Mediocrity is a hand-rail
🤖 Engineers Turned Living Venus Flytrap Into Cyborg Robotic Grabber — "The main purpose of this research was to find a way of creating robotic mechanisms able to pick up tiny, delicate objects without harming them. And this particular cyborg creation was able to do just that."
👀 First Look: Meet the New Linux Distro Inspired by the iPad — "This distro is designed to be a tablet first and a “laptop-lite” experience second. And I do mean “lite”; this is not trying to be a desktop Linux distro that runs tablet apps, but a tablet Linux distro that can run desktop ones – a distinction that’s worth keeping in mind."
🤯 DALL·E: Creating Images from Text — "GPT-3 showed that language can be used to instruct a large neural network to perform a variety of text generation tasks. Image GPT showed that the same type of neural network can also be used to generate images with high fidelity. We extend these findings to show that manipulating visual concepts through language is now within reach."
🔊 Surround sound from lightweight roll-to-roll printed loudspeaker paper — "The speaker track, including printed circuitry, weighs just 150 grams and consists of 90 percent conventional paper that can be printed in color on both sides."
👩💻 You can now run Linux on Apple M1 devices — "While Linux, and even Windows, were already usable on Apple Silicon thanks to virtualization, this is the first instance of a non-macOS operating system running natively on the hardware."
Quotation-as-title by Montesquieu. Image from top-linked post.
The certainties of one age are the problems of the next
🏙️ How the spread of sheds threatens cities — "A white-collar worker who has tried to work from the kitchen table for the past nine months might be keen to return to the office. A worker who has an insulated garden shed with Wi-Fi will be less so. Joel Bird, who builds bespoke sheds, is certain that his clients envisage a long-term change in their working habits. “They don’t consider it to be temporary,” he says. “They’re spending too much money.”
😬 Transactional Enchantment — "The greatest endemic risk to the psyche in 2021 is not that you’ll end up on the streets next week or fail to fund your retirement in 30 years. The greatest risk is that you’ll feel so relentlessly battered by the weirdness all around that you’ll go numb and simply disengage from the world entirely today."
🕸️ The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML — "Are you developing public services? Or a system that people might access when they’re in desperate need of help? Plain HTML works. A small bit of simple CSS will make look decent. JavaScript is probably unnecessary – but can be used to progressively enhance stuff. Add alt text to images so people paying per MB can understand what the images are for (and, you know, accessibility)."
💬 Convocational Development — "The fundamental difference between the convocation and traditional open source is that energy is put into facilitating discussions between users, coders, graphic designers etc. Documentation and instructions are often the weakest part of an open source project, and that excludes people who don’t have the time or ability to assemble a mental model of the open source software and its capabilities from just the code and the meagre promotional materials. The convocation starts as a basic web forum, but evolves tools and cultures that enable greater participation in the development process itself."
📈 GameStop Is Rage Against the Financial Machine — "Instead of greed, this latest bout of speculation, and especially the extraordinary excitement at GameStop, has a different emotional driver: anger. The people investing today are driven by righteous anger, about generational injustice, about what they see as the corruption and unfairness of the way banks were bailed out in 2008 without having to pay legal penalties later, and about lacerating poverty and inequality. This makes it unlike any of the speculative rallies and crashes that have preceded it."
Quotation-as-title by R.H. Tawney. Image from top-linked post.
You don't hate Mondays, you hate capitalism
🧠 I Feel Better Now — "Brain chemistry and childhood trauma go a long way toward explaining a person’s particular struggles with mental health, but you could be forgiven for wondering whether there is also something larger at work here—whether the material arrangement of society itself, in other words, is contributing to a malaise that various authorities nevertheless encourage us to believe is exclusively individual."
😟 Where loneliness can lead — "Totalitarianism uses isolation to deprive people of human companionship, making action in the world impossible, while destroying the space of solitude. The iron-band of totalitarianism, as Arendt calls it, destroys man’s ability to move, to act, and to think, while turning each individual in his lonely isolation against all others, and himself. The world becomes a wilderness, where neither experience nor thinking are possible."
