- Jun 2024
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www.nortonsimon.org www.nortonsimon.org
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It was bas relief. It wasn't completely in the round, but you could feel the scratchiness of the clothing. You could feel the roundness of the pearls. And so, in that regard, it was a lifelike three-dimensional model of a two-dimensional representation. Is this the way to go? Because, we could do 3D prints of everything in the collection.
tech for tech's sake; need for context
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forum.obsidian.md forum.obsidian.md
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if [[ -d ~/Library/Application\ Support/obsidian/Cache/Cache_Data ]] ; then rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/obsidian/Cache/Cache_Data/* else echo "Something odd has happened" fi
This fixed my issue with
Loading Cache...
slowness on obsidian startup on macOS Sonoma. Many thanks to OP!
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- Apr 2024
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www.freitag.de www.freitag.de
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www.linkedin.com www.linkedin.com
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This is not a discrete project but an ongoing process and should always be competing for focus in strategic decision making.
Absolutely agreed. One limitation of the Iron Triangle concept is that it often seems to be used to make decisions based on a snapshot in time (i.e. which two are we choosing now), when some choices have longer half-lives than others.
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- Feb 2024
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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Résumé de la vidéo [00:00:00][^1^][1] - [00:48:00][^2^][2] :
Cette vidéo est une conférence sur les low-tech, c'est-à-dire les technologies utiles, durables et accessibles, comme alternative à notre système de production et de consommation actuel. Elle présente les principes, les exemples et les enjeux des low-tech, ainsi que les recherches et les expérimentations menées par le Low-tech Lab et le Centre de sociologie de l'innovation.
Points forts : + [00:00:00][^3^][3] Introduction du cycle "Agir en temps de crise" * Présentation des partenaires et du thème * Présentation des intervenants Quentin Mateus et Morgan Meyer + [00:02:31][^4^][4] Définition et exemples de low-tech * Trois piliers : utile, durable, accessible * Exemples : toilettes sèches, capteur air chaud, four solaire, etc. * Changement de rapport à la technologie et aux besoins + [00:10:46][^5^][5] Diffusion et capitalisation des savoirs low-tech * Encyclopédie participative en ligne avec des tutoriels open source * Réseau de communautés locales qui se forment et s'entraident * Enquêtes auprès d'acteurs professionnels qui utilisent ou proposent des low-tech + [00:18:04][^6^][6] Recherches et analyses sociologiques sur les low-tech * Intérêt croissant des chercheurs et des institutions pour le sujet * Exemples de travaux sur l'ergonomie, l'agriculture paysanne, la boulangerie au four solaire, etc. * Réflexion sur l'innovation, la technologie, la transition et la société + [00:36:46][^7^][7] Questions du public et conclusion * Réponses sur les jeunes générations, le niveau européen, le rôle de l'industrie, etc. * Perspectives d'avenir et de développement des low-tech * Remerciements et annonce de la prochaine séance
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radiant.earth radiant.earth
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Brand vehemently disagrees with me, but I’d say that, more recently, the computer has also failed as a source of true community. Social media seems to immiserate people as much as it bonds them. And so there’s a need for future Brands, young cultural craftsmen who identify those who are building the future, synthesizing their work into a common ethos and bringing them together in a way that satisfies the eternal desire for community and wholeness.
At best a technology enables something, it does not provide it.
Community and connection are deep, sacred values that technology can assist -- or inhibit -- but they come from other sources and must be cultivated by other means.
Another primacy of being point if you like.
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- Jan 2024
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Local file Local file
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Tech debt is frequently experienced by developers notonly as a difficult source of friction in their day-to-day technical decision-making, but also as a source of ambiguityabout what types of engineering work their organizations value (Besker et al., 2020; Lee et al., 2023).
Interesting that this is considered a source of ambiguity. In my experience tech debt feels more like an expression of the type of work organizations value, reducing ambiguity by making concrete how little this kind of work is valued.
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www.notechmagazine.com www.notechmagazine.com
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for - heating rooms with steam - hvac low tech - home improvement - steam heating
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- Dec 2023
- Nov 2023
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docs.cypress.io docs.cypress.io
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Logging In
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- Oct 2023
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beta.next.ink beta.next.inkNext1
Tags
Annotators
URL
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- Sep 2023
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www.cell.com www.cell.com
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- for: desalination
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www.sciencedirect.com www.sciencedirect.com
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- for: futures - food production, futures - water production, desalination, ocean solar farm, floating solar farm, floating city
- title: An interfacial solar evaporation enabled autonomous double-layered vertical floating solar sea farm
- author: Pan Wu, Xuan We, Huimin Yu, Jingyuan Zhao, Yida Wang, Kewu Pi, Gary Owens, Haolan Xu
- date: Oct. 1, 2023
- source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1385894723041839?via%3Dihub#f0005
- comment
- Since this simple design integrates fresh water and food production, it can be integrated as a module for a floating city.
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www.techlearning.com www.techlearning.com
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QR Codes can be a great way for teachers to distribute class material. Here are free sites you can use to generate QR codes
Free QR code sites
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thescimus.com thescimus.com
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There are many reasons why you might want to migrate from one stack to another. Maybe you’re looking for a more robust solution, or perhaps you’re trying to simplify your development process. Whatever the reason, it’s important to know that it is possible to migrate from one stack to another.
Migration between tech stacks can be driven by various motivations, including the need for enhanced capabilities or a desire for a more streamlined development workflow.
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discussions.apple.com discussions.apple.com
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The iCloud era starting in 2012 finally ushered in free email addresses and free operating system updates. That's when the business model of large tech companies turned more into user accumulation wars to see who can attract the most subscribers and retain them in their ecosystem of products.
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- Aug 2023
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www.pewresearch.org www.pewresearch.org
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We are wasting valuable time for humankind when we focus on technology and platforms, or even in privacy and control over data, and not on conduct, a whole chain of conduct from the active subject of a possible manipulation to the harms suffered by others and society as a consequence of manipulation and other abuses. It’s not that tech is not important; it is that we overlook what goes on around it.
- for: quote, quote - Alejandro Pisanty, quote -human conduct vs tech, Alejandro Pisanty
- quote
- We are wasting valuable time for humankind when we focus on
- technology and platforms,
- or even in privacy and control over data,
- and not on conduct
- A whole chain of conduct
- from the active subject of a possible manipulation
- to the harms suffered by others and society
- occur as a consequence of manipulation and other abuses.
- It’s not that tech is not important; it is that we overlook what goes on around it.”
- We are wasting valuable time for humankind when we focus on
- author: Alejandro Pisanty
- professor at the National University of Mexico
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hackernoon.com hackernoon.com
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Early in 2013, Ronald Robertson, now a doctoral candidate at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, and I discovered that Google isn’t just spying on us; it also has the power to exert an enormous impact on our opinions, purchases and votes.
- for: big tech - bias, big tech - manipulation, big tech - mind control, big tech - influence
- paraphrase
- Early in 2013, Ronald Robertson,
- now a doctoral candidate at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University in Boston,
- and I discovered that Google isn’t just spying on us;
- it also has the power to exert an enormous impact on our opinions, purchases and votes.
- Early in 2013, Ronald Robertson,
-
he Search Suggestion Effect (SSE), the Answer Bot Effect (ABE), the Targeted Messaging Effect (TME), and the Opinion Matching Effect (OME), among others. Effects like these might now be impacting the opinions, beliefs, attitudes, decisions, purchases and voting preferences of more than two billion people every day.
- for: search engine bias, google privacy, orwellian, privacy protection, mind control, google bias
- title: Taming Big Tech: The Case for Monitoring
- date: May 14th 2018
-
author: Robert Epstein
-
quote
- paraphrase:
- types of search engine bias
- the Search Suggestion Effect (SSE),
- the Answer Bot Effect (ABE),
- the Targeted Messaging Effect (TME), and
- the Opinion Matching Effect (OME), among others. -
- Effects like these might now be impacting the
- opinions,
- beliefs,
- attitudes,
- decisions,
- purchases and
- voting preferences
- of more than two billion people every day.
- types of search engine bias
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www.businessinsider.com www.businessinsider.com
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Even director Christopher Nolan is warning that AI could be reaching its "Oppenheimer moment," Insider previously reported — in other words, researchers are questioning their responsibility for developing technology that might have unintended consequences.
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www.sciencedirect.com www.sciencedirect.com
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Reviewing wood-based solar-driven interfacial evaporators for desalination
- for: low-tech water purification, wood-based water purification, wood-based water desalination, low-tech water desalination
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pubs.acs.org pubs.acs.org
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Wood-Based Mesoporous Filter Decorated with Silver Nanoparticles for Water Purification
- for: low tech water purification, wood-based water purification, water purification
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- Jul 2023
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justwriteclick.com justwriteclick.com
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the best way to increase the understandability of the CRUFT rating for documentation would be to create a linear calculation for it
There are two versions of the calculations. The first formula is logarithmic which means a resulting score tends to increase significantly with small changes in the values of the formula components. The second one is made more user-friendly and forms a linear curve that distributes the results harmoniously.
I assessed a couple of tickets I created (90%, 50%; 80%; 90%; 90%) by these formulas. One showed 71% of cruftiness, while the other indicated 20%. I guess you could easily understand what formula I favor more. But jokes aside, I indeed think that the second formula is just more handy in understanding how quickly you’d better improve your docs.
Despite the fact that I do not think that this score should be mandatory, there is still a sense of its existence. Once measuring BA’s impact on the product is a separate topic for discussion, evaluating the artifacts prepared by BA can be a useful activity bringing us some valuable insights about how BA distributes their efforts between different activities, including documentation.
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www.drdobbs.com www.drdobbs.com
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how "crufty" a document actually is
Hi! :wave: Have you ever wondered if your documentation published in Wiki attracts as much attention from readers as you think it deserves or if it is as right as your team needs? I have, and so do 50 more BAs that took part in Steve Adolph’s BBC Workshop on May 8th, 2023.
If you are with us, then let’s observe how crufted our documentation is. Huh, now you are wondering what “crufted” means, aren’t you? (Or is it just me discovering this technique recently?) Cruft is a slang word for badly designed, unnecessarily complicated, or unwanted code or software. And already back in 2007, the approach to assess cruftiness of documentation appeared.
CRUFT criteria are kinda subjective but has it ever bothered anyone when estimating tickets in story points?
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steveadolph.com steveadolph.com
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the team can see all of the work associated with deciding precisely what to build, not just the coding work
Let's see what the Rock Crusher approach is.
