I just read and enjoyed this:
Social media platforms repeatedly use so-called dark patterns to nudge you toward giving away more of your data.
Read “How Facebook and Other Sites Manipulate Your Privacy Choices”
Recommended Reading
Recommended Reading: A Constructive Look At TempleOS
I just read and enjoyed this:
TempleOS is somewhat of a legend in the operating system community. Its sole author, Terry A. Davis, has spent the past 12 years attempting to create a new operating from scratch. Terry explains that God has instructed him to construct a temple, a 640×480 covenant of perfection.
Recommended Reading: A year without conferences? How the coronavirus pandemic could change research
I just read and enjoyed this:
This is shaping up to be an unusual year — it might even be the year scientists stop going to conferences.
Read “A year without conferences? How the coronavirus pandemic could change research”
Recommended Reading: What the Death of iTunes Says About Our Digital Habits
I just read and enjoyed this:
The abandonment of iTunes heralded a broader shift in how Americans are assumed to approach their digital lives. You could call it the victory of Gmail. When it debuted in 2004, Google’s email software offered Americans a revolutionary new way of thinking about their digital footprint: Don’t.
Read “What the Death of iTunes Says About Our Digital Habits”
Previously: Computer Files Are Going Extinct
Recommended Reading: Computer Files Are Going Extinct
I love files. I love renaming them, moving them, sorting them, changing how they’re displayed in a folder, backing them up, uploading them to the internet, restoring them, copying them, and hey, even defragging them.
There are some good observations on how development has changed as well:
Years ago websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies.
The other day, I came across a website I’d written over two decades ago. I double-clicked the file, and it opened and ran perfectly. Then I tried to run a website I’d written 18 months ago and found I couldn’t run it without firing up a web server, and when I ran NPM install, one or two of those 65,000 files had issues that meant node failed to install them and the website didn’t run. When I did get it working, it needed a database. And then it relied on some third-party APIs and there was an issue with CORS because I hadn’t whitelisted localhost.
Recommended Reading: How ‘dark patterns’ influence travel bookings
I just read and enjoyed this:
If you’ve wondered whether there were actually 30 people trying to book the same flight as you, you’re not alone. As Chris Baraniuk finds, the numbers may not be all they seem.Ophir Harpaz just wanted to get a good deal on a flight to London.
Recommended Reading: The Endless, Invisible Persuasion Tactics of the Internet
I just read and enjoyed this:
Even the cheesiest, most cloyingly overearnest romance movies lack the pathos of the pop-up notifications you get when you cancel an online subscription.
Read “The Endless, Invisible Persuasion Tactics of the Internet”
Recommended Reading: The 84 biggest flops, fails, and dead dreams of the decade in tech
I just read and enjoyed this:
The world never changes quite the way you expect. But at The Verge, we’ve had a front-row seat while technology has permeated every aspect of our lives over the past decade. Some of the resulting moments — and gadgets — arguably defined the decade and the world we live in now.
But others we ate up with popcorn in hand, marveling at just how incredibly hard they flopped.
Read “The 84 biggest flops, fails, and dead dreams of the decade in tech”
I would have ranked Google+ much, much higher, at least in the top 10, probably in the top 3, even though it arguably achieved its primary purpose: unifying Google’s account management.
Recommended Reading: New Productivity — Benedict Evans
I just read and enjoyed this:
We are in the middle of a wave of interesting new productivity software startups – there are dozens of companies that remix some combination of lists, tables, charts, tasks, notes, light-weight databases, forms, and some kind of collaboration, chat or information-sharing.
Recommended Reading: The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of “jaywalking”
I just read and enjoyed this:
A hundred years ago, if you were a pedestrian, crossing the street was simple: You walked across it.
Today, if there’s traffic in the area and you want to follow the law, you need to find a crosswalk. And if there’s a traffic light, you need to wait for it to change to green. […]
To most people, this seems part of the basic nature of roads. But it’s actually the result of an aggressive, forgotten 1920s campaign led by auto groups and manufacturers that redefined who owned the city streets.
Read “The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of “jaywalking””
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