onfocus

When things turn to garbage I guess I turn to Wikipedia. A couple more links I've been thinking about recently: False equivalence and Slippary slope. Have journalists seen these? Because I feel like they haven't seen these.

Some unorganized links from the past week or so:

• MetaTalk: mathowie transfers ownership of MetaFilter to cortex - Big MetaFilter Universe news, but not a big shift for the site. Congrats to Matt and Josh on the move! Long may MeFi run.
• Erica Joy: I am disappointed but unsurprised... - A sexist manifesto circulating Google is abuse of co-workers but defined as an alternative view by Google management. (Update: Google management takes an alternative view.)
• Ijeoma Oluo: Facebook's Complicity in the Silencing of Black Women
• Atlas Obscura: Join the Search for Geedis - I love these pop ephemera mysteries.
• New York Times: To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software - We have been having this conversation since voting machines were invented. This should be obvious.
• The Atlantic: Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? - See Betteridge, but there's more than just the headline here.
• Teen Vogue: We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in Reaction GIFs
• Siggraph 2017: Deep Bilateral Learning - Teaching computers to edit photographs like a human.
• Texas Monthly: The Drug Runners - Sad update on the reclusive Mexican native people The Tarahumara of Born to Run fame.
• @GalaxyKate ...welcome to Programmer Hell - Apple spent billions to build a terrible work environment.
• The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks
• Brad Sucks: Better Than Nothing Preorder - new vinyl ordered.
• Wall Street Journal: Why Vinyl's Boom Is Over - Two of my favorite artists provide a snapshot of where vinyl production is today.
• Ask Polly: It Seems Like My Friends Don’t Like Me - "We have to find a way to bring the sharp edges and troubling complications and glorious moments of joy into a world that communicates with a series of popping-Champagne emoji and eye roll memes."
• New York Times: Thanks to Venmo, We Now All Know How Cheap Our Friends Are - An update on PayPal's peer-to-peer option.
• Stanford Business: Why Working From Home Is a “Future-looking Technology”
• Dan Hon has been knocking neural network social commentary comedy out of the park lately by simulating Ask MetaFilter questions and Hacker News headlines.

I've been enjoying the new Arcade Fire:

And now, the wokest links (apologies to @ameliargh):

• Vox: President Trump is considering pardoning himself. I asked 15 experts if that's legal. - poli sci students 3am dorm room what if? is now our reality.
• Lawfare: The President vs. Federal Law Enforcement: Trump Attacks Everyone
• Daily Beast: Team Trump Used Obamacare Money to Run PR Effort Against It - "Problematic."
• The Atlantic: What’s Broken—and What’s Still Working—in American Politics

In other news:

• Jason Kottke: How to safely enjoy the 2017 solar eclipse, a buyer's guide for normal people
• Anil Dash: How Glitch is Growing - Things get interesting when you remove barriers.
• Mike Monteiro: On my second birthday we landed on the moon. - Making a larger We. Words to live by.
• New York Times: Are You a Carboholic? - Yes.
• The Verge: Google introduces the feed, a personalized stream of news on iOS and Android - Keeping Google Reader running would have given them a 10+ year head start.
• The Verge: The Game of Game of Thrones: season 7, episode 1, Dragonstone - Excellent summary and snark, +10 points. Won't trade Verge.
• BBC: Amazon and eBay images broken by Photobucket's 'ransom demand' - Host your own images (thoughts, ideas, creative output)! Decentralize now!
• Co.Design: AI Is Inventing Languages Humans Can’t Understand. Should We Stop It? - It doesn't look like anything to me to me to me to me to me.
• Disney Parks Blog: First Look: Disney Parks Unveils the Star Wars-Inspired Land Model - I think this park would live long and prosper but I don't see a quidditch pitch.
• New York Times: Don’t Leave Health Care to a Free Market
• Lucy Bellwood: 100 Demon Dialogues