Imagine business ideas as rocks, backlog as a stone storage container, and code-writing as a stone processing container. Rocks are mixed in sizes, different in materials, and fall from outside into the storage container unpredictably. The stones are selected from the storage by PO, and BA reshapes them into smaller-sized stones and instructs Developers how to adjust their code-writing stone-processing containers to start dealing with the material of the rocks and their size. When the next rock is selected by PO, BA splits it into a new number of pieces, and Devs re-adjust their processing containers to the new materials and sizes. And all this continues to happen with the pressure on the team to be consistent in delivery speed with unpredictable pieces of rocks.
The essence of the Rock crusher approach is in displacing the team’s focus. It should no longer be on how well the stone processing container is adjusted and how quickly the rock pieces are processed. Instead, the most attention should be paid to the pre-processing stage - to what is sent to the stone processing. These rocks-ideas should be more carefully selected, better prepared, split, groomed, combined, and assessed separately and in combination with others. That work even sounds huge and should be a team challenge and objective, there the team’s efforts should be put in.
Analysis of an idea - not development - is a focus and priority for all the team!
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processes evolve
Besides the fact that this article describes indeed an interesting practice of hiring process improvement, I also see it as a great example of how to formalize the feeling of needed changes for any process, functionality, or even Objective from the OKRs list.
That's how I see the steps:
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formulate the problem. It should not be the final, well-stated problem, just write down your concern with some background info;
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create a Request-for-comments doc to collect suggestions from various stakeholders about how to solve your concern;
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hold some sessions to review the comments. At this moment, it's highly possible that your understanding of the problem will expand, and suggested ideas will transform into new ones. It's time to define your strategy for problem resolution;
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for each group of ideas, define metrics to measure the progress. Select the north star metric and its value;
- experiment!
(1) Select stakeholders that are the most interested in the change and do not afraid of being early adapters; (2) hold impact mapping sessions and bet on some improvements to try them in the first place. Define the fundamental part of your changes; (3) validate the progress by the metrics regularly; (4) create a pipeline to visualize your progress;
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analyze the results of the experiment. Adjust the changes made before if needed.
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In case of positive results, spare the time for less significant changes and continue to track the progress.
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- Jun 2023
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learn-us-east-1-prod-fleet01-xythos.content.blackboardcdn.com learn-us-east-1-prod-fleet01-xythos.content.blackboardcdn.com
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so far as generalaccuracy of content is concerned, Wikipedia is comparable to conventionally compiledencyclopedias, including Britannica.
This information definitely changed my opinions and views of Wikipedia. I feel like all throughout high school I was taught that Wikipedia was not a scholarly source so I always avoided looking on there because I didn't think it was accurate but reading the results of this study and the article attached about this study has changed my views of Wikipedia.
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不支持 N 卡也代表着苹果完全放弃了现在最热门的以 CUDA 为核心的几大 AI 项目,包括 novelAI(绘图)miniGPT(微型对话语言模型)Deepfacelab(换脸)Deepfacelive(实时换脸)So-VITS-SVC(语音模拟)等等。即便支持也是效率极为低下(包括新版的 Adobe Photoshop 都是以 CUDA 为核心的)。苹果对此做出的对策是给了一个大规模的 32 核 NPU,但是苹果的 NPU 已经推出了这么多年了,至今针对 NPU 做兼容的 AI 项目一只手都数的过来,看样子压根就没人打算带苹果玩。
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- May 2023
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portal.mozz.us portal.mozz.us
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GEMINI PORTAL
Now we can connect gemini with hypothesis. Unlimited possibilities!
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URL
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- Apr 2023
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sotonye.substack.com sotonye.substack.com
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the entire premise of sci-fi is that a new scientific invention has changed the world, though we only seem to fully understand that in the context of a movie (where the changes are often for the worse and happen in fast-forward montages), but not in the context of the world today (where the changes are often for the better and happen one day at a time).
Why do people grasp the impact technology has on society through the art of storytelling, through media? Even then, people seem to only think of it for a brief moment, unable to adapt their thinking and behavioral patterns amidst life transforming technological breakthroughs that resemble or hint to what the media showed them. People aren't quick to incorporate god-like technologies into their lives in order to improve them, let alone do proper research to be informed and have open dialogues about whether we are responsibly advancing and integrating technologies to our daily lives (TO THE CHILDREN) which are increasingly becoming more digitally dominant.
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the private sector has made university-level learning accessible and free, employs over 70% of all Americans, and inches nearer every year to making death optional
Is the private sector, aka Big Tech, more powerful and capable the government itself?
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mp.weixin.qq.com mp.weixin.qq.com
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美团联合创始人王慧文曾在 2018 年美团无人配送开放平台亮相的发布会上谈到,他和王兴大学学的是电子工程,最初创业时本来想做硬件,因为「学习太差,搞不定」。王兴觉得互联网比较简单,就转型做了互联网。之后很多年想拉别的同学加入时,最大的障碍就是公司没有科技含量。「这在我的内心里一直是个结。」
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9to5mac.com 9to5mac.com
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Seeing how powerful AI can be for cracking passwords is a good reminder to not only make sure you‘re using strong passwords but also check:↳ You‘re using 2FA/MFA (non-SMS-based whenever possible) You‘re not re-using passwords across accounts Use auto-generated passwords when possible Update passwords regularly, especially for sensitive accounts Refrain from using public WiFi, especially for banking and similar accounts
看到人工智能在破解密码方面有多么强大,这很好地提醒了我们,不仅要确保你在使用强密码,还要检查:
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你正在使用 2FA/MFA(尽可能不使用基于短信的)。
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你没有在不同的账户间重复使用密码
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尽可能使用自动生成的密码
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定期更新密码,特别是敏感账户的密码
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避免使用公共WiFi,尤其是银行和类似账户
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Now Home Security Heroes has published a study showing how scary powerful the latest generative AI is at cracking passwords. The company used the new password cracker PassGAN (password generative adversarial network) to process a list of over 15,000,000 credentials from the Rockyou dataset and the results were wild. 51% of all common passwords were cracked in less than one minute, 65% in less than an hour, 71% in less than a day, and 81% in less than a month.
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keylol.com keylol.com
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基座 jsaux 起步,或者官方,不要杂牌,边玩边充可能烧电池 ic tf 卡闪迪红金三星蓝卡都行 ar 膜很必要,否则照镜子 其他配件感觉有用的: 摇杆帽可以 skull&co 或 jsaux 便携包可以考虑 tomtoc
Steam Deck 配件的有用建议。
3 月 8 日在 PCGamesN 的 文章 里了解过 JSAUX。
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- Mar 2023
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open.ncl.ac.uk open.ncl.ac.uk
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Via Stephen Downes https://www.downes.ca/post/75035
openvraag is er een link met [[Monstertheorie 20030725114320]] ook uit #2003/
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Another way to widen the pool of stakeholders is for government regulators to get into the game, indirectly representing the will of a larger electorate through their interventions.
This is certainly "a way", but history has shown, particularly in the United States, that government regulation is unlikely to get involved at all until it's far too late, if at all. Typically they're only regulating not only after maturity, but only when massive failure may cause issues for the wealthy and then the "regulation" is to bail them out.
Suggesting this here is so pie-in-the sky that it only creates a false hope (hope washing?) for the powerless. Is this sort of hope washing a recurring part of
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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But as tech companies have turned to mass layoffs in recent months, the big bets have increasingly looked like bad bets for
Say sometihng.
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- Feb 2023
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stylo.ecrituresnumeriques.ca stylo.ecrituresnumeriques.ca
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Stylo
D'autres outıls ?
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It is not necessarily bad for technology companies to take a leaf from sci-fi, but if you really have to, at least try picking the utopian stuff, like Amazon’s Echo, blatantly modeled after Star Trek’s chirpy talking computer, over the unsettling dog-eat-dog hellscape of Snow Crash.
Is the inability to parse satire related to the inability to understand something is a dystopia? I suppose dystopian fictions are simply satire at the core 🤷♀️
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- Jan 2023
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andreisurugiu.com andreisurugiu.com
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Actually I’m not sure most people do this, I just hope I’m not the only one.
You are not. I will hoard this blog post on my hypothes.is :)
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URL
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- Dec 2022
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www.axios.com www.axios.com
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"If you don’t know, you should just say you don’t know rather than make something up," says Stanford researcher Percy Liang, who spoke at a Stanford event Thursday.
Love this response
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URL
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- Nov 2022
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medium.com medium.com
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hat we want is to be able to leave Facebook and still talk to our friends, instead of having many Facebooks.
What about Matrix?
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community.interledger.org community.interledger.org
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11/30 Youth Collaborative
I went through some of the pieces in the collection. It is important to give a platform to the voices that are missing from the conversation usually.
Just a few similar initiatives that you might want to check out:
Storycorps - people can record their stories via an app
Project Voice - spoken word poetry
Living Library - sharing one's story
Freedom Writers - book and curriculum based on real-life stories
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- Oct 2022
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conf.raku.org conf.raku.org
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URL
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thenewleafjournal.com thenewleafjournal.com
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Twitter is the preferred platform for our elites. Journalists and media pundits
Case in point, October 21, 2022 headline from Bloomberg News: "Musk Gutting Twitter Would Be a Threat to Us All." This hysterical headline highlights Mr. MacIntyre's point, which I quoted here, about Twitter and elites. Moreover, the wording leads one to wonder whether Bloomberg News has contacts inside Twitter.
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Now, if involved families want to reach out to a teacher, they have to rely on the school or hope an online staff directory is updated. And if teachers want to reach out to families and let them know how their students are doing in school, they need to look up their contact information and hope its up-to-date — or find alternate messaging platforms.
I completed high school about 15 years ago. Back then, most communication between parents and teachers was done by phone and mail. The default assumption by the NYCDOE that every problem needs an app or program is unexplained. Using phones and keeping contact directories up to date is something that had to be done not long ago.
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Some class time has also been lost to teachers sitting down with students to manually show them their grades, a teacher at the school added.
Throughout my time in middle school, high school, and college, grades for tests were handed out in class and teachers had office hours for students to discuss their grades or any other issues. It is unclear to me from this article what time is being lost. Teachers can hand out grades to students just as well as they did before, and I presume that students who have questions or need additional guidance should be able to contact their teachers.
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The Department of Education has been rolling out its own free grades, attendance and messaging applications, to replace banned third-party software that was involved in a data breach of more than 800,000 students last school year.
The NYCDOE was correct to sever its tie with third-party services, but why was the default response to build its own service? It was not long ago that there were no mobile applications for grades, attendance, and messaging.
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- Sep 2022
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www.zylstra.org www.zylstra.org
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grating to come across people talking about how to create a community for their tech to help it scale.
This is the wrong way around, positioning the tech corp's perspective as more imporant than society's. It's insulting to position community as a means, similar to talking about users which limits the view one has of people and what they try to achieve to only their interaction with a tool.
