun Talk
  • The Pentagon has a laser that can identify people from a distance by their heartbeat - The title says it all
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Friday 28th June, 2019 #

  • Jony Ive is originally from Chingford in east London, his company his new company is to be called LoveFrom
  • John Gruber who I think it's fair to say spends rather a lot of time talking and thinking about Apple, writes some interesting analysis of Jony Ive's departure
  • Jony Ive to form independent design company with Apple as client
  • How Chinese Food Fueled the Rise of California Punk - A pretty good snapshot of an important part of music history, I had some sort of snot attack a few minutes before finding this article resulting in a lot of spitting while reading this, which somehow feels appropriate I guess - Some great photography and artwork too
  • EU experts recommend the ban of AI-powered citizen scoring and mass surveillance
  • There is a new shiney email client in town called Superhuman, quite expensive but apparently it has some nice premium price features
  • Global Feedback and Input on the Facebook Oversight Board for Content Decisions
  • Twitter will now hide - but not remove - harmful tweets from public figures
  • How to remove or delete single cron job using linux command?
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Wednesday 26th June, 2019 #

  • How Mark Rothko Unlocked the Emotional Power of Color - At the Tate Modern in London there is (or at least was) a room with just Rothko paintings, the room is big and the light is somewhat dimmed and all walls have these enormous canvas' on them, and there are wooden benches in the middle so you can just sit there and absord the moment feel the presence of the painting and the other people also experiencing the room - It's really quite something, as you enter the room it feels almost like you've walked into a new realm where everything is calmer, something about the colors, the light and the setting combine to create something that is much more than the individual parts - I did not know that he commited suicide or that he was from Latvia
  • Suicides among young Scots have risen by 50% in one year, ‘devastating’ figures show
  • Trump suggests EU out of line in 'suing' U.S. tech firms
  • HN Thread - GDPR Enforcement Tracker - Interesting hn thread about the GDPR tracker, highlighting some of the fines, some are not what you would expect - Using BCC in an email list, dashcams installed in vehicles
  • GDPR Enforcement Tracker - This website contains a list and overview of fines and penalties which data protection authorities within the EU have imposed under the EU General Data Protection Regulation
  • Paul McCartney on Linda’s best photos: ‘Seeing the joy between me and John really helped me’ - Photography is pretty amazing, life is often like going down a really chaotic river either in the physical or in your mind or both, and so sometimes when you see a photo, where you can say well in that moment, there was probably some happiness right there, it's nice, and for a moment you feel like the river has run out into a peaceful place and all the rapids and white water have calmed and you are drifting and just passing by for a bit
  • A Boris Johnson story that in terms of timing fits in earily with the previous post about Cameo, what are the chances eh?
  • Cameo just raised a round of funding, through their service you can book personalized videos from celebs for a fee, they have a lot of celebs on the platform
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Tuesday 25th June, 2019 #

  • An interesting article about how Australia has a history of grass roots movements against uranium mining and nuclear power - It's interesting to see a snapshot of the history on this topic in that region as I wasn't aware of it, I didn't realize that they don't have any nuclear power stations in Australia
  • Anti-surveillence fashion is becomming a thing, these glasses reflect IR light which hinders facial recognition, I guess in the future everyone wears glasses
  • The US migrant camps are quite expensive, apparently $775 per person per night
  • An interesting comparison of the internet to high-trust and low-trust societies, with all of it's fakery the internet is apparently low-trust, but I would argue that like the real world, it's very much a mixture
  • A Mental Model for Video - It's really just long lists of numbers that change over time
  • Why AirPods - and Earbuds Like Them - Are Especially Bad for Your Hearing
  • The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.
  • In a parallel universe podcasting started in the 80s and was distributed on floppy disks
  • Four restaurants in the Bronx feel the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez effect
  • Arab world turns its back on religion – and its ire on the US
  • USA edge past gritty Spain to set up mouthwatering quarter-final with France
  • Humans have made 8.3bn tons of plastic since 1950 - This is the illustrated story of where it's gone - This plastic problem is really urgent, is it more urgent than climate change?
  • Sky set to cancel Johnson-Hunt debate
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Sunday 23rd June, 2019 #

