Musks’s attack on Wikipedia is another step in getting rid of information sources where they can’t control the narrative and the “truth”. Everything they’re doing is built on lies.
Hans de Zwart’s end of the year media overviews are one of the highlights of what still happens on personal blogs for me. He’s a voracious reader and one of the rare people who acts on his moral clarity. Also, Hans is a great guy and I had the chance to briefly catch-up with him last year.
I get to have a lot of conversations around compliance and this is as good a “SOC2 for tech people” guide as I could have asked for by the good people at Fly.
Something that Ed Zitron has already mentioned, internet users are being trained very rapidly to suspect everything to be a scam. In the case of honey, it’s a Paypal owned online shopping extension that lies and deceives.
I made the mistake of opening the desktop Spotify app which does not really work anymore. The UI is broken and there’s lots of irrelevant stuff going on.
That’s an amazing overview of all the things that can and will go wrong in online PvP gaming. It covers the range from networking exploits to all the in-game ways that people try to grief or abuse others.
Seeing if I can move from Arc to Vivaldi but there are half a dozen radical improvements in Arc that *make* the experience. It just shows how much innovation and solid thinking was packed in all of that frivolous design.
Old people’s brains have been entirely cooked by the slop feeds that Meta produces. No parent worth their salt would trust these people to protect their kids. The EU should follow suit.
Data centres shouldn’t be using water for cooling in the first place. In the summer many parts of Europe are under water strain. It’s not weird that locals would oppose having a huge data center built near them.
Nicolas from All About Berlin has done so much to make living in this administrative nightmare bearable for people. It’s a very clear example of what kind of 10-100x improvements are there to be had.
Ribbonfarm retiring is another such ending in a time rife with them. I can’t overstate how influential it has been on my (our) thinking and practice. Tremendously impressive to think all of that was thought up by one person (who I still haven’t met).
Twitter’s ending is fine and can be the ending of more things as well as the beginning of other things. Delete all your stuff on that awful place and simply let go.
Turns out I hadn’t noticed my hosting provider Vimexx has their MySQL databases on latin1 coding and this blog was running on that happily corrupting data.
It’s become fashionable in tech circles to say that all legislation is bad. This is a dangerous and wildly ignorant way of thinking. Without legislation, many people would not survive and the very things that we depend on for a good life would not exist.
Wer täglich, manchmal mehrmals die Stunde, die Verdammten belächelt, ist wohl zu Recht in der Hölle. Twitter, so mussten wir uns eingestehen, war der Ort, den wir bewohnten, weil wir sehr schlechte Menschen waren.
Krasse Links looks like yet another collection of links but the German wall of text notwithstanding, it’s a remarkable act of curation and contextualisation. Remarkable and unique for sure in Germany.
Trying for years to explain to people that Germany has almost zero project power and is incapable of any progress and then suddenly a movement springs up that agrees entirely with that assessment.
A third truth is that we have a generation in crisis and in desperate need of the best of what science and evidence-based solutions can offer. Unfortunately, our time is being spent telling stories that are unsupported by research and that do little to support young people who need, and deserve, more.
Threads works functionally but as a product it’s very bad. As this article mentions being on Threads is a slow-motion exercise in going insane. Threads actively disables many things that make microblogging work and for the rest of the experience there’s very little thought that went into it other than “let’s make a text-based Instagram and see what happens”.
Netzpolitik has done a lot of good things, no doubt. But I’m left with a bit of a double feeling after reading Beckedahl’s farewell post. Imagine having spent 20 years to improve the state of the German internet (“eine bessere digitale Welt möglich ist”) and you leave with the situation like it is.
The comments online around the Apple Vision Pro have been pretty deranged in a stupid kind of way. Lots of people jumped to the foregone conclusion that Apple released a failure or that it “wasn’t going to be a success”. Most of that seemed to have been motivated by clout chasing.
The most vocal people in progressive/critical technology don’t have kids (for various reasons) and as such also have zero empathy for the real problems people deal with.
It’s much healthier for Germany if digital issues have an answer that goes beyond “Let’s see what the CCC has to say!” The CCC is a shady organization which is good at taking things apart but does not have that much constructive to offer.
Dropbox, a famously private file storage service, has shared files from people with OpenAI. I’d normally say this was a dumb move, but this is far far beyond just dumb.
Geertz’s theory of involution holds that a greater input (an increase in labor) does not yield proportional output (more crops and innovation). Instead, a society involutes. The Chinese term for involution, neijuan, which is made up of the characters for “inside”and “rolling,”suggests a process that curls inward, ensnaring its participants within what the anthropologist Xiang Biao has described as an “ endless cycle of self-flagellation.”Involution is “the experience of being locked in competition that one ultimately knows is meaningless,”Biao told me.
Suppose you’re a well-known journalists hosting a weekly rather left podcast around topics such as migration, the climate and criticism of right-wing frames in the media. And then suppose you let yourself get baited majorly by an American alt-right activist.
I can stop thinking about the Roman Empire, but this piece that draws an analogy between the Fall of the Romans and the End of Twitter is long overdue to be shared and still really good.
Life before there were mobile phones and internet was really totally different and simple and laid back. I got a bit of this but I think I got my first iBook during university and my first iPhone shortly after I got out of university.
Nice to see both the scale of the problems that Discord is attacking and the detail of the write-up of how they go about it. I always wondered whether migrating from Cassandra to Scylla would be worth it and it turns out that it is.
Frank Lantz has a well balanced take on the opportunities and perils of AI that is good (and if you didn’t think Harari was a grifter yet, you might after reading this).
Mensen die dit soort haatcampagnes de wereld in slingeren moeten strafbaar gesteld worden. De minste straf voor de aanjagers van dit soort haat zou een (social) media black-holing kunnen zijn; voor de komende zoveel jaar geen vertoon in media toegestaan.
Since the first time I saw when I was a kid, I loved Master and Commander. I had no idea that there were 20 books behind it or I would have probably read them.