Collected Friday Feed, 2021

The Collected Friday Feed, 2021 Anthony Starks

Friday Feed January 1, 2021 Timnit Gebru’s Exit From Google
Exposes a Crisis in AI With Gebru’s firing, the civility politics that yoked the young effort to construct the necessary guardrails around AI have been torn apart, bringing questions about the racial homogeneity of the AI workforce and the inefficacy of corporate diversity programs to the center of the discourse. Systems design explains the world: volume 1 I don't think any of us really understood what boxes-and-arrows engineering really was back then, but luckily for you, now I'm old. Let me tell you some stories. Is Substack the Media Future We Want? The newsletter service is a software company that, by mimicking some of the functions of newsrooms, has made itself difficult to categorize. The Evolution of American Protests After the Death of George Floyd: COVID-19, BLM and the Election 2020 has been a turbulent year for every country but particularly in the USA. Civil unrest surrounding the pandemic has been compounded by Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrations as well as by a disruptive national election. Using data collected by the US Crisis Monitor from ACLED and the Bridging Divides Initiative between May 24 - Nov 28, we clustered 17,946 demonstration events. Boston Dynamics Dancing Robots It's pretty awesome how dancing makes robots less intimidating. Looking forward to seeing more nontrivial Machine Learning on these robots.

Friday Feed January 8, 2021 Painting a girl taking a
selfie, with mathematics. This is math, computer science and extreme artistic talent. How the Oxford-AstraZeneca Vaccine Works An adenovirus helps prime the immune system to fight the coronavirus. Apple's privacy labels reveals Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger's hunger for user data As the world now grapples with Facebook's privacy changes that require users to compulsorily share their Whatsapp data with the social media platform, Apple's privacy labels update all but confirms what we always knew. That, data collected by Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger is far in excess of what its competitors do. What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry 1. Beware of the Curse of Knowledge, 2. Focus on the Fundamentals, 3. Simplicity, 4. Seek First to Understand, 5. Beware of Lock-In, 6. Be Honest and Acknowledge When You Don’t Fit the Role Side project: an open source intercom for kids using Raspberry pi and Telegram When it was done my kid liked it way more than I could ever expect. What I conceived as an utilitary tool to keep us connected when I wasn’t close soon became a part of a game of exchanging messages about every little action in the everyday routine, even when we are just a few meters away

Friday Feed January 15, 2021 What’s Wrong with the Way
We Work Americans are told to give their all—time, labor, and passion—to their jobs. But do their jobs give enough back? Parler Users Breached Deep Inside U.S. Capitol Building, GPS Data Shows The data, obtained by a computer hacker through legal means ahead of Parler’s shutdown on Monday, offers a bird’s eye view of its users swarming the Capitol grounds after receiving encouragement from President Trump — and during a violent breach that sent lawmakers and Capitol Hill visitors scrambling amid gunshots and calls for their death. 70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers However, after the news about the data scrape went global, the author of the hack @donk_enby explained in a tweet that neither her nor others have collected any personal data that Parler users did not make public themselves. Internet 3.0 and the Beginning of (Tech) History It turns out that when it comes to Information Technology, very little is settled; after decades of developing the Internet and realizing its economic potential, the entire world is waking up to the reality that the Internet is not simply a new medium, but a new maker of reality. The paradox of online “body positivity” NBC News spoke to seven women in their teens and 20s who said that the content they viewed on the app had “pushed them to fixate more on their diets and exercise regimens to a dangerous extent.” Sissy Sheridan, a 16-year-old actress and social media star who is often cited as “body goals” among TikTokers, tweeted earlier this year that “i liked my body before I downloaded TikTok.”

The Bitcoin Dream Is Dead Bitcoin’s recent 25% plunge illustrates
why it will never be a true currency

Friday Feed January 22, 2021 Capitol Attack Was Months in
the Making on Facebook Facebook spent the past year allowing election conspiracies and far-right militia activity to proliferate on its platform, laying the groundwork for the broader radicalization that fueled the Capitol insurrection in the first place. Intel Problems What is more concerning is that the question is no longer about seizing an opportunity but about survival, and it is the United States that has the most to lose. Exploring the Supply Chain of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines The following text is a collection of notes I wrote down while exploring the process for manufacturing and distributing the two new vaccines that have appeared all over the news and in more and more people’s arms over the recent weeks. I started reading about mRNA but quickly found myself on tangents about glass vials and temperature tracking devices. Cancer can be precisely diagnosed using a urine test with artificial intelligence As a noninvasive method, a diagnostic test using urine is convenient for patients and does not need invasive biopsy, thereby diagnosing cancer without side effects. Google threatens to remove its search engine from Australia if new law goes into effect Google is threatening to pull its search engine from an entire country — Australia — if a proposed law goes into effect that would force Google to pay news publishers for their content. Have We Already Been Visited by Aliens? An eminent astrophysicist argues that signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life have appeared in our skies. What’s the evidence for his extraordinary claim?

Star Wars PDP-11/45 Restoring the original computer used to produce
the grapics for Star Wars Why webcams aren't good enough After consulting numerous webcam buying guides and reviews, purchasing a handful of the most popular models, and testing them in varying lighting situations, I can't escape the grim truth: there are no good webcams. Even webcams recommended by reputable outlets produce poor quality imagery—a significant failing, given it’s the one job they're supposed to provide.

Friday Feed January 29, 2021 How to teach technical concepts
with cartoons This post is about a few patterns I use when illustrating ideas about computers. If you are interested in using drawings to teach people about your very favorite computer topics, hopefully this will help you! Has the Pandemic Transformed the Office Forever? Companies are figuring out how to balance what appears to be a lasting shift toward remote work with the value of the physical workplace. Cuffless device delivers clinically accurate blood pressure measurements The portable, cuffless and calibration-free Minshi device measures blood pressure when pressure is gently applied to either side of the device by gently squeezing between thumb and forefinger. Following simple game-style instructions displayed by the dedicated app and pressing on the V-Sensor on the Minshi occludes the arteries in the tip of the index finger – exactly the same as the proven Riva-Rocci method used by a blood pressure cuff. Trump Riots synchronized I synced up the videos scraped from Parler and published by ProPublica, so you can watch the Trump riots unfold from many perspectives. Send This to Anyone Who Wants to Know WTF Is Up With GameStop Stock How a horde of Redditors are destroying various hedge funds and becoming rich.

Friday Feed February 5, 2021 Demystifying Vaccination Metrics Nine considerations
when reading COVID-19 vaccination charts The Next Cyberattack Is Already Under Way Amid a global gold rush for digital weapons, the infrastructure of our daily lives has never been more vulnerable. Nextdoor Is Quietly Replacing the Small-Town Paper While Facebook and Twitter get the scrutiny, Nextdoor is reshaping politics one neighborhood at a time 20,000 honey bees took over a tech company’s empty office during lockdown For amidst the building’s abandoned desks and silent phones, 20,000 honey bees were hard at work, building a hive filled with 10 gallons’ worth of honey, beeswax, and pollen, Jeff Bezos Exits Stage Right Amazon has a huge advantage in both digital and physical logistics; that’s better than a moat, it’s two moats. It’s a moat surrounded by a ring of fire with a dragon inside.