It has been a while, dear reader. I was about to declare link bankruptcy, delete all to-share links, and start again with a clean slate. However, in the rush to find the latest and greatest links I assume you might have missed one of these non-organized gems from the past arbitrary amount of time. Or maybe you'll rediscover a popular link from weeks ago and see it from a wiser, weeks-older perspective. Anyway, here's Wonderwall (of links):

• What football will look like in the future
• The New Inquiry: Taxonomy of Humans According to Twitter
• Reliable: The Ultimate Collection of Google Font Pairings (Displayed Beautifully with Classic Art)
• Economist: How do you pronounce “GIF”? - Dammit Economist, this not a teach the controversy debate. Pick a side as we all must.
• Eugene Register Guard: Eclipse apocalypse: Up to a million visitors are expected to watch the rare event
• CBS: Facebook, for the first time, acknowledges election manipulation
• Buzzsumo: We Analyzed 100 Million Headlines. Here’s What We Learned - How is clickbait headline formed?
• Big Medium: No Share Buttons on Mobile Sites (Except This One Weird Case)
• Washington Post: The slow, secret death of the electric guitar. And why you should care.
• Syncope - Test the rhythm of typography.
• Postlight: Serving 39 Million Requests for $370/Month - Picture serving pages without servers, whoa.
• bl.ocks.org: Wilson’s Algorithm - a-maze-ing.
• Standard Ebooks - Nicely designed public domain books.
• OregonLive: Quest to develop abandoned film uncovers Mount St. Helens eruption photos
• Kelly Watkins: The 5 books every marketer should read
• NASA: Shadow of the Eclipse
• New Atlas: To the stars by atom bomb: The incredible tale of the top secret Orion Project
• The Most Hated Online Advertising Techniques
• Every Frame a Painting: Edgar Wright - How to Do Visual Comedy
• Open Culture: 65,000 Fans Break Into a Singalong of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” at a Green Day Concert in London’s Hyde Park

Links:

• New York Times: El Capitan, My El Capitan - Amazing story!
• Ars Technica: You’ll never guess where Russian spies are hiding their control servers - Instagram comments. (Saved you a click.) But go read for the details.
• BBC: The hidden ways that architecture affects how you feel
• The Official Delicious Blog - With del.icio.us in new hands, someone is writing about the history of the bookmarking service.
• A Book Apart: Color Accessibility Workflows
• DigitalOcean Cloud Firewalls - Happy to add this to UFW for managing access.
• Eugene Register Guard: Eclipse expert tells Eugene audience: Don’t miss the moment of totality on Aug. 21
• Monument Valley 2 - Sequel to the beautiful iOS game.
• Designer News: Redditors design worst volume sliders possible

And in other news:

• The Intercept: Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election
• TheHill: DOJ: Trump can accept payments from foreign governments - Corruption.
• Vice: What My Father the Pathological Liar Taught Me About Trump
• @hodgman: "Here's what seems plausible to me..." - John Hodgman's tragic hilarious (tragilarious?) Twitter take on Comey & Trump during Comey's testimony.

More links for your weekly link pile:

• Benedict Evans: Not even wrong - ways to dismiss technology
• reddit careerquestions: Accidentally destroyed production database on first day of a job... - Take a minute and make sure this can't happen wherever you are.
• @mtsw thread on 'Pittsburgh vs. Paris' - Hey, I drive a Prius.
• Noahpinion: The Shouting Class
• Pinboard Acquires Delicious - See also: @delicious is a human now.
• Daring Fireball: Fuck Facebook - Seconded, thirded, and agreed.
• Atlas Obscura: The Hypnotic Allure of Cinemagraphic Waves
• Archive.org: MIT Press Classics Available Soon - Information still wants to be free.