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Scaling is in our human structures. Artists don’t scale, road building doesn’t scale but art and road networks are at scale. Communities don’t scale, they’re fine as they are, but they are the grain of scale, resulting in society which is at scale. Don’t seek to scale your tech, seek to let your tech reinforce societal scaling, our overlapping communities, our cultures. Let your tech be scaffolding for a richer expression of society.
The aim of scaling tech is again a tech company's limited view of the world, that should not be adopted by people using a tech tool. Individual acts scale to community to society/culture, but that's a different type of scaling. One through sideways copying and adoption. Not to scale a tool but to amplify/scale an effect or impact. Tech is a scaffold for enriching society, society is not there to scale tech corps.
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humanity as not only the source and context for technology and its use, but its ultimate yardstick for the constructive use and impact of technology. This may sound obvious, it certainly does to me, but in practice it needs to be repeated to ensure it is used as such a yardstick from the very first design stage of any new technology.
Vgl [[Networked Agency 20160818213155]] wrt having a specific issue to address that is shared by the user group wielding a tech / tool, in their own context.
Vgl [[Open data begint buiten 20200808162905]] wrt the only yardstick for open data stems from its role as policy instrument: impact achieved outside in the aimed for policy domains through the increased agency of the open data users.
Tech impact is not to be measured in eyeballs, usage, revenue etc. That's (understandably) the corporation's singular and limited view, the rest of us should not adopt it as the only possible one.
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- Aug 2022
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gidmk.medium.com gidmk.medium.com
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Nerd, G. M.-K. H. (2022, February 25). The Jury is Still Out on Ivermectin. Medium. https://gidmk.medium.com/the-jury-is-still-out-on-ivermectin-7d0a1895549
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sspai.com sspai.com
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如果我的学生有自己的手机,我会希望他们不要像一般的孩子那样贬抑自己的创造力去只做一个网游和逗乐短视频的消费者。手机是我们这个时代的利器,它是洪堡的气压计、达尔文的捕虫网、斯文赫定的素描册、保罗索鲁的记事本,也是游牧教室中问题与材料的挖掘机。拍下自己看不懂的文本!拍下自己随手写的文字!拍下任何让你印象深刻的场景!录下自言自语!录下念诗的语气!
电子产品是这个时代的机甲。
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www.iana.org www.iana.org新しいタブ1
- Jun 2022
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www.axios.com www.axios.com
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What they're saying: "Because of this ground-breaking lawsuit, Meta will — for the first time — change its ad delivery system to address algorithmic discrimination," U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams said in a statement.
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www.civicsoftechnology.org www.civicsoftechnology.org
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Critical Ed Tech Scholars Alliance (CETSA), a grassroots group of educators working in higher ed
Where exactly is this group? They don't seem to have an online presence.
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alex-hanna.medium.com alex-hanna.medium.com
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As ever, we need to do more listening. And reading, there's lots of interesting references in here to read.
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- Apr 2022
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www.irrodl.org www.irrodl.org
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the technology can be the source of either frustration or motivation
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twitter.com twitter.com
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Prof. Christina Pagel. (2021, May 23). LONG THREAD on B.1.617.2 & latest PHE data covering: 1) latest tech report on B.1.617.2 (aka ‘India’ variant) 2) vaccine efficacy against B.1.617.2 3) consequences for roadmap 4) avoidability... Or not. [Tweet]. @chrischirp. https://twitter.com/chrischirp/status/1396574267349872644
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news.itsfoss.com news.itsfoss.com
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Hence, to keep things balanced, I think we should constantly oppose the anti-competitive behavior by tech giants and start using Mozilla Firefox (in whatever capacity, even as a secondary browser).
This is an interesting argument as to what individual users can do to keep Firefox alive. But the biggest dent on anti-competitive behavior should come from well enforced proper anti-trust regulations the way Europe is doing it. How can browser users contribute to this?
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www.nextinpact.com www.nextinpact.com
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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ellem52Op · 17 days ago There have been some amazing apps with small teams in the past. Three that jump out to me are Xobni, Mailbox, and Accompli. All three were bought by huge companies. Xobni got bought by Yahoo! who shut it down right after buying it. Mailbox by Dropbox who almost immediately dropped it - what a waste. Accompli is actually the mobile version of Outlook. (Like ToDo is actually Wunderlist.)TickTick has that same feel to me, like they're waiting for someone like Apple, or MS to buy them.
Ohhh yeah that definitely makes things far more concerning. Not only do I like having apps that are independent and focused on improving their products, and I definitely wouldn't want Todoist to be bought out by a bigger company, the history of these acquisitions would not inspire any confidence in their long-term stability. I never even heard of these apps before.
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I've used a lot of these apps. RTM is actually my favorite but like MinimaList it's essentially closed to itself. Microsoft ToDo (nee Wunderlist) was actually pretty good too but the mixing of work/home was not something I wanted.
I believe RTM is "Remember the Milk." I have heard this brought up a few times and the name is kind of odd, which makes me even more curious about what's special about it.
Before moving to Todoist, I used Microsoft To Do, but I wanted something more. I used TickTick for a bit but I barely remember anything from it. Todoist was the one that clicked with me.
On a side note, MinimaList is such a cute pun.
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- Mar 2022
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medium.com medium.com
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¿Deberíamos crear algo así para HackBo?
Una de las cosas importantes es pensar en cuando le damos curso a estos pensamientos. Al comienzo, quizás lo más conveniente es pensar en vida, más que en ayudar a morir. Otras metáforas como compostaje podría ser más convenientes.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTSEr0cRJY8
Starts out with four and a half minutes of anti-crypto and Web3 material. Presumably most of her audience is in the web3 space.
http://youvegotkat.neocities.org
Neocities: http://neocities.org
The Yesterweb: http://yesterweb.org
Marginalia Search: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random
It [the IndieWeb] is so so queer. Like it's super gay, super trans, super good.
The indie web also questions tech solutionism which often attempts to solve human problems by removing the human element. But easily the most remarkable and powerful thing about the internet is the ability it has to connect us with one another.
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psyarxiv.com psyarxiv.com
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Kourtesis, Panagiotis, Graham Wilson, and Mario Parra Rodrigues. ‘Factors Influencing Acceptance of Technology across Age: Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic’. PsyArXiv, 4 February 2022. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/tsrk4.
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www.theverge.com www.theverge.com
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Technology itself is culture, and a phone or a laptop or an algorithmic feed is in itself a cultural object just as worthy of analysis, critique, and serious attention as any piece of artwork or fashion trend.
See technology more critical -- it shapes culture more so than anything else these days. And every tech product is deliberately designed to be the way it is.
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www.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com
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“Twitch’s leadership is uncomfortable with mid-level and lower level employees pushing for change,”
Please name one larger tech company where questioning leadership is encouraged.
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The exodus began last year, when more than 300 employees left, and so far 60-plus people have walked out the door in 2022, according to a Bloomberg analysis.
Note that for huge tech companies like Amazon that's not necessarily unexpected. About 15% of people change their job every year.
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www.project-syndicate.org www.project-syndicate.org
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turning to SMS-based services for technical support that allows them more easily to adopt new crops and growing techniques, with benefits for both natural resources and household income and nutrition.
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e delivering real-time weather data to vegetable farmers via SMS. In West Africa, private companies such as Ignitia are expanding the accuracy and precision of SMS weather alerts to remote farmers.
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as more people in emerging economies connect to mobile networks, and apps designed to collect and share agricultural information become increasingly accessible.
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by investing in new technologies that enable farmers to connect with information and institutions that can decrease uncertainty and mitigate risk.
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Local file Local file
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Precision agriculture
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Farmers are also connected to agronomists and technologiststhrough the platform to help them develop advanced farming protocolsand automate their farming practices
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blockchain
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These nanosensors would be able to detectminor changes in the plant ranging from temperature to growth impactby soil acidity to pest infestations and diseases
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appropriate levels of machine intelligence required
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Automation requires different domains of informa-tion technologies such as perception (sensing and data acquisition),reasoning and learning (mathematical and statistical methodologies),communication (delivery platforms such as wireless and local areanetwork), task planning and execution (involving control logic, roboticsand flexible automation workcells), and systems integration (providingcomputation resources and capabilities of system informatics, model-ling and analysis). Successful implementation of automation wouldrequire more research into the different domains and how they can beintegrated to achieve system optimization
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Another area that requires muchattention is in the implementation of automation
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internet-driven agriculture, technology-driven food wastemanagement (zero waste food processing) as well as platform tech-nology to develop alternative and unconventional food sources
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lanting tech-nologies such as chemical fertilizers, pest and weed contro
e
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- Feb 2022
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www.dgsiegel.net www.dgsiegel.net
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good tools enhance invisibility
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A good tool is an invisible tool. By invisible, I mean that the tool does not intrude on your consciousness; you focus on the task, not the tool.
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www.thedriftmag.com www.thedriftmag.com
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Amid seemingly intractable problems here on Earth, a vision of the future can resemble a life raft, and in the absence of viable alternatives, substanceless promises of space travel, crypto-utopias, and eternal life in the cloud may become the only things to look forward to.
Is that a bad thing, to have something to look forward to? It implies that new technological inventions are the only way to make progress, but it is undeniably progress. Not everyone will hold this view, and no one should force it upon you. So why are people constantly criticing "techno-utopia" views instead of creating and moving towards their own visions of the future?
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as if he could see his own bright future unfolding before him.
He did see a bright potential before him, and that's precisely why he had a change at succeeding. I don't like the latent criticism about innovation in this article, it feels mostly like envy to me.
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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“Google established itself as a fact
That's some ed-tech imaginary rhetoric there.
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therebooting.substack.com therebooting.substack.com
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If the past two years have taught us anything, it’s to be wary of optimism.
This goes quadruple for tech optimism over the past 15+ years.
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doctorow.medium.com doctorow.medium.com
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Preventing cheating during remote test-taking:https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/17/proctorio-v-linkletter/#proctorioSpying on work-from-home employees:https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#bosswareSpying on students and their families:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_DistrictRepossessing Teslas:https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/Disabling cars after a missed payment:https://edition.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/wayoflife/04/17/aa.bills.shut.engine.down/index.htmlForcing you to buy official printer ink:https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printerSpying on people who lease laptops:https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2012/09/ftc-halts-computer-spyingBricking gear the manufacturer doesn’t want to support anymore:https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/05/google-reaches-into-customers-homes-and-bricks-their-gadgets/
This is some really troubling developments for all first world people, especially educators
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- Jan 2022
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Technological solutions to social problems seem quicker, cheaper, and simpler to implement than larger social changes.
Tech solutionism can often seem useful because it appears to be cheaper, simpler, and easier to implement than making more difficult choices and larger, necessary social changes.
