Pocket, the read-it-later service, has been purchased by Mozilla:
Pocket will continue on as a wholly-owned, independent subsidiary of Mozilla Corporation. We’ll be staying in our office, and our name will still be on the wall. Our team isn’t changing and our existing roadmap has been reinforced and is clearer than ever. In fact, we have a few major updates up our sleeves that we are really excited to get into your hands in the coming months.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. likes The Dangerous Summer.
Many consider Junior the poster boy for old-school NASCAR. He’s actually not. He’s far more of a hipster than good old boy. His music taste? There’s Lord Huron, of course, and The Dangerous Summer, a rock band so obscure they broke up in 2014. Then there’s Matthew Good, a Canadian rocker, and Twenty One Pilots, semi-Emo rock band. While he says he’ll listen to any good song, from Taylor Swift to Barry Manilow, one genre is noticeably absent: country music.
Eugune Wei, writing on his blog, about the “Magic iPod”:
How such work is received by a human audience is about more than its intrinsic qualities, however. In an objective competition like a game of Go, or when considering a mashup which is simply the synthesis of existing creative works, I suspect humans will be comfortable with acknowledging the achievements of an algorithm.
With original creative works, however, like music, novels, movies, I suspect humans will recoil from even intrinsically appealing creation if it was written by a computer program. Call it some variant of the uncanny valley effect.
We have a romantic attachment to human creation, and it may take a generation of people passing on before we overcome that cultural aversion.
Joseph Bernstein, writing for BuzzFeed:
But it’s on YouTube where he really goes to work. Since Nov. 4, four days before the election, Seaman has uploaded 136 videos, more than one a day. Of those, at least 42 are about Pizzagate. The videos, which tend to run about eight to fifteen minutes, typically consist of Seaman, a young, brown-haired man with glasses and a short beard, speaking directly into a camera in front of a white wall. He doesn’t equivocate: Recent videos are titled “Pizzagate Will Dominate 2017, Because It Is Real” and “#PizzaGate New Info 12/6/16: Link To Pagan God of Pedophilia/Rape.”
Seaman has more than 150,000 subscribers. His videos, usually preceded by preroll ads for major brands like Quaker Oats and Uber, have been watched almost 18 million times, which is roughly the number of people who tuned in to last year’s season finale of NCIS, the most popular show on television.
Jessi Hempel, writing at Backchannel:
Tolia was dining with his communications director, Kelsey Grady, when her iPhone alerted them to the story’s publication. They read the lengthy feature together. It alleged that white Oakland residents were using the “crime and safety” category of Nextdoor to report suspicious activity about their black neighbors. “Rather than bridging gaps between neighbors, Nextdoor can become a forum for paranoid racialism — the equivalent of the nosy Neighborhood Watch appointee in a gated community,” wrote Pendarvis Harshaw.
Companies including Apple, Facebook and Microsoft released statements and tweets following the administration’s announcement on Wednesday to withdraw legal guidance put in place by the Obama administration in May. The guidance had directed schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms consistent with their gender identity.
Trump’s policy is inhumane and cruel.
Amazon is balking at a search warrant seeking cloud-stored data from its Alexa Voice Service. Arkansas authorities want to examine the recorded voice and transcription data as part of a murder investigation. Among other things, the Seattle company claims that the recorded data from an Amazon Echo near a murder scene is protected by the First Amendment, as are the responses from the voice assistant itself.
Twenty One Pilots’ hit “Heathens” has now spent 28 weeks at number one on the Hot Rock Songs chart, breaking the record set by Walk the Moon:
Now with 28 weeks at No. 1 (as of the chart dated March 4), “Heathens” — the duo’s single from the Suicide Squad soundtrack — has spent more time atop the chart than any other song, dating to the tally’s June 2009 inception.
NASA:
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star. Three of these planets are firmly located in the habitable zone, the area around the parent star where a rocky planet is most likely to have liquid water.
