Weekly Roundup on Ivan: Thinking

Weekly Roundup: April 7-13, 2019

Sat, 13 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Dog people, in other words, are slightly happier than those without any pets. Those in the cat camp, on the other hand, are significantly less happy than the pet-less. And having both appears to cancel each other out happiness-wise.

My alma mater, SFSU, gets a donation of $25m in XRP from Ripple Co-founder and wife.

Quoting AVC’s quote, related to the Full Stack Employee:

A CEO does only three things. Sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholders. Recruits, hires, and retains the very best talent for the company. Makes sure there is always enough cash in the bank.

If you’re a fan of car camping, like Ali and I are, you may want to check out MetaFilter’s list of Must-have camping supplies.

Burning Man seems to be in a constant state of annihilation. Maybe that’s the whole point?

Live long and be happy, like Okinawan Centenarians:

It’s not just living for a long time, but it’s living an active, engaged, happy life for a long time. You won’t get this by taking the right pills from orange bottles. You need to spend your time doing something that you feel matters to the world. You need love and support from other humans.

Facebook’s new Watch Party being used to host illicit watch parties of pirated content. What the fuck did they expect?

Banksy authenticates his work with cryptography:

The tear is what uniquely separates the private key, the half of the note kept secret under lock and key at Pest Control, with the public key. The public key is the half of the note attached to the authentication certificate which gets passed on with the print, and allows its authenticity to be easily verified.

We have no idea what has been written on Pest Control’s private half of the note. Which means it can’t be easily recreated, and that empowers Pest Control to keep the authoritative list of who currently owns each authenticated Banksy work.

Hello, again, NIMBYs.

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Weekly Roundup: March 31-April 6, 2019

Sat, 06 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Be careful about who hears your tapping on your phone:

When a user taps the screen with a finger, the tap generates a sound wave that propagates on the screen surface and in the air. We found the device’s microphone(s) can recover this wave and “hear” the finger’s touch, and the wave’s distortions are characteristic of the tap’s location on the screen.

Housing policy isn’t just about housing. It’s also about transportation and climate as well.

Learn yourself some Turtle Coin for Great Good. Just very basics of getting setup right now. I’m hoping it’ll get some more meat here over time for the community.

Compressing the blockchain by O(1) Labs. It’s great to hear that this is now possible so we can begin to have more mobile-friendly blockchains.

$ prune google+

^related: Google Graveyard.

Real life blindspotting:

“People have told me, ‘It’s not that I didn’t see the black maid in the painting, I just didn’t know what to say about her’”

Web development, illustrated. Reminds me of the very helpful drawings of content hugging vs content compression resistance priority on Stack Overflow. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve re-googled this to reference these answers.

#weekly-roundup

Weekly Roundup: March 24-30, 2019

Sat, 30 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

What’s that smell? Perhaps it’s a recession:

The yield on the 10-year US Treasury note was a tiny bit less than that of the 3-month US Treasury bill. This is known as a yield inversion, and depending on which article you read, this specific type of yield inversion (10-year minus 3-month) has happened before each of the past 6, 7, or 9 recessions.

Maybe not yet, or maybe not at all:

There have been a few false yield-curve inversion signals in the post-war era, Paulsen wrote, but there has never been a recession that was not preceded by a significant fiscal contraction.

We are not seeing that in this cycle yet.

Meanwhile, brick and mortar retail seems to be taking a big hit too, as JCPenny, Payless, and LifeWay announce over 3,000 store closures.

You be your own judge, but be sure to have a plan for whatever happens. Mayhaps it’s time to start making sacrafices.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, we’ve got:
- Home values starting to drop
- And pending home sales in the US slip down
- NIMBYs flex their economic might on the Embarcadero by raising $75k to fight the construction of a homeless resource center which would house 200 homeless residents
- We also don’t want the homeless sleeping in vacant storefronts either, but we also don’t want those stores to be chain stores either:
  
  Residents have to start putting their money where their mouth is — if you want only local businesses in your neighborhood, and you oppose chains, why are you spending all your money on Amazon and staying in every night?
Speaking of places to stay, last year: American consumers spent more on Airbnb than on Hilton
The Cluetrain Manifesto turned 20:

In the industrial world, especially the commercial mass media part of that world, shipping was a very appropriate conceptual metaphor. It gave us a useful vocabulary for describing a world where a goods move great distances between a few producers and millions of consumers. The problem is, when you apply that metaphor in a networked world, with its networked markets, you make the mistake of treating in-your-face customers as distant consumers. They aren’t cattle. They fish-like gullets gulping down products that fall off the end of distribution’s conveyor belt. But we still conceive them that way, or we wouldn’t talk about “aggregating” and “capturing” them. We also wouldn’t talk about “moving content” through the Net as if it were just another medium, like TV, radio and newspapers.
Abigail Disney on what money means in relation to virtuosity:

Money is morally neutral. It does not, in and of itself, make you a bad person. It also does not, in and of itself, makes you a good person. You are who you are and the least important thing about you is what you have.

(emphasis mine)

On feeling worthy:

I’ve spent a lot of time earning things like post graduate degrees that make me feel legitimate. And those feelings have started to go away. But that’s outsourcing your sense of self. That is handing your self-esteem to the world to tell you whether or not you’re allowed to have any. And that’s a dangerous game.

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Weekly Roundup: March 17-23, 2019

Sat, 23 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

737 MAX:

A single faulty sensor — a vane on the outside of the fuselage that measures the plane’s “angle of attack,” the angle between the airflow and the wing — triggered MCAS multiple times during the deadly flight, initiating a tug of war as the system repeatedly pushed the nose of the plane down and the pilots wrestled with the controls to pull it back up, before the final crash.

[…]

When time was too short for FAA technical staff to complete a review, sometimes managers either signed off on the documents themselves or delegated their review back to Boeing.
Spotify vs. Apple \
Speaking of Apple, hold your brains: WWDC19 is on its way!
Those little yellow dots on sidewalk corners are called Tenji Blocks. I like telling people that they’re foot massagers installed by kind-hearted municipalities.
Otaku’s closest translation from Japanese to English would be geek. I hadn’t given much thought to what “kotaku” means though:

Since 2005, Kotaku has unabashedly covered Japan from Japan, breaking news and providing a boots-on-the-ground look at the country’s gaming and geek culture. The site’s name, “Kotaku”, is even from a made-up Japanese word with “ko” (小) meaning “small” and “otaku” (オタク) meaning “geek”. Voilà, Kotaku!
The Cloud is just another Sun. What a title! 😂 Interesting comparison between the UNIX wars and where we are today.
Are 47% of us (2 billion Internet users) using ad blockers?:

The market is sending a massive message. That message is that advertising online has come to have massively negative value. Ad blocking and tracking protection are legitimate and eloquent messages from demand to supply.

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