  • VueJS is dead, long live VueJS! - the View javascript fontend framework is undergoing some major changes for v3 based around improving encapsulation for better code reuse across projects, but some devs are worried about the change
  • Bitcoin Is Back Above $10,000 and Investors Say This Rally Is Different - Facebook's move into crypto with their product Libra is having a big effect on the markets
  • Open Source Could Be a Casualty of the Trade War - The first few paragraphs of this article is just some waffle but eventually it makes the point that the US-China trade war could effect open source software, both financially and with code contributions as donors get laeled as government adversaries - One interesting fact is that the Linux foundation received $500k from platinum sponsor Huawei, who have contrinuted 1.5% of the kernel's code
  • Secretive Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China
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Saturday 22nd June, 2019 #

  • The Browser as a Modular, Networked Video Synthesizer
  • Is Ubuntu Or Fedora A Better Distro For Programmers?
  • The Unimaginable Reality of American Concentration Camps - The author of this article has done a really tremendous job of describing a dynamic that I think is somehow a very fundamental primitive of some systems, and yes possibly a minoroty position but then again quantum physics is only understood by a small group of people yet a lot of the modern world is based on it in some way - And who knows, if the phenominon was properly understood perhaps it could be used to find places to live for all the people being held in the camps
  • European central bankers claim oversight over Facebook’s cryptocurrency
  • NASA hacked because of unauthorized Raspberry Pi connected to its network - The hackers had access to the network via the compromised device for over a year
  • Microsoft puts rival apps on internal list of ‘prohibited and discouraged’ software, siting security concerns - Apps include AWS, Google Docs and even Github
  • U.S. Targets China’s Supercomputing Push With New Export Restrictions
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Friday 21st June, 2019 #

  • A somewhat depressing xkdc cartoon, they used to cheer me up (it no longer cheers me up much)
  • UK heading for no-deal Brexit on 31 October, EU leaders conclude
  • Tory leadership - Jeremy Hunt to face Boris Johnson
  • NOISE-ARCH Collection - intoczecated
  • Learn git concepts, not commands - This looks like a pretty good git tutorial, I have only skimmed through it, but I like the diagrams and the topics covered are useful and it's not too verbose - Hopefully I get some time at some point to read it more thoroughly
  • Why I don't use web components - An interesting post about web components, the comments are also quite interesting
  • Writing HTML in HTML - Instead of using a database or a static site generator, just write your blog in HTML directly - One thing I like about this is that each post has it's own stylesheet and scripts so they become time capsules and always look the way they did when they were written
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Thursday 20th June, 2019 #

  • BBC Box personal cloud aims to rewrite the rules on internet privacy - Localization appears to be the topic of the day, in this case it's personal data localization where you have a box that stores your data that you have in your house
  • SpaceX's next Falcon Heavy mission is next Monday and will be carrying a bunch of satellites but also the Planetary Society's LightSail 2 which they will be testing, it's a sail that uses the photons from the sun to move through space, if the sail works as expected then the technology could be used to travel between star systems in the Galaxy and beyond
  • Ten cities ask EU for help to fight Airbnb expansion - "Digital multinationals should not be allowed to become more powerful than cities, more powerful than states. We need the European Union to be on the side of residents, not these big companies.” - but do these locals not use the airbnb type services? Where are the people coming from? Aren't they locals themselves somewhere, or is the problem really a different type of problem that hasn't been articulated properly?
  • U.S. tells India it is mulling caps on H-1B visas for countires that enforce data localization rules - The idea that you can quite easily add data localization to some web apps or services that you have build is pretty far from reality - To implement such a feature you have to completely redesign everything because it would massively effect page load times at the very least, but also not just the code for the app, but the whole infrastructure the app runs on, how the app is deployed, and there is are massive implicationos for security too, now maybe large orgs like Facebook and Google could do that but most smaller businesses are just not going to be able to do these data localization policies
  • Himalayan glacier melting doubled since 2000, spy satellites show
  • Tory leadership race - Stewart out as Johnson extends lead - No leadership for the skinneys this time
  • A New Law to Describe Quantum Computing’s Rise? Double exponentinal growth - That's all very interesting but can it run nodejs?
  • Apple explores moving 15-30% of production capacity from China
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Wednesday 19th June, 2019 #

