This is a daily (?) list of links I found worthwhile. Some of them are news, some are timely information, and some are things I should have known about a long time ago, but only now had pointed out to me.
This is a daily (?) list of links I found worthwhile. Some of them are news, some are timely information, and some are things I should have known about a long time ago, but only now had pointed out to me.
Strap in, it’s a little depressing this time.
Mostly the answer is a good thing — more people are biking and walking. Unfortunately, that brings more people into danger, given that our cities are designed for cars, and not for people.
The article overstates it a little bit. It’s chloramines, caused by reaction of chlorine with proteins that causes red eyes, and the smell of the pool. But sweat would also be enough to create chloramines, it’s not all pee.
This is a really good article about how perfectionism is implicated in depression and suicide. Also touches on social media, and how it can cover up depression while also making it worse for some people.
A personal, but also very generic and relatable, account of falling in and out of love with the Internet.
Similar theme, very good writing; more focused on the Extremely Online, and especially on Twitter, rather than on the changes in Internet culture over time.
A necessary antidote to the cult of forced civility. Smarm is the form of civility without its substance. A defense of snark.
Dianne Feinstein treats a group of children who have come to beg her to let them grow up in a non-apocalyptic world as if they were some flesh golem made from pieces of lobbyists and Russian spambots. Strike that; she’d be friendlier to the lobbyists.
This was a horror to read. You need to be in a resilient mental space before you read it, but you need to make time to read it when you’re in that space. I don’t think I’ve read any story that sums up the times we’re living in as well as this one. The workplace surveillance and abuse; the desperation, quiet and otherwise; the progressive face that corporate HR puts on while it basically tortures people for the sake of appearances and a goal they can never possibly fulfill.
tldr; providing IT and cloud services to coal and oil companies enables them to extract fossil fuels more efficiently, effectively moving carbon from the ground to the atmosphere faster. This effect massively overshadows any kind of investments that Big Tech is making in clean energy or efficiency.
Oh God, never leave me voicemail. I need to set all of my voicemail messaegs to remind callers to send a text or email instead.
An amazing Catholic argument for prison abolition.
Companies that insist on surveilling their employees want to make encryption weaker for everyone. Pervasive monitoring is an attack.
A powerful piece of sequential art about fascist aesthetics in modern America.
That’s all for this edition.
Over the last five years or so, maybe a little bit more, downtown Columbia has been sprouting these student apartments everywhere there’s space for them and a lot of places there isn’t (displacing existing local businesses). One thing about them is that they all look alike – basically they’re long boxes, four or five stories tall, with various superficial architectural features that don’t really do anything to hide the fact that they’re long boxes.
This week I finally found out why this is! Apparently they are a type of building called “five over one” or “five on one” that consists of one story of poured concrete and four or five stories of “stick” (wood frame) construction, the same kind you see in single family homes. Apparently this used to violate fire codes, but in 2009 the nationwide model code updated to allow it (with increased sprinkler requirements, I think?). And it spread because it’s cheap. You don’t need as skilled labor to assemble pre-cut and pre-attached wood frames as you do to build the steel frames that used to be required.
Here are the articles I read about this in.
Teacher trainings for school shooter response are both terrifying and useless. And almost certainly profitable.
A film compiling footage of a Nazi rally in the US by the German-American Bund, before Pearl Harbor.
Why online “rationalists” are typically less rational than average.
Russiagate is brain worms for liberals who are unwilling and unable to look for domestic causes for Trump’s win. We’re entering the primary season again, and it looks like we’re going to repeat the mistakes of 2016 or worse, because Americans are incapable of learning anything.
A properly short linkblog today!
One of a couple of recent articles that talks about how web design has turned into front-end development, which has turned into JavaScript development. The conclusion is good:
Designing for the modern web in a way that pleases users with great, fast designs needn’t be this maze of impenetrable complexity. We’re making it that! It’s possible not to.
While there are certainly some projects that, if they’re going to be web apps, have to be SPAs, for the vast majority of projects, making an SPA means making life harder for yourself and going against the grain of what your project requires. Contrarian opinion: if your app does demand that it be an SPA, maybe it ought to be a native desktop app instead.
