onfocus

As a collector of dumb domain names I am shocked (!) by this performance report. How could anyone go for these idiotic TLDs? Also wondering: is .shocked available?

Your weekend long read that attempts to explain why the US is politically polarized:

"Destructive cherry-picking breeds fear, anger, and cynicism. It’s why we always think crime is getting worse even though it’s almost always getting better."

The most resonant part to me was about media negativity bias and disgust. It's a cliché that we don't hear good news but it's also true and feeds our cognitive biases.

LOL. Nerds.

"The new thing here is that Yandex is working not just as a reverse image search tool; it seems to be doing facial matching."

Nelson has an interesting follow-up to the bellingcat guide to reverse image searching I posted recently.

"The warmongers are never ruined by their mistakes."

Justified outrage at the media's willful ignorance of recent history.

Thoughtful ideas about team communication from Basecamp with a focus on writing vs. meetings:

"Speaking only helps who’s in the room, writing helps everyone. This includes people who couldn't make it, or future employees who join years from now."

It makes sense that they're down on chat (the competition!), but I don't agree that live chat is a mind-killer. Some decisions require quick consensus rather than lengthy position statements for the ages.

The state of reverse image search on the web.

"...if you only use Google for reverse image searching, you will be disappointed more often than not."

As disinformation season ramps up in 2020, finding an image origin is a useful tool to have.

The web is becoming more and more ephemeral.

"Vanished are amazing pieces of writing on kuro5hin about tech culture, and a collection of mathematical puzzles and their associated discussion by academics that my father introduced me to; gone are Woodman's Reverse Engineering tutorials from my high school years, where I first tasted the feeling of dominance over software; even my most recent bookmark, a series of posts on Google+ exposing usb-c chargers' non-compliance with the specification, disappeared."

This article includes some steps you can take that could help preserve what you publish. Complex frameworks, walled-gardens, and serverless publishing trade away endurance for convenience.

Excellent description of how broken “both sides” journalism is right now.

"Chuck Todd has essentially said that on the right there is an incentive structure that compels Republican office holders to use their time on Meet the Press for the spread of disinformation. So do you keep inviting them on air to do just that?"

Paging Upton Sinclair.

My alternate headline for this: Twitter CEO makes the case that Mastodon has a superior architecture for social media; forms group to invent it. The Mastosphere has been chatting about this quite a bit with worries about embrace, extend, and extinguish. It wasn’t received well is what I’m trying to say. Mastodon BDFL Eugen was more diplomatic.

Anil on links and the web we’ve settled for:

"So let’s look at all the apps that live under our thumbs, and interrogate the choices they’re making, and then imagine what they would look like if we demanded that our tools don’t tie our hands."

"[$50 billion] sounds like a lot, but it could be a bargain compared to adding a lane to I-5, the current north-south corridor linking the megaregion."

Co-signed!