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.
Article gives maybe too much credit to Snowden’s opponents, but does give a good overview of what the impacts have been.
Apparently, Brexit has gotten bad enough that mainstream newspaper columnists are invoking our Dread Lord Cthulhu.
The US government in action — this is quite possibly the most illiterate press release I’ve ever read, and it’s an official publication of the federal government.
I want this Contrapoints shirt, though.
Quinn Norton on why giving up on white privilege is terrifying to whites.
This is astonishing advice from someone I greatly expect, but I’m not sure exactly how to implement it.
Magneto did nothing wrong.
This article seems to be aimed at me: I love org-mode, but I fundamentally fail at every organizational technique I try, from GTD to Bullet Journal. A lot of that is having my personal and work org-mode trees physically separated by IT policy, but surely there’s some way I can do better.
A command-line gopher client. So far I’ve been using Lynx on GNU/Linux, and Pocket Gopher on Android to read phlogs.
I’d like to mirror my blog and this linkblog on gopher. In principle it should be easy because my site is just a directory tree of markdown files, already gopher-friendly. The only bit is autogenerating the gopher maps the way I autogenerate the html site.
I aten’t dead.
How to use microformats to tag your pronouns in your blog’s metadata
This is why my hate for JavaScript and the modern web does not extend, as some people’s does, to CSS. CSS is what lets us have reasonably good typography on the web.
How US official policy is inherently contradictory, and why no one dares say so.
I usually make a no-knead bread, but this one time I forgot to put it in the night before, and still wanted a dutch oven loaf. Mine came out kind of flat because it was 100% whole wheat, but it was still good and not crumbly.
A poem that was in a friend’s memorial service.
Violates Bettridge’s Law of Headlines. tldr: yes, there were.
Vaccinate in the preventative sense here applies more to PTSD than to depression; for depression it’s something like a monthly treatment.
“Postmodernists didn’t create the new fractured reality; they merely described it.”
It used to be even more private, but less convenient. I think the current implementation is a good balance.
A moving story about the unbearable grief of losing a child.
“An old lady’s personal anger and rants about the modern web industry.” This really captures the way I and a lot of other people feel about the web today.
How current toxic ideas about gender and sex today trace back to the Medieval invention of romance.
Because of course it did.
I’m very behind on link blogging (over a month! And the last one was very minimal!), so I’m just going to dump some things.
An intro to protecting what you need to protect.
Another case where the cruelty is the only point.
The right is currently using a model of “offense as [emotional] hurt”, while the left is using a model of “offense as harm”. But this author proposes “offense as insult”, a model based on early-Modern dueling culture as better suited to the current situation.
You can’t do a biological/chemical test for a social status.
We’re finally getting to the point where tech worker unionization has traction.
A TUI library for Rust.
A low-boilerplate web backend library for Python. It’s more minimal, like Flask, but also more opinionated, like Django. Also, async.
This would really be appealing to me if I were still doing a mobile data-only, no phone number dealio. Only thing is that my fake phone number (SIP) and my fake SMS number (JMP) would be different.
If I can motivate myself to do more blogging, I’ll need this.
An under-appreciated woman in Weird Fiction.
Some mood music
Good night, #fediverse. Good night.
The Web is still a DARPA weapon. – Giacomo Tesio – Medium
A good article on a few loosely connected points. How centralization of the web tends to promote US government/business interests, as against those of internet users and other countries. A lot of it is nothing you haven’t heard before, especially about DNS.
But the better part is the discussion of how JavaScript is fundamentally a weapon, aimed against users, because it is basically designed to execute untrusted code.
I’d like to see browser vendors “pave the cowpaths” when it comes to the actually useful things that can be done with JavaScript, and allow them to be done declaratively, without client-side scripting. I’m thinking of something similar to Intercooler.js, but implemented natively in the browser.
Links for the past few days, no unifying theme.
This is fine.
Democrats break with left on ICE | TheHill
This is expected behavior for the Democrats right now — avoid doing something that is both right and popular, because it would be disruptive. Beto O’Rourke’s position (abolish ICE through a reorganization of DHS, and moving their responsibilities elsewhere) should be the base position of Democrats, allowing progressives to stake out more radical positions.