🙍 The problem is poverty, however we label it — "If your only choice of an evening is between skipping dinner or going to sleep in the cold before waking up in the cold, then you are not carefully selecting between food poverty and fuel poverty, like some expense-account diner havering over the French reds on a wine list. You are simply impoverished."
👩💻 Malware found on laptops given out by government — "According to the forum, the Windows laptops contained Gamarue.I, a worm identified by Microsoft in 2012... The malware in question installs spyware which can gather information about browsing habits, as well as harvest personal information such as banking details."
🏭 Turn off that camera during virtual meetings, environmental study says — "Just one hour of videoconferencing or streaming, for example, emits 150-1,000 grams of carbon dioxide... But leaving your camera off during a web call can reduce these footprints by 96%."
Quotation-as-title by unknown. Image via top-linked article.
The problem is that the person who should be the most restrained is the least
🦆 Bionic Duckweed: making the future the enemy of the present — "In its broader sense, bionic duckweed can be thought of a sort of unobtainium that renders investment in present-day technologies pointless, unimaginative, and worst of all On The Wrong Side Of History. “Don’t invest in what can be done today, because once bionic duckweed is invented it’ll all be obsolete.” It is a sort of promissory note in reverse, forcing us into inaction today in the hope of wonders tomorrow."
🤔 The best tech of CES 2020: Where are they now? — "What looked like it was just a one-off at the largest tech tradeshow in the world, but actually turned out to be a real product? What got a lot of buzz and then dropped off our radars, only to resurface months later? And, of course, what was simply too good to be true?"
💬 If it will matter after today, stop talking about it in a chat room — "Rule of thumb: If a discussion will matter after today, don’t have it in a chat room. Check out Discourse, Twist, Carrot, Threads, Basecamp, Flarum, or heck even GitHub issues. These tools exist for a reason. They solve a real problem."
🔥 Sauron Has the Power of the One Ring for Another Week, What’s the Worst that Could Happen? — "Upon further reflection, we are not entirely sure the orcs and trolls who participated in this demonstration were indeed sent by Sauron. Yes, the Mouth of Sauron encouraged the pro-Evil horde into a “trial by combat.” Yes, the crowd was painted with Sauron’s Red Eye and chanted his name. But anyone can mix paint and yell. We have it on good rumor that there were hobbits mixed into the gathering and inciting violence. Granted, we started these rumors, but oftentimes rumors are true."
⛵ Working Off-Grid Efficiently — "For the first 3 years we tested the limits of our space, and at first, it was difficult to create new things, as we had to make time to learn how to solve the underlying problems. Our boat was not just an office, it was also our house and transport. As for us, we were artists, but also had to be plumbers, deckhands, electricians, captains, janitors and accountants."
Quotation-as-title by Baltasar Gracián. Image from top-linked post.
There are many things we despise in order that we may not have to despise ourselves
🇺🇸 Well, that was expected — "I’ve recorded this here since it feels like the chronology of events and the smaller details are already evaporating, and this helps me wrap my head around a tiny fraction of it. If you happen to read this, don’t take this at face value (nor anything else on the web for that matter). Do your own research and correct me if you think any of the timestamps are wrong."
📺 Fox News and the real insurrection — "After Democrats said they planned to impeach Trump again, Fox opinionators echoed the risible Republican talking point that such a move would be provocative; after Twitter banned Trump, they pivoted to bash Big Tech. Yesterday morning, Jeanine Pirro compared Amazon’s decision to boot Parler, an app popular among right-wing extremists, from its web-hosting services to Kristallnacht—the night, in 1938, when Nazis in Germany killed around one hundred Jewish people and arrested tens of thousands more"
₿ Lost Passwords Lock Millionaires Out of Their Bitcoin Fortunes — "Of the existing 18.5 million Bitcoin, around 20 percent — currently worth around $140 billion — appear to be in lost or otherwise stranded wallets, according to the cryptocurrency data firm Chainalysis. Wallet Recovery Services, a business that helps find lost digital keys, said it had gotten 70 requests a day from people who wanted help recovering their riches, three times the number of a month ago."
