What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars?
Starlink is a point of departure to consider the costs of the unrelenting drive toward artificial illumination, a technological development most of us now take for granted.
Why does no one ever talk about Sweden anymore?
Very weird, isn't it?
The Tamagotchi Cemetery
In 1996, Japanese toy designers Aki Maita and Yokoi Akihiro debuted the first ever Tamagotchi.
Fuck.com (1997)
Since then the Internet has grown by literally hundreds of thousands of percentage points, people have been busted big time for online obscenity - folks at InterNIC have become more cautious.
Clubhouse is the big stinker that nobody wants to talk about
DO NOT SUBSCRIBE HERE subscribe at wheresyoured.at. Click to read DO NOT SUBSCRIBE HERE subscribe at wheresyoured.at, by Ed Zitron, a Substack publication.
Kropotkin's 'The Conquest of Bread'
A blog containing essays, of varying cogency, about various things that my mind have wandered to.
Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated
Back in April I wrote Cryptocurrency's Carbon Footprint about the catastrophic carbon emissions of Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies such as B...
A Compass for the Politics of Collapse
The word "collapse" appears more and more often in recent political debate. Online, in the media, in the Academia, and in radical politic...
Web3 is a stupid idea
timdaub · Web3 is a stupid idea A long time ago, I gave a talk in front of a full audience talking about BigchainDB, a company I worked for to create a (scalable) decentralized database. As
iDOS 2 will be gone soon
Recently I tried to submit an iDOS update with a few bug fixes, but then got a notification from Apple Review Team, and my heart dropped cold.
Are Experts Real?
Credentials, Expertise, and Feedback Loops
US Customs Export Control Says: I’m Screwed
Update: It looks like this problem may have been resolved by USPS, with international shipments sent May 11 or later proceeding normally. But there’s still confusion about the source of the problem, the date it was resolved, and whether it’s truly fixed. It appears it’s necessary to buy new postage to reship any…
Breakdown of data on homeless populations across the U.S.
Many people see a homelessness crisis, but what does the data say? We examine different locations, rates of change, types of homelessness, and mental health and substance abuse issues.
Google and Microsoft have opaque and unpredictable ad moderation
Yet another sad story of how big companies kill small ones because of poor processes.
Against Hickelism
Poverty is falling, and it isn't because of free-market capitalism
I exploited existing YouTube videos with a fake Patreon profile
I am watching a lot of investing videos on youtube recently. I like to watch them while I eat, or they play in the background while I do something else. I…
I Can’t See You but I’m Not Blind
If I ask you to think of an elephant do you see an elephant in your head when you close your eyes? I don’t. Regardless of how descriptive the imagery, story or text I can’t create any pictures in m…
The Importance of Price Signals
Originally published: December 2021 When price inflation occurs, it can be a very challenging time for everyone. In that type of environment, prices of goods and services often go up faster than wages, and the public and policymakers wish to constrain them. Historically, when price inflation becomes rampant…
Arkham Quixote (2020)
“There’s that sort of sense that many technical people will see or feel when you see something and you know what it could be, and you know it could be important, and you see companies just doing it wrong — there’s that powerful desire to fix it and do it right and show them sort of how it’s supposed to be done”
Using GDPR to obtain one’s data as JSON
TL;DR: If you live in the EU or are a EU citizen, companies must provide personal data you provided or they collected in a machine-readable format, following the article 20 of the GDPR.
Interpreting 9/11 commemorative Afghan carpets (2011)
The most controversial and confronting of the many categories of Afghan “war carpets” made since the Soviet invasion in 1979 were those which first appeared in early 2002 and which memorialized the…
Shitty Software Kills People
How the public healthcare system in Italy is using software to support the vaccination effort is appaling. I’ve spent a good part of the last 30 years trying to convince people that software is imp…