News outlets join forces to track down children separated from their parents by the U.S. | Poynter
Haven’t seen any results from this yet. But the news organizations involved are all credible. Yes, even BuzzFeed.
Defense contractor detained migrant kids in vacant Phoenix office buildingReveal
This is a notable atrocity among many.
‘I snookered them’: Illinois Nazi candidate creates GOP dumpster fire
How to make friends and verify requests - Official Mastodon Blog
Gargamel documents how ActivityPub works in practice, which is really useful because you wouldn’t know it from the standard.
Alex Schroeder: 2018-07-05 Preventing Dog Piling
Alex Schroeder discusses the features of social media that make harassment and dog-piling easy, and suggests what changes you’d need to make in order to avoid them. What results doesn’t look very much like social networking as we know it, and doesn’t provide what most people would want.
I think the suggested system for stranger introductions is a little complex, and could violate users’ privacy expectations if they didn’t understand the system well. But something more like FOAF introductions for “public” posts could work.
The “no celebrities or news bots” is a beneficial effect.
Fiat Money, Fiat News - Epsilon Theory
The author of this article makes a useful distinction among types of “fake news”: fiat news, and counterfeit news. Counterfeit news is news that is blatantly fake — put out by clickbait sites to maximize ad impressions, or by state actors to misinform. Fiat news is news that is real, or at least, mostly real, from a certain point of view, but basically useless. The point of fiat news is neither to be accurate nor inaccurate, just to be believed, in the interest of preserving an institutional status quo. This is, of course, what the NYT, WaPo, and other companies in the business of manufacturing consent produce. Fiat news is a kind of hyperstition, since it is effectively true as long as everyone believes that everyone else believes it. And the author posits that fake news (of both kinds) drives out real news like bad money drives out good.
I’m not crazy about the currency metaphor, because while I’m still a little attached to the idea of real news, the idea of real currency is totally ridiculous, especially in the form of Goldbuggery (Rational Wiki). But it does capture something significant about two different kinds of “fake news”
Links for the last couple of days, focusing on the US police state, and companies that are complicit with it.
tldr; Microsoft is providing cloud services to ICE. They claim that this support is not going directly to supporting child detention, but services are fungible, and the ethical thing would be to refuse to accept the contract.
Microsoft needs to pick a side in the ICE debate. The world is watching
There are some tech writers speaking out about it, and there are companies refusing to provide services to companies that can be expected to contribute to the problem.
Separating immigrant families isn’t just wrong, it’s a war crime
It Takes a Village to Separate A Family - Deps
An artist wrote a Python script to scrape LinkedIn (no link because they are a terrible company) for employees of ICE and publish their information.
antiboredom/ice-linkedin: Dataset of LinkedIn members who work for ICE
This information was immediately deleted by GitHub, of course.
GitHub, Medium, and Twitter take down database of ICE employee LinkedIn accounts - The Verge
However, there are still forks of it available on GitHub that didn’t get removed, and there is also a backup on archive.org.
github.com-antiboredom-ice-linkedin_-_2018-06-19_03-03-37 …
A Mastodon user shares with us a detailed thread on what US riot police are likely to be using against you.
pɹıq ɥsɐɹʇ ǝɥʇ: "USpol, activism, police violence" - Mastodon
Here are a couple of bills that have been entered into the US Congress to restrict the actions of ICE.
The Keep Families Together Act was introduced in the Senate by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to end the practice of separating children from their parents. It really doesn’t otherwise stop ICE abuse, but any little bit helps. You can call your senator about this, especially if they are on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is where the bill is currently residing.
Keep Families Together Act (S. 3036) - GovTrack.us
The DONE Act was introduced in the House by Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) to prohibit the expansion of immigration detention facilities and to improve their oversight. You can call your US representative about this bill.
DONE Act (H.R. 5820) - GovTrack.us
Neither bill goes far enough, and neither is likely to pass the current Congress, but we must imagine Sisyphus to be happy.
