I slipped on JavaScript’s Banana Peel.

If you’ve contributed to a few open source projects, you might be familiar with the special kind of shame that results from a reverted patch. My embarrassment in this case was “extra special” because I didn’t even understand the rationale.

List of emerging technologies.

What the Hell Is Going On With Bitcoin?

As Dan Gross wrote in his book Pop!, the soapsuds of burst bubbles often fertilize the next generation’s breakthrough technologies. Before the national telegraph, train system, and tech giants, there was a telegraph bubble, a train bubble, and (who could forget?) a dot-com and online-retail bubble. The blockchain, like each of those technologies, has the potential to become a critical piece of infrastructure for the digital economy, even if the price of bitcoin is crashing as you read this paragraph.

Εxodus is a privacy auditing platform for Android applications. It detects behaviors which can be dangerous for user privacy like ads, tracking, analytics, …

The Case for Not Being Born.

While good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place.

#PlasticPolluters

Plastic pollution is a nightmare. Globally, 300 million tons of plastic are produced annually, and up to 12 million tonnes of plastic waste enter the sea each year. In some places around the world, plastic pollution has been extremely severe with catastrophic effects on the environment and people.

It's a Mistake to Focus Just on Animal Extinctions.

If lions disappeared except from one small corner of Kenya, the prey they keep in check would run amok everywhere else. If sparrows were no more except in one Dutch forest, the seeds that sparrows disperse would stay in place everywhere else. If honeybees became isolated to one American meadow, the flowers that they pollinate would fail to reproduce everywhere else. None of those species would be extinct per se, “but we’d still be in very bad shape” (…)

The End of the Social Era Can’t Come Soon Enough.

Will a future generation look back in 10, 20, or maybe 100 years from now and wonder, mystifyingly, why a generation of humans believed in these platforms despite mounting evidence that they were tearing society apart—being used as terrorist recruitment tools, facilitating bullying, driving up anxiety, and undermining our elections—despite the obvious benefits and facilitations they provide?

Why Building More Freeways Makes Traffic Worse, Not Better.

The Internet Is Dying. Repealing Net Neutrality Hastens That Death.

(…) a vibrant network doesn’t die all at once. It takes time and neglect; it grows weaker by the day, but imperceptibly, so that one day we are living in a digital world controlled by giants and we come to regard the whole thing as normal.