Author: Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
Read The Influencer and the Hit Man | Do It For State Snaps: How How a Feud Over a URL Ended in a Bloody Shootout by Ian FrischIan Frisch (onezero.medium.com)

How a years-long domain name feud ended in a bloody shootout

When Ethan Deyo’s small, sandy-haired dog cocked his head and perked up his ears, Deyo knew something was wrong. Deyo stepped out of the second-floor office of his Cedar Rapids, Iowa, home and peered down the stairs. That’s when he saw a man with a gun standing in his foyer, and he began to understand the peril he was in.

“Come here, motherfucker!” Deyo remembered the man screaming, pointing a gun at him. The gunman wore a baseball cap, had pantyhose pulled over his face, and sunglasses covered his eyes.

An extreme case where owning “your” domain may run you into trouble…
Watched December 10, 2019 - PBS NewsHour from PBS
Tuesday on the NewsHour, a historic day on Capitol Hill as the House delivers articles of impeachment against President Trump -- and a long-anticipated trade deal. Plus: The details of the USMCA, how strategic mistakes derailed the war in Afghanistan, grim news about Arctic ice melt, why Maryland has harsher prison sentences than other states and the “sober curious” movement among millennials.
Read “Link In Bio” is a slow knife by Anil Dash (Anil Dash)
We don’t even notice it anymore — “link in bio”. It’s a pithy phrase, usually found on Instagram, which directs an audience to be aware that a pertinent web link can be found on that user’s profile. Its presence is so subtle, and so pervasive, that we barely even noticed it was an attempt to kill the web.
This is another good example of how social media is destroying value and preventing new value creation to keep the power for itself. 

I like how Anil has managed to find a purple colored knife for the featured image.

I originally read his post on my cell phone and was surprised that it tool almost 30 seconds for the post to resolve because it’s apparently hosted on Glitch and it took the app ages to start itself back up. Not necessarily good UI for hosting a personal website, but bully to Anil for selfdogfooding his own work to host his site. I’m sure the speed will improve in the future.

Read Against “Excellence” by Briallen Hopper (Avidly | Los Angeles Review of Books)
Harvard just denied tenure to an award-winning Latinx scholar and teacher who is working in the field of Latinx studies. (Yale did the same thing last year.) Thousands of students and scholars have already signed an open letter in protest. There is so much to say, and so much already eloquently being said, about the ways that, over and over and over, elite universities fail to support people of color and the fields of knowledge that center them. These repeated failures to recognize excellence in non-white forms demonstrate the systemic racism that pervades these institutions
Read Bbbreaking News: Discovering Amateur News Videos by Monitoring Journalists on Twitter by Andy BaioAndy Baio (Waxy.org)

If you’ve ever looked at the replies on any newsworthy amateur video posted to Twitter, you’ll see an inevitable chorus of news organizations and broadcast journalists in the replies, usually asking two questions:

  1. Did you shoot this video?
  2. Can we use it on all our platforms, affiliates, etc with credit?

That gave me an idea, which I posted to Twitter.

Within two days, a talented developer named Corey Johnson made it real by launching Bbbreaking News.

Read Blogging Less in the 2020s by Kicks Condor (Kicks Condor)
How frequently should you post to keep pace with the next decade?

h0p3 (at philosopher.life) who I just like to converse with and keep up with throughout my week ❧

I’m curious what modality you use to converse? Am I missing some fun bit of something about that wiki?
–annotated on December 10, 2019 at 01:52PM

I like the thrust of this piece a lot Kicks. It’s also somewhat related to a passing thought I had the other day which I need to do some more thinking/writing on soon: On the caustic focus on temporality in social media.

Read It’s Time to Get Personal by Laura KalbagLaura Kalbag (24ways.org)
Is it just me or does nobody have their own website anymore? OK, some people do. But a lot of these sites are outdated, or just a list of links to profiles on big tech platforms. Despite being people who build websites, who love to share on the web, we don’t share much on our own sites. Of course ...
Some great ethical reasons for why go IndieWeb. I like that she’s got some concrete examples here and then goes into how she’s done what she has for herself.