We’re Building a Dystopia Just to Make People Click on Ads
We’re building an artificial intelligence-powered dystopia, one click at a time, says techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci. In an eye-opening talk, she details how the same algorithms companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon use to get you to click on ads are also used to organize your access to political and social information. And the machines aren’t even the real threat. What we need to understand is how the powerful might use AI to control us — and what we can do in response.
This is good.
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How Do You Go to a Gym, Though?
Casey Johnston, writing for The Hair Pin:
Kelly—I’m so glad you asked this, because as the Deepak Chopras and Oprahs and etc of the world will tell you, visualization is the key, or at least a key, to success. It’s impossible to prepare for every scenario but you wouldn’t know it to see my exhaustively anxious thought process. I am someone who tends to freeze up, and cannot, as they say, roll with the punches, so having thought through the motions does certainly help me. And Kelly, it can help you too.
This was hilarious.
Hannah’s playing with the Oregon Symphony tonight. She’s very excited and I’m very proud.
How to Heal the Left-Liberal Divide
Pete Davis, writing at Current Affairs:
Roughly speaking, these two sides could be characterized as the “populist wing” and the “establishment wing” of the party, but even the divide’s terminology is a point of controversy between the feuding sides. The party’s left wing, for example, wants to call the conflict the “left-liberal divide.” Loyalist Democrats want to play down the divide, calling for unity on the grounds that Democrats are either (if they are younger, millennial types) all members of the Left, or (if they are older, Clinton-era types) all “liberals.” The Right, meanwhile, does not understand the divide, continuing to believe in a monolithic “radical left” filled with “radical liberals.” This leads to the funny situation, as one commentator noticed, where members of both the Left and the Right reach for the same “I made it through college without becoming a liberal” t-shirt.
This is a good piece.
Add Favicons to Tabs in Safari
Faviconographer asks Safari.app for a list of all visible tabs (and their positions) in the current window, and for the URLs of those tabs.
It then uses that information to fetch the corresponding icons from Safari’s Favicon cache (WebpageIcons.db), and draws them above the Safari window.
It’s a “hack” — the cleanest solution would be Apple implementing Favicons in Safari — but it works surprisingly well.
Note: Faviconographer does not “hack” your system. It does not inject code into other apps or manipulate system files. In fact, it doesn’t even require Administrator access!
I’ve gotten used to not having favicons in tabs, but I know a lot of people live by them.
This Is for Boston
Isaiah Thomas, writing at The Players’ Tribune:
But that’s what I think my trade can show people. I want them to see how my getting traded — just like that, without any warning — by the franchise that I scratched and clawed for, and bled for, and put my everything on the line for? That’s why people need to fix their perspective. It’s like, man — with a few exceptions, unless we’re free agents, 99 times out of 100, it’s the owners with the power. So when players are getting moved left and right, and having their lives changed without any say-so, and it’s no big deal … but then the handful of times it flips, and the player has control … then it’s some scandal? Just being honest, but — to me, that says a lot about where we are as a league, and even as a society. And it says a lot about how far we still have to go.
This whole thing is fantastic and worth reading.
Pixelmator Pro Coming This Fall
Pixelmator, my image editor of choice, has announced their new “Pro” app coming later this year:
Pixelmator Pro is an image editor packed full of innovations. From a reimagined editing workflow and simplified editing tools to machine learning powering all-new, intelligent image editing features. So the tools at your fingertips are smarter and more powerful, yet more intuitive and easier to use than ever before.
It looks good.
Scenes From a Debacle in Phoenix
Dave Eggers, writing on Medium:
In downtown Phoenix, in the space of a few blocks, there were 15,000 Trump supporters and 10,000 anti-Trump protesters. There were Bikers for Trump and a platoon from the John Brown Gun Club, an anti-fascist group carrying loaded handguns and semiautomatic weapons. There were roving packs of weightlifters wearing pro-Trump attire. There were men in sleeveless Confederate flag jackets, and there was a giant inflated chicken made to look like Donald Trump. There was a man with a megaphone who asserted throughout the afternoon that homosexuals were going to hell, drunk drivers should die, and women who wore skirts deserved to be raped. There were anarchists, antifa, and hundreds of heavily armed police officers. This was a week after Charlottesville, the country grieving and boiling in the madness of its most irrational era, and in Arizona, it was more than 105 degrees and felt far hotter.
That no one died that day in Phoenix is miraculous.
YouTube Without Comments
If you use 1Blocker: here’s a package you can install that will make YouTube not suck. It cleans up the sidebar and hides all the comments. YouTube without comments is better.
‘Star Wars: Rebellion’ Expansion Set
Fantasy Flight Games is proud to announce the upcoming release of the Rise of the Empire expansion for Star Wars: Rebellion!
Inspired largely by the characters and events of Rogue One, Rise of the Empire introduces a plethora of new heroes, villains, starships, troopers, and vehicles from that film, alongside other characters, ships, and events from Star Wars: Rebels and the classic trilogy, plus new missions that add more drama and intrigue to your games.
Hannah and I have been playing the original board game, Star Wars: Rebellion, over the past few nights and it’s one of the best board games I’ve played in a long time. Can’t wait to check out this expansion set.
We’re playing Rebellion today. It’s basically our entire day so far. And it’s very fun and intense and massive.
Cloudflare’s Lava Lamps
When you walk into the San Francisco office of the cloud network and security firm Cloudflare, you’re greeted by a receptionist–and a giant wall of 100 lava lamps. It isn’t just a throwback to the 1960s. The lava lamps act as a random number generator, helping to encrypt the requests that go through Cloudflare, which make up 10% of all internet requests.[…]
Cloudflare turns the “Wall of Entropy” into encryption using a camera that photographs the wall every millisecond of every day of the year. Any one of the company’s systems can turn the display of pixels–which changes based on a multitude of factors, like the movement of the lava, the inclusion of anyone who’s walking by, and the shifting daylight–into random numbers.[…]
In London, they use dual pendulums. While a single pendulum swinging back and forth is very predictable, mathematicians have shown that if you take a pendulum and hang another pendulum from it, you’ll create a system that no one has figured out how to model.