“Meaning is in the eyes of the beholder — aows”
Love that photo.
“I’ve noticed a concerning trend lately: small business owners who sell anything are being seen and labelled as the enemy by some folks online.”
“Static or database? Our love of complexity“
“Because a database is more ‘advanced’ than a static website, so a database must by definition be better, mustn’t it?”
“My Culture is Not Your Toy: A Gay Japanese Man’s Perspective on Queer Eye Japan”
Wow. This series sounds like a complete train wreck.
Social Media Platforms are a liability to the businesses that run them
I was reading Thomas Baekdal’s latest newsletter…
“Publishers dealing with a market of abundance; Closing print vs online”
…and in it I came across this passage in a note about how risky automated systems make modern online life.
” the idea that I could potentially just lose access and have everything deleted simply because an automated system thought I had posted too many emojis one day … that’s scary as hell.”
Basically, a Youtuber asked his viewers to do something that sounded like fun and that accidentally triggered an automated process that perma-banned many of his viewers.
A corollary to that is that this represents an immense risk to Google.
Unlike Twitter or Facebook, Google has a constellation of businesses that all make money and are strategically important to it as a tech organisation. Youtube represents a huge systemic risk to every other part of Google:
- All forms of moderation and spam control cost Google more than they do its competitors: when Google bans or limits a user, it’s also removing a customer from its other businesses.
- All experiments with abuse control have a huge secondary risk because all of Google’s other properties use Youtube heavily for promotion. Imagine if the Youtuber above had been a Google Cloud tech evangelist talking about new platform features. A mistake like this, with the wrong concentration of viewers, could have taken a big chunk out of Google Cloud’s business.
A lot of people want Google broken up. What Google is missing is that breaking it up would probably be good for its various businesses. Google Cloud, for example, would benefit from not being saddled with the privacy violations of the ad business or the crowd control risks that come with Youtube.
The Mandalorian underscores just how much of an achievement Darth Vader was in the original series: great voice acting by James Earl Jones, great physical acting by David Prowse.
And it helps that Darth Vader is never silent in a scene. He’s a talker. Gets good lines.
Damn. I’ve been reading Tom Spurgeon’s writing on comics since his days at The Comics Journal back in the 90s. 🙁
“The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising”
via @walkley’s newsletter
“Adactio: Journal—Third party”
“I go to performance-related conferences and you know who I’ve never seen at those events? The people who write the JavaScript for third-party tracking scripts.”
“A Big, Warm Welcome to Pressbooks’ Newest team members: Carlos, Ho Man, and Başak - Pressbooks”
Some new people in the office.
“Some Thoughts about OER Research”
“It matters far less which materials students are using than what students are doing with them. We learn by doing, so if you’re doing the same things you shouldn’t expect to find a difference in learning”
“Svelte makes our web components as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
“The most surprising principle of good leadership? Don’t be busy. - Know Your Team - Blog”
“If you’re busy as a leader, you’re doing it wrong.”
Not many managers are capable of following this advice.
Eight years ago Ted Nelson demonstrated his usual foresight in deconstructing modern computing
Parts of it are intentionally silly. Many other parts are just true.
The safest prediction anywhere is usually “more of the same”. For tomorrow’s computer world, I safely predict more of the same, but much more so– louder and more intrusive, with more interruptions, more security threats, more monopolies with more cattle-pens for users, and of course lousier interfaces.
The World Wide Web will get even more chaotic, with new forms of annoyance, temptation and danger. Meanwhile, as the HTML internals worsen, each of the competing browsers will continue to be wrong in its own way.
[…]
There will be more and more software settings nobody can get right, and the phone support people in Hyderabad who talk you through the menus will be taught new slang to make your hours with them seem more comfortable
Warning, the original is a PDF.
“8 Unbelievable Things You Never Knew About Tracking”
It strikes me that our web dev stacks as implemented are fundamentally incompatible with providing fully privacy-respecting services.
No wonder people are turning to native apps.