‘Facebook Nation’ May Be Closer Than We Think.
Their products are addictive, their motive is solely to make money and their infrastructure – how they work – is incredibly technical and complicated. Even when we have clear examples of their harm, like their role in a genocide in south-east Asia or, closer to home, boosting COVID misinformation, we struggle to believe that we are being manipulated. The manipulation is not being carried out by a screaming dictator or a military general. It is silent, psychological and insidious.
Not all early human societies were small-scale egalitarian bands.
The idea that human nature was forged in a chaos of sundry social environments might be more distressing than a narrative about small, egalitarian bands. But it explains the breadth of human behaviour and the ease with which we live in modern societies. The world today is unlike anything humans have experienced, yet in terms of their hierarchy, sedentism and political complexity, the societies we’ve built might still be deeply familiar.
AskNature.
If the history of life on Earth were put to a 24‑hour clock, humans would have been here shaping the world for mere seconds. As latecomers, it’s time to begin asking the rest of our complex planetary family how to build a more resilient, regenerative, and beautiful world.
Relevant: The Biology of Disinformation – Memes, media viruses, and cultural inoculation.
For decades, it was nearly impossible to type in Urdu online. Meet the people fighting to digitally preserve its script.
Spoken by nearly 170 million people in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, Urdu is written in an alphabet derived from Arabic. But while Arabic is written in a script called naskh, simpler and more linear in its appearance, many other people — including Iranians, Afghans, Pakistanis, Urdu-speakers in India, and Uighur-speakers in parts of China — employ an ornate style of writing that originated in 14th-century Persia called nastaʿlīq.
The last miles and miles of the vaccine.
(…) consulting company Deloitte, a huge federal contractor, with a $16 million no-bid contract to manage “covid-19 vaccine distribution and administration tracking.” In December, Deloitte snagged another $28 million for the project, again with no competition. The contract specifies that the award could go as high as $32 million, leaving taxpayers with a bill between $44 and $48 million. (…) And, who else is involved in all of this? Our good friends at Palantir.
Alaska has the highest rate of sexual assault in the nation. These women and men did not choose to be violated, but they now choose to speak about what happened.
Better BASHing Through Technology.
Before we get to the implementation, make sure you are using ShellCheck it provides static analysis of your scripts, pointing out many things like missing quotes, or incorrectly handling arrays.
21 Bad Front-End Habits to Drop in 2021.
- Pretending Tech is Neutral
Dependency Confusion: “How I Hacked Into Apple, Microsoft and Dozens of Other Companies.”
The idea was to upload my own “malicious” Node packages to the npm registry under all the unclaimed names, which would “phone home” from each computer they were installed on. If any of the packages ended up being installed on PayPal-owned servers — or anywhere else, for that matter — the code inside them would immediately notify me
Relevant: For The Love Of All That's Holy, Use CCL To Control Complexity In Your Systems.
Corona-Impfungen: Geimpft – was nun?
Gerade jetzt bei Corona zeigt sich, wie egoistisch die Menschen sind. Ihnen geht es hier gut, die wissen gar nicht, was Unfreiheit ist. Und dann stellen sie sich hin und sagen, sie fühlen sich ihrer Freiheit beraubt. Das ist der größte Schwachsinn. Ja, sind wir denn unfrei, weil wir zum Schutz anderer Masken tragen, Abstand halten und keine Partys feiern? Nein.
Esther Bejarano, 96, Musikerin. Als Holocaust-Überlebende besucht sie seit vielen Jahren Schulen und hält die Erinnerung wach.