🕸️ Pirated Academic Database Sci-Hub Is Now on the ‘Uncensorable Web’ — "As evidenced by Sci-Hub’s own problems, the decentralized web is being built out of fears of deplatforming. As the internet’s access points are increasingly centralized in the hands of a few actors, certain applications – most recently, Twitter-alternative Parler – have faced censorship at the hands of web server providers, app stores and DNS certificate authorities."
🏛️ Internet 3.0 and the Beginning of (Tech) History — Here technology itself will return to the forefront: if the priority for an increasing number of citizens, companies, and countries is to escape centralization, then the answer will not be competing centralized entities, but rather a return to open protocols. This is the only way to match and perhaps surpass the R&D advantages enjoyed by centralized tech companies; open technologies can be worked on collectively, and forked individually, gaining both the benefits of scale and inevitability of sovereignty and self-determination.
Quotation-as-title by Vauvenargues. Image from bottom-linked post.
Nothing is repeated, and everything is unparalleled
🤔 We need more than deplatforming — "But as reprehensible as the actions of Donald Trump are, the rampant use of the internet to foment violence and hate, and reinforce white supremacy is about more than any one personality. Donald Trump is certainly not the first politician to exploit the architecture of the internet in this way, and he won’t be the last. We need solutions that don’t start after untold damage has been done."
💪 Demands and Responsibilities — "If you demand rights for yourself, you have to demand those same rights for others. You have to take on the responsibility of collective action, and you yourself act in a way that benefits the collective. If you want credit, you have to give credit. If you want community, you have to be communal. If you want to be satiated, you have to allow others to be sated. If you want your vote to be respected, you have to respect the votes of others."
🗯️ Parler Pitched Itself as Twitter Without Rules. Not Anymore, Apple and Google Said. — "Google said in a statement that it had pulled the app because Parler was not enforcing its own moderation policies, despite a recent reminder from Google, and because of continued posts on the app that sought to incite violence."
🙅 Hello! You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act — "While this may all feel kind of mean, it's not meant to be. Unless you're one of the people who is purposefully saying wrong things about Section 230, like Senator Ted Cruz or Rep. Nancy Pelosi (being wrong about 230 is bipartisan). For them, it's meant to be mean. For you, let's just assume you made an honest mistake -- perhaps because deliberately wrong people like Ted Cruz and Nancy Pelosi steered you wrong. So let's correct that."
🧐 What Wikipedia saw during election week in the U.S., and what we’re doing next — "To help meet this goal, we hope to invest in resources that we can share with international Wikipedia communities that will help mitigate future disinformation risks on the sites. We’re also looking to bring together administrators from different language Wikipedias for a global forum on disinformation. Together, we aim to build more tools to support our volunteer editors, and to combat disinformation."
Quotation-as-title by the Goncourt Brothers. Image from top-linked post.
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self
📚 Bookshelf designs as unique as you are: Part 2 — "Stuffing all your favorite novels into a single space without damaging any of them, and making sure the whole affair looks presentable as well? Now, that’s a tough task. So, we’ve rounded up some super cool, functional and not to mention aesthetically pleasing bookshelf designs for you to store your paperback companions in!"
📱 How to overcome Phone Addiction [Solutions + Research] — "Phone addiction goes hand in hand with anxiety and that anxiety often lowers the motivation to engage with people in real life. This is a huge problem because re-connecting with people in the offline world is a solution that improves the quality of life. The unnecessary drop in motivation because of addiction makes it that much harder to maintain social health."
⚙️ From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — "This technological enframing of human life, says Heidegger, first “endanger[s] man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is” and then, beyond that, “banishes” us from our home. And that is a great, great peril."