  • Send Outgoing Webmentions - Remi Sharp has written some tools to send webmentions, which are the evolution to pingbacks - It's good to see some decentralized indieweb stuff hapening amongst the torrents of dystopia is the norm these days
  • Douglas Rushkoff - "Humans are no longer valued for our creativity, in a world dominated by digital technology, we’re now just valued for our data"
  • Matt Green walked along every street of New York City’s five boroughs
  • Man guilty of making a gun using a 3D printer
  • Understanding Nginx Server and Location Block Selection Algorithms
  • Chennai, India - water crisis: City's reservoirs run dry
  • Oxford to receive biggest single donation 'since the Renaissance' - £150m to fund AI ethics research
  • The UK conservative party elections get under way with a televised debate - The thing that I noticed most is how thin Rory Steward is, his legs look like toothpicks, serious question why is he so thin? Is it normal to be that thin? Perhaps it is time to have a leader that has been malnourished in charge
  • Two potentially life-friendly planets found orbiting a nearby star - The earth sized planets are orbiting a star named Teegarden’s star 12 light years away
  • Quite a confusing article about Facebook's new crypto currency, first it says the blockchain network is proprietary, then it says the software is being released as open source, well is Libra proprietary or is it open source?
  • MongoDB moves beyond the database with new cloud services - A lot of new features and cloud services
  • Facebook Token Runs Into Instant Political Opposition in Europe
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Tuesday 18th June, 2019 #

  • How many / how long are stashes saved by git?
  • Asian countries take a stand against the rich world’s plastic waste - I'd like to see some figures that show how recyclable plastic actually is, how would the world function if we had to stop using plastic? That's a really important question to answer because the current use of plastic world wide is dangerously damaging the planet - It's really good that the asian countries are starting to push back against all the plastic waste
  • You Care More About Your Privacy Than You Think
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Monday 17th June, 2019 #

  • The State of CSS 2019 - Another edition of the yearly survey
  • When Amazon CEO Werner Vogels was asked about the ethics of the AI and surveillance technology they are developing -"That’s not my decision to make"
  • UK rules out death penalty extradition (2003) - "They give guarantees and we believe their guarantees" - There might of course be some angle I'm not seing, I am no expert in any of this, but if I were making the rules, based on the current information I have, I would say no extradition to countries that have the death penalty, the reason it's important is that it doesn't just apply to terrosits and murderers as is often suggested in the media, it applies to everyone, and it could be that someone is wrongly accused, it could be a business manager that is involved in some accident were people die, or some new modern crime that hasn't been invented yet, and once the extradition happens it might be too late to stop the death penalty
  • US-UK extradition - The law explained (2003) - There is some imbalance in the arrangements, it;s easier for the US to extradite people from the UK, but this article doesn't say anything about how the death penalty is handled, I would hope that any application that could face the death penalty would be rejected because otherwise it creats a rather blatant whole in the UK legal framework, essentially "The UK has no death penalty unless the US says we do"
  • rga - pretty neat looking command line grep tool that searches in PDFs, E-Books, Office documents, zip, tar.gz, slide decks, movie subtitles
  • The end of erotica? How Hollywood fell out of love with sex
  • Women's World Cup - Tough World Cup start for England has set them up nicely for latter stages
  • Hong Kong Protests: About 2 Million Marchers Hit the Streets - As I read about the protests in HK I keep wondering why there are no protests in the UK about extraditon to the US, sure they have their legel system and everything on the surface is about freedom but they also have the death penalty
  • Relearn CSS layout - Some neat ways to think of CSS primitives, also I'm liking the miniamlist design of this site
  • The Ruin of Britai - Some interesting history about Britain in the 5th and 7th centuries, only two manuscripts survivd from that period, and one was influencial even if it was quite ranty
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Sunday 16th June, 2019 #

  • The Performance Gap is widening - Artcle discusses that a lot of the world's mobile devices are running on lower spec'd hardware and that modern day javascript heavy apps render very slowly blocking the main thread, web workers can aleviate some of this slowness, interesting topic - incidentally this page breaks all the linkblog bookmarklets and has a lot of errors in the javascript console
  • Upgrade Your Memory With a Surgically Implanted Chip - Less than 48 hours after I mention chip in head, low and behold an artcle about brain chips, need I say more?
  • Table Salt Compound Spotted on Jupiters moon Europa - "Europa is covered by a layer of salty liquid water encased in an icy shell"
  • Bitcoin causing CO2 emissions comparable to cities such as Hamburg or Las Vegas
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Saturday 15th June, 2019 #