Links for the last couple of days. Things on clean energy, cults, and horrible, horrible Christmas music.
I’ve certainly passed this on I-77 near I-26. It’s about the size of a smallish cornfield — too big to be a garden, but not really a commercial field, either. I don’t know how much this project is a respectable investment into sustainable energy, and how much is greenwashing. Bear in mind this is the same company that just raised rates to build a nuclear plant that, despite being massively over-budget, will never be completed.
I know, banning cars isn’t feasible for the US outside of bigger cities, and it also has potentially ableist implications. But seriously, we should still ban cars.
And this is why we’re doomed, honestly. More energy than is used by the entire country of Ireland is currently being used to calculate collectible numbers in the hope that they will be valuable (currently they are, but don’t expect to be able to cash out). And the energy used is increasing exponentially. This is basically how we end up with the Vile Offspring in Charlie Stross’s Accelerando.
There’s basically no remaining connection between Republican policy and consensus reality.
This guy is more or less a baseline cult leader, in terms of what he teaches, and the way he takes advantage of his followers. What’s different, at least according to this article, is that he uses the same tactics for self-promotion as SV startups. And maybe A-B tests stuff on his core followers before rolling it out to the rest? But anyway, the main take-home is that supposed sophisticates are running the same broken wetware as backwoods snake handlers.
An agnostic Buddhist takes a look at the abusive dynamics enabled by the traditional teachings of Tibetan Buddhism.
Redneck Revolt and the John Brown Gun Club are doing good work.
This is a Windows-compatible operating system, built mostly from the ground up (not on Linux). I’ve got like two Windows programs that I want to be able to run occasionally (I need Adobe Digital Editions to read library books (Thanks, Obama)). I’m going to see if I can install this in a VM and run them there.
A like/fav is a minimal response to a social media post or comment. It says “I’ve seen this, but I don’t feel the need to reply”. And clearly you can do this in email, too.
The funniest part to me is that this is very similar to how Like/Dislike/Seen works in the ActivityPub distributed social media standard. A Like is another message sent to the server just like a reply.
“Little Drummer Boy” is my least favorite piece of Christmas music (followed closely by “Do You See What I See”, and distantly by “Mary, Did You Know”). And someone has chosen, for some reason, to make a 45-minute version of it. 😱
Here’s another long one, since I’ve been too busy/tired to collect my links for a few days. DRM, social media, indieweb, and, as usual, tons of bad news.
Sorry about that.
The story of how underspecified proprietary DRM became a W3C standard, and what the consequences are. The canary in the title is the “canary in the coalmine”: DRM at the W3C is just one example of how market concentration is killing the open web.
Because the big web silos like Reddit and YouTube are starting to recognize the consequences of allowing hate speech on their platforms, the far right is starting to get banned from them. They’ve been starting their own platforms, but they can’t even sustain interest in them among themselves.
POSSE is Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. This article suggests a POSSE approach to using Medium. Effectively, your blog is the origin site for your articles, while Medium acts as a CDN to defray your bandwidth costs.
A history and explanation of a number of biological topics, but mostly how the idea of sex chromosomes came to be, and why and how it is oversimplified. If you end up having to deal with someone who thinks karyotype = sex determination, this is a good article to send them.
It doesn’t really matter whether Google or Facebook “is” a technical platform or a media company, what matters is the results we want to see from regulation.
I thankfully don’t come any closer to the SV startup/VC world than reading HN, but from what I can tell, this is extremely accurate.
Most people’s taxes are going to go up, by a lot, under the Republican tax plan. What remains to be seen is, if, next year, people actually connect their big tax bill to their Republican legislators.
An insightful article by JP (Mastodon).
A look at untrustworthy police testimony in the J20 case.
This one is pretty dark, sorry. Turn back if you need to protect yourself, I’ll understand. The basic theme: our institutions are not capable of dealing with the threats we are faced with today, and we don’t have any other solutions waiting in the wings. Let’s get started.
The author makes a few points about why America is /choosing not to fight/ the rise of fascism in America.
And that’s that, really.