And in other news:

• Washington Post: How Congress dismantled federal Internet privacy rules
• The Nation: The Covfefe Is Often Worse Than The Crime
• Fusion: Stop Enabling the Nihilist Republican Shrug
• Vox: Don’t just blame Trump for quitting the Paris deal...
• Rebecca Solnit: The Loneliness of Donald Trump
• Washington Post: Trump addresses London attack by tweeting about gun control, travel ban
• George Lakoff: Disaster Branding: The Importance of Naming

And a chaser, la hora sonó, la hora sonó:

Today is Memorial Day in the US. It can't hurt to read about the history of Memorial Day on Wikipedia. Here are some other links from the last week or so:

• The Pulse: Transcript of New Orleans Mayor Landrieu's address on Confederate monuments - See also: The Memory Palace, Episode 73.
• Brian Harry's blog: The largest Git repo on the planet - Windows source code is now on Git.
• SSHFS Windows 10 | Mount Your Remote Hosting as a Local Disk Drive - I wish this worked in Ubuntu on Windows, but alas, no FUSE.
• Medieval Fantasy City Generator - This is a neat start at generating random RPG cities.
• Nick Craver: HTTPS on Stack Overflow: The End of a Long Road - The technical details of Stack Overflow's move to all-HTTPS.
• Motherboard: Wikipedia’s Switch to HTTPS Has Successfully Fought Government Censorship
• Wired: Get Ready for the Next Big Privacy Backlash Against Facebook - A leaked document shows that Facebook was doing research into targeting ads to teens who feel vulnerable.
• New York Times: ‘The Internet Is Broken’: @ev Is Trying to Salvage It
• Pixel Envy: Google’s Proprietary Fork of HTML Is Taking Over the Open Web - *smacks forehead*. Yes, this is true. (See also: Russian Hackers Are Using Google's Own Infrastructure to Hack Gmail Users)
• Seldo.Com Blog: Are we making the web too complicated? - Yes and no.
• Resilient Web Design - A book about Web design by Jeremy Keith, in Web form.
• These Are The Victims Of The Portland Train Stabbing Attack
• @RabbeseKing: Yeah Yeah Beebiss I - NES game mystery.

And in other news:

• Washington Post: Russian ambassador told Moscow that Kushner wanted secret communications channel with Kremlin

A few recent links:

• mltshp faq - mltshp is mlkshk reborn! I'm pb over there.
• Remembering Chris Cornell... - John Roderick writes about Chris Cornell just before the world discovered him.
• JSON Feed - RSS alternative. But is there enough interest in syndication?
• New paint colors invented by neural network - This cracks me up. Sign me up for future machine learning comedy. (See also.)
• Download 200 Free Art Books, Courtesy of the Guggenheim - Information still wants to be free.
• The Guardian: How physical exercise makes your brain work better
• The Interconnected: Redefining Web Brutalism - Makes me wonder if this site could be defined as brutalist.
• The Washington Post: FCC votes to start rolling back landmark net neutrality rules
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to d3.js - Nice intro to the web native data visualization library.

And in other news:

• Time: Washington AG: President Trump’s Aggression Will Be His Undoing - "Ferguson is an internationally rated chess master and the attorney general for Washington State."
• New York Times: The Election Is Over, but Trump Can’t Seem to Get Past It

It's link time.

• Brand New: New Logo and Identity for Oregon State University by Pentagram
• Stack Overflow Trends - A new service from Stack Overflow that charts the number of questions about a particular technology over time.
• Prune - Looks like a beautiful mobile game about growing a tree.
• The WordPress.com Blog: Inclusive Illustrations, By Design - John Maeda inteviews Alice Lee about designing inclusive illustrations for WordPress.
• Ask MetaFilter: Finding Beautifully Designed, Practical Objects
• Kottke: When introversion collides with the desire to connect - It me.
• George Lakoff: The Public's Viewpoint: Regulations are Protections

I've been spending quite a bit of time trying to keep up with our sinking ship of state. If you haven't been watching, here are some links that will help (?):