One needs to always ask what is the real underlying problem? What other methods are there for potential solutions? What are the knock-on effects of these potential solutions. Is the particular solution really just a quick fix or bandaid? Once implemented how will one measure the effects and adjust after-the-fact?
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Current approaches to improving digital well-being also promote tech solutionism, or the presumption that technology can fix social, cultural, and structural problems.
Tech solutionism is the presumption that technology (usually by itself) can fix a variety of social, cultural, and structural problems.
It fits into a category of problem that when one's tool is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail.
Many tech solutionism problems are likely ill-defined to begin with. Many are also incredibly complex and difficult which also tends to encourage bikeshedding, which is unlikely to lead us to appropriate solutions.
Tags
- diversity
- diversity equity and inclusion
- problem solving
- racist ideas
- move fast and break things
- long term solutions
- psychology
- racist policies
- attention
- attention economy
- tech solutionism
- technochauvinism
- standard of care
- biological determinism
- hammer and nail bias
- ethical technology
- social media
- complexity
- structural racism
- bikeshedding
- read
- cognitive bias
- marginalized groups
- #DLINQDigDetox
- mental health
- moral panic
Annotators
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human.libretexts.org human.libretexts.org
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NVIDIA, AMD Radion, BlackMagic Design and Lenovo
I suggest proposing only the names " Nvidia" and "AMD" as companies that make graphic cards. Possibly add "Intel".
I would suggest to remove "Radion" (I believe you are referencing the "Radeon" line of cards by AMD.
Also BlackMagic Design does not produce, I believe, graphic cards.
Lenovo seems to but I would also remove as I have never heard of these used in video editing.
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blog.thepete.net blog.thepete.net
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When a product manager trusts that the engineers on the team have the interest of the product at heart, they also trust the engineer’s judgment when adding technical tasks to the backlog and prioritizing them. This enables the balanced mix of feature and technical work that we’re aiming for.
Why is it so common for engineering teams to be mistrusted by other parts of the business?
Part of that is definitely on engineers: chasing the new shiny, over-engineering, etc.
That seems unlikely to account for all of it, though.
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- Dec 2021
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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In order to truly have checks and balances, we should not have the same people setting the agendas of big tech, research, government and the non-profit sector. We need alternatives. We need governments around the world to invest in communities building technology that genuinely benefits them, rather than pursuing an agenda that is set by big tech or the military. Contrary to big tech executives’ cold-war style rhetoric about an arms race, what truly stifles innovation is the current arrangement where a few people build harmful technology and others constantly work to prevent harm, unable to find the time, space or resources to implement their own vision of the future.
She's talking about monopolies here. How can we break the monopolies of big tech?
Here again is an example of the extreme power of granting corporations the ability to be protected as "people".
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www.ft.com www.ft.com
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Espinoza, J. (2021, November 28). Vestager urges European legislators to push through rules to regulate Big Tech. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/1880d0fb-0651-47ed-a8f4-6cde0f729859
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- Nov 2021
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luby.com.br luby.com.br
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Transformação Digital da concepção à entrega
The best company for software development in Brazil.
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morningsidepost.com morningsidepost.com
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“After all the hundreds of millions of dollars we have spent on ed-tech, when we had five days to pivot not one person in my shop tried to call the ed-tech vendors to ask for help,” Shirky said
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www.thegreenwebfoundation.org www.thegreenwebfoundation.org
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What resources are powering our projects and how do we manage those resources? Are we willing to approach our work with a set of values that centers several generations after us? And how do we do that?What protections do we need to fight for in the workplace to hold companies accountable around climate justice goals?How do we measure our impact on the climate crisis?Are we willing to sundown projects if mitigating their negative impact on the environment is impossible or creates little impact?
great questions
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www.theverge.com www.theverge.com
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You.com’s big differentiating feature is that it lets people influence which sources they see. You can “upvote” and “downvote” specific categories, so when you run searches, you’ll see preferred sources first, neutral searches next, and downvoted sources last.
THIS IS LITERALLY THE ANSWER TO SEARCH.
Just… FYI.
All you need to do is give users more control.
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- Oct 2021
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web.dev web.dev
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powerful Emscripten
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www.xanadu.net www.xanadu.net
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The computer world is not just technicality and razzle-dazzle. It is a continual war over software politics and paradigms. With ideas which are still radical, WE FIGHT ON. We hope for vindication, the last laugh, and recognition as an additional standard-- electronic documents with visible connections.
El mundo de la informática no es sólo tecnicismo y deslumbramiento. Es una guerra continua por la política y los paradigmas del software. Con ideas todavía radicales, seguimos luchando. Esperamos la reivindicación, la última carcajada, y el reconocimiento como un estándar más: documentos electrónicos con conexiones visibles. /// Comentar con la traducción como un modo de estar completamente de acuerdo con este definición. Muchas veces hemos dicho, no es la tecnologia perse lo que nos mueve, es la apropiación social de esta y las implicaciones que tiene en nuestro habitar politico, social, cultural etc del mundo.
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- Jul 2021
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themarkup.org themarkup.org
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consumer friendly
Including the "consumer" here is a red herring. We're meant to identify as the consumer and so take from this statement that our rights and best interests have been written into these BigTech-crafted laws.
But a "consumer" is different from a "citizen," a "person," we the people.
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passage in March of a consumer data privacy law in Virginia, which Protocol reported was originally authored by Amazon
From the article:
Marsden and Virginia delegate Cliff Hayes held meetings with other large tech companies, including Microsoft; financial institutions, including Capital One; and non-profit groups and small businesses...
Which all have something at stake here: the ability to monitor people and mine their data in order to sell it.
Weak privacy laws give the illusion of privacy while maintaining the corporate panopticon.
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- Jun 2021
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github.com github.com
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The emphasis was made on a raw CDP protocol because Chrome allows you to do so many things that are barely supported by WebDriver because it should have consistent design with other browsers.
compatibility: need for compatibility is limiting:
- innovation
- use of newer features
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github.com github.com
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so by adopting git installations with latest source code you're effectively agreeing to go bleeding-edge. I would assume that means you're ready for any breaking changes and broken installations, which is what happened here.
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- May 2021
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fabiensanglard.net fabiensanglard.net
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LocationManager can provide a GPS location (lat,long) every second. Meanwhile, TelephonyManager gives the cellID=(mmc,mcc,lac,cid) the radio is currently camping on. A cellID database[1], allows to know the (lat,long) of each CellID. What is left is to draw the itinerary (in red) and, for each second, a cellID-color-coded connection to the cell.
To design such a map, one needs to use these 2 Android components:
- LocationManager - provides a GPS location (
lat
,long
) every second - TelephonyManager - provides a cellID=(
mmc
,mcc
,lac
,cid
) the radio is currently camping on
and cellID database to know the (
lat
,long
) of each cell ID. - LocationManager - provides a GPS location (
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crookedtimber.org crookedtimber.org
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I’ve probably spent too much time standing around at receptions, drinking bad white wine to get me through yet another twenty-eight year old from the Cato Institute droning about how the completely new paradigm of data-ownership is going to ‘fix privacy’. (These guys are a menace. Even in Brussels!)
A set related to the tech bro toxic culture.
Interesting that libertarianism only seems to liberate a select few and not all.
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The problem with US Big Tech is bigger, deeper – iceberg-dimensioned, you might say – and not even remotely blockchain-sized or shaped. Leslie Daigle has described the consolidation of the entire Internet stack under the hierarchical and totalizing business models of US tech firms as “climate change for the Internet’. If we don’t fix it, I personally do not believe we will be able to fix much else. That’s why my life’s work is helping to fix it. And by fix, I mean destroy.
I want this career!
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- Apr 2021
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reallifemag.com reallifemag.com
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Valleyspeak
"Spaces" is not an official entry here, but svdictionary is a good resource for all sorts of technical jargon common in the valley, and the site itself gives plenty of insight into the internal culture at these companies. Interested readers will also appreciate this guardian article from 2019 which covers a bunch of commonly used silicon valley terms.
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www.peakgrantmaking.org www.peakgrantmaking.org
- Mar 2021
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thehypothesis.substack.com thehypothesis.substack.com
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It’s the usual Silicon Valley sleight-of-hand move, very similar to Uber reps claiming drivers aren’t “core” to their business. I’m sure Substack is paying a writer right now to come up with a catchy way of saying that Substack doesn’t pay writers.
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So Substack has an editorial policy, but no accountability. And they have terms of service, but no enforcement.
This is also the case for many other toxic online social media platforms. A fantastic framing.
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www.open-source-civic-tech.com www.open-source-civic-tech.com
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Ce site fournit une liste non-exhaustive des outils Open Source utilisables pour des projets de démocratie participative.
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‘How Slovakia Tested 3.6 Million People for COVID-19 in a Single Weekend’. Accessed 26 February 2021. https://www.bi.team/blogs/how-slovakia-tested-3-6-million-people-for-covid-19-in-a-single-weekend/.
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Ramamurti, R. (2020, October 27). Global Crowdsourcing Can Help the U.S. Beat the Pandemic. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2020/10/global-crowdsourcing-can-help-the-u-s-beat-the-pandemic
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store.steampowered.com store.steampowered.com
- Feb 2021
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publicstack.net publicstack.net
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stackoverflow.com stackoverflow.com
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However, banning him opens a very dangerous precedent, making the US more like a dictatorship... more like China. Also it's not effective. Those who were silenced will only have more motivation, and the risk of terrorism is greatly increased. The people must decide what is true. Not big companies. Individuals must be able to express their beliefs. Bot accounts must be banned, but real individuals must not. If you think a group of people is a bunch of idiots who believe fake news, then, tough, that's democracy for you. Maybe it means that your government is not investing enough in education and welfare to properly educate and give hope to those people.
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I oppose the banning of Donald Trump and his non-violent believers/content from social media platforms such as Facebook Twitter, YouTube and Amazon. I feel (irrationally?) Trump is arrogant and disgusting as a person. I like some of his anti-CCP policies, but not sure I'd vote for him. The "USA First" stance is particularly damaging as it scares USA allies away. I don't think there's enough evidence for the electoral fraud allegations, but I haven't researched the court cases extensively. However, banning him opens a very dangerous precedent, making the US more like a dictatorship... more like China. Also it's not effective. Those who were silenced will only have more motivation, and the risk of terrorism is greatly increased. The people must decide what is true. Not big companies. Individuals must be able to express their beliefs. Bot accounts must be banned, but real individuals must not. If you think a group of people is a bunch of idiots who believe fake news, then, tough, that's democracy for you. Maybe it means that your government is not investing enough in education and welfare to properly educate and give hope to those people. I'm against violence.