  • Chrome 76 beta blocks Flash by default, stops Incognito detection, lets sites auto-enable dark modes, new system level progressive web apps install shortcut, CSS backdrop-filter property for creating a translucent frosted glass effect
  • Facebook announces it's list of partners for the crypto blockchain venture Libra, it's a big list and a lot of well known companies, I'm a bit suprised I hadn't read anything about it before, yesterday was the first I had heard about it
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Friday 14th June, 2019 #

  • Software below the poverty line - This blog post takes a look at the financials of open source projects and finds that there is a really big imbalance in the amount of money that is available to people working on these projects, and they end up receiving money well below industry standards
  • Facebook’s is launching a crypto currency called Libra, pretty big news considering they currently have 2.4 billion monthly active users, around 1/4 of the worlds population, with that many people I guess they might as well have their own currency, it's all quite strange, are we all going to have to add payment via Facebucks options on our websites now?
  • Initial Thoughts on iPadOS: A New Path Forward - I keep wanting to get interested in the new iPad software but every artcle I read I very quickly start to loose interest - Might be because I don't have an iPad and reading a static page of text and photos is just not enough because it's all gesture based, the desciptions just go in one ear and out the other for me, needs more animations or gifs IMO
  • Initial Thoughts on iPadOS: A New Path Forward - I keep wanting to get interested in the new iPad software but every artcle I read I very quickly start to loose interest - Might be because I don't have an iPad and reading a static page of text and photos is just not enough because it's all gesture based, the desciptions just go in one ear and out the other for me, needs more animations or gifs IMO
  • After contacting the mobile provider using the web chat on their website, it appears that they will be able to reconnect me - It's unclear why they cut me off specifically now since they could have done that anytime in the past year of so for the same reason they gave - Given that I was having a sim issue, it was an incredibly unlikely coincidence that person on the chat was called Simi, but that's not nealy as unlikely as the other coincidence, which is that today I woke up with a bump on my head that I definitely did not have when I went to sleep, it's right on the top softer part of the head, and it's a weird coincidence because I bashed my head in the shower a few weeks ago, and posted about it on the 27th May, but never had a bump, and the mysterious bump that has happened last night is in excatly the same place that I bashed my head a few weeks ago, I don't like all these coincidences, my read of the situation, is that the cunt universe is trying to imply that I have a sim in my head, well thanks that's just great, but frankly I have a lot of more important things to worry about, chip in head is pretty close to the bottom of the list of worry items
  • My mobile phone has just been cut off, a number that I have had for over 10 years, no warning, nothing, just sim not registered, and phone number no longer works - Apparently when you write the word cunt too many times (approx 50 times over the span of a couple of weeks) then every part of your life is systematically shutdown
  • China Reportedly Crashed Private Messaging App Telegram Amid Hong Kong Protest - the protests were against extradition treaties being setup with China, they seem really against it, which made me think about the UK's extraditions treaties with the US, is it so different?
  • Japan outlaws flying drones while drunk - Sees like this should become a standard, clearly it's very dangerous to pilot a drone while intoxicated
  • Donald Trump - US president in 'Prince of Whales' Twitter error - Some amuzing memes, and also I'm secretly kind of happy I'm not the only one who is pretty terrible at spelling
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Thursday 13th June, 2019 #

  • Today I am part man, part ▶︎ Radiohead
  • More incredibly synchronous news - Helium a decentralized network infrastructure for internet of things, with blockchain enabled hotspots that you can run in your home, they will no dount have one of the moon soon too
  • Microsoft Alternatives project (MAlt) - CERN is looking to move away from Microsoft products since the license fees have been increased by 10x, there isn't much details on the website, all the interesting details seems to be behind a login screen
  • India Plans to Launch Moon Mission in July - They also have plans to put astronauts into orbit, and send robots to Mars and even Venus - Pretty exciting especially since there appears to be a commercial plan to mine helium on the moon, earth's stocks or helium have been running quite low
  • Donald Trump's impromptu press conference - The 31 most stunning lines - I like this approach to reporting, I especially liked when the reporter seems to go off script and just say what they are thinking rather than some university level boffin analysis of a impromptu meeting
  • We Read 150 Privacy Policies - They Were an Incomprehensible Disaster - Linkblog's privacy policy is rather short and easy to read, I was tired of reading these horrible policies so I tried to write one that had the information I would be looking for if I was signing up for an account on a website
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Wednesday 12th June, 2019 #