The discovery sets a new record for greatest number of habitable-zone planets found around a single star outside our solar system. All of these seven planets could have liquid water – key to life as we know it – under the right atmospheric conditions, but the chances are highest with the three in the habitable zone.
If we discover life on other planets while Trump is in office, humanity will have definitely jumped the shark.
Jay Z has become the first rapper inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. The full class of inductees was announced today:
Musical titans Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, Robert Lamm, James Pankow & Peter Cetera, p/k/a “Chicago,” Max Martin, and Shawn “JAY Z” Carter will become the latest inductees of the Songwriters Hall of Fame at the organization’s 48th Annual Induction and Awards Dinner. Berry Gordy, who deferred his induction in 2016, will also be part of the 2017 class.
Apple has announced details about their new campus, “Apple Park.”
Steve would have turned 62 this Friday, February 24. To honor his memory and his enduring influence on Apple and the world, the theater at Apple Park will be named the Steve Jobs Theater. Opening later this year, the entrance to the 1,000-seat auditorium is a 20-foot-tall glass cylinder, 165 feet in diameter, supporting a metallic carbon-fiber roof. The Steve Jobs Theater is situated atop a hill — one of the highest points within Apple Park — overlooking meadows and the main building.
A leaked memo from Uber’s CEO, Travis Kalanick, outlines how the company plans to respond to the allegations from a former employee:
First, Eric Holder, former US Attorney General under President Obama, and Tammy Albarran — both partners at the leading law firm Covington & Burling — will conduct an independent review into the specific issues relating to the work place environment raised by Susan Fowler, as well as diversity and inclusion at Uber more broadly. Joining them will be Arianna Huffington, who sits on Uber’s board, Liane Hornsey, our recently hired Chief Human Resources Officer, and Angela Padilla, our Associate General Counsel. I expect them to conduct this review in short order.
The big question will be what the company does after the review.
My favorite podcast client, Overcast, has had a big update for 3.0:
Overcast 3 is now available, and it’s a huge update, mostly in the design and flow of the interface. I’ve been working on it since last summer, informed by over two years of testing, usage, and customer feedback.
MacStories has as great review (and I don’t just say that because there’s a nice screenshot of Encore in it):
The most notable visual and practical change in Overcast 3.0, however, is the new episode action tray. Inspired by Tweetbot’s tap-to-reveal action drawer in the timeline, Overcast’s action bar groups and simplifies actions that were previously hidden behind swipe gestures or other menus nested in an episode’s page. Upon tapping an episode in a list, Overcast will display buttons to share, star, play, add to queue, and delete the selected item.
I spent all of yesterday listening to my favorite shows in the new version of the app, and it’s still by far my favorite way to listen to podcasts.
Susan J. Fowler, now an engineer at Stripe, wrote about her year at Uber:
Uber was a pretty good-sized company at that time, and I had pretty standard expectations of how they would handle situations like this. I expected that I would report him to HR, they would handle the situation appropriately, and then life would go on — unfortunately, things played out quite a bit differently. When I reported the situation, I was told by both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me, it was this man’s first offense, and that they wouldn’t feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to. Upper management told me that he “was a high performer” (i.e. had stellar performance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn’t feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part.
Mark Zuckerberg has outlined a new mission statement for Facebook:
This is a time when many of us around the world are reflecting on how we can have the most positive impact. I am reminded of my favorite saying about technology: “We always overestimate what we can do in two years, and we underestimate what we can do in ten years.” We may not have the power to create the world we want immediately, but we can all start working on the long term today. In times like these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.
For the past decade, Facebook has focused on connecting friends and families. With that foundation, our next focus will be developing the social infrastructure for community — for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.
Kara Swisher spoke with Mark over at Recode about the manifesto:
He is particularly concerned about the use of headlines as the only signal to online users. “In most news consumed on paper, the headline is not separate from the content,” he said. “Online the headline is often the only indicator and that is a problem.”
Zuckerberg seems to get how complex it is and how damaging fake news is to the Facebook platform. “Our community wants good information and no one ever said, ‘I want misinformation,’” he said.