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www.cnbc.com www.cnbc.com
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AWS can even terminate or suspend its agreement with a customer immediately under certain circumstances as it did in 2010 with Wikileaks, pointing to violations of AWS’ terms of service.
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The swiftness with which Amazon acted shouldn’t come as a shock. Companies have been disclosing details about their deals with Amazon that warn of these kinds of sudden discontinuations for years.
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The incident demonstrates a type of power that Amazon wields almost uniquely because so many companies rely on it to deliver computing and data storage.
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Time. ‘The Great Reset: How to Build a Better World Post-COVID-19’. Accessed 19 February 2021. https://time.com/collection/great-reset/.
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- Jan 2021
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www.cs.cmu.edu www.cs.cmu.edu
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Two-complement: First bit is sign bit, interrupted as negative number.
10 = 01010 -> 8 + 2 = 10 -10 = 10110 -> -16 + 4 + 2 = 210
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- Dec 2020
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padlet.com padlet.com
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When you visit a padlet page created by another Padlet user, that page may collect more information than we do and may provide information to third parties that we have no relationship with. We request you use discretion when sharing personal information on padlet pages created by other users.
How? Is this because embedded resources (YouTube, etc.) will send information to their host sites? Is this process automatic on displaying the padlet or is it something that would happen on clicking the resource?
A partial answer below addresses this - this does appear to create engagement trackable through those original sites. "You may access Third Party Services through the Service, for example by watching a YouTube video on a padlet. "
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In the event that all or a portion of Padlet or its assets are acquired by or merged with a third-party, personal information that we have collected from users would be one of the assets transferred to or acquired by that third-party. This Policy will continue to apply to your information, and any acquirer would only be able to handle your personal information as per this Policy (unless you give consent to a new policy). We will provide you with notice of an acquisition within 30 days following the completion of such a transaction, by posting on our homepage, or by emailing you on your email address on file. If you do not consent to the use of your personal information by such a successor company, you may request its deletion from the company.
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First and foremost, you should know that Padlet does not sell or rent your personal information to any third-party for any purpose.
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github.com github.com
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more leading edge than bleeding
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Is using bleeding edge tech risky and foolish? How much blood are we talking about? My experience tells me Svelte is a safe choice, more leading edge than bleeding.
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- Nov 2020
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developer.mozilla.org developer.mozilla.org
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with another magic trick, the star *.
more info on neo4j star usage to find reports of a manager
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In a recent poll, 77 percent of responding colleges said they already use or are considering using proctoring software.
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- Oct 2020
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www.howtogeek.com www.howtogeek.com
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How to Access Your Linux (WSL) Files in Windows 10
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elearningindustry.com elearningindustry.com
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How To Make Online Corporate Learning Fun During Lockdown
(Available in text or audio.) This article provides basic principles (agenda, duration) and technologies (gamification, discussion boards) and activities to keep employees engaged in online learning. While this provides strategy, it does not provide implementation guidance within the corporate environment. (2/10)
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app.thebrain.com app.thebrain.comTheBrain1
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Imagining Our Future Through Tech Frank Chen - a16z Operating Partner
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theintercept.com theintercept.com
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But these lookalike audiences aren’t just potential new customers — they can also be used to exclude unwanted customers in the future, creating a sort of ad targeting demographic blacklist.
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www.buzzfeednews.com www.buzzfeednews.com
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Without a retweet button, Wetherell said, brands “would certainly be less inclined to have a financial relationship with [a platform]. And when you're Twitter and that's vastly your primary source of income, that might be a challenge.”
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medium.com medium.com
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Online media, despite being so different from traditional printed media, is still trying to maximize its potential audience, and in order to do that, going for quantity over quality.
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we drove 10 billion clicks a month to publishers’ websites for free.
Really free? Or was this served against ads in search?
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We’re now in the early stages of testing a “Propensity to Subscribe” signal based on machine learning models in DoubleClick to make it easier for publishers to recognize potential subscribers, and to present them the right offer at the right time.
Interestingly the technology here isn't that different than the Facebook Data that Cambridge Analytica was using, the difference is that they're not using it to directly impact politics, but to drive sales. Does this mean they're more "ethical"?
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www.theverge.com www.theverge.com
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SearchEngineLand notes that this could have an impact on the ad market, since a website’s visitors may be automatically scrolled down past its ads to the relevant content. The publication notes that sites may need to change the location of their ads in light of Google’s latest feature.
And of course there will be crazy implications for the adtech space.
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scripting.com scripting.com
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While many blogs get dozens or hundreds of visitors, Searls' site attracts thousands. "I partly don't want to care what the number is," he says. "I used to work in broadcasting, where everyone was obsessed by that. I don't want an audience. I feel I'm writing stuff that's part of a conversation. Conversations don't have audiences."
Social media has completely ignored this sort of sentiment and gamified and psychoanalyzed it's way into the polar opposite direction all for the sake of "engagement", clicks, data gathering, and advertising.
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www.wired.com www.wired.com
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Our political conversations are happening on an infrastructure built for viral advertising, and we are only beginning to adapt.
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journals.sagepub.com journals.sagepub.com
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Refusing advertising is refusing to privilege moneyed speech. The increasing equation of money with speech—that is, those with the most money can be the loudest and most persistent voices in contemporary media—is denied when advertising is refused.
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Carol Nichols of the Twitter alternative rstat.us makes this explicit: Twitter is “actively ignoring the needs of their users in order to serve the needs of their advertisers and shareholders.” In contrast, she argues that rstat.us is more concerned with user expression.
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stackoverflow.com stackoverflow.com
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localhost with lvh.me this is a domain that always resolves to localhost and now whenever you write sub1.lvh.me even though a port like sub1.lvh.me:3000 it will still work.
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- Sep 2020
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scattered-thoughts.net scattered-thoughts.net
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emilyriederer.netlify.app emilyriederer.netlify.app
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Notes on preparing a tech talk
Useful tips on preparing and giving a tech talk
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- Aug 2020
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www.thelancet.com www.thelancet.com
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Balsari, S., Sange, M., & Udwadia, Z. (2020). COVID-19 care in India: The course to self-reliance. The Lancet Global Health, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(20)30384-3
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Kirkwood. I. (2020) HERE’S HOW #CDNTECH COMPANIES ARE PITCHING IN DURING COVID-19. Betakit. Retrieved from:https://betakit.com/heres-how-cdntech-companies-are-pitching-in-during-the-covid-19-outbreak/
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www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
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Romeo, N. (n.d.). What Can America Learn from Europe About Regulating Big Tech? The New Yorker. Retrieved August 19, 2020, from https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/what-can-america-learn-from-europe-about-regulating-big-tech
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uptech.team uptech.team
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How To Make A Social Media App The Right Way
Read this guide by Uptech to learn more about social media apps and to make a successfull social media app
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hyperlink.academy hyperlink.academy
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Online courses tend to be based around linear playlists of videos, along with associated readings and other activities. These often look like university courses filmed and translated more or less directly to online form. More internet native courses tend to be shorter and more focused, but still just as linear and video-centric.
agree with this.
I've often thought that at times learning feels more like the Path fo Exile skill spider-web than a linear path.
Many 'road maps', 'how to' feels like a ladder - and then it's not always clear how much you need to learn about a certain step before moving onto the next step, while also failing to realize that you may have learned the outcomes from the step in another way.
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What is a "course"? And more importantly: what more can a course be?
I like this framing, as something that I've been thinking for awhile is that when it comes to teaching/education - people are too caught up in an old style of education and are trying to copy-paste the classroom setting into the online world.
While some K-12 education seems to be adapting a bit faster, higher education still feels a little stuck.
Bootcamps are a little different, but gaps still exist --- got thinking about this also when talking with Sam recently
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webchat.quakenet.org webchat.quakenet.org
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Q does not prevent opera proxy users from communicating on their platform. Q's webchat is old school speedy and simple.
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courses.ischool.berkeley.edu courses.ischool.berkeley.edu
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teaching experience with hypothesis
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Guide how to download ebooks via IRC
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- Jun 2020
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signal.org signal.org
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Some large tech behemoths could hypothetically shoulder the enormous financial burden of handling hundreds of new lawsuits if they suddenly became responsible for the random things their users say, but it would not be possible for a small nonprofit like Signal to continue to operate within the United States. Tech companies and organizations may be forced to relocate, and new startups may choose to begin in other countries instead.
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nymag.com nymag.com
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Walsh, J. D. (2020, May 11). The Coming Disruption to College. Intelligencer. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/scott-galloway-future-of-college.html
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- May 2020
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www.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com
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the AV race
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stateup.co stateup.co
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Filer, T. & Kaminer, R. How governments can engage digital resources to manage their Covid-19 response. (2020, March 9). StateUp. https://stateup.co/how-governments-can-engage-digital-resources-to-manage-their-covid-19-response/
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- Apr 2020
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luttig.substack.com luttig.substack.com
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Once this securitization accelerates, ARR securities will become the next bond-like asset class for both institutions and individuals – irresponsible not to have some in your portfolio, as a fixed income product and a balance against equities. And who will make this market? Sand Hill Sachs.
"As Alex Danco highlighted in his recent article Debt is Coming, it is clear that recurring revenue securitization – the notion of selling your future ARR bookings at a discount – is the future. "
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Put another way, as happens in every maturing industry before it, Internet company revenue will become zero-sum.
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www.getrevue.co www.getrevue.co
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"As an aside, the idea that we live in a time where Apple is telling Europe what forms of exposure notification will be permitted is basically the entire thesis behind / pitch for the existence of this newsletter. Not because I believe Apple abused its power, but because the world is still catching up to the idea that Apple and a handful other tech giants have this power."
One country that has been persuaded of the companies’ approach is famously privacy-conscious Germany. Germans were instrumental in devising the (tongue twister alert) Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing project, an effort to do exposure notification in a way that protected citizens from their governments. But the project would have required operating system-level changes to Apple’s iOS by making Bluetooth available to public-health apps that sought to process exposure notifications on a central server controlled by the government. For privacy reasons, Apple said no, and now Germany has signed on with Apple’s system. Here are Douglas Busvine and Andreas Rinke in Reuters: Germany changed course on Sunday over which type of smartphone technology it wanted to use to trace coronavirus infections, backing an approach supported by Apple and Google along with a growing number of other European countries. […] Germany as recently as Friday backed a centralised standard called Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT), which would have needed Apple in particular to change the settings on its iPhones. When Apple refused to budge there was no alternative but to change course, said a senior government source.
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In one instance, Amazon employees accessed documents and data about a bestselling car-trunk organizer sold by a third-party vendor. The information included total sales, how much the vendor paid Amazon for marketing and shipping, and how much Amazon made on each sale. Amazon’s private-label arm later introduced its own car-trunk organizers. “Like other retailers, we look at sales and store data to provide our customers with the best possible experience,” Amazon said in a written statement. “However, we strictly prohibit our employees from using nonpublic, seller-specific data to determine which private label products to launch.”