  • Google Is Moving More Hardware Production Out of China
  • The DOJ’s antitrust chief explains that Tech companies moves that make no economic sense but simply to harm competitors could be a violation of anti-trust laws
  • Benjamin Fröhlich - Spitting Image (Cooper Saver Remix) (Permanent Vacation, Germany) (2019)
  • I just started using a new library today in my integration tests and it has a bug in it where instead of returning a string it returns all the letters of the string individually, one at a time - For all the cunt universe denialists, check out my post from 3 days ago, where I had to copy and paste the letters 1 at a time because the cunt universe temporarily broke my keyboard - What are the chances? Pretty much zero, but in the cunt universe it's actually a very likely event
  • MINIDISCS [HACKED] by Radiohead (Self-released, 2019) - I really cunting miss mini-disks, I have a collection that I never managed to turn into digital files, and which I'm likely to loose during the eviction, which is why this is very cunt universy for me right now, it's lovely and beautiful and I'll listen to the tracks, but it's still very cunt universey
  • Radiohead releases 18 hours of unheard music after hackers demand ransom
  • The One Rule of Content Moderation That Every Platform Follows
  • Apple’s U.S. iPhones Can All Be Made Outside of China If Needed
  • Deepfake video of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on Instagram
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Tuesday 11th June, 2019 #

  • I just got notification that I'm being evicted - Just when you've been kicked so many times in the teeth that you no longer hardly have a face, the cunt universe evicts you - I think we can all see where this is going since I'm not going to stop writing the word cunt, it's really a marvelous and underused word
  • Women's World Cup 2019 - Record 6.1m watch England beat Scotland on BBC TV (Up from previous record of 4m)
  • The end of political cartoons at The New York Times - If I was able to draw (a long time ago I was), and if I had the time, then I would probably publish something like political cartoons along with all the links on the linkblog, that might be kind if cool
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Monday 10th June, 2019 #

  • Let’s publish everything - In interesting blog post about the problems the psychology community is facing in some of it's processes, broadly speaking that people don't like criticism - I like his thought experiment of "fliping it around" something people don't do enough
  • Identity is dead - There is a move to use attributes instead of identities for authentication - I bet the crisis actors out there are loving this new direction
  • Inside the amazon warehouse where humans and machines become one
  • Gunge mouth again this morning but only the 3rd time (and final) time I woke up, also left hand ring finger middle knuckle feels like it was bashed, the skin around my left eye which had mostly recovered by the time I went to bed was once again hanging down and all puffy this morning - After a few hours it's apparent that I've also had the pleasure of another bout of punched in the gut during the night - So perhaps the cunt universe is going for death but via something slow like cancer, that's how the coward cunt universe would do it, likelly the kidneys, pancreas, gallbladder or stomach, that's where the pain is, it's really quite painful, this is probably how they do it in holocaust 2.0, oh and btw cunt universe cancer isn't going to stop me writing cunt
  • Fifa Women's World Cup - England hang on to beat Scotland (2:1) - given the eye issues I've had the oast two days, the owl eyes celebration was a bit cunt universy for me, but anyway glad they won the match
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Sunday 9th June, 2019 #

  • Opera, Brave, Vivaldi to ignore Chrome's anti-ad-blocker changes, despite shared codebase - The controversy is over the new set of standards collectively known as Manifest V3
  • China Summons Tech Giants to Warn Against Cooperating With Trump Ban
  • Apple’s new sign-in button is built for a post-Cambridge Analytica world
  • Cunt universe broke my keyboard for 10 mins, the first two words of this sentence were created laboriously using cut and paste, 1 letter at a time - I will always find a way to document the cunt universe, breaking my keyboard won't help you cunt universe
  • Cunt universe disfigurement update - It's actually a lot worse than I initially thought, it's affecting almost my entire left eye socket, the skin is hanging off in the corner of the eye but also about an inch under the eye, when I went to sleep last night the skin around the eye was completely normal
  • Women's World Cup - England's opener against Scotland kicks off later today in Nice - All the best to the team
  • Write HTML Like It's 1999 - "Be more conscious of their HTML skeleton" - Ys and make sure the skin around your eye is attached to the cunt skeleton
  • Literally the first artcle I opened up today is a nose related story, that's more cunt universe action right there
  • Woke up this morning and as well as another case of gunge mouth, a small spot which had appeared on my upper nose, in approximately the same place as the woman that got assaulted on the london bus yesterday, has become massive but also the area right above it is completely enflamed and puffed out so much so that it is obscuring my vision, and visually looks like the skin is detaching from the corner of my eye and hanging down - so the cunt universe has opted not to kill me bcause I survived the night, but possibly has gone for some minor disfigurement, I will be documenting the cunt universe's cunt behaviour as it unfolds here
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Saturday 8th June, 2019 #

  • Cunt universe, do us all a favour, skip to the end, and kill me because that's the only place where this sort of escalation can lead to, so you might as well just do it and save us all the time and aggravation
  • RadioLab Podcast - Neither Confirm Nor Deny - This was the next podcast lined up on my player, it's repeat but they bang on about "glomar responses" like it's going out of fashion, they probably use the word in the region of 30-40 times - Last week I created a bunch of git aliases, still to be checked in to the repo, one of which is 'glo' which I've been using many times per day since, and also the second part of the word is the first half of my name, these two facts plus the general topic of the podcast, which as usual was a good podcast, but under today's context for me is more of the cunt universe flexing it's, for lack of a better word, and since I am completely cunt based now when it comes to swearing, flexing it's cunt - As you can see cunt universe, I am going to keep writing cunt, when you send me cunt you will only get more of my cunts, your friend Mark
  • Goin' Out West, Bone Machine, Tom Waits [197] - Song by Song Podcast - This was next up on my podcast list today and it lloks like the pedophile theme I picked up on earlier has continued, there is a big section about a pedo story, I was cooking while I listened to this and managed to burn both lips and tongue on a soup spoon right at the moment where they talk about something or other being a master class, well cunt universe, you say master class, I say cunt universe
  • The most detailed map of galaxies, black holes and stars ever made - A interesting talk about the mapping of the visible universe, unfortunately because of all today's items in my data feeds today this came across to me as the cunt universe being rather creepy and confrontational
  • Another horrible example of the cunt universe that is front page of the guardian today, very graphic images, two women were beaten up on a London public bus for being gay - Bizarely both these women look like women from my past, I hope they are alright whoever they are
  • For two hours, a large chunk of European mobile traffic was rerouted through China
  • India’s draft bill proposes a 10-year jail sentence for using cryptocurrencies
  • I didn't read the full article, it's unpleasant stuff, about someone called "DrPizza" soliciting minors, the artcle makes a point about fetishes - I'm mainly posting this because it's creepily synchronous with things happening to me, I used the word fetish yesterday in a completely unrelated post, and famous musician DrJohn died which I posted about, probably just yet another case of creepy synchronicity, but the only thing I can do is to point at it and say once again it's probably just an example of the cunt universe that I seem to be trapped in, or maybe it's nothing
  • Some more night time bizarness - here is the pattern - I wake up after 4-5 hour of sleep and everything is fine, I go back to sleep for an hour or two, and it's the 2nd or 3rd time I wake that there is this discusting sensation in my mouth, it's as if some strange sticky / glupy liquid has been poured in my mouth, all my teeth, gums and lips are covered in it, it's horrible and worrying, and the only thing I can say about it is that it's just another example of the cunt universe, it appears to happen a few times per week
  • IBM and the Holocaust (2017) - It's startling to realize what they were able to do with just punch cards, now the technologies have gotten orders of magnitute more advanced - It's one of the reasons I don't like the idea or Facebook privacy groups, at least if people are posting publicly then there is chance of seing something of this nature happening, but I fear that a holocaust type sitation could easily be blended into everyday life, with everyone "just doing their jobs", and it might even be optimized enough that they don't need to do the deaths
  • Christian Fitness - Newly Colonised Moon (Self-released, UK - 2019) - Been wanting to post this for a while, now seems like a good time, something about the guitars and the singing in this gets me all fired up
  • Nasa to open International Space Station to tourists
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Friday 7th June, 2019 #

