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.

👓 Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js | Facebook

Read Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js by Adam Wolff (Facebook)
Next week, we are going to relicense our open source projects React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js under the MIT license. We're relicensing these projects because React is the foundation of a broad ecosystem of open source software for the web, and we don't want to hold back forward progress for nontechnical reasons. This decision comes after several weeks of disappointment and uncertainty for our community. Although we still believe our BSD + Patents license provides some benefits to users of our projects, we acknowledge that we failed to decisively convince this community.
This won’t bode well for large portions of the web…

🔖 Stamp for music playlist portability

Bookmarked Stamp | FREE YOUR MUSIC (Stamp)
Stamp moves tracks and playlists across various services - Apple Music, Spotify, Google Music and others!
How awesome this portends to be! I’ve been wanting this type of functionality for a long time. I’m curious how long it stays up?

Too many music services don’t make it easy to transport your playlists as it’s one of the methods they use to lock you into their service (and their recurring subscription fees). It looks like it supports .csv formats, but it would be nice if there were a better standardized data format to let users own all of their own data. How great would it be if I could maintain my own playlist on my own website and then authorize services to access it to play what I wanted? Then I could have one central repository and take it to any subscription service out there.

It looks like it supports Spotify, Apple Music, Google Music, Pandora (Pro only?), Amazon Music, Groove, YouTube, rdio, Deezer, and Tidal.

Stamp | Free Your Music

🎧 This Week in Google: #411 Dinah Won’t You Blow | TWiT.TV

Listened to This Week in Google: #411 Dinah Won't You Blow from TWIT.tv
EU fines Google €2.42 billion, Canada demands global de-listing. Google News' redesign causes Jeff concern. YouTube Party. Amazon Show unboxing. Facebook hits 2 billion users. Petya ransomware may be retaliation for Russian cyberwarfare on Ukraine. Jeff's report from Vidcon.

https://youtu.be/bRI078mWrxg

🎧 This Week in Google: #410 Addicted to Convenience | TWIT.TV

Listened to This Week in Google: #410 Addicted to Convenience from TWIT.tv
Amazon's purchase of Whole Foods and how it could change grocery stores. The transition from an economy of goods to one of experiences. Uber and Lyft get their way in Texas after refusing to comply with an ordinance requiring fingerprint background checks for drivers. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick resigns and whether or not the corporate culture of Uber was necessary for its success. Stacey's Thing: Radical Technologies - The Design of Every Day Life by Adam Greenfield Mike's Number: 18, the number of Girl Scout badges introduced for cybersecurity education Leo's Tool: Search for "Spinner" on Google

I enjoyed the discussion of the purchase of Whole Foods by Amazon. I had described a big chunk of the value there as Amazon buying up a lot of the only warehouse space available in housing zoned areas while they described it as solving the last mile problem in local delivery. This is essentially the same thing, though they didn’t mention Amazon’s experiments with delivery via drones which could easily become a reality with not only warehouse space, but landing pads and bases in every big neighborhood with a Whole Foods located within them.

It was cool to hear the news about Girl Scouts adding lots of cybersecurity badges to their list.

🎧 This Week in Google: #409 Practical Telepathy | TWIT.TV

Listened to This Week in Google: #409 Practical Telepathy from TWIT.TV
Leo, Jeff, and Stacey are all off this week, so Jason Howell, Ron Richards, and Kevin Marks are in charge. The Essential phone will be a Sprint exclusive, but that doesn't mean you can't buy one and use it with whatever service you want. Google's successor to the Pixel XL may be getting even bigger, and might get made by LG this time around. The current Pixel XL will self-destruct on October of 2018. Google's cute little self-driving cars are self-driving off into the sunset. Google Drive wants to back up your whole computer. Softbank is buying Boston Dynamics. Google's Project Sunroof lets you know which neighbors have solar power. Facebook expands safety check in a possibly stressful way. Kevin's Pick: IndieWeb and IndieWeb Summit Ron's Pick: Astro Jason's Pick: pix2pix fotogenerator

The conversation about how Facebook is doing their safety check is intriguing. How should they be doing it better to inform people who might be concerned, but without creating undue stress to others who generally aren’t involved or nearby? This is particularly interesting to me as I’m often near to frequent forest fires in Los Angeles, not to mention the future potential of major earthquake events.