Case study:
- build a marketplace
- get other companies to figure out which cakes are the hottest to sell
- sell those cakes yourself
- charge other companies to advertise and get favorable placement "Fortem spends as much as $60,000 a month"
- put your products on top... because you own the platform
Amazon’s private-label business encompasses more than 45 brands with some 243,000 products, from AmazonBasics batteries to Stone & Beam furniture. Amazon says those brands account for 1% of its $158 billion in annual retail sales, not counting Amazon’s devices such as its Echo speakers, Kindle e-readers and Ring doorbell cameras.
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blairreeves.me blairreeves.me
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The browser is the new OS.
And Google controls it
Standardization on something like Chrome/V8 is actually very useful for us, in this sense. We have a pretty good sense of how our Javascript will execute, where and how we can tighten up performance, and simulate the kind of experience most of our users will have.
That said, I’m always conscious that we are living on someone else’s standards. Sure, Chromium and the V8 engine are open-source, but they still belong to Google in a way that, say, TCP/IP or IMAP does not.
Google can distribute products on the web better than any other single company. When it placed a callout link to download Chrome right under its search bar, it effectively sealed IE’s demise. Nothing that Microsoft could do would ever reach as many potential users, or drive adoption, at anywhere near the same scale, and they eventually came to understand this.
Google is paying Apple a cool $12 billion in 2019 to remain Safari’s default search engine, because the amount they make from all those searches (and the ads they support) is far greater.
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firstround.com firstround.com
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Quite long but plenty of amazing advice in here from the founders of Looker (acquired by Google)
“My biggest piece of advice to early-stage founders on fundraising is don't try to raise money too early,” says Tabb. “I see so many founders out there trying to raise with just an idea on a slide. We waited almost a year to raise money, until we knew it was a venture business — not every startup is, and you don’t want to get locked in. We were cranking along with customers and revenue. And it wasn’t all nailed down, but we had figured out enough of how go-to-market might work to know that it was workable. That made our seed raise in the summer of 2012 so much easier. If you build value, it takes the fundraising process from how good you are at pitching yourself to a place where you can simply say ‘Ask the people who are using us for their opinion about it.’”
As the investor on the receiving end of that fundraising tactic, Trenchard agrees that it was effective. “When we were deciding whether or not to invest in their seed round, Lloyd sent me a list of 10 customer references — many of them were First Round-backed companies. I talked to each and every one during diligence, and I was blown away. The love they had for the products was off the charts, they would have been very disappointed without it,” says Trenchard.
Learning a new language. “I created LookML to serve as the basis of our platform. It’s an abstraction layer, the sequel to SQL. My thought was that if we could simplify the problems with SQL and evolve the data language, it would be easier to use,” says Tabb. But banking on data analysts learning a new language was anything but a surefire move. “This was a scary one,” says Porterfield. “I remember those early existential questions: ‘Can analysts learn this language? Will they want to?’ Looking back now, it seems more obvious that developer-style tooling and workflows would be embraced. These days, there’s a lot of discussion that any time you can provide tools that increase someone’s leverage, they will adopt them. But that wasn’t clear at the time.”
“For most companies in the data space, pre-sales folks are like plumbers, they're just hooking stuff together. We tried to take a different approach at Looker by asking prospects for a dataset and then putting economics or math majors to work. In the early days, they wore all the hats: They were pre-sales, post-sales, customer support. Eventually, those became separate roles as we scaled,” says Bien.
“In the early days, Margaret had a habit of saying ‘We'll be successful when we have 1,000 true fans.’ That was our driving force — figuring out how to build a fanbase in enterprise software,” says Tabb. “If you make a product that customers love, your customers will love you back. It may seem cheesy, but it was really about love — that’s the emotion we wanted to evoke in our customers. We call customer success our ‘Department of Customer Love.’ We made ‘Love Looker Love’ one of our values. I had early customers tell me that life at their company was now divided into two eras: ‘Before Looker’ and ‘After Looker.’ That’s the reaction we were always chasing,” he says.
“Back in my college days, I was really into the ideas of Robert Greenleaf, who kicked off the concept of servant leadership. Today, as a CEO, that philosophy carries forward — I view myself as a steward,” says Bien. “My role is to remove obstacles for other people and remove ownership for myself.”
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Technologies are not simply objects but architectures that organize our bodies in space and time.
New technologies require us to develop new literacies. By developing such literacies, we train our bodies into habitual choreographies. When you learn to write, you are learning not just symbols but the hand motions that turn lines into letters. When you learn to type, you tether your hands to a keyboard, defining your motions in ways that have neurological and physiological effects. Research shows that writing in print, in cursive, or by typing are each associated with distinct brain patterns and significant learning outcomes. How we use our hands profoundly affects how we think.
Digital interfaces exercise similar demands on our bodies. When you first acquire a smartphone, the interface is clunky. Each interaction feels contrived, each gesture an intrusion on your consciousness. But as you rehearse these movements, they become second nature. Like the alphabets your hands write into existence, each of these gestures has assigned meanings. As you achieve fluency with them, these gestures become units of the communication structure you form with your device. When you reach instinctively for your phone, it only takes a few unconscious flicks of your thumb to navigate past the lock screen and into your web browser or messaging app. At the same time, you attain a fluency particular to that brand—when your fingers know an iPhone, it’s pretty jarring to use a friend’s Galaxy.
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An amazing read/insight into how Ping An, the world's #1 insurer is using big data to reduce costs (>$750M/y) and save customers time (62% of claims handled automatically)
In 2017, Ping An, China’s second-largest insurer and its biggest non-state-owned company by revenue, rolled out a “Superfast Onsite Investigation” system—enabling policyholders to submit claims by simply opening a smartphone app and answering a few questions. But the app’s niftiest feature offers the option to not even wait for an inspector. Instead, customers can snap photos of a damaged vehicle and send them to a Ping An computer, which can respond with a repair estimate in three minutes or less. If the customer accepts the estimate, then wancheng! (“Done!”) Ping An can transfer funds immediately. Last year, Ping An’s customers used this feature to settle 7.3 million claims, or 62% of the total. The service saves the company more than $750 million each year by reducing bogus claims and human error. But its simplicity belies the extraordinary sophistication of the artificial intelligence and data-processing operations that make it possible. To generate accurate estimates, Ping An matches photos of vehicle damage against a database of 25 million parts used in the 60,000 different auto makes and models sold in China. The system assesses whether those parts can be repaired or must be replaced, then calculates the cost of parts and labor in more than 140,000 garages. Ping An integrates all that information with face-, voice- and image-recognition tech and a complex matrix of anti-fraud rules. Ping An chief scientist Xiao Jing says it took a team of A.I. experts, data scientists, and insurance managers three years to design, develop, and integrate the new service. It is, he exults, “the only one of its kind in the world.”
These products and services have a vital feature in common: They match online data, generated by China’s digitally native consumer masses, with a vast storehouse of “offline” data and insight amassed over three decades in the insurance business.
Ping An’s leadership foresees the day when the company’s technology businesses contribute as much as half of its earnings, up from only 6% today, and compete head-to-head with pure technology plays like Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings.
Ping An earmarks 1% of revenue for investments in innovation. Over the past 10 years, the group has plowed more than $7 billion into research and development, and Ma has vowed to invest $15 billion more in the decade to come. That endowment has nurtured 11 technology affiliates, of which two—Good Doctor and Autohome, a platform for car buyers—are publicly traded and three are privately held “unicorns” with multibillion-dollar valuations For now, only two of those five are profitable. Even so, the combined value of the group’s tech ventures tops $70 billion. (See the “Star Pupils” sidebar.)
Schulte estimates that the BAT (China’s troika of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent) processes at least 10 times as much data every day as Ping An has acquired in its entire existence. But Ping An executives argue that quality matters more than quantity. The data its businesses collect is richer than that gleaned by the BAT, they claim, because it involves big-ticket transactions relating to health, wealth, and property—among the most meaningful decisions in customers’ lives.
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www.eugenewei.com www.eugenewei.com
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An insight into how social networks work
Let's begin with two principles: (1)People are status-seeking monkeys, (2) People seek out the most efficient path to maximizing social capital.
Why do some large social networks suddenly fade away, or lose out to new tiny networks? What ties many of these explanations together is social capital theory. Classic network effects theory [that a network’s utility increases with the number of users who use it] still holds, I’m not discarding it. Instead, let's append some social capital theory. Together, those form the two axes on which I like to analyze social network health. When modeling how successful social networks create a status game worth playing, a useful metaphor is one of the trendiest technologies: cryptocurrency.
How is a new social network analogous to an ICO?
(1) Each new social network issues a new form of social capital, a token.
(2) You must show proof of work to earn the token.
(3) Over time it becomes harder and harder to mine new tokens on each social network, creating built-in scarcity.
(4) Many people, especially older folks, scoff at both social networks and cryptocurrencies.
Perhaps you've read a long and thoughtful response by a random person on Quora or Reddit, or watched YouTube vloggers publishing night after night, or heard about popular Vine stars living in houses together, helping each other shoot and edit 6-second videos. While you can outsource Bitcoin mining to a computer, people still mine for social capital on social networks largely through their own blood, sweat, and tears.
Almost every social network of note had an early signature proof of work hurdle. For Facebook it was posting some witty text-based status update. For Instagram, it was posting an interesting square photo. For Vine, an entertaining 6-second video. For Twitter, it was writing an amusing bit of text of 140 characters or fewer. Pinterest? Pinning a compelling photo. You can likely derive the proof of work for other networks like Quora and Reddit and Twitch and so on. Successful social networks don't pose trick questions at the start, it’s usually clear what they want from you.
If you've ever joined one of these social networks early enough, you know that, on a relative basis, getting ahead of others in terms of social capital (followers, likes, etc.) is easier in the early days. Some people who were featured on recommended follower lists in the early days of Twitter have follower counts in the 7-figures, just as early masters of Musical.ly and Vine were accumulated massive and compounding follower counts. The more people who follow you, the more followers you gain because of leaderboards and recommended follower algorithms and other such common discovery mechanisms.
Young people, with their much higher usage rate on social media, are the most sensitive and attuned demographic to the payback period and ROI on their social media labor. So, for example, young people tend not to like Twitter but do enjoy Instagram.
It's not that Twitter doesn't dole out the occasional viral supernova; every so often someone composes a tweet that goes over 1K and then 10K likes or retweets (Twitter should allow people to buy a framed print of said tweet with a silver or gold 1K club or 10K club designation to supplement its monetization). But it’s not common, and most tweets are barely seen by anyone at all. Pair that with the fact that young people's bias towards and skill advantage in visual mediums over textual ones and it's not surprising Instagram is their social battleground of preference (video games might be the most lucrative battleground for the young if you broaden your definition of social networks, and that's entirely reasonable, though that arena skews male).