• Lawfare Blog: The Nightmare Scenario: Trump Fires Comey, the One Man Who Would Stand Up to Him
• New York Times: Who Will Save the Republic?
• New York Times: After Comey, Here Are the Options for an Independent Russia Inquiry
• Politico: Behind Comey's firing: An enraged Trump, fuming about Russia
• NBC: Trump Hires Law Firm to Fight Suggestions of Russia Business Ties
• CNN: CNN exclusive: Grand jury subpoenas issued in FBI's Russia investigation
• Talking Points Memo: They're Trapped in His Lies
• Marie Claire: How the AHCA Is Bad for Women - Trumpcare Targets Women
• @drvox: Thread on Trump Theory of Mind - Terrifying follow-up to this pre-election article: The question of what Donald Trump “really believes” has no answer. (And here's a non-tweetstorm version: We overanalyze Trump. He is what he appears to be.)

I'm off to rearrange some deck chairs.

A few Sunday links in at buzzer here in Pacific time:

• Financial Times: Macron uses grandest of backdrops for entrance on world stage
• OPB: Solar Eclipse Or Bust: Small Oregon Towns Grapple With How To Prepare For Thousands
• The Washington Post: Every Republican who voted for this abomination must be held accountable
• NPR: The Purdue - Kaplan Deal Raises Questions
• The Atlantic: Rural Economies and College Towns (See also: OSU president tells Bend crowd his school needs more money)
• Pentagram: Oregon State University - OSU has a new institutional identity with a new logo by Pentagram.
• Dan McKinley: Deploying Often is a Very Good Idea - Slides from a talk that should be given.
• Revenge of nerdview - De-jargoning language.
• Regulating English with retext-mapbox-standard - De-jargoning with computers.
• Google Dev: Getting Started with Headless Chrome
• Running Mastodon - Nice tutorial about running your own Mastodon instance.

Quite a few links in my pile of links to share. Here they are in no particular order:

• The Register: 'I feel violated': Engineer who pointed out traffic signals flaw fined for 'unlicensed engineering' - Oregon has laws against pointing out flaws.
• Mic: Inside the elite meme wars of America's most exclusive colleges
• Google Research: Experimental Nighttime Photography with Nexus and Pixel - What if phones but too many night pictures averaged together?
• First Round Review: Fralic's 7 Rules for Making Memorable Connections
• Sarah Kendzior: The tale of the dictator’s daughter and her prince
• SSH Port - come gather round the terminal and hear the story of how one core service got its port.
• BBC: Sheep are not stupid, and they are not helpless either - Get woke on sheep, sheeple lemmings.
• New York Times: Comey Tried to Shield the F.B.I. From Politics
• Salon: Kindergartners get little time to play. Why does it matter? - The push for success starts early.
• The Atlantic: Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria - Another take on the failure of Google Books.
• Maciej Cegłowski: Build a Better Monster: Morality, Machine Learning, and Mass Surveillance - A talk about strategies for ethical progress in tech.
• What city is the microbrew capital of the US? - Fun use of IP geolocation to personalize the headline.
• Waxy: The Flagpole Sitta Lip Dub Turns 10
• How To Host Your Own Private Git Repositories

In the grand tradition (two is a tradition) of posting links on Wednesdays, here is some fine reading to tide you over until the weekend:

• Buzzfeed: Mark Zuckerberg's Makeover Is a Political Campaign Without the Politics
• Buzzfeed: Climbing Out Of Facebook's Reality Hole
• The Verge: Instant recall - Facebook Instant didn't save publishing
• Song Sleuth - Shazam for birdsong! (Though $10 is steep and the early reviews aren't good. )
• Lauren Hallden: Ask me what I do
• Kate Imbach: Fairytale Prisoner by Choice
• Vox Video: CNN treats politics like sports
• NYT: How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off
• Matt Haughey: The Flickr Explore page is still really amazing - (Inspired by Tim Carmody's stint on kottke.org gathering the best of the Web. Go there too!)