Friday Feed February 12, 2021 The man who produced Steve
Jobs’ keynotes for 20 years. If you look at the primitive narratives in Steve’s presentations at NeXT, you can see the influence that our experience at Pixar had on the storytelling over time that resulted in events like the iPhone launch. Making Vaccine Back in December, I asked how hard it would be to make a vaccine for oneself. Months after TikTok apologized to Black creators, many say little has changed TikTok's popularity has been significantly helped by Black creatives, whose trends, dances and challenge ideas were often scooped up and repackaged by white creators, boosting those creators to internet stardom. Africa's Hit Science Show For Kids Is Coming To The U.S. Educators have praised the show for prominently featuring women. Christine Kathurima, principal of Nova Pioneer Schools, an independent school network spanning preschool to secondary grades in Kenya and South Africa, describes N*Gen as "absolutely ground-breaking in the quality and the African female presenters." The Doctor Will Sniff You Now What can one’s odor tell about one’s health? Apparently, a lot. The information that can be picked up from the airborne molecules is amazingly rich

Friday Feed February 19, 2021 Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?
At artificial-intelligence conferences, researchers are increasingly alarmed by what they see. The Business Of Influence With MKBHD Marques Brownlee is one of the best reviewers I know, and also one of the most savvy and successful YouTubers. And he’s been in the game for a long time: he started the channel MKBHD in 2009 when he was just a teenager making videos about his new HP laptop. Since then, he’s grown it to one of the biggest tech channels on YouTube, with 13.5 million subscribers, a podcast, and a growing support team. Interactive Simulation of Perseverance Landing on Mars Just scroll NASA’s Perseverance Rover Sends Sneak Peek of Mars Landing This high-resolution still image is part of a video taken by several cameras as NASA’s Perseverance rover touched down on Mars on Feb. 18, 2021. A camera aboard the descent stage captured this shot. Snowshoe Art In this video I show you how I created this design. This project took 6 hours and about 10.1 miles of walking. It was more challenging than some of my other projects... wait until the end SolarWinds: How Russian spies hacked the Justice, State, Treasury, Energy and Commerce Departments The hidden virus spread to 18,000 government and private computer networks by way of one of those software updates we all take for granted. The attack was unprecedented in audacity and scope. Russian spies went rummaging through the digital files of the U.S. departments of Justice, State, Treasury, Energy, and Commerce and for nine months had unfettered access to top-level communications, court documents, even nuclear secrets. And by all accounts, it's still going on.

Friday Feed February 26, 2021 Perseverance Rover’s Descent and Touchdown
on Mars (Official NASA Video) The real footage in this video was captured by several cameras that are part of the rover's entry, descent, and landing suite. The views include a camera looking down from the spacecraft's descent stage (a kind of rocket-powered jet pack that helps fly the rover to its landing site), a camera on the rover looking up at the descent stage, a camera on the top of the aeroshell (a capsule protecting the rover) looking up at that parachute, and a camera on the bottom of the rover looking down at the Martian surface. The Parachute Message from Perseverance The clever folks at JPL hid secret messages in the marking of the parachute that deployed as Perseverance landed on Mars Timnit Gebru's ouster shows how Big Tech dominates AI ethics For AI to work in the best interest of all members of society, the power dynamics across the industry must change. The people most likely to be harmed by algorithms—those in marginalized communities—need a say in AI’s development. “If the right people are not at the table, it’s not going to work,” Gebru says. “And in order for the right people to be at the table, they have to have power.” Iceberger Draw an iceberg and see how it will float. Data + Diversity: Exploring the Data Visualizations of W.E.B Du Bois Join us as we celebrate the life and visualizations of Black American civil rights activist, sociologist and writer, W.E.B. Du Bois. Jason Forrest, Director of Interactive Data Visualization at McKinsey, and Anthony J Starks, Independent Consultant. Jason will explore Du Bois's visualizations and how they came to be, while Anthony will take you through his journey of how he recreated the Du Bois Data Portraits.

Modules, monoliths, and microservices Remember, ChromeOS is a monolith. iOS
is a monolith. Your team is probably much smaller than either of those teams. You simply don't need to juggle a lot of microservices to get what you want. Architect things the easy way until you're absolutely forced to do them the hard way.

Friday Feed March 5, 2021 E-mail Is Making Us Miserable
In an attempt to work more effectively, we’ve accidentally deployed an inhumane way to collaborate. New AI ‘Deep Nostalgia’ brings old photos, including very old ones, to life But Deep Nostalgia can take photos from any camera and bring them to “life.” The program uses pre-recorded driver videos of facial movements and applies the one that works best for the still photo in question. Its intended purpose is to allow you to upload photos of deceased loved ones and see them in “action,” How to Build an Artificial Heart Millions of hearts fail each year. Why can’t we replace them? Bias, disrespect, and demotions: Black employees say Amazon has a race problem Interviews with diversity managers and internal data obtained by Recode indicate that Black Amazon employees are promoted less frequently and are rated more harshly than non-Black peers. The ZX81 computer, turns 40 today For many, the ZX81 offered a gateway to not only computing and coding itself, but also into the rich and growing world of video games. Its legacy today is alive and well today thanks to the revival of such computer relics, with similar models showing a renaissance in gaming circles and the wider tech industry.

Friday Feed March 12, 2021 Encode Mighty Things People from
around the world decoded the message in the parachute they designed. Encode your own message. How Black Americans used portraits and family photographs to defy stereotypes They seized upon the camera to represent themselves, using photographs to depict who they really were. Seemingly a “magical instrument” for “the displaced and marginalized,” as critic bell hooks writes, the camera provided “immediate intervention” to counter the injurious images used to deny them their rightful place in American society. 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2021 mRNA vaccines, GPT-3, Tik-Tok recommendation algorithms, Lithium Metal batteries, Data trusts, Green Hydrogen, Digital contract tracing, Hyper-accurate positioning, Remote everything, Multi-skilled AI How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation The company’s AI algorithms gave it an insatiable habit for lies and hate speech. Now the man who built them can't fix the problem. The most engaging political news on Facebook? Far-right misinformation. A new study shows that before and after the election, far-right misinformation pages drew more engagement than all other partisan news. Beeple sold an NFT for $69 million Until October, the most Mike Winkelmann — the digital artist known as Beeple — had ever sold a print for was $100. Today, an NFT of his work sold for $69 million at Christie’s. The sale positions him “among the top three most valuable living artists,” according to the auction house.

Friday Feed March 19, 2021 Who Is Making Sure the
A.I. Machines Aren’t Racist? When Google forced out two well-known artificial intelligence experts, a long-simmering research controversy burst into the open. The Buzzy, Chatty, Out-of-Control Rise of Clubhouse Paul Davison and Rohan Seth’s audio-only app is the tech crush of the pandemic. Now comes the hard part: hosting a global gabfest, without the toxicity. The uneasy intimacy of work in a pandemic year How capitalism and the pandemic destroyed our work-life balance. The End of Silicon Valley as We Know It? the inventions we most urgently need will take us in a very different direction than the consumer internet and social media revolution that is coming to an unsightly end. Photographer Spends 12 Years, 1250 Hours, Exposing Photo of Milky Way Finnish astrophotographer J-P Metsavainio has released a Milky Way photo that took him nearly 12 years to create. The 1.7-gigapixel image has a cumulative exposure time of 1,250 hours. A Pandemic Winner: How Zoom Beat Tech Giants To Dominate Video Chat Looking back, the 9-to-5, everybody needs to be in the same place at the same time during that window so you can pound on a computer for eight hours straight — that's in our rear view mirror

Friday Feed March 26, 2021 End Meeting for All When
we remember this time, we’ll do so through a bunch of little boxes on a laptop screen. The photographer Thomas Dworzak captured our strange, sad year on Zoom. What Data Can’t Do When it comes to people—and policy—numbers are both powerful and perilous. Finance Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser calls for Zoom-Free Fridays and new bank holiday as pandemic fatigue grows The blurring of lines between home and work and the relentlessness of the pandemic workday have taken a toll on our well-being,” Fraser said in the memo. “It’s simply not sustainable. Since a return to any kind Uptime 15,364 days - The Computers of Voyager This talk explores the computing systems of Voyager - the systems which enable remote control of the spacecraft, and provide for the recording and return of data to Earth. These systems have proved to be both adaptable, durable, and resilient in support of a scientific undertaking now in it's fifth decade. Part of Wright brothers' 1st airplane on NASA's Mars chopper NASA's experimental Martian helicopter holds a small swatch of fabric from the 1903 Wright Flyer, the space agency revealed Tuesday. The helicopter, named Ingenuity, hitched a ride to the red planet with the Perseverance rover, arriving last month.