The gradient of your network's social capital ROI can often govern your market share among different demographics. Young girls flocked to Musical.ly in its early days because they were uniquely good at the lip synch dance routine videos that were its bread and butter. In this age of neverending notifications, heavy social media users are hyper aware of differing status ROI among the apps they use.
TikTok is an interesting new player in social media because its default feed, For You, relies on a machine learning algorithm to determine what each user sees; the feed of content from by creators you follow, in contrast, is hidden one pane over. If you are new to TikTok and have just uploaded a great video, the selection algorithm promises to distribute your post much more quickly than if you were on sharing it on a network that relies on the size of your following, which most people have to build up over a long period of time. Conversely, if you come up with one great video but the rest of your work is mediocre, you can't count on continued distribution on TikTok since your followers live mostly in a feed driven by the TikTok algorithm, not their follow graph.
Why copying proof of work is lousy strategy for status-driven networks… Most clones have and will fail. The reason that matching the basic proof of work hurdle of an Status as a Service incumbent fails is that it generally duplicates the status game that already exists. By definition, if the proof of work is the same, you're not really creating a new status ladder game, and so there isn't a real compelling reason to switch when the new network really has no one in it.
I once wrote about social networks that the network's the thing; that is, the composition of the graph once a social network reaches scale is its most unique quality. Copying some network's feature often isn’t sufficient if you can’t also copy its graph, but if you can apply the feature to some unique graph that you earned some other way, it can be a defensible advantage. Nothing illustrates this better than Facebook's attempts to win back the young from Snapchat by copying some of the network's ephemeral messaging features, or Facebook's attempt to copy TikTok with Lasso, or, well Facebook's attempt to duplicate just about every social app with any traction anywhere. The problem with copying Snapchat is that, well, the reason young people left Facebook for Snapchat was in large part because their parents had invaded Facebook. You don't leave a party with your classmates to go back to one your parents are throwing just because your dad brings in a keg and offer to play beer pong.
I think the Stories format is a genuine innovation on the social modesty problem of social networks. That is, all but the most egregious showoffs feel squeamish about publishing too much to their followers. Stories, by putting the onus on the viewer to pull that content, allows everyone to publish away guilt-free, without regard for the craft that regular posts demand in the ever escalating game that is life publishing. In a world where algorithmic feeds break up your sequence of posts, Stories also allow gifted creators to create sequential narratives. In the annals of tech, and perhaps the world, the event that created the greatest social capital boom in history was the launch of Facebook's News Feed. Before News Feed, if you were on, say MySpace, or even on a Facebook before News Feed launched, you had to browse around to find all the activity in your network. Only a demographic of a particular age will recall having to click from one profile to another on MySpace while stalking one’s friends. It almost seems comical in hindsight, that we'd impose such a heavy UI burden on social media users. Can you imagine if, to see all the new photos posted in your Instagram network, you had to click through each profile one by one to see if they’d posted any new photos? I feel like my parents talking about how they had to walk miles to grade school through winter snow wearing moccasins of tree bark when I complain about the undue burden of social media browsing before the News Feed, but it truly was a monumental pain in the ass.
By merging all updates from all the accounts you followed into a single continuous surface and having that serve as the default screen, Facebook News Feed simultaneously increased the efficiency of distribution of new posts and pitted all such posts against each other in what was effectively a single giant attention arena, complete with live updating scoreboards on each post. It was as if the panopticon inverted itself overnight, as if a giant spotlight turned on and suddenly all of us performing on Facebook for approval realized we were all in the same auditorium, on one large, connected infinite stage, singing karaoke to the same audience at the same time.
It's difficult to overstate what a momentous sea change it was for hundreds of millions, and eventually billions, of humans who had grown up competing for status in small tribes, to suddenly be dropped into a talent show competing against EVERY PERSON THEY HAD EVER MET.
Incidentally, teens and twenty-somethings, more so than the middle-aged and elderly, tend to juggle more identities. In middle and high school, kids have to maintain an identity among classmates at school, then another identity at home with family. Twenty-somethings craft one identity among coworkers during the day, then another among their friends outside of work. Often those spheres have differing status games, and there is some penalty to merging those identities. Anyone who has ever sent a text meant for their schoolmates to their parents, or emailed a boss or coworker something meant for their happy hour crew knows the treacherous nature of context collapse.
Add to that this younger generation's preference for and facility with visual communication and it's clearly why the preferred social network of the young is Instagram and the preferred messenger Snapchat, both preferable to Facebook. Instagram because of the ease of creating multiple accounts to match one's portfolio of identities, Snapchat for its best in class ease of visual messaging privately to particular recipients. The expiration of content, whether explicitly executed on Instagram (you can easily kill off a meme account after you've outgrown it, for example), or automatically handled on a service like Snapchat, is a must-have feature for those for whom multiple identity management is a fact of life.
Many types of social capital have qualities which render them fragile. Status relies on coordinated consensus to define the scarcity that determines its value. Consensus can shift in an instant. Recall the friend in Swingers, who, at every crowded LA party, quips, "This place is dead anyway." Or recall the wise words of noted sociologist Groucho Marx: "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member."
The Groucho Marx effect doesn't take effect immediately. In the beginning, a status hierarchy requires lower status people to join so that the higher status people have a sense of just how far above the masses they reside. It's silly to order bottle service at Hakkasan in Las Vegas if no one is sitting on the opposite side of the velvet ropes; a leaderboard with just a single high score is meaningless.
Snapchat— Snapchat opens to a camera. If you want to text someone, it's extra work to swipe to the left pane to reach the text messaging screen. Remember Snapchat's original Best Friends list? I'm going to guess many of my readers don't, because, as noted earlier, old people probably didn't play that status game, if they'd even figured out how to use Snapchat by that point. This was just about as pure a status game feature as could be engineered for teens. Not only did it show the top three people you Snapped with most frequently, you could look at who the top three best friends were for any of your contacts. Essentially, it made the hierarchy of everyone's “friendships” public, making the popularity scoreboard explicit.
As with aggregate follower counts and likes, the Best Friends list was a mechanism for people to accumulate a very specific form of social capital. From a platform perspective, however, there's a big problem with this feature: each user could only have one best friend. It put an artificial ceiling on the amount of social capital one could compete for and accumulate. In a clever move to unbound social capital accumulation and to turn a zero-sum game into a positive sum game, broadening the number of users working hard or engaging, Snapchat deprecated the very popular Best Friends list and replaced it with streaks.
Social Arbitrage— Because social networks often attract different audiences, and because the configuration of graphs even when there are overlapping users often differ, opportunities exist to arbitrage social capital across apps. A prominent user of this tactic was @thefatjewish, the popular Instagram account (his real name was Josh Ostrovsky). He accumulated millions of followers on Instagram in large part by taking other people's jokes from Twitter and other social networks and then posting them as his own on Instagram. Not only did he rack up followers and likes by the millions, he even got signed with CAA! When he got called on it, he claimed it wasn't what he was about. He said, "Again, Instagram is just part of a larger thing I do. I have an army of interns working out of the back of a nail salon in Queens. We have so much stuff going on: I'm writing a book, I've got rosé. I need them to bathe me. I've got so many other things that I need them to do. It just didn't seem like something that was extremely dire." Which is really a long, bizarre way of saying, you caught me. Let he who does not have an army of interns bathing them throw the first stone.
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Someday soon, every place and thing in the real world—every street, lamppost, building, and room—will have its full-size digital twin in the mirrorworld ... We are now building such a 1:1 map of almost unimaginable scope, and this world will become the next great digital platform.
The first big technology platform was the web, which digitized information, subjecting knowledge to the power of algorithms; it came to be dominated by Google. The second great platform was social media, running primarily on mobile phones. It digitized people and subjected human behavior and relationships to the power of algorithms, and it is ruled by Facebook and WeChat.
We are now at the dawn of the third platform, which will digitize the rest of the world. On this platform, all things and places will be machine-readable, subject to the power of algorithms. Whoever dominates this grand third platform will become among the wealthiest and most powerful people and companies in history, just as those who now dominate the first two platforms have.
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www.forbes.com www.forbes.com
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Acton's $850M moral stand and the $122mn fine for deliberately lying to the EU Competition Commission
Under pressure from Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg to monetize WhatsApp, he pushed back as Facebook questioned the encryption he'd helped build and laid the groundwork to show targeted ads and facilitate commercial messaging. Acton also walked away from Facebook a year before his final tranche of stock grants vested. “It was like, okay, well, you want to do these things I don’t want to do,” Acton says. “It’s better if I get out of your way. And I did.” It was perhaps the most expensive moral stand in history. Acton took a screenshot of the stock price on his way out the door—the decision cost him $850 million.
Despite a transfer of several billion dollars, Acton says he never developed a rapport with Zuckerberg. “I couldn’t tell you much about the guy,” he says. In one of their dozen or so meetings, Zuck told Acton unromantically that WhatsApp, which had a stipulated degree of autonomy within the Facebook universe and continued to operate for a while out of its original offices, was “a product group to him, like Instagram.”
For his part, Acton had proposed monetizing WhatsApp through a metered-user model, charging, say, a tenth of a penny after a certain large number of free messages were used up. “You build it once, it runs everywhere in every country,” Acton says. “You don’t need a sophisticated sales force. It’s a very simple business.”
Acton’s plan was shot down by Sandberg. “Her words were ‘It won’t scale.’ ”
“I called her out one time,” says Acton, who sensed there might be greed at play. “I was like, ‘No, you don’t mean that it won’t scale. You mean it won’t make as much money as . . . ,’ and she kind of hemmed and hawed a little. And we moved on. I think I made my point. . . . They are businesspeople, they are good businesspeople. They just represent a set of business practices, principles and ethics, and policies that I don’t necessarily agree with.”
Questioning Zuckerberg’s true intentions wasn’t easy when he was offering what became $22 billion. “He came with a large sum of money and made us an offer we couldn’t refuse,” Acton says. The Facebook founder also promised Koum a board seat, showered the founders with admiration and, according to a source who took part in discussions, told them that they would have “zero pressure” on monetization for the next five years... Internally, Facebook had targeted a $10 billion revenue run rate within five years of monetization, but such numbers sounded too high to Acton—and reliant on advertising.
T he warning signs emerged before the deal even closed that November. The deal needed to get past Europe’s famously strict antitrust officials, and Facebook prepared Acton to meet with around a dozen representatives of the European Competition Commission in a teleconference. “I was coached to explain that it would be really difficult to merge or blend data between the two systems,” Acton says. He told the regulators as much, adding that he and Koum had no desire to do so.
