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A World Run with Code
What the world will be like when computational intelligence and computational contracts are ubiquitous. Transcript of a talk by Stephen Wolfram from a 2019 blockchain conference.
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True Surprise
How many true surprises are there in life? This was the question I asked Mrs. Bastard when she was pregnant with our first child and wanted ...
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The Ethics of Web Performance
Tim Kadlec writes about performance, product management, and the web.
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Civilizational Collapse, Part 4
This is part 4 of an intermittent yet always enjoyable series: • Part 1: the rise of the ancient Puebloan civilization in the American Southwest from 10,000 BC to 750 AD. • Part 2: the rise and col…
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The curious economics of being ripped off on holiday
I once wrote that there are two types of charges: the ones you see coming and the ones you don’t. Perhaps I was too reductive. There’s a third category: the fees that you know are looming, but the …
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The Most Gender-Switched Names in the U.S.
We use some names mostly for boys and some mostly for girls, but then there is a small percentage that, over time, switched from one gender to another. Which names made the biggest switch?
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Freeing My Phone from Google
Phones are so full of ads that you don’t even notice them anymore. Suggestions and notifications you didn’t ask for, tracking mechanisms you don’t even know are there, services over which you have no control. It’s absurd how much smartphones, a large extension of our private and social lives, are controlled and…
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The Siege of Carrie Lam
On September 26, 2019, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam held her first listening session after seventeen weeks of protest. Her government, which had spent the summer nearly incommunicado, had settled on these encounters as a way to heal social divisions and identify the mysterious goals of a movement whose five…
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Google Forcing Nest Cameras’ Visual Indicator Light To Be On
Google Forcing Nest Cameras Visual Indicator Light To Be On
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On me, and the Media Lab
(Please be sure to read the addendum at the end of this post.) A week ago last Friday, I spoke to Joi Ito about the release of documents that accuse Media Lab co-founder Marvin Minsky of involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s horrific crimes.* Joi told me that evening that the Media Lab’s ties to Epstein went… Read More »On…
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ET Don't Phone Home
I recently became aware of this article where a Google exec says - he’s serious - that ‘Nest owners should probably warn their guests that their conversations are being recorded’. That’s assuming the owners themselves are even aware of what these devices are doing, and the likely truth is that they do not. Like needy…
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How the Great Pyramid at Giza Looked in 2560 BCE
The current outer surface of the Great Pyramid at Giza is made of rough limestone blocks, colored a dark sandy brown from hundreds of years of pollution and wea
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Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor
These candidates were assessed on a variety of axes, most importantly Community Participation Guideline enforcement and accessibility, but also including team requirements from engineering, organizational-values alignment, usability, utility and cost. To close out, I’ll talk about the options we haven’t chosen and…
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Our Dazzling Night Sky When the Milky Way Collides with Andromeda in 4B Years
This is what our night sky is going to look like in 3.9 billion years: Wow! So what’s going on here? Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers at
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The Internet and the Third Estate
Mark Zuckerberg suggested that social media is a “Fifth Estate”; in fact, social media is a means by which the Third Estate — commoners — can seize political power. Here history matters…
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My Parents Are Flat Earthers
For decades, my parents have been working up to Flat-Earther beliefs. From Egyptology to Jehovah's Witnesses to theories that human built the Moon billions of years in the future. Surprisingly, it doesn't affect their successful lives very much. For me, it's a fun family pastime.
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Dear Mozilla, please stop spamming
Detailing Mozilla's failures to send newsletters only to users who actually opted in.
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The crisis in physics is not only about physics
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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Medical records on the blockchain – the history of a bad idea
Patients having some sort of “control” over their own medical data is a perennial favourite blockchain pitch. We may have found the source.
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Protest against the EU radio lockdown
We are facing a EU regulation which may make it impossible to install a custom piece of software on most radio decives like WiFi routers, smartphones and embedded devices. You can now give feedback on …
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English speakers should learn math instead of a second language
An old joke goes: Q: What do you call someone who knows three languages? A: Trilingual Q: What do you call someone who knows two languages? A: Bilingual Q: What do you call someone who knows just o…
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Twitter to decentralize something
Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard.
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Sexy weasels in Renaissance art
Exploring the sexual symbolism hidden in paintings of weasels in Renaissance art