Friday Feed April 2, 2021 The Robots Are Coming For
Your Office If you have the kind of job that involves sitting in front of a computer using the same software the same way every day, automation is coming for you. It won’t be cool or innovative or even work all that well — it’ll just be cheaper, faster, and less likely to complain. The Louvre has digitized 482,000 artworks The Collections database consists of entries for more than 480,000 works in the Musée du Louvre and Musée National Eugène-Delacroix. Updated on a daily basis, it is the result of the continuous research and documentation efforts carried out by teams of experts from both museums. What FaceID really looks like How the Face ID (or ‘TrueDepth’) sensor housed the iPhone “notch” works. Here’s FaceID in action, shot in infrared: (see also: https://lux.camera/iphone-12-camera-review/) Think You Can Tell the Difference Between Human and AI? Take This Test What makes a painting uniquely human? Is music generated by artificial intelligence really that different from what a human makes? Can you tell when a machine learning program has created the image you’re looking at? Siri gets two more male and female voices Hi, I'm Siri, choose the voice you'd like me to use

Friday Feed April 9, 2021 Beauty filters are changing the
way young girls see themselves Researchers don’t yet understand the impact that sustained use of augmented reality may have, but they do know there are real risks—and with face filters, young girls are the ones taking that risk. They are subjects in an experiment that will show how the technology changes the way we form our identities, represent ourselves, and relate to others. A Computer Scientist Who Tackles Inequality Through Algorithms Rediet Abebe uses the tools of theoretical computer science to understand pressing social problems — and try to fix them. FDA approves first test of CRISPR to correct genetic defect causing sickle cell disease After six years of work, that experimental treatment has now been approved for clinical trials by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, enabling the first tests in humans of a CRISPR-based therapy to directly correct the mutation in the beta-globin gene responsible for sickle cell disease. The WeWork Documentary Explores a Decade of Delusion Jed Rothstein’s film about the rise and fall of Adam Neumann’s real-estate startup isn’t an example of epic, Ken Burns-style storytelling. But it’s a good yarn. Google v. Oracle Supreme Court Decision Google’s copying of the Java SE API, which included only those lines of code that were needed to allow programmers to put their accrued talents to work in a new and transformative program, was a fair use of that material as a matter of law.

Friday Feed April 16, 2021 Star Trek + Design Being
drawn to the aesthetics of Trek, especially of The Next Generation, made me curious about the the specific objects that set designers used to create the visual embodiment of what living and working on a starship would look like in a technologically-advanced, post-scarcity future. How “My Octopus Teacher” Defied Convention r the course of a year evolved from curiosity to care—even to love. And though her own feelings were left for viewers to interpret, the film’s indelible impression was of nature populated by species who are not only beautiful and exquisitely evolved and ecologically important, but highly sentient, too. How Facebook let fake engagement distort global politics: a whistleblower's account in the 2.5 years I’ve spent at Facebook, I’ve … found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry Over the course of 7,800 scathing words, Zhang outlined Facebook’s failure to combat political manipulation campaigns akin to what Russia had done in the 2016 US election. “We simply didn’t care enough to stop them,” she wrote. “I know that I have blood on my hands by now.” Apple vs. Facebook: Why iOS 14.5 Started a Big Tech Fight A new privacy feature in Apple’s iOS 14.5 requires apps to request permission to track you. And Facebook isn’t happy about it. WSJ’s Joanna Stern put Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook into the ring to explain why this software update has kicked off a tech slugfest. A 'Worst Nightmare' Cyberattack: The Untold Story Of The SolarWinds Hack NPR's months-long examination of that landmark attack — based on interviews with dozens of players from company officials to victims to cyber forensics experts who investigated, and intelligence officials who are in the process of calibrating the Biden administration's response — reveals a hack unlike any other, launched by a sophisticated adversary who took aim at a soft underbelly of digital life: the routine software update.

Friday Feed April 23, 2021 First Flight of the Ingenuity
Mars Helicopter: Live from Mission Control Up, up, and away! The Ingenuity #MarsHelicopter is set to make history. It will make the first attempt at powered flight on another planet on Monday, April 19. The Incredible Rise of North Korea’s Hacking Army The country’s cyber forces have raked in billions of dollars for the regime by pulling off schemes ranging from A.T.M. heists to cryptocurrency thefts. Can they be stopped? Software designers, not engineers An interview from alternative universe In my universe, we treat the creation of software as a design activity, putting it as a third item on the same level as science and art. Somewhat simplistically, science studies the natural world using experiments and its aim is to discover the truth. Art is concerned with human experience, it works via metaphors and aims for justice. Design studies the artificial, it does so using the method of synthesis and its objective is appropriateness. The Most Important Role You’re Not Hiring for Your Data Team: The Information Architect Three case studies that show how Information Architecture design can impact data visualization Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model Apple’s M1 positioning, evaluated in its totality, claims the CPU is cheap and unremarkable enough to be sold at $699, powerful and capable enough to sell at $1699, and power-efficient enough to power both a tablet and a pair of laptops priced in-between.

Friday Feed April 30, 2021 Breaking Camp Basecamp announced it
would ban “societal and political discussions” at work. But the hardest conversations at work were about the company itself. Facebook Stopped Employees From Reading An Internal Report About Its Role In The Insurrection. You Can Read It Here. After BuzzFeed News reported on an internal document that examined the social network’s failings leading up to the Capitol riot, many of Facebook's employees were prevented from accessing it. TikTok and the Vibes Revival Increasingly, what we’re after on social media is not narrative or personality but moments of audiovisual eloquence. 'Full Of Hatred And Fear': Disinformation On YouTube Divided A Dad And Daughter "The last time I saw my dad, he was painting my house," Ekwoge says. "He came and helped paint all weekend. It was nice when we lived closer and had ways to hang out that didn't include nonsense videos." Zoom’s Immersive View could make video calls feel a bit more in-person Immersive View builds on the virtual background features Zoom already has, but focuses on actually placing meeting attendees in a realistic-looking location, rather than just switching out a flat background. Just because you can work from home doesn’t mean you’ll be allowed to Which jobs are heading back to the office and which can stay home varies widely.

Friday Feed May 7, 2021 How Pixar Uses Hyper-Colors to
Hack Your Brain The animation studio’s artists are masters at tweaking light and color to trigger deep emotional responses. Coming soon: effects you’ll only see inside your head. The Five Rules of Harmony in the Art of Federica Fragapane Data visualization as an art should strive for harmony. Here’s how award-winning information designer Federica Fragapane achieves it. 80% of the 22M comments on net neutrality rollback were fake Of the 22 million comments submitted to the FCC regarding 2017’s controversial rollback of net neutrality, some 18 million were fake, an investigation by the New York Attorney General’s office has found. The broadband industry funded the fraudulent creation of about 8.5 million of those, while a 19-year-old college student submitted 7.7 million, and the remainder came from unknown but spurious sources. How China turned a prize-winning iPhone hack against the Uyghurs An attack that targeted Apple devices was used to spy on China’s Muslim minority—and US officials claim it was developed at the country’s top hacking competition. Microsoft says pandemic ‘turbocharged’ digital transformation Enterprises have also become more socially aware during the pandemic. In the survey, 76% said the pandemic “has placed fresh responsibility on companies to play a constructive role in wider society.” And 75% said any digital transformation plans should go beyond business motivations to include the impact on society.

Friday Feed May 14, 2021 Employees grapple with re-entry anxiety
as jobs call them back https://www.axios.com/work-offices-coronavirus-safe-vaccines-9e2337ea-eb8d-4e96-9ab8-e1fa6586f629.html What the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack can teach us about national cybersecurity defense The ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline on May 7, 2021, exemplifies the huge challenges the U.S. faces in shoring up its cyber defenses. The private company, which controls a significant component of the U.S. energy infrastructure and supplies nearly half of the East Coast’s liquid fuels, was vulnerable to an all-too-common type of cyber attack. The FBI has attributed the attack to a Russian cybercrime gang. It would be difficult for the government to mandate better security at private companies, and the government is unable to provide that security for the private sector. Just 12 People Are Behind Most Vaccine Hoaxes On Social Media, Research Shows Now that the vaccine rollout is reaching a critical stage in which most adults who want the vaccine have gotten it, but many others are holding out, these 12 influential social media users stand to have an outsize impact on the outcome. Information Graphic Visionaries As RJ describes it, his goal for the series is to “celebrate the tradition of our craft, celebrate the people who have gone before, who lit the way and gave us the torch to keep running forward.” He describes falling in love with not just Willard’s, Nightingale’s, and Marey’s iconic graphics, but with the ideas they were meant to convey and the approach each took to data communication. Programming and Writing One year ago I paused my programming life and started writing a novel, with the illusion that my new activity was deeply different than the previous one. A river of words later, written but more often rewritten, I’m pretty sure of the contrary: programming big systems and writing novels have many common traits and similar processes.

Friday Feed May 21, 2021 Amazon’s Ring is the largest
civilian surveillance network the US has ever seen One in 10 US police departments can now access videos from millions of privately owned home security cameras without a warrant Someone mailed an AirTag to themselves to see if they could track its route Apple's AirTag item tracker is now on sale and people are already putting them through their paces. But just how accurate is the tracking capability of the little plastic pucks? That's something Dutch YouTuber AirtagAlex wanted to find out, so they mailed an AirTag to themselves and watched it work its way through the Dutch mail service. Distribution and Demand Cable mogul John Malone, a major Discovery shareholder, said that although he believes Time Warner is doing fine, merging content and distribution usually doesn’t make sense. “I think that the technology of connectivity and digital technologies are one focus, and creating content that people get addicted to is another focus,” he said. “And you seldom would find both of those in the same management team.” Unequal Scenes Unequal Scenes uses a drone to illustrate the inscribed history of our world in a new way. The scars within our urban fabric, so apparent from above, can provoke a sense of surprise…But also reveal our complicity in systematic disenfranchisement. Metric Display Standards Best practices for presenting numbers that change with time

Friday Feed May 28, 2021 A disturbing, viral Twitter thread
reveals how AI-powered insurance can go wrong Lemonade tweeted about what it means to be an AI-first insurance company. It left a sour taste in many customers’ mouths. NYC’s School Algorithms Cement Segregation. This Data Shows How What both students couldn’t help but notice was how many White students shuffled up to one floor and how many students of color moved on to the others. Park Slope was 10 percent White during the 2019–20 school year, compared to 46 percent at Millennium. “I enjoy most of my classes,” Grumbach-Bloom, who is White, said, “and I think the main thing that’s missing is a diverse group of students in my classes.” Vizio makes nearly as much money from ads and data as it does from TVs Those low-priced TVs are a vehicle for advertising and they can track what you're watching. Mars in 8K 8K images from the surface of Mars made by Curiosity Rover. a day in the life of an engineer working from home I'm sorry I'm late. No worries, I'm sure there was a lot traffic from your bedroom to your living room.

Friday Feed June 4, 2021 Employees Are Quitting Instead of
Giving Up Working From Home The drive to get people back into offices is clashing with workers who’ve embraced remote work as the new normal. Amazon devices will soon automatically share your Internet with neighbors Amazon's experimental wireless mesh networking turns users into guinea pigs. Can Apple change ads? Much more interesting, though, is what happens if Apple opens up its cohort tracking and targeting, and says that apps, or Safari, can now serve anonymous, targeted, private ads without the publisher or developer knowing the targeting data. Google says it’s committed to ethical AI research. Its ethical AI team isn’t so sure. Six months after Timnit Gebru left, Google’s ethical artificial intelligence team is still in a state of upheaval. 5 unconventional ways to appreciate beauty Early in my career in art and design, the one question that used to bother me a lot is ‘How exactly do I appreciate art?’ and connecting to this ‘Why do people tell a work is beautiful?’.

Friday Feed June 11, 2021 I helped pioneer UX design.
What I see today disturbs me Instead of challenging teams to stretch their thinking to address deeper and subtler user needs, product design practices have become increasingly less insight-driven. UX processes in many organizations these days amount to little more than “UX Theatre” Good internet service is still a luxury in the US Lower-income Americans are way less likely to have broadband. How A New Team Of Feds Hacked The Hackers And Got Colonial Pipeline's Ransom Back The Justice Department has assembled a new task force to confront ransomware after what officials say was the most costly year on record for the crippling cyberattacks. It managed to recover $2.3 million of the ransom paid by Colonial Pipeline in an attack earlier this year, the department announced Monday. What Really Happened When Google Ousted Timnit Gebru She was a star engineer who warned that messy AI can spread racism. Google brought her in. Then it forced her out. Can Big Tech take criticism from within? Work from Home & Productivity: Evidence from Personnel & Analytics Data on it Professionals These findings suggest that communication and coordination costs increased substantially during WFH, and constituted an important source of the decline in productivity. Employees with children living at home increased hours worked more than those without children at home, and suffered a bigger decline in productivity than those without children.

Friday Feed June 18, 2021 Winners and Losers of the
Work-From-Home Revolution High-income workers at highly profitable companies will benefit greatly. Downtown landlords won’t. When Graphs Are a Matter of Life and Death Pie charts and scatter plots seem like ordinary tools, but they revolutionized the way we solve problems. What If Doctors Are Always Watching, but Never There? The child’s death left us shaken, with one question hanging like a dagger in the room: What could we have done to notice his decline sooner—while he was still just edging toward the precipice, and not after he had started the steep, downward slide? The coming productivity boom When you put these three factors together—the bounty of technological advances, the compressed restructuring timetable due to covid-19, and an economy finally running at full capacity—the ingredients are in place for a productivity boom. The Document Culture of Amazon Reading documents is so ingrained in our culture and process that our scheduling tools have check boxes to automatically create a document. If I’m catching up on a new service or feature launch, I will find the document rather than emailing or calling the product manager.

Friday Feed June 25, 2021 How a Sharp-Eyed Scientist Became
Biology’s Image Detective Using just her eyes and memory, Elisabeth Bik has single-handedly identified thousands of studies containing potentially doctored scientific images. NASA inches closer to printing artificial organs in space Researchers used 3D-printing to create human liver tissue that could soon be tested on the International Space Station. As The Pandemic Recedes, Millions Of Workers Are Saying 'I Quit' As pandemic life recedes in the U.S., people are leaving their jobs in search of more money, more flexibility and more happiness. Many are rethinking what work means to them, how they are valued, and how they spend their time. Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out Scientists said their findings, published in the journal Annals of Oncology, show that the test accurately detects cancer often before any signs or symptoms appear, while having a very low false positive rate. Here are the visual changes Microsoft showed off in Windows 11 Microsoft announced Windows 11 today, and one of the headline features of the “next generation” operating system is its visual overhaul. It’s released an entire video about how it designed its new OS, which shows off the new rounded corners, icons, and more

Friday Feed July 2, 2021 The Black experience at work
in charts The scale of the issues facing Black US workers is massive, and the roots of the problem are deep. As a recent article explained, “Inequality is baked deep into our current capitalist society.” Many researchers see the challenges as rooted in the socioeconomic and racial history of the United States. Watch a police officer admit to playing Taylor Swift to keep a video off YouTube ‘You can record all you want. I just know it can’t be posted to YouTube.’ What Deadlines Do to Lifetimes Can we find a balance between structuring our time and squandering it? Google reports soaring attrition among Black women What Google calls an attrition index, with 100 as a baseline, registered at 121 last year for Black+ workers in the United States compared with 112 in 2020. For Latinx+ employees, it jumped to 105 last year from 97. This Changed Everything: Source Code for WWW x Tim Berners-Lee, an NFT Sold at aution for $5,434,500

Friday Feed July 9, 2021 It’s not just bad behavior.
Social media was designed to infuriate people We studied how online disagreements unfold on YouTube, Facebook, and WhatsApp—and found design flaws in each platform. How a Harvard Professor Makes Transforming Toys and Designs Chuck Hoberman's eponymous sphere is one of the best-loved toys of the last quarter century. But it's only one example of his incredible work in transformable design. From adaptive nanotech to flexible building materials, Hoberman has created surprising and inventive designs at every scale. FIDENZA Fidenza is my most versatile generative algorithm to date. Although it is not overly complex, the core structures of the algorithm are highly flexible, allowing for enough variety to produce continuously surprising results. I consider this to be one of the most interesting ways to evaluate the quality of a generative algorithm, and certainly one that is unique to the medium. Sheikh Zayed Masjid Skylight - Abu Dhabi - How to draw Islamic Geometry This pattern is yet another one of those universal ones, seen in mandalas and other sacred art.

Friday Feed July 16, 2021 Man Wrongfully Arrested By Facial
Recognition Tells Congress His Story Robert Williams was arrested last year in Detroit after a facial recognition system misidentified him as a suspect. A People’s History of Black Twitter, Part I Black Twitter has become the most dynamic subset not only of Twitter but of the wider social internet. Capable of creating, shaping, and remixing popular culture at light speed, it remains the incubator of nearly every meme (Crying Jordan, This you?), hashtag (#IfTheyGunnedMeDown, #OscarsSoWhite, #YouOKSis), and social justice cause (Me Too, Black Lives Matter) worth knowing about. Amazon's Data Dragnet Amazon is expanding into every corner of people’s lives with its growing list of products and services. That’s allowing it to collect far more data about its users than many people realize. Inside the Industry That Unmasks People at Scale Unique IDs linked to phones are supposed to be anonymous. But there’s an entire industry that links them to real people and their address. How to Achieve Sustainable Remote Work Companies must move away from surveillance and visible busyness, and toward defined outcomes and trust.

Friday Feed July 23, 2021 The Tyranny of Spreadsheets These
were 16,000 people who should have been warned they were infected and a danger to others, 16,000 cases contact tracers should have been running down to figure out where the infected went, who they met and who else might be at risk. None of which was happening. Why had the cases disappeared? Apparently, Microsoft Excel had run out of numbers. Investigation: How TikTok's Algorithm Figures Out Your Deepest Desires The Wall Street Journal created dozens of automated accounts that watched hundreds of thousands of videos to reveal how the social network knows you so well DeepMind says it will release the structure of every protein known to science Now the firm has announced that it has used its AI to predict the shapes of nearly every protein in the human body, as well as the shapes of hundreds of thousands of other proteins found in 20 of the most widely studied organisms, including yeast, fruit flies, and mice. The breakthrough could allow biologists from around the world to understand diseases better and develop new drugs. The Framework Laptop is now shipping, and press reviews are up! “A poster child for the right-to-repair movement, Framework’s modular laptop is one of the smartest designs I’ve seen in a long time.” No Employee Left Behind How to stop wasting money and design an experience every employee will legitimately love.

Friday Feed July 30, 2021 She risked everything to expose
Facebook. Now she’s telling her story. Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook, revealed that it enables global political manipulation and has done little to stop it. Doctors altered a person’s genes with CRISPR for the first time in the U.S. Here’s what could be next. A woman with sickle cell anemia had her genes edited to make normal functioning red blood cells. On the Heels of Foot Soldiers Fueled by the power of love, Black Voters Matter co-founder LaTosha Brown wants the next generation of activists to learn from the music and wisdom of the past and to press on to protect voting rights in the rural South and beyond. Common UI/UX mistakes devs make I reviewed 100+ user interfaces this year. Avoid the most common 18 mistakes to make your UI/UX design bette Stat of the day: 38% of remote workers work from bed Forget the home office — 45% of American teleworkers regularly work from a couch, 38% regularly work from bed and 20% often work outside, according to a study by the home improvement marketing firm CraftJack.

Friday Feed August 6, 2021 The Oxymoron of “Data-Driven Innovation”
So garden variety Pareto Principle-style business thinking doesn’t work for inclusive decisions, and companies can incur costly failures by mis-applying it, and companies can achieve momentous victories by approaching inclusion differently. Designing for the edges can produce something better for everyone. 640 Pages in 15 Months Remember back on Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood when he would take you to a factory and show you how pencils or umbrellas are made? I love that stuff, so I thought maybe you might like to see what I spent the past year on. You can read this as a peek behind the curtain, or maybe a long apology for why it took so long. Fooling neural networks it is easy to generate perceptually meaningless images that will be classified as any given class with high confidence The World Wide Web turns 30 On August 6, 1991, without fanfare, British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee published the first-ever website while working at CERN, the huge particle physics lab in Switzerland. Blues Wireless: Notecard The Notecard combines prepaid global cellular, low-power hardware, simple software design, and secure communications into a single SoM.

Friday Feed August 13, 2021 End of the line for
Uber Uber is a bezzle ("the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it"). Every bezzle ends. Gazing at the Mother Tongue Analyzing Twitter’s Image Cropping Algorithm on Bilingual Memes: Her experiment shows how the algorithm favors cropping Latin scripts over Arabic scripts and what this means in terms of harms to linguistic diversity and representation online. The IBM PC, 41 Years Ago But in August 1980, one year earlier, IBM started putting together the design of the IBM PC. If that (one year) sounds like an awfully short development cycle for a product like the PC, that’s because it was, especially for a company like IBM where the typical product development cycle was closer to five years at the time. The tight schedule determined the PC design: No custom or not yet available chips, no major software development, favor proven and familiar technologies. Nvidia Reveals Its CEO Was Computer Generated in Keynote Speech Nvidia pulled off a stunt to promote and showcase its latest technology by digitizing its CEO Jensen Huang in a conference keynote. Tiny tools and the ephemeral nature of digital art… I think it’s fascinating how certain art will outlive the tools it was made in, or some tools will outlive the art… with formats once supported in that tool just dying out and no longer being something you can even see.

Friday Feed August 20, 2021 The Beauty of Bézier Curves
Bézier curves - how do they do? They're used for animation, text rendering, and all sorts of curved shapes! But how do they actually work? well, like, that's what the video is about, so, watch it to find out etc The little-known human stories behind emoji designs "My father's music is message music, to uplift the world from its slumbering mentality," says reggae musician Andrew Tosh. f you open your emoji keyboard and search for "levitating", you will find a tiny picture of a man dressed in a dapper black suit, hat and shades How digital beauty filters perpetuate colorism An ancient form of prejudice about skin color is flourishing in the modern internet age. How Two Bored 1970s Housewives Helped Create The PC Industry For its part, Vector Graphic went on to become one of the best known PC makers of the late 1970s. Like Apple, it was one of the first computer companies to go public, and like Apple, it set its products apart from the crowd with its attention to industrial design. 1800s Astronomical Drawings vs. NASA Images Of all the gorgeous, funny, odd, and impressive items I’ve stumbled upon, the E. L. Trouvelot astronomical pastel drawings sit in my top ten. Trouvelot was a French immigrant to the US in the 1800s, and his job was to create sketches of astronomical observations at Harvard College’s observatory.

Friday Feed August 27, 2021 The Secret Bias Hidden in
Mortgage-Approval Algorithms Nationally, loan applicants of color were 40%–80% more likely to be denied than their White counterparts In certain metro areas, the disparity was greater than 250% Use Technology Like the Amish Engage in a similar reflection about the devices and apps you already use. What do they add to your life? What do they take away? If you have a family, consider holding your own version of an Amish community council to hash things out together. The Story of Playdate We’re a small software company that makes Mac/iOS apps. For our 15th anniversary, I’ve been tinkering with an idea: find our 150 best customers, manufacture something incredibly special, and send it to them. Why are hyperlinks blue? When the hyperlink was created, limited colors were available. Today we have almost every color option, so what should be the default color and state of links on the internet? When given every opportunity to deviate from tradition, do we do so for the sake of progress, or should we keep the blue because it’s an established visual pattern? Linux turns 30: Linus Torvalds on his "just a hobby" operating system In 1991, Unix was an important but secondary x86 operating system. That year, on August 25, a mild-mannered Finnish graduate student named Linus Benedict Torvalds announced on the Usenet group comp.os.minix that he was working on "a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." No one knew it, not even Torvalds, but the technology was going to change forever.

Friday Feed September 3, 2021 Apple Cares About Privacy, Unless
You Work At Apple The company has taken a strong stance on safeguarding its customers’ data — but some employees don’t believe it protects theirs Why Do We Work Too Much? In the modern office, stress has become a default metric for judging whether we are busy enough. Brooks, Wirth and Go Instead, each revolution of the wheel is spun until it arrives exactly where it started, with the promise of new beginnings. Luckily, there are exceptions. Here’s one of them. How I Write Code: Pen & Paper Steve Jobs once talked about computers being like a bicycle for our minds. To me it feels like a lot of times we expend lots of energy on bikeshedding rather than actually riding our bikes. And maybe we should also get off our bikes every once in a while, and just walk. Stanford researchers develop an engineered ‘mini’ CRISPR genome editing system Bioengineers have repurposed a “non-working” CRISPR system to make a smaller version of the genome engineering tool. Its diminutive size should make it easier to deliver into human cells, tissues and the body for gene therapy.

Friday Feed September 10, 2021 Meet the Little-Known Genius Who
Helped Make Pixar Possible You may not be able to pinpoint Smith’s presence in the code of the alpha channel or in the swooping camera pivot in The Wrath of Khan. But it’s there. The breakthrough behind the Pixar films was that it didn’t matter that movie screens and iPads were streaming bits entirely created within computers—the emotions they unleashed were as vivid as those produced by a human performance How Slack Changed Apple’s Employee Culture, With Zoë Schiffer Apple employees are demanding more transparency and input than ever, and they’re doing it in public, in a way that challenges Apple’s secretive, top-down corporate culture. The pushback is real, and it starts with the introduction of one software tool to Apple’s workplace: Slack. Meetings suck. Can we make them more fun? As hybrid and remote work become the norm, meetings are including video game and virtual reality elements to increase engagement. In the Middle of the Great Resignation, Employers Are Rejecting Millions of Qualified Workers, New Harvard Research Finds And while the research turns up a number of issues, the lion's share of the blame falls on companies' recruiting practices, particularly due to specific job descriptions and automated hiring software that unnecessarily screens out many qualified candidates. Our fridge just emailed us to say we opened its door too many times in the past month I hope it’s not learning at a geometric rate. If it continues I fear my family and I will be taken out of all fridge door opening decisions.

Friday Feed September 17, 2021 Portable Analyzer Brings Blood Testing
to Rural Areas Indian researchers create a Raspberry-Pi-based device to monitor health Dieter Rams' principles of good design applied to software engineering Good software is... Ebooks Are an Abomination Given the entrenched history of bookiness, a book is less a specific thing than an echo of the long saga of bookmaking—and an homage to the idea of a book bouncing around in our heads, individual and collective. That makes books different from other human technologies Apple events are a useful indicator of what the company cares about. And this time, there were a few recurring themes: Hundreds of scientists had worked on mRNA vaccines for decades before the coronavirus pandemic brought a breakthrough. Webcams and battery life: What mattered at Apple's latest event Apple events are a useful indicator of what the company cares about. And this time, there were a few recurring themes:

Friday Feed September 24, 2021 This 3D Map of the
Undersea Cables Connecting the Globe is Mesmerizing A world of information is thrumming through miles of cables laying on the ocean floor. This map will show you where they are. Black Girls Code's Founder on the Power of Trusting Your Intuition Kimberly Bryant says listening to her gut, despite what others advised her, was one of the best moves she ever made for her company. FILE NOT FOUND A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans The bias that blinds: why some people get dangerously different medical care Medical research and practice have long assumed a narrow definition of the ‘default’ human, badly compromising the care of anyone outside that category. How can this be fixed? “Completely Running Blind.” Apple’s Power Move To Kneecap Facebook Advertising Is Working. People are opting out of Facebook’s tracking for a reason: they no longer trust the company with their data after years of evidence they should not. But the context of Apple’s power move is important too. The company competes with Facebook’s messaging apps, and it’s working hard to build a robust ad platform of its own.

Friday Feed October 1, 2021 Is Going to the Office
a Broken Way of Working? It’s these two features of remote-first work—its decreased overhead and increased access to talent—that lead to the most striking element of Herd’s theory. This style of work, he claims, is not simply an interesting, if slightly esoteric, alternative for those looking to try something different from the office-as-factory model; it’s inevitably going to replace the office model completely—a transformative process that is, in fact, already under way. AMD’s Lisa Su Breaks Through the Silicon Ceiling "As engineers transition into business or management, you have to think about a different set of challenges that are not necessarily 'How do you make your transistor go faster?' but [instead] 'How do you motivate teams?' or 'How do you understand more about what customers want?' I've made my share of mistakes in those transitions, but I've also learned a lot. On the Internet, We’re Always Famous What happens when the experience of celebrity becomes universal? Something Weird Is Happening on Facebook Someone appears to be pouring enormous energy and effort into a data collection project aimed at building personality profiles from social media interaction…again. This has been tried before, most prominently by Cambridge Analytica back in 2016. Refugees help power machine learning advances at Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon Big tech relies on the victims of economic collapse. Can You See Me Now? A Measurement Study of Zoom, Webex, and Meet In this paper, we present a detailed measurement study that compares three major videoconferencing systems: Zoom, Webex and Google Meet. Our study is based on 48 hours’ worth of more than 700 videoconferencing sessions, which were created with a mix of emulated videoconferencing clients deployed in the cloud, as well as real mobile devices running from a residential network.

Friday Feed October 8, 2021 Why Facebook and Instagram went
down for hours on Monday When a company can't use the gateway protocol, it's as if their online domains simply don't exist. But that didn't stop web pages, searches and messages from looking for Facebook's properties. And that, in turn, led to other problems. Why this Facebook scandal is different Internal evidence shared by former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen shows Facebook has known — but ignored — the harm it causes. The Facebook Whistleblower Is Heroic... And Terribly Wrong But a regulatory overlay in some ways would worsen the problem, because it would explicitly fuse political control with market power over speech and it would legitimize the dominant monopoly position of Facebook. Facebook Political Problems Facebook’s growth isn’t just about competence, but about a single-minded determination to do everything possible to make Facebook synonymous with the Internet. Why Unlimited Vacation Days Is a Scam Increasingly, companies include unlimited paid time off as part of their job offers, as it’s an enticement popular with millennials and Gen Z workers. But you’ll want to think twice about whether it’s really all that great—studies show that workers often take less time off with unlimited vacation days. Why would that be so?

Friday Feed October 15, 2021 Dopamine, Smartphones & You: A
battle for your time Your dopamine centers have been primed by those initial negative outcomes to respond robustly to the sudden influx of social appraisal. This use of a variable reward schedule takes advantage of our dopamine-driven desire for social validation, and it optimizes the balance of negative and positive feedback signals until we’ve become habitual users. Slackers Of The World, Unite! Why employees love the software, and bosses don’t The Return-to-Office Quandary Ambiguous plans are good for executives but bad for other employees. Worst Case Suppose you’re running your organization’s crucial apps in the cloud. Specifically, suppose you’re running them them on AWS, and in particular in the “us-east-1” region? Could us-east-1 go away? What might you do about it? Let’s catastrophize! The Death and Birth of Technological Revolutions While the introduction to Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital makes the case that the Dotcom Bubble was the Turning Point, Perez now thinks we are still waiting for the Golden Age — and that there may be another crash in the future

Friday Feed October 22, 2021 Caution! ⚠️ These emoji mean
different things in different countries Here are some of our favorite emoji that don’t quite mean what you might think. Eating the Cloud from Outside In AWS is playing Chess. Cloudflare is playing Go The AI oracle of Delphi uses the problems of Reddit to offer dubious moral advice A fascinating project that’s best understood as a cautionary tale The Technopolar Moment Technology companies are shaping the global environment in which governments operate. M1 Pro/Max MacBook Pro Chips Explained: SoC Deep Dive! Apple's new 14 and 16" MacBook Pros pack the BRAND NEW M1 Pro and M1 Max chips which have a TON of technology behind them. In this video, I explain what makes them so special!

Friday Feed October 29, 2021 Apple’s Long Journey to the
M1 Pro Chip When you look at M1 Pro/Max today it is tempting to think of this in terms of performance, but performance per watt AND integrated graphics AND integrated memory AND integrated application processors is innovation in an entirely different direction. Just the beginning. Inside the Facebook Papers A WIRED series dives into thousands of internal documents, showing a company rife with issues that it largely failed to address. New computer modelling could boost drug discovery The computer modeling tool will predict novel sites of binding for potential drugs that are more selective, leading to more effective drug targeting, increasing therapeutic efficacy and reducing side effects. Jobs that Marry Together the Most In the chart below, based on estimates from the American Community Survey, find out which jobs most often pair together among married couples. The Traitorous Eight and the Battle of Germanium Valley But even without the racism and paranoia, Shockley was a genuinely terrible manager. He was prone to starting and then halting projects, switching up the corporate priorities based on his whims without regard to the work that his employees had put into work that he was scrapping or de-emphasizing. Within a year of the company’s founding, eight of its top engineers had had enough. They quit Shockley Semi and founded their own rival, Fairchild Semiconductor. Less than a year after that, Fairchild launched its first silicon transistor,

Friday Feed November 5, 2021 Meta That’s also why I
considered titling this article “House of Zuck”; that, more than ever, is what Meta née Facebook is. Today’s Facebook Connect keynote is entirely about a future that doesn’t yet exist; believing that it will happen rests on the degree to which you believe that Zuckerberg the founder can accomplish more than any mere manager. Why is Delta so infectious? New lab tool spotlights little noticed mutation that speeds viral spread “Viruslike particles” open the way to safely study nucleocapsid and other viral proteins ‘The Great Resignation’ Misses the Point The phrase has come to describe record levels of job turnover. But it overlooks the bigger story: a radical rethinking of our relationship to work. Combating Disinformation With Humility. Humility empowers an individual by providing him the willingness to cultivate critical thinking i.e. a method to discover whether an idea is wrong. Introducing Isomorphic Labs Reimagining the entire drug discovery process with an AI-first approach

Friday Feed November 12, 2021 Securing your digital life, part
one: The basics The key to protecting your digital life is to make it as expensive and impractical as possible for someone bent on mischief to steal the things most important to your safety, financial security, and privacy. The Story of VisiCalc You’ve never heard of Dan or Bob. But you should have. They built a company, VisiCalc, that led to Apple first big success and changed computers forever. Here’s their story. Get Ready to Rock with Sonic Pi - The Live Coding Music Synth for Everyone Sonic Pi is an environment for live coding music that targets both education and professional musicians. In this demo-heavy talk we’ll cover its history - why it was created, how it evolved and what it can do today. An original Apple-1 computer sells for $400,000 The first Apple-1 computers were sold for $666.66 in 1976. Forty-five years later, a still-functioning one has sold for $400,000. Why Great Employees Leave “Great Cultures” there are three elements to a culture: behaviors, systems, and practices, all guided by an overarching set of values. A great culture is what you get when all three of these are aligned, and line up with the organization’s espoused values. When gaps start to appear, that’s when you start to see problems — and see great employees leave

Friday Feed December 17, 2021 The battle of the computing
clouds is intensifying The true story behind the IBM Personal Computer The industry-creating IBM Personal Computer 5150 turned 40 this year. To mark the occasion, we reveal the story of its birth – and destroy one long-running myth in the process

Friday Feed November 19, 2021 Do-It-Yourself artificial pancreas given approval
by team of experts More than 40 healthcare professionals and legal experts have issued the first guidance of its kind to support people with type 1 diabetes using Do-it-Yourself (DIY) technology driven systems to manage their condition. Animation: How mRNA vaccines work COVID-19 mRNA vaccines deliver directions to make a protein that educates our immune system, so it will neutralize the virus in future encounters. Arthur C Clarke predicts the internet in 1964 These things will make possuble a world in which we can be in instant contact with each other where ever we may be; where we can contact our friends anywhere on earth if we don;t know their actual physical location. It will be possible for a man to conduct is business from Haiti or Bali just as well as he could from London. Any skill could be made independent of distance. Why NFTs are bad: the long version NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are intended to be unique digital identifiers; a kind of “uncompromisable digital record”. They are not in fact anything like this, but this is what they claim to be. Apple's Lost Future: Phone, Tablet, And Laptop Prototypes Of The ’80s Some of the mockups still look sleek and stylish today, but few resemble the reality of the tablets, laptops, and phones that Apple would actually come to make two decades later, after Jobs' return.