Later he learned that elsewhere in Facebook, there were “plans and technologies to blend data.” Specifically, Facebook could use the 128-bit string of numbers assigned to each phone as a kind of bridge between accounts. The other method was phone-number matching, or pinpointing Facebook accounts with phone numbers and matching them to WhatsApp accounts with the same phone number.
Within 18 months, a new WhatsApp terms of service linked the accounts and made Acton look like a liar. “I think everyone was gambling because they thought that the EU might have forgotten because enough time had passed.” No such luck: Facebook wound up paying a $122 million fine for giving “incorrect or misleading information” to the EU—a cost of doing business, as the deal got done and such linking continues today (though not yet in Europe). “The errors we made in our 2014 filings were not intentional," says a Facebook spokesman.
Acton had left a management position on Yahoo’s ad division over a decade earlier with frustrations at the Web portal’s so-called “Nascar approach” of putting ad banners all over a Web page. The drive for revenue at the expense of a good product experience “gave me a bad taste in my mouth,” Acton remembers. He was now seeing history repeat. “This is what I hated about Facebook and what I also hated about Yahoo,” Acton says. “If it made us a buck, we’d do it.” In other words, it was time to go.
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markmcgranaghan.com markmcgranaghan.com
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All startups say they’re ambitious. You better be if you take venture funding!
Stripe’s insight was that tackling ambitious problems doesn’t just make the potential prize bigger. Ambitious efforts are often more feasible than smaller ones, because the strongest people want to work on the most ambitious efforts. In our experience this positive talent effect was stronger than the negative effect of problem difficulty. So, paradoxically, tackling a bigger problem could be both more rewarding for the company and in a sense more tractable.
This probably needs to be qualified. Stripe is set up so that we’re successful when our customers are successful (in real, economic terms). Ambitious problems for Stripe look like enabling more internet businesses and supporting entrepreneurs in more countries, not getting more ad clicks. The talent effect of ambition certainly applies to Stripe-style problems, but I’m not sure if it’d work for something like ads.
Again all startups say “our team is our most important asset”; leaders say “the hardest part of my job is hiring good people”. But what most companies actually do day-to-day on recruiting is disastrous: generic job ads, clueless outside recruiters, screening on brand name, candidate-hostile interview processes, slow response times, etc. The poor recruiting results of most companies reflect the work they put in.
Stripe was different in two respects: effort and thoughtfulness.
In terms of effort, Stripe’s recruiting was absolutely relentless. On the front of the pipeline this meant investing in potential candidates that wouldn’t apply for years, through genuine 1:1 relationships as well as many small events that introduce Stripe and its team. Once candidates were active, Stripe tried to move very quickly. Ideally we'd turn around recruiting steps on the same day: respond to the candidates inbound email the same day, and even decide on and give them an offer on the same day as their interviews. We could close candidates before Google replied to their initial emails.
Stripe was also thoughtful in recruiting processes. This signaled to candidates that the company was clueful and understood the candidate’s perspective. One example is Stripe’s capture the flag program, which not only put Stripe on the radar of a lot of candidates, but also gave them a sense of the strength of the engineering team. Another example was Stripe’s guidance on what to expect for interviews. We’d send candidates a PDF describing exactly how their interviews would be conducted, how they’d be evaluated, and how to prepare. These certainly helped candidates present their best work in the interviews. But they also showed that Stripe actually cares about this, which candidates knew from experience many other companies did not.
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zackkanter.com zackkanter.com
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Walmart can be thought of as a bounded search for the optimal selection, inventory, and pricing of SKUs that a local market could support. It was bound, or constrained, by the characteristics of the local economy, and so each Walmart location was a direct reflection of the local market dynamics. The immensely difficult job of the local management team was to predict and implement the optimal mix that could theoretically have been found if every possible permutation were tested by the local economy. Undershooting or overshooting – that is, having too few or many SKUs, or too little or much inventory – would be a costly mistake. By the same token, higher-level managers were responsible for estimating the optimal size and location of the building itself, and for choosing the best associates to manage it, and so on. Each level of management, then, was tasked with managing their own level of the algorithm.
Bezos, in other words, wanted to build an unbounded Walmart. By removing the constraint of geography – and therefore the local economy – and by adding search functionality, the new formula became simpler: the more SKUs it added, the more items would be discovered by customers; the more items that customers discovered, the more items they would buy. In this world of infinite shelf space, it wasn’t the quality of the selection that mattered – it was pure quantity. And with this insight, Amazon did not need to be nearly as good – let alone better – than Walmart at Walmart’s masterful game of vendor and SKU selection. Amazon just needed to be faster at aggregating SKUs – and therefore faster at onboarding vendors.
To make sense of what started to happen after Amazon rolled out Marketplace, you have to understand that things get really weird when you run an unbounded search at internet-scale. When you remove “normal” constraints imposed by the physical world, the scale can get so massive that all of the normal approaches start to break down.
So, what is Amazon? It started as an unbound Walmart, an algorithm for running an unbound search for global optima in the world of physical products. It became a platform for adapting that algorithm to any opportunity for customer-centric value creation that it encountered. If it devises a way to keep its incentive structures intact as it exposes itself through its ever-expanding external interfaces, it – or its various split-off subsidiaries – will dominate the economy for a generation. And if not, it’ll be just another company that seemed unstoppable until it wasn’t.
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www.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com
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“The most important thing is that we are not a news business. We are more like a search business or a social media platform,” Zhang said in a 2017 interview, adding that he employs no editors or reporters. “We are doing very innovative work. We are not a copycat of a U.S. company, both in product and technology.”
The story of how Bytedance became a goliath begins with news site Jinri Toutiao but is tied more closely to a series of smart acquisitions and strategic expansions that propelled the company into mobile video and even beyond China. By nurturing a raft of successful apps, it’s gathered a force of hundreds of millions of users and now poses a threat to China’s largest internet operators. The company has evolved into a multi-faceted empire spanning video service Tik Tok -- known as Douyin locally -- and a plethora of platforms for everything from jokes to celebrity gossip.
“The predominant issue in China’s internet is that the growth in users and the time each user spends online has slowed dramatically. It is becoming a zero-sum game, and costs for acquiring users and winning their time are increasing,” said Jerry Liu, an analyst with UBS. “What Bytedance has created is a group of apps that are very good at attracting users and retaining their time, in part, leveraging the traffic from Jinri Toutiao.”
What Zhang perceived in 2012 was that Chinese mobile users struggled to find information they cared about on many apps. That’s partly because of the country’s draconian screening of information. Zhang thought he could do better than incumbents such as Baidu, which enjoyed a near-monopoly on search. The latter conflated advertising with search results, a botch that would later haunt the company via a series of medical scandals.
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techcrunch.com techcrunch.com
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Spontaneity is the big thing you'll miss
Forget the calendar invite. Just jump into a conversation. That’s the idea powering a fresh batch of social startups poised to take advantage of our cleared schedules amidst quarantine. But they could also change the way we work and socialize long after COVID-19 by bringing the free-flowing, ad-hoc communication of parties and open office plans online. While “Live” has become synonymous with performative streaming, these new apps instead spread the limelight across several users as well as the task, game, or discussion at hand.
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www.wired.com www.wired.com
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you may be more likely to work alongside a robot in the near future than have one replace you. And even better news: You’re more likely to make friends with a robot than have one murder you. Hooray for the future!
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www.gauthierroussilhe.com www.gauthierroussilhe.com
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produire de nouvelles cultures techniques
la low-tech aurait donc plus à voir avec une «culture technique» que les objets techniques eux-mêmes; avec une intellectualisation de la technique plutôt qu’à son objectification.
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- Mar 2020
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txti.delightcreative.com txti.delightcreative.com
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Open a placeholder with txti.es to publish a post on your RedCamel Annotations blog.
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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document
drag and drop lets you annotate PDFs.
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[#contributor: /contributors/59327110a312645844994e4d]|||Free/libre software advocate Richard Stallman is president of the Free Software Foundation. He launched the development of the [free software](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) operating system [GNU](http://www.gnu.org/gnu/the-gnu-project.html) in 1984; the [GNU/Linux](http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html) system (essentially GNU with Linux added) is used on tens of millions of computers today. Stallman also founded the League for Programming Freedom, which campaigned against legal threats to programming (including patents).|||
Clear hints of Markdown syntax in a Wired Formatting error
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Skype is a clear example: when one person uses the non-free Skype client software, it requires another person to use that software too – thus surrendering their freedoms along with yours. (Google Hangouts have the same problem.) We should refuse to use such programs even briefly, even on someone else's computer.
which should be an alternative solution?
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Both non-free software and SaaSS can spy on the user, shackle the user, and even attack the user.
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assets.cengage.com assets.cengage.comuntitled1
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Integrating EducationalTechnology into the Curriculum
The article is very user friendly and effectively describes how to integrate tech into curriculum. Curriculum would be student centered, engaging, and promote higher levels of learning. 5/5
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lidtfoundations.pressbooks.com lidtfoundations.pressbooks.com
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(1) increasing access to educational technologies, (2) increasing the use of technology for instructional purposes, and (3) improving the effectiveness of technology use to facilitate learning.
Tech Framework needs to include: increase access to tech, increase tech instruction, use tech to facilitate learning 4/5
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researchworkspace.com researchworkspace.com
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Teledyne
I can make comments here, Teledyne is a high-tech sounding name.
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www.lastampa.it www.lastampa.it
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le nuove tecnologie sono presenti nella vita di tutti, sia lavorativa sia quotidiana. Spesso non ci rendiamo neanche conto che interagiamo con sistemi automatici o che disseminiamo sulla rete dati che riguardano la nostra identità personale. Per cui si produce una grave asimmetria tra chi li estrae (per i propri interessi) e chi li fornisce (senza saperlo). Per ottenere certi servizi, alcuni siti chiedono a noi di precisare che non siamo un robot, ma in realtà la domanda andrebbe capovolta
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«È necessario che l’etica accompagni tutto il ciclo della elaborazione delle tecnologie: dalla scelta delle linee di ricerca fino alla progettazione, la produzione, la distribuzione e l’utente finale. In questo senso papa Francesco ha parlato di “algoretica”»
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www.lastampa.it www.lastampa.it
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non sono gli utenti a essere incapaci di resistere alle sirene di Facebook e Instagram: sono i social network e gli smartphone a essere progettati appositamente per ottenere questo risultato.
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coffeescript.org coffeescript.org
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Underneath that awkward Java-esque patina, JavaScript has always had a gorgeous heart.
aww
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“La speranza è che potremo caricare la nostra auto elettrica mentre stiamo guidando su un’autostrada”
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