some good recent links

Just in case you have a script for finding interesting links, here are some links from mine…

Parable of the Sofa It seems blindingly obvious that an economy with a higher proportion of lifestyle businesses is going to be more resilient, more humane, and immensely more pleasant than the one that the Leaders Of Industry are trying to build. How would we get there from here?

Lord Kelvin and His Analog Computer On Thomson’s tide-predicting machine, each of 10 components was associated with a specific tidal constituent and had its own gearing to set the amplitude. The components were geared together so that their periods were proportional to the periods of the tidal constituents. A single crank turned all of the gears simultaneously, having the effect of summing each of the cosine curves.

Solar Passes 100% of Power Demand in California! [UPDATED] (electricity prices going negative regularly is going to be a big opportunity)

What is the Cara app, and why are artists deleting Instagram for it? (nifty image sharing site with built-in poisoning for ML training)

Online Privacy and Overfishing What seems normal to us in the security community is whatever was commonplace at the beginning of our careers.

One Facebook Ad Promotes a For-Profit College; Another a State School. Which Ad Do Black Users See? (algorithmic discrimination is already a hard problem to track down—and so-called privacy-enhancing ad personalization systems are just making it harder.)

The Moral Economy of the Shire From everything we’re told, the Shire is a very agriculturally productive region, which helps explain the lack of debt-peonage or other forms of unfree labor. It also explains the relative “looseness” of the system we’re looking at here; the gap between the lower gentry and upper yeomanry isn’t very large, and most families are able to support themselves with only minimal assistance.

New zine: How Git Works! (memo to self: order this)

Amazon Sold Fake Copies of Hotly Anticipated UFO Book (more news from the Big Tech #pivotToCrime. When Microsoft needed support in its antitrust courtroom drama, the MS-Windows OEMs and ISVs were right there. Amazon, Meta, and Google need support now—but they’re telling the content business to go eat a turd.)

Video Shows China’s Rifle-Equipped Robot Dog Opening Fire on Targets (If you thought wow, AI means we don’t have to hire as many content moderators! was big news, get ready for wow, AI means our country’s army will be able to get by without conscription! stories)

Origins of the Lab Mouse The early supply of mice for research depended on a late-19th century community of hobbyists—fanciers—who collected, bred, and sold unusual mice varieties. These “fancy” varieties were then standardized in the 1920s…

WTf Quora: how a platform eats itself As Quora pursued AI-driven enhancements, things got weird. (At the very beginning of Quora, they tried populating it with bot-written questions. Then they cut back, it went through a human user phase, now back to crap.)

HouseFresh has virtually disappeared from Google Search results. Now what? (hard to swallow pills for Google management: employee hoarding and union contracts cost money, but are cheaper than trying to run a company in a layoffs-scheming-quality-revenue-layoffs doom spiral)

The Tigers at the Gate: Moving Privacy Forward Through Proactive Transparency GPC is easy to set up and listen for because it is a simple HTTP header. Perhaps too simple as it only conveys whether the choice mechanism is turned on or off (GPC=1 or GPC=0). Unlike the more complex IAB EU’s Transparency and Consent signal (TC String) signal itself does not encode information about the source of the opt-out signal, or provide details about how the signaling mechanism was implemented or presented to users. (imho this is a win. You have to respect GPC, but you can’t trust a sketchy site or adtech intermediary to set GPC correctly, therefore you can’t deal with sketchy sites or adtech intermediaries.

The deskilling of web dev is harming the product but, more importantly, it’s damaging our health – this is why burnout happens – Baldur Bjarnason You’re expected to follow half-a-dozen different specialties, each relatively fast-paced and complex in its own right, and you’re supposed to do it without cutting into the hours where you do actual paid web development. Worse yet, you’re not actually expected to use any of it directly. Instead you’re also supposed to follow the developments of framework abstractions that are layered on top of the foundation specialties, at least doubling the number of complex fields a web dev has to follow and understand, right out of the gate. (I don’t know about you, but this site has a basic HTML template, Pandoc, and a Makefile. That’s about it.)

A (tiny, incomplete, single user, write-only) ActivityPub server in PHP (lots of good news from the Fediverse. If it didn’t remind me of the original web already, it now has me pre-ordering from O’Reilly like it’s 1995 or something. Real 1995, not The Radiant Future! (Of 1995))

Google’s Protected Audience Protects Advertisers (and Google) More Than It Protects You (If you have Google Chrome, you can still turn this stuff off: Google Chrome ad features checklist)

Why I went back to buying CDs (and you should too) The integrity of my audio library had been corrupted, at least in small ways. Horns were easy to spot, but how many other songs or albums had been messed with, without my knowledge? It turns out, way more than I had thought.

Google Researchers Say AI Now Leading Disinformation Vector (and Are Severely Undercounting the Problem) As bad as the AI-generated images problem is according to the paper, it is very possibly much worse because the paper’s data sample is relying on public fact checker data, who are not selecting AI-generated image-based disinformation randomly. Sites like Snopes and Politifact, which have limited resources, are focusing on fact checking images that have earned some degree of virality or news coverage, so their fact checks serve a purpose or an audience.

Personal Blocklist (not by Google) (useful browser extension to remove sites from search results when they’re better at SEO than actual content)

Elon Musk’s Gifts to Web Scrapers (Guest Blog Post) [B]y providing a foil in litigation against both the Center for Countering Digital Hate (“CCDH”) and Bright Data (the world’s largest seller of scraped data), he’s given judges in the most important district court in the country for tech legal issues, the Northern District of California, plenty of motivation to rule against him. As a result, judges have provided two landmark opinions in the last 45 days in favor of web scrapers. This creates powerful new precedent that will make it easier for web scrapers to prevail in litigation and will make it much harder for websites to prevent scraping.