I often wonder where we’d be if Google had spent their don’t-be-evil honeymoon actually interviewing people for some sort moral or ethical framework instead of teaching a generation of new hires that the important questions are all about how many piano tuners play ping pong on the moon.
Mike Hoye on what matters.
Long and kinda dense, but worth a read regarding the corrupt practices endemic in so-called “ethical AI” research.
An esoteric programming language designed to look and read like classical Chinese literature.
For the non-compsci set, an esoteric language is one that’s mostly meant “for funsies”, rather than something intended for wide scale use. Generally they can be used in this way—programming languages are for humans to understand, and by the time the code gets to the computer itself it’s been translated through several other layers of increasing abstraction anyway—but their oddball natures tend to make them, at minimum, difficult to write and even harder to maintain. But they’re pretty popular all the same, because programmers are Like That…
Your regularly scheduled reminder that Twitter is a cesspit that actively makes the world worse and that there are significantly better alternatives.
Disclaimer: I still have a Twitter account though it’s mostly a placeholder. I use it mostly for promotion and following a bunch of journalists as a kind of lazy cross-publication newsfeed.1 But all casual/social/personal stuff goes to Mastodon.
What if you could make an animated GIF entirely in CSS?
(Just in case it wasn’t obvious, this is kind of a joke/proof-of-concept and it is very processor intensive; it’s likely to crash browsers on older or mobile systems, so… don’t say I didn’t warn you!)
What if Linux took over the world and basically no-one noticed?
The obvious answer is, of course, that the vast majority of *NIX-based systems most people use are propriety, i.e. they’re Android and Mac-/iOS, meaning the *NIX community itself generally doesn’t “count” them. And the place where most “traditional” *NIX-type OSes are used, i.e. server infrastructure, is generally fairly inscrutable to non-technical types. But the reality is still the reality, and it’s actually Windows that’s the weirdly different hold-out operating system in the ecosystem.
Of course Giphy is going to retain its own brand. If they renamed it to “Facebook Tracking Pixels”, usage might drop off. Think about all the messaging apps that don’t offer Facebook integration for security/privacy reasons […] where Giphy images appear. You know, like Apple’s Messages. Well, now Facebook has tracking pixels in them.
John Gruber on acquisitions.
I know it’s kind of conceptually funny to think of Facebook getting smacked with antitrust lawsuits over, like, buying a website of dank memes… but this is the reason that it’s Big Srs, Actually.
James Mickens is always good value.
At the beginning of 2015, Alex Balk, then-editor of the now-defunct website the Awl, wrote a post of advice for young people in which he supplied three laws about the internet. The first: “Everything you hate about The Internet is actually everything you hate about people.” The second: “The worst thing is knowing what everyone thinks about anything.” But Balk’s third law was most prescient, especially as we end this miserable decade: “If you think The Internet is terrible now, just wait a while.” He went on: “The moment you were just in was as good as it got. The stuff you shake your head about now will seem like fucking Shakespeare in 2016.” Reader, we’ve waited a while, and today it seems indisputable that Balk’s law has held: The 2010s is the decade when the internet lost its joy.
Clio Chang on the corporate internet.
Things That Give Me Joy On The Internet:
