What the Superhuman Controversy Reveals About the Shifting Ethics of Software.
For years, Silicon Valley benefitted from tech reporting that was either breathless and laudatory or simply indifferent. Since the 2016 election, though, tech coverage has grown more skeptical, investigative, and serious—a shift from treating Silicon Valley as a novelty to seeing it as the power center it has become. The industry has been struggling to adjust to being the center of attention on outsiders’ terms.
some comics about guns.
The Serendipity Engine works just like an internal combustion engine and, like with a high performance muscle car, you need to feed it with the right kind of propellant.
In this analogy, the fuel is made of different activities, skills, and conversations. In my case I select them so that they are deliberately out of or tangential to my current professional domain. The engine also requires maintenance and fine tuning via iterations and changes to the activities or skills I become involved with.
Via kottke.org.
Mozilla SSL Configuration Generator.
Why are many humans so afraid of self-replicating, sentient robots, you ask? Well, here is my reply: humans pretty well know what a self-replicating, sentient being is capable of.
Is this tweet recursive? t.co
— Escher Bot (@mauritscorneIis) May 1, 2018
Our ideas about what early movies looked like are all wrong.
In particular, early 68mm film, which was less practical than 35mm film and thus used less frequently, delivered startlingly lifelike impressions of distant realities to early moviegoers.
Dann haben wir die Schuhe in jeder Schuhgröße 3.000 mal online gestellt, mit dem Titel: „Bild von Schuh XY“ und in die Produktbeschreibung geschrieben, dass es sich nicht um den Schuh handelt, sondern um sieben Produktbilder des Schuhs zu je 10 Euro. Aber das erkennt so ein Bot natürlich nicht. Der sucht ja einfach nur nach dem Produktnamen und denkt dann: „Kaufen. Kaufen. Kaufen.“ Das geile ist, du musst beim Check Out abhaken, dass du dir im klaren bist, dass du ein digitales Produkt kaufst und keinerlei Rückgaberecht hast. Sobald die dann bezahlt haben, kam das Ding bei denen per Email an, die Bots haben sich abgeschaltet und wir haben gesagt: „Danke!“ und hatten ganz fix einen sehr hohen Betrag eingenommen…
(…) da sind Supreme und Nike, die regelmäßig von Bots platt gemacht werden und nichts dagegen tun können und dann ist da so ein kleiner Pups-Shop aus Frankfurt, der die ganzen Bots auseinander nimmt.
Tworking.
Rubbing one's buttocks against keyboard in order to produce code.
What big history says about how royal women exercise power.
In most cases, for example, the women had no say in whom they married. They were used as bargaining chips by their male relatives in an eternally shifting landscape of political alliances. They answered to their husbands and were usually excluded from war- and policymaking. But they found other ways to exert influence, some of which were not available to men.