Society

The UK government, like its US counterpart, is not held in much respect. Does this create an opportunity?

Some people say “hobby” like it’s a bad thing. In a race for more, it seems as though doing something you don’t get paid for, something that requires patience and skill&#821…

Posted on Monday 3 Jan 2022. 1,263 words, 10 links. By Matt Webb.

Social media and many other facets of modern life are destroying our ability to concentrate. We need to reclaim our minds while we still can

J.K. Rowling's views on trans people have tarnished the Harry Potter books for many fans, but the community remains strong.

So long as algorithms are trained on racist historical data and outdated values, there will be no opportunities for change.

"Honor Thy Mother" explores shame, identity and motherhood in a Washington community that built Filipino and Indigenous families.

Another year of Tedium is behind us, and gotta say—it’s looking like another thousand years of it. Here’s the tedium you should expect in 2022.

LVMH does not need your money

So last year I made a bunch of predictions that with one exception were kind of obvious. I don’t want to do that again, so I am going to list five things that I think will happen this year that most people would not likely agree with. 1/ As the pandemic evolves into an endemic […]

(image credit) News came last week that TikTok eclipsed both Google and Facebook as the most visited domain and most downloaded app in the United States. The mainstream media response can be summed…

For years the broadband industry has successfully convinced the U.S. government to remain fixated exclusively on broadband coverage gaps, not the overall lack of broadband competition. That's in part because they've known for decades that...

The history of copyright can be seen as one of increasing control by companies over what ordinary people can do with material created by others. For the online world, the endgame is where copyright holders get to check and approve every single file...

Nobody likes to spend money, even if they crave the things that this money buys them. If someone handed you the thing you want for free, you likely wouldn’t beg them to take your money in return. I doubt that anyone has ever woken up, read a post on personal finance, and then thought “huh, if I

About 30 years ago this month, some boffins at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Lab at Stanford University decided to set up a website — they wanted to improve how i…

Recently a security hole in a certain open source Java library resulted in a worldwide emergency kerfuffle as, say, 40% of the possibly hund...

One principle of (strong/sci-fi) AI seems to be that what can replicate the effects of intelligence is intelligence, e.g. the Turing test, or the present claim by some philosophers that a Chinese r…

No one freely buys anything unless it’s worth more than it costs. And so, in a competitive market, organizations will compete to capture as little value as they can afford to, offering the mo…

Just learned Wayne Thiebaud died, at 101. I didn’t know he was still alive. But I did know he had a lot of influence, most famously on pop art. Least famously, on me. Many of Thiebaud’s…

Since vaccines became widely available in April, nearly 250,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the United States. Their demographics are different from earlier in the pandemic.

The pandemic has been a wake-up call for America's job market.

At the turn of the 20th century, rural cooperative associations found a way to install telephone networks without erecting poles: They simply connected their wires to the existing pasture fences. “Fifteen or twenty farmers in Clay Township, Cass County, are enjoying the privileges of first-class telephone service without the annoyance of a monthly collector thrusting a bill for rental under their noses,” reported the Washington Post in 1903. “Their homes are connected by a system of wires, and the novelty of the plan lies in the fact that the barbed wire fences are utilized as a conveyor of neighborhood gossip....

All ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system.Dr. Richard I. Cook, How Complex Systems Fail There’s a wonderful book by the late urban planning professo…

The pioneers of holography (Gabor, Leith, Upatnieks, and Denisyuk) predicted very early that the ultimate 3D display will be based on this technique. This conviction was rooted in the fact that holography is the only approach that can render all optical cues interpreted by the human visual system. Holographic 3D displays have been a dream chased after for many years, facing challenges on all fronts: Computation, transmission, and rendering. With numbers such as 6.6 × 1015 flops required for calculations, 3 × 1015 b/s data rates, and 1.6 × 1012 phase pixels, the task has been daunting.

The metaverse could be the killer app for several of the most exciting emerging technologies that haven't yet found their footing.

Everybody needs high-speed internet. But private corporations will never provide it. The solution: treat internet infrastructure as a public utility, funded by the public and built by union workers.

"WARNING: You may die inside this car."

1/ With the omicron surge, I have had more friends send me screenshots of exposure notifications (EN) in the last week than I have in the last year. Here are some reflections based on the work I led at @Apple working with @Google and some thoughts on the road ahead. 🧵 https://t.co/Iw1jZdJNyE