Imagine a social network that consists almost entirely of old white people who are scared of their shadows, doing nothing but calling the police on their neighbors for walking on the street. That describes Amazon’s Neighbors, it describes NextDoor, and it describes my local neighborhood’s group on Facebook. That was one of the reasons, before the latest round of privacy scandals, that I disabled my Facebook account.
This is worth a read, but the take-home point for me was that Facebook’s algorithmic approach to moderation wasn’t any better than its algorithmic approach to surfacing posts. Apparently the algorithm for presenting posts to fact-checkers kept aggressively missing the point and keeping the fact-checkers from doing anything substantial.
The collapse of insect populations is likely to lead to collapse of ecosystems and massive crop failures. Next to the collapse of ocean ecosystems, this is what I worry about more than anything.
Got behind again, and have to drop a lot of things I was going to note here. Fewer is better.
Designers and front-end developers tend to treat web rendering as a pixel-perfect graphics runtime; it’s not.
This is pretty extreme even by the standards of surveillance capitalism.
This is business as usual – the simple rule is that everything always gets worse.
Another basic CSS toolkit, focused on simple, good typography. This plus some slim wrappers around grid or flexbox are really all you need.
Good points about the shape of the industry.
Two conflicting articles that should be read together for a good view of where we stand today.
It’s primary season again, and the neoliberals are even more out in force now than last time, so this is worth bearing in mind.
The US is a single party state, but with its usual overindulgence, it has two of them.
SC makes national news for being horrible.
Basically if you have an interaction with the cops, and you are carrying cash, be prepared to lose it (especially if you are Black, naturally). I knew civil forfeiture was bad, but I had no idea it was this bad.
South Carolina makes national news again, for being at the forefront of taking regular people’s money to give to rich assholes.
Suburbanites want to destroy wetlands, teacher wants to save it, schoolboard member wants to use it as leverage in a grudge. SC local politics are amazing.
This is one of many valid takes on Blade Runner.
A review of the Queer Eye reboot as a window into the kind of helplessness and incompetence that is produced by masculinity, and the kind of changes to identity that are required to move forward. Laurie Penny is also one of the best writers working in journalism today.
Highly relatable.
Amber from Chapo Trap House explains why Bernie is the only viable candidate for 2020, even if he dies on the campaign trail and his corpse has to be operated like a Muppet.
Even among law enforcement agencies, the Border Patrol has always been notably racist.
In brief: the Green New Deal completely changes the conversation.
Liberal history treats MLK Jr’s assassination as something that happened after the success of his movement (the Voting Rights Act). But it was really at the beginning of a movement that was cut short.
Welcome the hatred of your actual enemies.
This article seems to imply that if CBT is wrong (it probably is), then traditional Freudian analysis must be right (it probably isn’t).
Enough said.
It’s certainly abnormal.
This link has already rotted between the time I saved it and the time I shared it. But basically, it points out the problem with Marie Kondo’s test for whether to keep something: your toilet plunger almost certainly does not spark joy. But you also can’t get rid of it. And really, there are a whole lot of things about adult life that are like that.
This is an amazingly tepid take, but I guess the fact that it’s not obvious to everyone means that the gendering of babies is way out of control. The answer to the question is no, of course; you’re an anarchist if you put your baby in a red onsie that says “I’m a Little Wobbly” on them.
“Poor performance can, and does, lead to exclusion…There is a growing gap between what a high-end device can handle and what a middle to low-end device can handle.”
I was amazed to learn about 18th-19th century diaries being written to be passed around to fiends and family.
This is one reason why I love Chapo Trap House and ContraPoints. They may sometimes be problematic, but in terms of both style and substance, they are exactly what is needed for deprogramming people who might be just beginning the slide towards the alt-right.
A Dreamwidth community for talking about the design of social media platforms.
A CSS stylesheet for making brutalist websites. Eventually I need to make a theme for brutaldon that uses this.
A sociologist looks at the cost you have to pay to quit Facebook and Google.
A kind of corporate puff piece on DuckDuckGo, but you should totally be using it anyway.
Most Facebook users have no idea how Facebook makes money, or what that has to do with their data.
Surprised/not surprised.
Solarpunk/lunarpunk aesthetic.
Folktronica, alternative pop, some nifty covers.
