Hola, frendz! Good 🎵 this week: discovered the bright & spacious jazzy prog of I Think You're Awesome, the Portishead-esque vibes of Oracle Hysterical, and the rhythmic sax of Roller Trio.
News:
- Kottke: The carrot is not important; chasing it is and I've never had a goal.
- New No’s by Paul Chan, written after US' 2016 election:
No to racists
No to fascists
No to taxes funding racists and fascists
No mercy for rapists
No pity for bigots
No forgiveness for nativists
No to all those
No hope without rage
No rage without teeth
No separate peace
No easy feat
No to bounds by genders
No to clickbait as culture
No to news as truths
No to art as untruths
No anti-Semitic anything
No Islamophobic anything
No progress without others
No meaning without meaning
No means no
No means no
No means no
No means no
- Grandmaster Flash hacked his first mixer using parts from Radio Shack.
- How would English sound if it were phonetically consistent?
- SMBC - Reverse Victorianism.
- xkcd #2033 - Repair or replace on our current attitude towards tech fix-ability.
- Tech:
- Neil Postman - Five things we need to know about technological change (original PDF).
- All technological change is a trade-off. For every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage.
- The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population. This means that every new technology benefits some and harms others.
- Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Every technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards.
- Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. The consequences of technological change are always vast, often unpredictable and largely irreversible.
- Media tend to become mythic. Cars, planes, TV, movies, newspapers — they have achieved mythic status because they are perceived as gifts of nature, not as artifacts produced in a specific political and historical context.
- xkcd#2030 - Voting software.
- Good comment from HN user notatoad about Google AMP:
AMP's innovation isn't a way to make pages fast. AMP is a way to sell other stakeholders on implementing technologies that make your website fast. All the stuff AMP does is stuff you could do yourself without the extra request to amp.js and the extra work to amp-ify your pages.
But imagine you've got an advertising department that wants three different ad networks, a couple different managers that want to see stats from a couple different analytics platforms, and and the designer wants to load a font from fontsquirrel and another one from typekit and another one from google web fonts, and as a developer who wants to keep the site fast you have to fight them every single time they want to add something else that slows your site down. Having the same fight every time, with everybody else saying "oh, it's just one request. and this one is really critical" it's hard to keep fighting that fight.
It's a lot easier to say "i can't do that, it doesn't work in AMP". If you can find a better way to convince large organizations that page load speed is a valuable metric, and more important that whatever other resource they want to load today, I'd love to hear it. But from what i've seen, AMP is the only thing that's had any success in tackling this problem.
- There's Waldo is a robot that finds Waldo.
- James Veitch: More adventures in replying to spam, thx bro.
- Google data collection research, via DF.
In “Google Data Collection,” Professor Douglas C. Schmidt, Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University, catalogs how much data Google is collecting about consumers and their most personal habits across all of its products and how that data is being tied together. The key findings include:
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A dormant, stationary Android phone (with the Chrome browser active in the background) communicated location information to Google 340 times during a 24-hour period, or at an average of 14 data communications per hour. In fact, location information constituted 35 percent of all the data samples sent to Google.
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For comparison’s sake, a similar experiment found that on an iOS device with Safari but not Chrome, Google could not collect any appreciable data unless a user was interacting with the device. Moreover, an idle Android phone running the Chrome browser sends back to Google nearly fifty times as many data requests per hour as an idle iOS phone running Safari.
