onfocus

If you watch nothing else from the impeachment trial, please watch Schiff’s argument that truth should matter. See also: Is the Oath a Joke?

This is also a good time to mention impeachment.fyi. Daniel is watching every minute and then summarizing events so you don’t have to watch every minute. He’s doing a great service that’s worth pitching in for.

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.

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.