onfocus

Are movies getting more divisive? Rex shows that Rotten Tomatoes audience vs. critics scores are getting further apart.

"Many films from the past year saw huge disparities between audience and critic ratings. For instance, Gemini Man, a deepfake doppelganger thriller starring Will Smith, scored 83% fresh with audiences, but a paltry 26% fresh with critics."

Click through to see many more examples.

I’m enjoying the Recs reboot. I assume you already subscribe because I made subscribing mandatory last year. If not, now is the time!

This is a fascinating story about the rise of radio.

In the early days of broadcast development and regulation, Crosley and WLW sparked debate about what radio should and could be. Could a few clear-channel stations adequately serve—and acculturate—entire regions of listeners? Or would a national network system with local affiliates better target listener needs and interests?

As we reinvent everything with software I feel like there's a lesson for how we might think about public interest. Centralized social media websites consider themselves The World's Network but there might be better options.

I keep trying to switch to Firefox because it's not managed by an advertising company. It has been hard breaking the Chrome habit. But this browser theme for Firefox makes it look exactly like Chrome. I wasn't happy with the compact design for tabs and the bookmarks bar in Firefox. Now I have no excuse. I will switch.

Update: A trick that has helped me remember I want to switch is setting my Chrome homepage to the Firefox download page.

My guess is that no one could figure out how to set up a job in Windows Task Scheduler so they do cert renewals by hand and their cert renewal person was sick on renewal day. (Sorry to joke, but this gives me real flashbacks and it's nice to know even corporations can make basic mistakes.)

"Rogers Communications said a landslide damaged a fibre cable and caused the outage."

Amazing that one cable could be that critical to such a wide geographic region.

Darkest timeline continues. I’m just going to get news via the dictionary now.

Speaking of fonts, Inter is nice. In fact, if you're reading this at my website you're reading this text in Inter right now.

This is a free typeface for developers that looks niiiiice. Consolas is my preferred font for programming but I will give JetBrains Mono a try. Similarly, I'm enjoying the Dracula color theme in console windows and VSCode. It's similar to my usual preferred theme Solarized (dark), but sometimes you just have to throw caution to the wind and try a new font and color theme, you know?

Here's another must-read article even for chronic sufferers of tech-culture outrage fatigue—sorry.

"At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media — a sign that Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for."

If you don't have or want a NYT subscribtion, The Verge has a good summary: Go read this NYT expose on a creepy new facial recognition database used by US police. (Interesting that a Facebook board member is funding a company that is seemingly breaking the Facebook terms of service?) Another must-read, Bruce Schneier's take on banning facial recognition: We’re Banning Facial Recognition. We’re Missing the Point.

"A ban on facial recognition won’t make any difference if, in response, surveillance systems switch to identifying people by smartphone MAC addresses. The problem is that we are being identified without our knowledge or consent, and society needs rules about when that is permissible."

ps. (1/21) Vox has a great explainer video: What facial recognition steals from us.

Bash is like a friendly nemesis to me. I use it all the time for simple commands and I often think, "If I could just string two or three of these commands together with some simple logic I won't need to move to a ‘real’ development environment!" But then stuff like this...

"This looks very much like the if conditional statement in any programming language. However, it's not."

...means six hours later I have a bash script and 99 problems. This article helps explain why I run into trouble by describing how bash evolved.

Thanks, I guess? Counterpoint, kind of.

A note from our dystopian present where software ate everything and humans are API endpoints rather than driving the system:

"A future that plans on everything going right so no one has to think about what happens when things go wrong. Because computers don’t make mistakes. An automated future where no one actually knows how things work. A future where people are so far removed from the process that they stand around powerless, unable to take the reigns."

Not a big deal for watching movies but this could be tragic applied to more critical areas of our lives. It's good to watch out for this and push back on it.