TeX: A tale of two worlds.

Here is where the timelines diverge. In one, TeX was just the beginning. Computer typography evolves rapidly as the decades go by, building on Knuth’s prior work and taking advantage of the million-fold increases we’ve seen in computing power. Browsers, e-readers, and word processors deliver beautiful type to every person who looks at a screen, with almost no effort from authors.

In the darker timeline… none of this happens.

Misinformation Has Created a New World Disorder (via scientificamerican.com).

Stress testing technology in the context of the worst moments in history might have illuminated what social scientists and propagandists have long known: that humans are wired to respond to emotional triggers and share misinformation if it reinforces existing beliefs and prejudices. Instead designers of the social platforms fervently believed that connection would drive tolerance and counteract hate. They failed to see how technology would not change who we are fundamentally—it could only map onto existing human characteristics.

Vietnam, Mongolei, Ruanda, Senegal, Uruguay.

Die Corona-Bändiger, die der Westen ignoriert.

Den ärmsten Ländern der Welt wurde in der Pandemie die Katastrophe vorhergesagt. Dabei haben einige von ihnen das Virus besser im Griff als viele Länder des Westens. Und ja: auch besser als Deutschland. Was haben sie anders gemacht?

git wip: What the heck was I just doing?

[alias]
  wip = for-each-ref --sort='authordate:iso8601' --format=' %(color:green)%(authordate:relative)%09%(color:white)%(refname:short)' refs/heads

Valley Novela.

Technology Review read the paper that Jeff Dean used to force Timnit Gebru out of Google.

Gebru, a widely respected leader in AI ethics research, is known for coauthoring a groundbreaking paper that showed facial recognition to be less accurate at identifying women and people of color, which means its use can end up discriminating against them. She also cofounded the Black in AI affinity group, and champions diversity in the tech industry.

rachelbythebay’s list of magic numbers.

The UX of Among Us: The importance of colorblind-friendly design.

ArchiveBox – The open source self-hosted web archive.

You feed it URLs of pages you want to archive, and it saves them to disk in a varitety of formats depending on the configuration and the content it detects.

More than 25 years later and still standing.

10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design.

Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction design. They are called "heuristics" because they are broad rules of thumb and not specific usability guidelines.

Hardly understand a thing but the title is just too amazing.

Weird Machines, Exploitability, and Provable Unexploitability (via googleprojectzero.blogspot.com).

The concept of exploit is central to computer security, particularly in the context of memory corruptions. Yet, in spite of the centrality of the concept and voluminous descriptions of various exploitation techniques or countermeasures, a good theoretical framework for describing and reasoning about exploitation has not yet been put forward.