Nigerién composer Hama presents a groundbreaking album of traditional electronic desert folk songs, hovering somewhere between early 90s techno and synthwave. Nomadic herding ballads, ancient caravan songs, and ceremonial wedding chants are all re-imagined into pieces seemingly lifted from a Saharan 1980s sci-fi soundtrack or score to a Tuareg video game.
This could actually increase deaths as armed police are dispatched to “check in” on reportedly suicidal people. And that’s not counting the opportunities for algorithmic cruelty, like notifying someone’s domestic abuser that they’re suicidal.
This was the last straw for the fediverse’s jjg, who reports on the previous techcrunch post in his goodbye letter to Facebook. He points out that the AI capability is bound to be used to bring marketing to a new level.
But they’ve still got lots of ways to track you, even if you yourself aren’t on Facebook anymore. You should still quit, though.
AOC is a breath of fresh air…
But let’s not get carried away with the hero worship just yet.
It constantly amazes me how the fash have zero security culture, even compared to anarchists. I guess it comes from not having to worry about being targeted by the state.
Pleroma’s kaniini goes into some technical details on what’s wrong with ActivityPub (the protocol Mastodon, Pleroma, and others use to federate) from a security perspective.
The artifacts of internet life are personal—that is, not professionally or historically notable—and therefore worthless.
I agree that native (non-JS) lazy image loading is needed, and that service workers are a great way to stumble into the second hardest problem in computer science. The image format issue I’m less concerned with; people could do a better job optimizing their PNGs and JPGs, but the gains of webp and jpeg2000 are pretty marginal. The real problems with web performance are mostly self-owns: too much JavaScript, too much of it third-party, and just generally too heavy resources.
Medium is a lot like other silos — it makes money off of other people’s content, and generally doesn’t give anything back.
A minimalist emacs setup, sufficient to bootstrap you into setting up everything else you need.
While I’m not a Millennial (late GenX, child of earliest boomers), a lot of this resonated with me. Especially this:
That’s one of the most ineffable and frustrating expressions of burnout: It takes things that should be enjoyable and flattens them into a list of tasks, intermingled with other obligations that should either be easily or dutifully completed. The end result is that everything, from wedding celebrations to registering to vote, becomes tinged with resentment and anxiety and avoidance.
Good night, internet. Good night.
I’ve started to use this, to go along with my resolution to start using calendars more, and to-do lists less.
There were some useful hints in here for me. I tend not to use multiple-cursor-mode, because I have trouble remembering how it selects things, and it’s easier for me to use iedit-mode or just macros to do multiple similar edits.
This is fairly concerning. I no longer have a Facebook account, but while I prefer to use Free Software apps from F-Droid as much as I can, I don’t have a Google-free phone, and I use a few non-free apps. I find it concerning that they may be providing information to Facebook. I do use Blokada, which should block most of that kind of traffic, and you probably should, too.
Lots of interesting stuff in this issue. If you want to run a modern XMPP (Jabber) server, check out my article on Setting Up Prosody for Conversations.
In Columbia, people mostly only use the bus if they have to, and that is mainly poor people, and especially poor Black people. The CMRTA seems to be mostly interested in trying to get more affluent white people to ride by making the bus more “fun”. But I have to say that I stopped riding the bus when they eliminated stops near my house, and made the routes less frequent. Reversing those two things would do a lot more to get me back on the bus than WiFi and chargers.
I’m not super-supportive of the #Resistance, especially the neoliberal wing like Pelosi. But the article does mention Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is the real deal. And it would be wrong to underestimate the role of fashion in political messaging.
An article that does a good job of explaining to economic liberals (i.e., conservatives and centrists, in US terms) why they would be better off under social democracy, and why they should support it. I think we need actual socialism, not just social democracy, but I do think that this article is tactically well-aimed.
JMF, one of the developers on Lollipop Cloud and an admin on one of the Mastodon instances I use, is also linkblogging. Go check her linkblog out if you like this one!
Art Nouveau coloring pages under Creative Commons licenses. That’s pretty Solarpunk.
Interestingly, it seems to be mainly pacifists and environmentalists rehabilitating these structures.
I’ve enjoyed several artists from this label… which suggests I might want to listen to some of the others.
