Blog AF

• How Slack and Facebook Are Making Access to Information Less Democratic
  Ezra Galston - BreakingVC
  

  There are clear tensions regarding how information is stored and accessed on the internet. In the OSS world, there is a loud group that constantly complains about the IRC => Slack trend, for example. Whether the fringe is becoming more or less accessible, I don’t know, I have not tried to hang out there, but there is an overwhelming feeling of the walls closing in on themselves.

• The Falsity of False Equivalence
  Paul Krugman - The New York Times
  

  The fact that this is not clearer to the public at large is insane. It is a bizarre time to live.

• A mistake is just a moment in time
  Jason Fried - Signal V. Noise
  

  Internalize your mistakes, correct your course, but don’t forget you messed up.

• What San Francisco Says About America
  Thomas Fuller - The New York Times
  

  I lived in Chicago for 4 years, and I never saw levels of poverty and homelessness as intense as I see in San Francisco. However, both cities have poverty. Both cities have homelessness. In Chicago it is a matter of “out of sight, out of mind”, while in SF you see it day in and day out. Market Street and the Magnificent Mile are a stark contrast, but both cases require society to provide solutions. This article is missing a call to action.

• The Free-Time Paradox in America
  Derek Thompson - The Atlantic
  
• Spotify Is Perfecting the Art of the Playlist
  Devin Leonard - Bloomberg
  

  Probably one of the best features in Spotify. Pretty cool story of how it came about.

• Snapchat Releases First Hardware Product, Spectacles
  Seth Stevenson - The Wall Street Journal
  

  A glimpse into the future of media/advertising, an interesting personal story, and a product I’d love to try. The back story of how this story got leaked by Business Insider, and the WSJ ended up being whipped into releasing it early says a lot about journalism in the 21st century, too. A lot to unpack.

• I Used to Be a Human Being
  Andrew Sullivan - New York Magazine
  

  Another piece about the perils of living attached to our screens, and taking a break from the addiction. These have become more and more common, but somehow Sullivan gives a refreshing view.

• The MIT License, Line by Line
  Kyle E. Mitchell - /dev/lawyer
  

  I wish I understood licensing better, but this is a first step. Open source software is amazing. It is one of the reasons computers today are as powerful as they are.

• Compressing and enhancing hand-written notes
  Matt Zucker
  

  Another cool project on image processing by Zucker. Code that solves a real problem, however tiny, is always worth reading.

A collection of photos from the past couple of months. The first few I took for my photo class, but I never shared here, while the later ones are mostly tests of my new lens. Still getting used to it. More...

So much for making an effort to post more consistently… 🙄

• Beyond the iPhone
  Ben Thompson - Stratechery
  

  A few weeks have vindicated Ben’s comments. While everyone was thinking about the missing headphone jack, this article explained the latest iPhone release for what it most likely is: set up.

• The Age of the Wordless Logo
  Kalle Oskari Mattila - The Atlantic
  
• Deep Exploration Into Python: Let’s Review The Dict Module
  Andrew Kelleher - BuzzFeed Tech Blog
  

  In python, everything is a dict. Understanding how they work is really important, beyond the basic idea of hashing keys and mapping to values. This article by should be required reading.

• Things which aren't magic - Flask and @app.route - Part 1
  Ainsley Escorce-Jones
  

  I have been helping a friend level up his python recently, focusing on web development with Flask. One of his first questions? “What does @app.route, do?”

• Why Silicon Valley is all wrong about Apple’s AirPods
  Chris Messina - Medium
  

  Apple, the fashion company.

• Vote as if It Matters
  Paul Krugman - The New York Times
  
• Uncertainty Wednesday: Reality, Explanations, Observations
  Albert Wenger - Continuations
  

  Part two was also really good, and I am very much looking forward to the rest of the series.

• The Morality of Surge Pricing
  Russ Roberts - Medium
  
• Making up Ground
  99% Invisible
  
• The Takeover
  Reply All (Podcast)
  

We went to Lake Tahoe. It was fun. More...

• Knowledge (2015)
  Albert Wenger - Continuations
  

  In this post, Albert defines knowledge from a humanistic perspective. It nicely ties into a recent article I shared about nihilism. Knowledge only matters if it is worth reproducing.

• Learning and mastering isn’t the same
  David Heinemeier Hansson - Signal V. Noise
  

  Slowly, one abstraction at a time, software engineering has become more and more accessible. The advent of Ruby on Rails marked the beginning of a wave that lowered the barriers to entry for programming, particularly web development, for thousand of engineers. I am one of them. Now it is time to put in the hours and master the craft.

• Story of My Life: How Narrative Creates Personality
  Julie Beck - The Atlantic
  

  We contain multitudes. Our idea of the “self” is just an aggregate of layers of all previous actions and states of mind, wrapped in a narrative that also changes over time. It’d be an interesting exercise to try and model this computationally, somehow.

• When You Change the World and No One Notices
  Morgan Housel - Collaborative Fund
  

  Real innovation takes time. It is, however, important to remember that cycles are contracting. Innovation itself is accelerating, and that needs to go into our decision making models, too.

• How Apple Helped Create Ireland’s Economies, Real and Fantastical
  Adam Davidson - The New Yorker
  

  The events that are developing in the EU right now are potentially more important to the future of global culture than most people realize. Whatever conclusion comes from this case might define sovereignty and jurisdiction across national and supranational borders. As Tim Cook posits in his letter, “at its root, the Commission’s case is not about how much Apple pays in taxes. It is about which government collects the money,” and that is the actually interesting question here.

• How Harambe Became the Perfect Meme
  Venkatesh Rao - The Atlantic