🎨 Finding time for creativity will give you respite from worries — "According to one study examining the links between art and health, a cost-benefit analysis showed a 37% drop in GP consultation rates and a 27% reduction in hospital admissions when patients were involved in creative pursuits. Other studies have found similar results. For example, when people were asked to write about a trauma for 15 minutes a day, it resulted in fewer subsequent visits to the doctor, compared to a control group."
🧑🤝🧑 For psychologists, the pandemic has shown people’s capacity for cooperation — "In short, what we have seen is a psychology of collective resilience supplanting a psychology of individual frailty. Such a shift has profound implications for the relationship between the citizen and the state. For the role of the state becomes less a matter of substituting for the deficiencies of the individual and more to do with scaffolding and supporting communal self-organisation."
Quotation-as-title by Cyril Connolly. Image from top-linked post.
You can never get rid of what is part of you, even when you throw it away
🤖 Why the Dancing Robots Are a Really, Really Big Problem — "No, robots don’t dance: they carry out the very precise movements that their — exceedingly clever — programmers design to move in a way that humans will perceive as dancing. It is a simulacrum, a trompe l’oeil, a conjurer’s trick. And it works not because of something inherent in the machinery, but because of something inherent in ours: our ever-present capacity for finding the familiar. It looks like human dancing, except it’s an utterly meaningless act, stripped of any social, cultural, historical, or religious context, and carried out as a humblebrag show of technological might."
💭 Why Do We Dream? A New Theory on How It Protects Our Brains — "We suggest that the brain preserves the territory of the visual cortex by keeping it active at night. In our “defensive activation theory,” dream sleep exists to keep neurons in the visual cortex active, thereby combating a takeover by the neighboring senses."
✅ A simple 2 x 2 for choices — "It might be simple, but it’s not always easy. Success doesn’t always mean money, it just means that you got what you were hoping for. And while every project fits into one of the four quadrants, there’s no right answer for any given person or any given moment.."
📅 Four-day week means 'I don't waste holidays on chores' — "The four-day working week with no reduction in pay is good for the economy, good for workers and good for the environment. It's an idea whose time has come."
💡 100 Tips For A Better Life — "It is cheap for people to talk about their values, goals, rules, and lifestyle. When people’s actions contradict their talk, pay attention!"
A candour affected is a dagger concealed
🤯 The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse
📝 White privilege - a guide for parents
👩💻 Working from home could lead to more prejudice, report warns
🎩 The radical aristocrat who put kindness on a scientific footing
Quotation-as-title by Marcus Aurelius. Image from top-linked post.
To pursue the unattainable is insanity, yet the thoughtless can never refrain from doing so
💬 The Surprising Power of Simply Asking Coworkers How They’re Doing
🤔 Facebook Maybe Not Singlehandedly Undermining Democracy With Political Content, Says Facebook
👂 Unnervingly good entry in the "what languages sound like to non-speakers" genre
⚔️ Could a Peasant defeat a Knight in Battle?
Quotation-as-title from Marcus Aurelius. Image from top-linked post.
Even those of a harsh and unyielding nature will endure gentle treatment: no creature is fierce and frightening if it is stroked
🌼 Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet
⛏️ Dorset mega henge may be ‘last hurrah’ of stone-age builders
📺 Culture to cheer you up during the second lockdown: part one
Quotation-as-title by Seneca. Image from top-linked post.
If you have been put in your place long enough, you begin to act like the place
📉 Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit
💪 How to walk upright and stop living in a cave
🤔 It’s Not About Intention, It’s About Action
💭 Are we losing our ability to remember?
🇺🇸 How The Presidential Candidates Spy On Their Supporters
Quotation-as-title by Randall Jarrell. Image from top-linked post.
Everything intercepts us from ourselves
🤝 Medieval English people used to pay their rent in eels
🤺 The Mad, Mad World of Niche Sports Among Ivy League–Obsessed Parents
📜 Archaeologists unearth 'huge number' of sealed Egyptian sarcophagi
🌉 3D model of how the Charles bridge in Prague was constructed
💪 Every Man Should Be Able to Save His Own Life: 5 Fitness Benchmarks a Man Must Master
Quotation by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Image from top-linked post.