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The falling nutritional value of crops
The mineral content of wheat and rice is lower today than sixty years ago. Why is that and what does it mean for how we eat?
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Cruel optimism and lazy pessimism
Do you remember the avocado toast guy? I read Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus recently (you should read it, it’s great), and I learned that someone1 has come up with a name for this sort of modern reinterpretation of “let them eat cake”: cruel optimism. Cruel optimism, the way Hari interprets it2, boils down to the folly…
274
GitHub Renamed Me (2014)
Github Renamed Me - We will change your SSH keys and you will like it
275
The Disappearance of the Ashtray
These things used to be pieces of furniture
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Why aren't motherboards mostly USB-C by now? (2021)
I’m beginning to think that the Windows PC that I built in 2015 is ready for retirement (though if Joe Biden can be president at 78, maybe this […]
277
The Mao-Kissinger Meeting of 1973
The archives of declassified foreign relations documents from the United States, China and other countries can give us some insights. I’ve enjoyed reading some of the documents in Wilson Cent…
278
No one wants simplicity
We think we do, but in fact every web developer will happily sacrifice simplicity to the first shiny thing promising them relief from the mildest of ailments.
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Is it my fault if you can't handle the truth? (2019)
You can't handle it! In 2018 or 2019, I was introduced to the idea of hyper-rationality. I think it was under another name (to be g...
280
Layoffs Are Cruel and Don't Work
Imagine you had a dog. You got the dog when it was young, trained and raised it. This animal was a part of your family and you gave it little collars and cute little clothes with your family name on it. The dog came to special events and soon thought
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Meta in Myanmar, Part III. The Inside View
Whistleblower disclosures and investigative reporting have revealed a lot about what was happening—and what was known—inside Meta during the lead-up to the genocide in Myanmar, including a connection to a global wave of fake-page networks devoted to manipulation and political misinformation.
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The WFH future is destroying bosses' brains (2021)
Yesterday, Silicon Valley Analyst Jeremiah Owyang vaguely reported that executives are scared of their employees “working part-time (but paid full salary)” and “even working on side hustle startups, while on a full-time salary,” a truly terrifying prospect that has chilled me to the bone.
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Transcending My Father's Abuse
Seeing My Dad as More than a Monster
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Post-apocalyptic life in American health care
Experiences navigating disintegrating American health care institutions, and what they might imply for life in 2037
286
How the Mac didn’t bring programming to the people
HyperTalk, AppleScript, Prograph, Automator, Swift Playgrounds and Shortcuts – all wonderful tools in their day, but none has brought coding to the crowd.
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Free and open source software projects are in transition
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
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How random is xkcd? (2015)
Apparently Randall Munroe gets a lot of messages saying that the “random” button on xkcd is biased.
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People who've received a black bar on Hacker News
I'm not sure when Hacker News started adorning a black bar on top of the website after a significant person passed, but I compiled a list of people who've received it.
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Dating, education, and sex ratios
Men floundering, women most affected
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WP20 and Audrey Scholars
Today is the 20th anniversary of the first release of WordPress. None of us knew what we were getting into when it started, but we had a shared conviction that the four freedoms of the GPL combined…
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An invitation to a secret society
Or: why you should be a lizard
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TIL: You Can Stop Updating Copyright Attribution Years (2021)
Every January 1st, an army of open source developers rushes out to update their copyright attributions in licenses and documentation. Why? Because we’ve always done it that way.
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I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one
I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one.
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The Placeholder Girlfriend
It became real when I saw the list. When I saw the rubric.
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Tor is not just for anonymity (2022)
Tech, Pets, and Vettes
297
Microsoft consumes Activision; and a plea
The gavel has fallen; the cup has been stomped; pick your metaphor. Microsoft has succeeded in its almost-two-year quest to gobble up Activision. The peculiar side effect in my corner of the world is that Microsoft now owns the dusty remains ...
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AI and Trust
I trusted a lot today. I trusted my phone to wake me on time. I trusted Uber to arrange a taxi for me, and the driver to get me to the airport safely. I trusted thousands of other drivers on the road not to ram my car on the way. At the airport, I trusted ticket agents and maintenance engineers and everyone else who…
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The Right to Lie and Google’s “Web Environment Integrity”
This is a fundamental principle of free and open source software. The World Wide Web abides by this principle, although we don’t often think of it that way. The Web is just an agreed-on set of programmatic interfaces: if you send me this, I’ll send you that. Your computer can construct the “this” by whatever means it…
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When Interfaces Kill: What Happened to John Denver (1999)
How poor design killed John Denver dead.