Friday Feed November 26, 2021 How Processing And P5 Got
Newbies Into Coding What the creators of Processing — now 20 years old — did right A Look Under The Hood Of The Most Successful Streaming Service On The Planet Netflix’s secret sauce is something none of us ever see What next? 22 emerging technologies to watch in 2022 Hydrogen-powered planes, Vertical farming, Vaccines for HIV and malaria, 3D-printed bone implants, Space tourism... About Apple threat notifications and protecting against state-sponsored attacks Apple threat notifications are designed to inform and assist users who may have been targeted by state-sponsored attackers. Why V7 Unix matters so much To quite a lot of people, this makes V7 the last 'pure' Unix, the one that expresses the intentions of the creators of Unix.

Friday Feed December 3, 2021 Crime Prediction Software Promised to
Be Free of Biases. New Data Shows It Perpetuates Them Millions of crime predictions left on an unsecured server show PredPol mostly avoided Whiter neighborhoods, targeted Black and Latino neighborhoods. These communities weren’t just targeted more—in some cases, they were targeted relentlessly. Crimes were predicted every day, sometimes multiple times a day, sometimes in multiple locations in the same neighborhood: thousands upon thousands of crime predictions over years. A few neighborhoods in our data were the subject of more than 11,000 predictions. Remote work has a downside. Here’s why I want to go back to the office What makes human beings happiest at work, just as in the rest of their lives, is having close connections with other people, a strong sense of belonging, and meaningful work. The truth is all of these are put at risk when any of us works primarily from home. How An Excel Tiktoker Manifested Her Way To Making Six Figures A Day KatKat Norton is a Microsoft Excel influencer. She has over a million followers on TikTok and Instagram, where she goes by the name Miss Excel, and she’s leveraged that into a software training business that is now generating up to six figures of revenue a day. How User Engagement Features Created Weaponized Social Algorithms But why was the user’s timeline full of garbage in the first place? The unfortunate answer is: these products were no longer designed for the wants and needs of the user. Instead, features were added (and added, and added) with one central goal, one guiding North Star: to bring users back to the platform and keep them engaged. Notes on an Apple car There's a counter-argument to all of this, of course, that the correct place for intelligence is in the device you hold in your hand, take everywhere with you and replace every two year, not the large piece of moving metal that you replace every 5 or 10 years.

Friday Feed December 10, 2021 Over 40 million people had
health information leaked this year Over 40 million people in the United States had their personal health information exposed in data breaches this year, a significant jump from 2020 and a continuation of a trend toward more and more health data hacks and leaks. Three Steps to the Future The most exciting themes in technology today are transformative visions for 2025 or 2030: crypto, web3, VR, metaverse… and then everything else. Meanwhile, hundreds of start-ups take ideas from the last decade and deploy them over and over in one industry after another. And trying to keep up, the old economy faces waves of disruption from ideas we first talked about in the 1990s. 52 things I learned in 2021 ...Early versions of PowerPoint were created by a technical team that was 43% women, compared to an average of 10% in Silicon Valley at the time. What Google’s trending searches say about America in 2021 Wolf haircuts and Wall Street: What Americans googled this year. How Louis Armstrong Shaped the Sound of Ghana Today, Ghana is a thriving country with a stable democracy and its own distinctive beat—highlife. The homegrown musical genre, a blend of local indigenous melodies and rhythms with elements of jazz, all played on Western instruments, became a voice of the emerging nation thanks in large part to Armstrong’s visit, and it is now experiencing a resurgence within the country, as Ghana reexamines the legacy of the slave trade and the African diaspora

Friday Feed December 17, 2021 A Poet’s Perspective: Seven Reasons
Why Your Dataviz Team Should Include an Analyst from the Humanities Many years and many projects later, my best contributions as a data visualization consultant are still consistently derived from my roots in the humanities. Thought leaders like Gioriga Lupi have powerfully advocated for the integration of data humanism to propel our work beyond superficial infographics and towards deeper, more meaningful visualizations. The ‘Invisible’, Often Unhappy Workforce That’s Deciding the Future of AI The Google paper notes that crowd-workers – whose evaluations often form the defining basis of machine learning systems that may eventually affect our lives – are frequently operating under a range of constraints that may affect the way that they respond to experimental assignments. How Amazon Warehouse Policies Put Workers At Risk Six people died in an Amazon warehouse collapse — why were they there at all? I’m a Black woman and the metaverse scares me – here’s how to make the next iteration of the internet inclusive While techno-utopias communicate desired visions of the future, the reality of new technologies often doesn’t live up to these visions. In fact, the internet has brought novel forms of harm to society, such as the automated dissemination of propaganda on social media and bias in the algorithms that shape your online experience. Log4j: Just How Screwed Are We? Well, it’s certainly been a year for cyber debacles, so, sure, why not tie things off with a nice, fat security vulnerability that affects almost everything on the internet? That sounds about right.

Friday Feed December 24, 2021 The 2021 Stratechery Year in
Review There is a perspective in which 2021 was an absolute drag: COVID dragged on, vaccines became politicized, new variants emerged, and while tech continued to provide the infrastructure that kept the economy moving, it also provided the infrastructure for all of those things that made this year feel so difficult. How YOU can Invent the Future in 2022 -- like the Wright Brothers did in 1903. Today we're going to talk about what it took to push humanity forward, by looking into the age of aviation: a time that brought the world together and changed the course of humanity through technology. What seemed impossible made the crossover to possible. iTunes Has Turned 20. Here Are 5 Lessons All Entrepreneurs Can Take Away From Its 2 Decades of Disruption Although Apple has since transitioned away from iTunes and toward streaming services like Apple Music, Apple Podcasts and Apple TV, there is a lot we can learn from iTunes’ journey to the forefront of the music industry. Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3 Blockchain developers believe that this time they’ve found a structural answer to recentralization, but I tend to doubt it. An interesting question to ask is what the next locus for centralization and control might be. A deep dive into an NSO zero-click iMessage exploit: Remote Code Execution JBIG2 doesn't have scripting capabilities, but when combined with a vulnerability, it does have the ability to emulate circuits of arbitrary logic gates operating on arbitrary memory. So why not just use that to build your own computer architecture and script that!? That's exactly what this exploit does. Using over 70,000 segment commands defining logical bit operations, they define a small computer architecture with features such as registers and a full 64-bit adder and comparator which they use to search memory and perform arithmetic operations. It's not as fast as Javascript, but it's fundamentally computationally equivalent.

Understanding the Impact of Apache Log4j Vulnerability More than 35,000
Java packages, amounting to over 8% of the Maven Central repository (the most significant Java package repository), have been impacted by the recently disclosed log4j vulnerabilities (1, 2), with widespread fallout across the software industry. The vulnerabilities allow an attacker to perform remote code execution by exploiting the insecure JNDI lookups feature exposed by the logging library log4j.

Friday Feed December 31, 2021 James Webb Space Telescope Deployment
Sequence (Nominal) Engineers on the ground will remotely orchestrate a complex sequence of deployments in the hours and days immediately after the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. This animation shows the nominal sequence for these deployments. Sequencing your DNA with a USB dongle and open source code Imagine a hole so tiny that a single strand of DNA can fit through at a time. Push your genetic material through this pore, and the As, Ts, Gs, and Cs that make up a human genome will be revealed in sequence. The worst technology of 2021 Face filters, billionaires in space, and home-buying algorithms that overpay all made our annual list of technology gone wrong. What is the metaverse? 2 media and information experts explain The metaverse is a concept from science fiction that many people in the technology industry envision as the successor to today’s internet. It’s only a vision at this point, but technology companies like Facebook are aiming to make it the setting for many online activities, including work, play, studying and shopping. TikTok Got More Traffic Than Freakin' Google in 2021 It's no surprise that TikTok is ridiculously popular, but somehow it even beat out Google this year.

Collected Friday Feed, 2021

Collected Friday Feed, 2021

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