Thinking about the link on org-mode use I posted a little while ago that suggested giving every TODO headline a SCHEDULED property.
Gets at one of the reasons that ActivityPub is problematic — the LinkedData aspect is useful for Big Social (advertising targeting, business intelligence), but not for the actual use of sharing that we want to enable. This is one of several things that the fediverse inherits from corporate social media without really intending to (I think/hope).
In case you need a Vox explainer on Gritty. I’m mainly posting it because of the ascending Muppet meme.
This Jacobin article addresses bourgeois liberal anti-natalism. But it doesn’t really assuage my fear that my children are going to grow up in a hellscape that I feel guilty for bringing them into.
RSS is still extremely useful, and most sites still have it because it’s so simple to implement that it basically costs nothing relative to the rest of the CMS, blogging software, or static site generator. One thought I had while reading this was, “Goddamn, the Semantic Web people really do destroy everything they touch.”
Don’t design your software to enable privacy violations, or indiscriminate censorship.
In time for New Year’s.
Apparently, more than half of internet traffic is advertising-related scams (fake impressions, fake video views) of some kind. And that’s not counting the spam.
Merry Christmas Edition
There’s a pretty wide potential space, both hardware and software, for what a personal communicator could look like.
John Ohno (Modernist Microfiche Minotaur on the fediverse) writes (on Medium, unfortunately) an excellent article on saving the gift economy of Free Software from the way Big Software builds an industry on Open Source.
The kicker:
Software intended for businesses has a need that software intended for individuals does not: scalability. Software intended for individuals can be unstandardized, ad-hoc, quirky, and personal. ‘Enterprise’ software must pretend to scale (even if it cannot), & the centralization necessary for any business to make a profit increases the load on the software that inhabits that bottleneck.
For twenty years, we’ve been making corporations rich by buying into standardization and scale — making it feasible for them to funnel us into silos. We can stop this process, and perhaps even reverse it, by refusing to make un-frivolous software. Personal software should be personal: it should not scale or conform; it should chafe at strictures the same way you do, and burst out of any box that dare enclose it.
Using this (and variable-pitch-mode) for linkblogging right now.
This is what I worry about most when thinking about climate change — ecosystem collapse from the bottom. That and permafrost methane release leading to a Venus-like environment.
IMO the only problem with this is that personal websites are still a bit too hard for everyone to be able to do this. I’d like to see a secure, lightweight appliance running on free software and open hardware make this practical.
This is probably the best article I’ve read recently about Facebook, and I’ve read a lot. Some really great quotes.
What’s on your mind? I can tell you only what’s on mine. What’s on my mind is that I miss the human internet with an intensity that borders on homesickness. […]
The internet of 1995 and 1999 and 2001 and even 2007 was a backwater by today’s standards, but to me, it was the most wonderful thing. It was strange and silly and experimental and constantly surprising, and it made you feel good about other people, because online, away from corporate media and every channel of established culture, other people turned out to be constantly surprising too. They translated Anglo-Saxon poetry and posted photographs of Victorian ghosts and told you, to your eternal benefit, about what it was like to be someone other than yourself (in my case, to be a woman, to be a person of color). They wrote fascinating, charismatic diaries. And all of this, this faster, weirder, more forgiving universe, was right there, at your fingertips, for free. This sounds like nostalgia, but it was how I really felt at the time. We were making this thing together.
The fact that I cannot remember the last time the internet made me feel, on balance, less anxious and better about other people tells you something about how much has changed online since 1999, 2001, and even 2007.
No one likes a lying asshole.
Haven’t played it, but it sounds interesting.
The Star Wars galaxy really does kind of suck.
Even after no one is really using Facebook, everyone’s residual data will still be valuable (and dangerous).
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.
Bonus: YouTube is still a toxic hellworld.
Why you absolutely must use Firefox.
This one is from before we lost EdgeHTML as an independent browser engine, but talks about why it’s important.
A nicely illustrated essay on how social media is exploited to sell cheap Chinese knock-off watches as lifestyle brands.
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.
A few pages of Superman showing that it’s something other than his powers that make him the world’s greatest superhero.
Comrade Pamela, go on Chapo!
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.