  • I've been pretty captivated by the sets from the AVA festival 2019 the past few days - There is nothing quite like a day time rave party, there's something it does to the brain which expects these music performances to be at night time, so when it's during the day it seems really quite surreal, it's like being in the mosh pit at a punk rock gig except they've somehow managed to turn all the energy into a completely different thing, it's the shear impossibility of it that makes it possible because each guy and gal realises the impossiilty but then they also immediately realise that they are there so it must be real, which creates a wave of euphoria through the crowd and the music keeps the whole thing suspended in time, I will say though to any young readers that want to get into music start with rock and roll on the radio and work your way towards the rave parties when you are older - This Myler set stood out to me because it's relentless right from the start, there's no messing around, straight into banging techno, I've been enjoying having it playing in the background as I write code and while unit and integration tests are runnning I switch to the video, watch all the flailling arms and legs, the crowd pumping, it's a real festival of movement, I think I'm dveloping some sort of fetish for watching people move a lot, the stranger the dancing the better - all the sets from the festival are worth watching
  • The Velvet Underground - Rock And Roll (Original Version) - Verve Records (1986)
  • Woke up again this morning in the exact same position I went to sleep in, except once again shifed down by a foot with both my feet dangling off the end of the bed - the broken fridge has been replaced but the new one is too tall by about an inch and doesn't fit in the fridge space anymore so the maintenance guys will have to cut the feet of the new fridge off, probably just another one of these creepy coincidences right? I gotta say it, classic cunt universe, shrugs shoulders, such a cunt universe
  • Dr John Plays mac Renennack - The album I was listneing to just a few days ago
  • Dr John, legendary genre-bending New Orleans musician, dies at 77 - Wierd thing, after not listening to his music for quite a while I listened to one of his albums just 2 days ago when I was out to the shops - I saw him in concert at a blues festival a few years back, he had a legend sort of vibe about him, like he'd been through a long and windy life, he had a lot of stage presence but not over stated, a really great musician
  • In things that are so similar they are virtually indistinguishable news - The mysterious crystal that melts at two different temperatures
  • Stanford engineers make editing talking heads videos as easy as editing text
  • New Weird Britain - Urban Hinterlands - Part 1/4 of the Radio4 documentary about the UK experimental music scene, I've been listening to quite a lot of what could be called experimental music recently so I quite liked this
  • Delightful animation all about the clitoris - The narrator has a cool french canadian accent, the animation is cute and amusing but it's also informative
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Thursday 6th June, 2019 #

  • There’s a subreddit populated entirely by AI personifications of other subreddits - The bots are written using OpenAI, the framework backed by Elon "I like brain implants" Musk
  • Woke up this morning to discover that during the night two almost identical Tupperwares (they are actually very different when you know what to look for) had been switched - the one I left out to dry last night was now in the cupboard containing the food that the Tupperwares in the cupboard when I went to bed had - the one now sitting out to dry was still not dry even though it had been sitting there in hot weather for 8 hours, the one now in the cupboard had some small insects in it, yet the rest of the cupboard, which is full of open bags of sugar and icing somehow had no small insects anywhere
  • Donald Trump state visit - How to navigate awkward small talk
  • UK Newspaper headlines - D-Day anniversary - 'Let us never forget their sacrifice'
  • Apple will be deprecating popular scripting language runtimes such as Python, Ruby, and Perl on future versions of OSX
  • Apparently a lot of local news stories these days are written by AI -"The readers couldn’t care less who wrote it" - I don't believe that is true, I can see that it could be a useful technology to use but as a reader I would like to see these AI generated articles have a disclaimer that explains how the article was generated
  • Google's harassment and cyberbullying policy - Mostly seems like a good policy, the one thing that stands out a bit to me is the ban on calling out crisis actors, clearly it's a touchy subject but what if there are actual crisis actors operating, how would you call it out? It's not like this isn't a somewhat likely situation, the US after all does have some of the best actors on the planet, and it's a bit of a loophole isn't it - become a crisis actor and you get Google's protection
  • YouTube - No, We Won't Remove These Videos of Racist, Anti-Gay Harassment Because It's Just 'Debating'
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Tuesday 4th June, 2019 #

