Recent Articles

Christopher Mims:

His example was DDT, a pesticide and probable carcinogen that nonetheless saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in India as a cheap and effective malaria prevention. Today, we can see how one technology, Facebook groups, can serve as a lifeline for parents of children with rare diseases while also radicalizing political extremists.

Interesting set of rules, and the above is from the ‘technology is neither good nor bad, but both,’ section.

Farhad Manjoo:

As I’ve argued before, Twitter has become the small bowel of the American news landscape — the place where the narratives you see on prime-time cable are first digested and readied for wider consumption. It’s no accident that it is President Trump’s social network of choice. And it’s also no accident that foreign powers are attracted to Twitter. According to its recent congressional testimony, Twitter was a primary target of Russian trolls who sought to influence last year’s presidential election; collectively, trolls created millions of election-related tweets, according to the company, some of which were widely cited across the media.

Great update to keep the app feeling perfect with iOS. The new D12 theme is also really great, I think a lot of people are going to love using it.

GORUCK started their deals on all bags (just not black ones) this week. $250 for a GR1 is a fucking steal, I grabbed another one. If you’ve been waiting: get on it. Ranger Green and Steel are both awesome colors.

These are easily the best backpacks money can buy.

Sandy Parakilas:

Facebook is free to do almost whatever it wants with your personal information, and has no reason to put safeguards in place.

That’s got to be a terrifying sentence for any Facebook user.

Keith Collins:

Since the beginning of 2017, Android phones have been collecting the addresses of nearby cellular towers—even when location services are disabled—and sending that data back to Google. The result is that Google, the unit of Alphabet behind Android, has access to data about individuals’ locations and their movements that go far beyond a reasonable consumer expectation of privacy.

Quartz observed the data collection occur and contacted Google, which confirmed the practice.

This is hardly surprising.

One complaint I kept hearing when people started getting access was: “I can’t see how many followers I have”, or “there’s no one here”. But that’s thinking about it wrong. Micro.blog in my eyes is a platform for openly sharing your content to other places.

That’s why the content starts on my site and get’s pushed to Micro.blog and from there to Twitter. I would hope that this could lead to more services. Let those services fuck around and breach privacy, Micro.blog can remain pure and easy to use. I like that much better.

I have one of these as well, love it.

Melissa Hogenboom:

Misleading by “telling the truth” is so pervasive in daily life that a new term has recently been coined to describe it: paltering.

As noted, this is very common in business.

When I first saw this, I was ready to say “Fuck Twitter” yet again (and still, they deserve that monicker for many things), but the more I think about this, the more I think this might be borderline accidental genius. Think about it like this, the people with these badges really seem to care about them. So what’s a bigger ego blow: being removed from Twitter as a martyr, or losing your status?

Losing your status is a much larger blow to the ego, then being made martyr. So good on Twitter for this one, assuming that is they actually follow through. And hell, they even got me to link to The Verge.

In short, iCloud unless you like to be, umm, particular about file management. Also, I in no way agree that the speed differences are negligible. DEVONthink is slow as fuck.

Kevin Roose, in an otherwise uninteresting article:

The sensors on cars used by Waymo, the self-driving-car division of Alphabet, Google’s corporate parent, have struggled in heavy rain and snow.

Editor: “Waymo, that’s the Google company right? Be sure to point that out to juice the SEO.”
Roose: “Actually it’s an Alphabet company.”
Editor: “Yeah, they are Google, so say that.”
Fact Checker: “You’re going to have to say that Waymo is a division of Alphabet, and Alphabet also owns Google — if that’s the connection you really want to make.”
Roose: “Fuck me.”

Cory Doctorow:

That presents a paradox: if the purpose of lifehacking is to mindfully choose your priorities, what can you do when that process leads you to a position where no more choices are possible?

Quinn Norton:

Technically Americans work slightly more hours per year than the Japanese, but neither of those numbers include unpaid overtime or extra work you’re supposed to do around and for your regular job. Uncounted, this work remains unreal, though its consequences are harder to dismiss. The Japanese have defined a form of death-from-productivity: karōshi. Karōshi is when you are so productive your heart or head break and you bleed to death inside yourself. Conversely, if those organs have persisted but the mind has not, karōshi can become karojisatsu: suicide from overwork.

Mike Allen, relaying a comment from Sean Parker:

“The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’”

Caroline Knorr:

What do the big tech companies say to the criticism that they’re designing addictive products? They typically give the business argument, that they’re creating products people love to use and are constantly trying to improve people’s experience (Facebook says it polls users daily to gauge success).

I was going to write some thoughts I have about the X, but Justin’s thoughts mirrors mine.