Facebook imploding
What Happens When Facebook Goes the Way of Myspace? - The New York Times
Even after no one is really using Facebook, everyone’s residual data will still be valuable (and dangerous).
As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants - The New York Times
Summary: Facebook gave complete access to its customer data, including “private” messages, and including not only reading them, but writing or deleting them, to its “partners”, including Apple, Spotify, Yahoo, Microsoft, and several others.
I feel like the private message issue may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for normal people.
Two years after #Pizzagate showed the dangers of hateful conspiracies, they’re still rampant on YouTube - The Washington Post
Bonus: YouTube is still a toxic hellworld.
Browser diversity
Adactio: Journal—Browsers
Why you absolutely must use Firefox.
The Ecological Impact of Browser Diversity | CSS-Tricks
This one is from before we lost EdgeHTML as an independent browser engine, but talks about why it’s important.
Cultural notes
There’s No Such Thing as a Free Watch | Topic
A nicely illustrated essay on how social media is exploited to sell cheap Chinese knock-off watches as lifestyle brands.
Image Synthesis from Yahoo’s open_nsfw
Note: images are sort-of NSFW. This article looks at neural networks that have been trained to recognize pornography, and then what you get if you generate images that are maximally or minimally pornographic. The maximally pornographic ones are still abstract — no people and, really, few naturalistic recognizable body parts, but they still manage to be both perverse and disturbing. The minimally pornographic ones are semi-abstract landscapes.
Superman and the Jumper - Imgur
A few pages of Superman showing that it’s something other than his powers that make him the world’s greatest superhero.
And finally some politics
Pamela Anderson on Europe’s Turmoil
Comrade Pamela, go on Chapo!
Why I’m a climate change denier – The Rational Radical – Medium
Spoiler: the author is a denier in the sense of psychological denial, rather than denying the facts of pending ecological collapse. The facts are too horrible to face, so on a day to day basis, we don’t face them.