Our institutions aren’t going to do anything to save us from climate change, either, because their incentive structures strongly favor the status quo.
The most we can hope for from current mainstream leadership is for people to look like they’re doing the right thing, or to do some of the right things, but not enough of them to upset the money-laden apple cart that gets them elected, or to turn the mainstream press so against them that they get the “Sanders-Kucinich treatment.” Recall that even Al Gore got the Sanders-Kucinich treatment from the press, one of the under-mentioned factors in his loss to Bush.
The author’s main argument is that acts of sabotage are justified under the “necessity defense” — as when someone is arrested for breaking and entering after they hear a baby crying in a burning building.
The author is hopeful that we can mitigate the worst consequences of climate change this way (i.e., hold ocean level rises to 6 feet this century rather than 11). I hope so, too, but I’m not wielding my Blue Lantern ring today, either.
How accepting VC money to grow turned a socially-responsible B-corp into another Silicon Valley hellhole. The numbers shareholders care about are up, but internally, it’s in a tailspin.
One bit of good news. The main block to a decentralized YouTube alternative is the possibility that a given video might go viral and overwhelm the server that it’s hosted on, and impose unbearable costs on the site’s operator. Using a P2P protocol (bittorrent, in this case) in the browser to stream videos means that site operators are protected. And because of federation, no single site owner has to take responsibility for indexing or storing all of the media, either. As a side bonus, you can embed PeerTube videos directly into your Mastodon timeline.
Here’s a video on how the federation works.
That’s it for tonight. There were other things I read today, but I’ve either already discussed them on Mastodon, I’m saving them to write about at more length, or I just don’t have anything to say about them at all. Good night, and stay safe out there.
There’s a big link roundup today.
Nazis in the New York Times, Net Neutrality, global warming killing our shrimp, snaketits, bitcoin, and more.
I’m not going to link to that fishwrap’s article; a lot of the things I link to will have a link to it. I’m interested in rounding up reactions to it.
A couple from the HuffPo:
New York Times Defends Its Inflammatory Nazi Sympathizer Profile | HuffPost
NYT Accused Of Normalizing White Nationalism In ‘Nazi Sympathizer’ Profile | HuffPost
And from birbsite:
And the Daily Banter:
The New York Times can go F*ck Itself With its “Cute and Cuddly Nazi” Profile - The Daily Banter
And a bit of contrast: how an organization with a bit of journalistic integrity does it:
How Unicorn Riot covers the alt-right without giving them a platform - Columbia Journalism Review
We’re pretty much all going to have to be doing this, within the next few years, as the consequences of abandoning Net Neutrality start trickling down.
Speaking of which…
It is amazing that RationalWiki can so often be on-point even though the Internet skeptic and rationalism communities are so terrible. This roundup is informative and has all the signature wit of the site it’s published on.
It seems to be because of warmer fall waters than usual. The spring and summer harvests were fine, though?
A right-wing gotcha organization tries to gotcha the Washington Post (in a pretty stupid and transparent way), gets caught. Not that that will do anything to stop them from trying again and again.
This isn’t exactly a source of energy so much as a way to collect ambient energy that would otherwise be lost. And maybe it’s only suitable for relatively low-drain applications? It’s hard to tell. But it’s neat.
This was described as “Extremely Mastodon Content”, but not once was the phrase “snake tits” used. But seriously, a very funny look at femme representation in fantasy gaming. Outrageous examples of MTG cards.
Not just Net Neutrality, but also the advertising economy, aka “weaponized AI propaganda”.
Obviously, I’m heavily influenced by Iain M. Banks’ vision that “the future is – in Earth terms – a bright, bright red”.
An argument that the fear of an AI Singularity is misplaced, because it depends both on a misunderstanding of what actually-existing intelligence is.
A look at the horror of our actual society, by way of a TV dystopia that we actually put to shame.
Scottish science-fiction author Charles Stross makes me hate bitcoin more than I did before, something that I would previously have considered impossible.
Children take in what we teach them, perhaps too well. Why then, do adults get so frightened of what children learn?
This is terrible, but you can’t look away.
The rich aren’t like us.