Good news, everyone… NOT!
Is this the end of forests as we've known them? (Via densediscovery.com.)
Forests also absorb around one-quarter of all human carbon emissions annually, and increasingly there are worries that if forests die back they will switch from storing carbon to emitting it, because dead trees will release all the carbon they have accumulated. This helps explain why much-touted proposals to plant millions of trees to suck up carbon and ameliorate the climate crisis are encountering skepticism; they won’t work if conditions on Earth don’t allow for forests to reproduce and thrive.
The traditional guidelines of typography about line-lengths, spacing, harmonies, and so on still apply on the web; it's just that we're now trying to apply them in a context where many of their parameters have become variable
Relevant: “So, how did I make a video game from a font?”
Melon Usk’s False Covid Predictions: A Timeline (via wt.social).
Relevant: Melon Usk, Starbase, and “Innovationism”.
Offensive Security.
What Happened to Pickup Trucks? (Via densediscovery.com.)
To fill the bottomless tank of a pickup … is to practice the religion of the American Way. It is to affirm climate denial, petrol-adventurism, and American exceptionalism.
Metaforecast is a search engine for probabilities.
Given a query, it searches for relevant questions in various prediction markets and forecasting platforms (namely CSET-foretell, Elicit, Foretold, Good Judgment, Good Judgment Open, Guesstimate, GiveWell & OpenPhilanthropy blogposts as of early 2021, Hypermind, Ladbrokes, Metaculus, Omen, Polymarket, PredictIt, Smarkets, William Hill, and Michael Aird's database of existential risk estimates).
Dolphin intelligence and humanity’s cosmic future.
If we truly are alone, in an otherwise mute cosmos, the positive impact of our actions could be truly astronomical in scope.
He got Facebook hooked on AI. Now he can't fix its misinformation addiction.
Everything the company does and chooses not to do flows from a single motivation: Zuckerberg’s relentless desire for growth. Quiñonero’s AI expertise supercharged that growth. His team got pigeonholed into targeting AI bias, as I learned in my reporting, because preventing such bias helps the company avoid proposed regulation that might, if passed, hamper that growth. Facebook leadership has also repeatedly weakened or halted many initiatives meant to clean up misinformation on the platform because doing so would undermine that growth.
Hunspell. 17 (ever so slightly) weird facts about the most popular dictionary format.
(…) the dictionary format of Hunspell has a lot of peculiarities. Depending on your mindset, you might find the facts below curious, fascinating, ridiculous, or just plain boring. From my perspective, they are, first of all, didactic: they demonstrate the blossoming complexity of organically evolved software that solves the complicated task.
Relevant: Rebuilding the spellchecker.
#TeamRSS
Newsletters are Walling Off Your Freedom.
The Internet started as a new frontier of mutualism and open protocols, and it seems at each crossroads, somebody is trying to stamp out or control the protocols and processes that enrich people through freedoms of the Internet.
Let’s play master and servant.
GitHub, f*ck your name change.
We’re going to change the branch name because it could be seen as offensive but we’re still going to sell police facial recognition software that is biased against black people and women. Facial recognition software that misidentifies black people as gorillas. Facial recognition software that was used to identify unmasked BLM protesters. We’re going to change the branch name to be more inclusive of minorities but we’re going to carry on selling software to ICE. Get the fuck outta here.
We really don’t need to arm police with any shitty, biased facial recognition software. Their eyes already do a perfectly good job of that. George Floyd and Breonna Taylor can both attest to that. I can attest to it.