Y’ever read something and have understanding that has eluded you interminably suddenly stop, curl up, and snuggle neatly into a fold in your brain because a new way opened to it?
Amazing, thanks a million!
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hello vonnie
Cosimo Galluzzi
DEAR READER

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TVSTRANGERTHINGS
RMH
Jules of Nature
Sade Olutola
almost home

JVL
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

Kiana Khansmith
trying on a metaphor

pixel skylines
Mike Driver
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me

izzy's playlists!
occasionally subtle

seen from United States
seen from T1
seen from Indonesia

seen from United States
seen from Brazil
seen from Colombia

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@jmmoes
Y’ever read something and have understanding that has eluded you interminably suddenly stop, curl up, and snuggle neatly into a fold in your brain because a new way opened to it?
Amazing, thanks a million!
“Technology can do wondrous things, like connect lonely grandmothers and grandchildren, or provide biomedical solutions for rare diseases—but it can also provide information to carry out mass shootings or bomb a city or hack a computer grid. Technology left on its own can be a frightening tool. The value of internet technology is the value humans ascribe to it; it can be used for human purposes and belong to God, or it can acquire an autonomy that gives it a quasi-divine status and power, placing humans under its thrall. When we place technology out of care and responsibility, we may get disastrous and unpredictable results.”
— Gun Violence and Technology
Learning to care and be responsible, be it toward technology or fellow human beings, when did we start to take this for granted?
“Not quite a digital native, I am old enough to feel that this plight of ours—filling out onscreen forms, recovering lost passwords, scanning QR codes, downloading each new version of our government-approved coronavirus tracker or vaccine passport, always waiting for the little buzz of some notification or authorization or other—represents more than just an onerous imposition. It has been a foretaste of a new mode of existence. If I am going to have any hope of thriving under future conditions, I will need to get used to all this. And yet, though some of my coevals associate the following sentiment with petulant and self-absorbed Zoomers, I confess that I am tired. I feel as though the past few years have broken me.”
— Permanent Pandemic
We were promised a future where digital tools would allow us to extend far beyond our limited physical reach, meet our fellow human sisters and brothers, and build together a better and multicultural world. We have indeed made 1984 a reality and I'm tired too.
“…in the last decade, technology has transformed from a tool that we use to a place where we live. If we’re setting out to change the character of technology in our lives, we’d be wise to learn from the character of places.”
— The Good Room
Or how the Internet could and now should once again reinvent the Commons. Thanks for sharing those thoughts with us.
“No expert needs validation from an amateur.”
— Epictetus
Point on.
Decorsteals
Could part of this bathroom design make its way to our own? 🤗
“To think that Bitcoin can solve the problem of money, or the problem of the state, is to misunderstand what money is or what states do. Every exploitative socio-economic system is predicated on what the minority running it can make the rest do for them (who does what to whom, as Lenin famously put it). Money and the state are epiphenomena of this system. To believe that you can fix money, or that you can fix the state, is to demonstrate a devastating innocence regarding the larger exploitative system with which they are integrated. No smart contract can, for example, subvert the labour contracts that underpin society’s layered patterns of exploitation. No NFT can change an art world where art is a commodity within a universe of commodified people and things. No central bank can serve the interests of the people so long as it is independent of the demos. Yes, blockchain will be useful in societies liberated from the patterned extractive power of the few. However, blockchain will not liberate us. Indeed, any digital service, currency, or good that is built on it within the present system will simply reproduce the present system’s legitimacy.”
— Yanis Varoufakis
The “father of information theory” also paved the way for AI
A decade before, while working on his master’s thesis at MIT, he invented the logic gate. At the time, electromagnetic relays—small devices that use magnetism to open and close electrical switches—were used to build circuits that routed telephone calls or controlled complex machines. However, there was no consistent theory on how to design or analyze such circuits. The way people thought about them was in terms of the relay coils being energized or not. Shannon showed that Boolean algebra could be used to move away from the relays themselves, into a more abstract understanding of the function of a circuit. He used this algebra of logic to analyze, and then synthesize, switching circuits and to prove that the overall circuit worked as desired. In his thesis he invented the AND, OR, and NOT logic gates. Logic gates are the building blocks of all digital circuits, upon which the entire edifice of computer science is based.
In 1950 Shannon published an article in Scientific American and also a research paper describing how to program a computer to play chess. He went into detail on how to design a program for an actual computer. He discussed how data structures would be represented in memory, estimated how many bits of memory would be needed for the program, and broke the program down into things he called subprograms. Today we would call these functions, or procedures. Some of his subprograms were to generate possible moves; some were to give heuristic appraisals of how good a position was.
Genius
“Typewriters are incredibly complex and precise piece of machinery. At their peak in the decades around World War II, we built them so well that, today, we don’t need to build any typewriters anymore. We simply have enough of them on earth. You may object that it’s because nobody uses them anymore. It’s not true. Lots of writers keep using them, they became trendy in the 2010s and, to escape surveillance, some secret services started to use them back. It’s a very niche but existing market.”
— The computer built to last 50 years
Still remember fondly my mother's typewriter, typing with two fingers when I was barely 6 years old, having mastered the art of 10-fingers typing by the age of 15 thanks to a wonderful lyceum teacher. Yes, they were bulky and sturdy, later would they become lighter and electrical, even sometimes bearing digital screens and memorizing bits of texts and styles, which I enjoyed so much. Yes indeed, computers should also be built to last 50 years.
Something's brewing... #babyyoda #christmaspresent #coffeelover #familylove (at Esvres) https://www.instagram.com/jmmoes/p/CX5tpG4pIrw/?utm_medium=tumblr
Supposedly today we have a lot of browsers to choose from - Google Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, etc. Having choices is a good thing, right? Nobody wants to relive the time of almost complete Internet Explorer domination again. Unfortunately our choices are significantly fewer than they seem to be at first glance, as Chrome and Safari (thanks to the iPhone) totally dominate the browser landscape in terms of usage and almost all browsers these days are built on top of Chromium, Google’s open-source browser project. Funny enough even Edge is built on top of Chromium today, despite the bitter rivalry between Google and Microsoft. What’s also funny is that Chrome and Safari control about 85% of the browser market share today, and Microsoft’s Edge commands only about 4%:
Forty years after his breakout story, “Johnny Mnemonic,” the father of cyberpunk remains one of the best writers around
The world Gibson was building was a wormhole away from most science fiction—from space-opera optimism and the sort of intergalactic intrigue that’s settled by laser sword. Gibson’s heroes were hustlers, their turf the congested city. They used substances, skirted the law, and self-edited via surgery (see Molly’s nails). He provided more detail, the following year, in the story “Burning Chrome,” which coined the term cyberspace: a boundless 3-D grid, “an abstract representation of the relationships between data systems”—a kind of web. And then, in 1984, he went even deeper with Neuromancer. His zeitgeist-rattling debut novel was about a hacker for hire who navigated cyberspace using a modem and an Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 deck, a Gibson confection that rests on his hacker’s lap (and sounds a lot like a modern-day laptop).
In time, the cyberspace coinage went viral the vintage way: it travelled from printed page to rapt fanboy. Neuromancer scooped up the available awards, generated two sequels, and popularized a sci-fi subgenre, “cyberpunk,” a nuisance term (see also “grunge” or “millennial”) that leapt from think piece to think piece like an augmented tick.
William Gibson, the man, the author, the creator who made me at the same time dream about and be scared to hell of the world we have begun to live in.
“Today, everything we do involves the internet. Tomorrow, everything will require it. We can’t afford to let our digital citizenship be reduced to a heavy-handed mess of unreadable terms of service and broken appeals processes.”
— Utilities Governed Like Empires
Apple has announced impending changes to its operating systems that include new “protections for children” features in iCloud and iMessage. If you’ve spent any time following the Crypto Wars, you know what this means: Apple is planning to build a backdoor into its data storage system and its messaging system.
There are two main features that the company is planning to install in every Apple device. One is a scanning feature that will scan all photos as they get uploaded into iCloud Photos to see if they match a photo in the database of known child sexual abuse material (CSAM) maintained by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). The other feature scans all iMessage images sent or received by child accounts—that is, accounts designated as owned by a minor—for sexually explicit material, and if the child is young enough, notifies the parent when these images are sent or received. This feature can be turned on or off by parents.
"As a reminder, a secure messaging system is a system where no one but the user and their intended recipients can read the messages or otherwise analyze their contents to infer what they are talking about."
“Silicon Valley reflects many of the worst aspects of American industry today. It consists of monopolies and oligopolies. Too many business models are predatory. The industry has outsourced too many jobs, and helped to eliminate jobs in other industries. The companies do not pay enough taxes. Some operate as if they have more power than any government.”
— Dear Joe Biden: Don’t Listen to Silicon Valley
Other countries might also want to think twice, say... France?
The Fake Heroism of Space Billionaires
Within hours, Jeff Bezos will blast off into space, a week after Richard Branson went up. Another small step for billionaires.
Once upon a time, long long ago, people with names like John Glenn, Alan Shepard, Buzz Aldrin, and Sally Ride blasted into space. None was selected on the basis of income or wealth, but on skill and rigorous training. Their heroism – and we regarded them as national heroes – symbolized America’s technological prowess and egalitarianism.
I remember as a kid talking with other kids my age about becoming an astronaut. It was something any of us could aspire to if we had enough guts and gumption. The astronauts of that time came from middle-class and blue-collar families. They’d gone to public schools. They were like the rest of us, but their bravery and skill justified their status as national heroes.
The space program itself was quintessential American. In a way, it seemed as if all of us were going into space, risking our lives for the nation, and becoming the first to land on the moon. Yet our pride was not of the nativist variety. We won the space race because we had worked harder, longer, better. Our astronauts were backed by teams of scientists, aeronautical engineers, and aerospace workers who took great pride in their work, and we took pride in all of them. Again and again, we used the term “we” to describe the achievement, a common good.
Today’s space race could not be more different. Bezos, Branson, and Elon Musk, the third billionaire racing into space, aren’t “we.” There’s no common good in their achievement. They symbolize the extreme apex of wealth today, some of it gained by paying their workers rock-bottom wages and shutting out competitors. They’re closer to the robber barons of the first Gilded Age – Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller – whose conspicuous fortunes were founded on wage suppression, union-busting, and monopolization, and whose toys were the first motor cars and airplanes. The new space venturers are not backed by widely-celebrated teams of scientists, engineers, and workers. There is no collective pride in their achievement.
When Branson came down to earth last week, the New York Times wrote admiringly that “billionaire entrepreneurs are risking injury or death to fulfill their childhood aspirations — and advance the goal of making human spaceflight unexceptional.” And it quoted Eric Anderson, chairman of Space Adventures Limited, a company that charters launches to orbit, saying “They’re putting their money where their mouth is, and they’re putting their body where their money is. That’s impressive, frankly.”
Rubbish. If Branson, Bezos, and Musk – or Eric Anderson, for that matter – are advancing anything or anyone, it’s the prospect of making boatloads of money by selling future seats to other people able and willing to pay huge sums for the thrill. At a time when America and the world face existential crises ranging from climate change to raging inequality to deathly pandemics, these ventures into space aren’t impressive, frankly.
If some kids today are inspired by Branson, Bezos, and Musk, the inspiration is more about accumulating money and power than making the nation proud, more about propelling themselves forward than propelling America or the world forward. Sure, it takes some bravery to belt yourself into a rocket next to a few other billionaires who have paid tens of millions for the privilege, but that doesn’t come close to heroism.
We’ve privatized almost everything else, but no one can privatize heroism.
Space expansion, just like education, culture, and travel should be declared common goods, with states to fund them and allow everyone to thrive.
“What does the Internet do? I think it’s clear the Internet is both an engine and a camera. To some extent it does drive behavior, but it also shows us ourselves in vivid detail. That is bound to make us uncomfortable, but is also very useful. The Internet can reinforce existing beliefs and misconceptions, but it also reveals underlying truths that otherwise would remain hidden. For example, the Internet makes it far easier to discover when an authority figure is lying to us, which is an overwhelming good.”
— Marc Andreessen
It also reinforces the need for every one of us digital tools users to rediscover the ancient art of disputing each piece of data that crosses our screens.