  • Apple breaks up iTunes, creates separate Podcasts, TV, and Music apps for macOS
  • The new Mac Pro is the shiny, expensive powerhouse that pros wanted
  • Apple announces 'Sign in with Apple' - The hide my email feature when setting up accounts is quite neat, a lot of people have been doing this for years using a secondary email for spam, but this streamlines the process
  • 41-gun salutes and a Twitter tirade - Donald Trump arrives in UK
  • The new Mac Pro looks rather sleek - 360 degree access, thermal cooling system, practical additions like the wheels, handles and ports on the top, up to 28 cores, up to 1.5TB of memory
  • Google Chrome, the perfect antitrust villain? - "there’s a non-zero chance Google may come to rue this seemly small decision as a crack that let in water in precisely the wrong place" - the article does a pretty good analysis of the antitrust issue that faces Google
  • Taiwan's digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship
  • The latest version of MacOS called Catalina will ship with zsh as the default shell rather than bash, apparently they are making the switch because of licensing issues with GPLv3 resulting in not being able to upgrade bash versions, zsh is released under MIT license - I used zsh for a while a few years back and didn't like it much, was much happier when I switched back to bash
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Monday 3rd June, 2019 #

  • A Twitter thread about every day sexism that women experience delivered via the medium of classic art
  • Donald Trump to land in UK amid rising anger over trade demands - I agree with the worryers in this case, I think a trade agreement would be a good idea, but maybe the US view a trade agreement as a way to buy parts of the UK (i.e. the NHS), which is a very different type of agreement
  • The Dark Side of Dark Mode - This article goes into rather a lot of detail about why dark mode is bad, I didn't read the whole article it's too long, but it's something I think about because I worry that looking at a bright screen for 8-15 hours per day is affecting my vision long term, if I look at a bright web browser for a while and close my eyes I can still see an outline of where the browser window was, and that probably isn't good
  • Not one single country set to achieve gender equality by 2030
  • Woke up this morning once again feeling like I had been repeatedly punched in the gut and stomach during the night, also my middle finger smaller knuckle has internal bruising, several days ago the same thing happened to my ring finger, also and this is more worrying, is that I had a strange taste and texture in my mouth, the only description that fits is "old cloth" - as you might be able to imagine I'm not particulary happy with the cunt universe at the minute - Oh yeah and also, I removed a load of ice from the freezer yesterday with a knife and this mornng there was a large patch of water around the fridge so I guess the power must have gone out during the night and most of the remaining ice in the freezer has melted - Update: the freezer continued to completely defrost, which is odd because the only way as far as I know to do that is to press the defrost button and I never pressed the defrost button
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Sunday 2nd June, 2019 #

  • What if Instagram Got Rid of Likes? - I think this is an interesting topic, personally I like not having metric on my linkblog, but the article does highlight an important consideration - "For users, numbers are power. For the platforms, so is hiding them"
  • After SpaceX Starlink Launch, a Fear of Satellites That Outnumber All Visible Stars
  • About 4bn people have a smartphone, according to this article approx 94% of humans above the age of 15 have a mobile phone
  • Apple WWDC 2019 - Mac Pro, iOS 13, Marzipan, and what else to expect - Several quite interesting things expected, the new "Marzipan" iOS/MacOS hybrid apps could be a way to compete with the internet and websites, the break up of bloated iTunes, the high end Mac Pro, I wish they would also release some decent software tools so you can see exactly which application is cunting up your kernel, the current situation where the activity montor shows the kernel running at %1500 cpu is useless, anyway will probably be worth watching
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Saturday 1st June, 2019 #

  • Woke up this morning everything normal apart from it felt like I had during the night been repeatedly punched in the gut, stomach still very sensitive to the touch, yesterday morning woke up where I had fallen asleep but moved down with legs dangling off the end of the bed, quite odd, I can't figure out how I could have gotten into this position while asleep, also tendon on right ankle was slightly sprained like it had been twisted in an odd way
  • Spotify Will Soon Let You Listen Along With Your Friends
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