Understanding the Threat of “Surveillance Capitalism”.
This whole digital domain, which is now essentially owned and operated by surveillance capitalism, must come under the democratic rule of law and the governance of democratic institutions. Democracy has been literally asleep for two decades and that has to change—and it is changing.
Breaking a Degenerate Hyper-Dimensional Game of Life.
(…) discover successive new mathematical properties of a “degenerate” hyper-dimensional game of life" to take a “7 dimensions may just barely be possible on a commercial PC, could we ever reach 10 dimensions?” to “10 dimensions is easy enough to be run on any modern browser (jump to spoilers here), and 60 dimensions can be reached with a compiled language”.
‘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