Month: November 2018
🎧 The Daily: Which to Believe: Trump’s Words, or His Acts? | New York Times
Is the United States’ policy toward Russia what the president says, or what the government does?
🎧 The Daily: Why the A.C.L.U. Wants to Be More Like the N.R.A. | New York Times
We speak to Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, about the group’s major shift in strategy following the election of President Trump.
🎧 The Daily: The Democrats’ Comeback Plan | New York Times
The party’s seemingly narrow strategy for the 2018 midterm elections belies its big hopes for the future.
🎧 The Daily: The Fight Over 3-D-Printed Guns | New York Times
Critics say that publishing blueprints for 3-D-printed weapons is a threat to public safety. Supporters say it’s a First Amendment right.
👓 Some OwnYourSwarm Updates | Aaron Parecki
Aaron Parecki (Aaron Parecki)Today I launched some updates to OwnYourSwarm, the service that sends your Swarm checkins to your own website. It does this by watching your Swarm account and sending checkins to your site via Micropub.
Private Posts
I made two changes to how OwnYourSwarm can handle private posts. Private posts ar...
This is awesome Aaron! Thanks for continuing to push the boundaries.
📺 "The Great British Baking Show" Bread Week | Netflix
Directed by Andy Devonshire. With Mel Giedroyc, Sue Perkins, Mary Berry, Paul Hollywood. The bakers face an ovenless technical challenge and a three-flour showstopper.
This show makes me wonder a bit about the bread culture in England. Are people really baking larger plaited loaves either at home or even in restaurants? Why isn’t it more of a thing here in the US?
👓 Why we’re changing Flickr free accounts | Flickr
Today, we’re announcing updates to our Free and Pro accounts that mark a new step forward for Flickr. To be candid, we’re driving toward the future of Flickr with one eye on the rearview mirror; we…
Nice to see that they’ve looked at the data to come up with what will hopefully be a reasonable dividing line.
Having a worthwhile community there would be the only thing to make me want to syndicate my photos to it, particularly with backfeed coming from Brid.gy. I haven’t gotten much, if any, interaction from Flickr in quite a long time.
I suspect that having a curated community there will actually dovetail with helping out the IndieWeb in the long run. What they’d like to have sounds a lot more like what micro.blog has become for me in the past year. It also sounds a lot more like how SoundCloud works to some extent.
👓 Gab and the decentralized web | Ben Werdmüller
Ben Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)As a proponent of the decentralized web, I've been thinking a lot about the aftermath of the domestic terrorism that was committed in Pittsburgh at the Tree of Life synagogue over the weekend, and how it specifically relates to the right-wing social network Gab. In America, we're unfortunately used ...
I couldn’t have put it any better myself.
👓 Reply to Ben Werdmüller | Interdependent Thoughts
I think this is a false dilemma, Bernd.
I’d say that it would be great if those extremists would see using a distributed tool like Mastodon as the only remaining viable platform for them. It would not suppress their speech. But it woud deny them any amplification, which they now enjoy by being very visible on mainstream platforms, giving them the illusion they are indeed mainstream. It will be much easier to convince, if at all needed, instance moderators to not federate with instances of those guys, reducing them ever more to their own bubble. They can spew hate amongst themselves for eternity, but without amplification it won’t thrive. Jotted down some thoughts on this earlier in “What does Gab’s demise mean for federation?“
📑 Reply to Ben Werdmüller | Interdependent Thoughts
They can spew hate amongst themselves for eternity, but without amplification it won’t thrive. ❧
This is a key point. Social media and the way it (and its black box algorithms) amplifies almost anything for the benefit of clicks towards advertising is one of its most toxic features. Too often the extreme voice draws the most attention instead of being moderated down by more civil and moderate society.
🎧 The Daily: The Strange Case of QAnon | New York Times
A fringe online movement makes a front-and-center appearance at a televised event for President Trump.
🎧 How Paul Manafort’s Plans Backfired | The Daily | New York Times
The story of the former Trump campaign chairman and his ties to foreign governments begins long before the 2016 election.
🎧 The Rise of Michael Avenatti | The Daily | New York Times
The lawyer’s self-sure ways and penchant for media spectacle have led some to characterize him as the anti-Trump.