Jonathan Levine will direct and Kenya Barris will write a sequel to ‘Coming to America’, which is being developed with cooperation from Eddie Murphy.
Category: Read
👓 3 Ways To Read Sen. Bob Corker’s Retirement | FiveThirtyEight
It’s not unusual for a 65-year-old to announce his retirement, but a lot of people were caught by surprise when Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee did so on Tuesday. In a statement, the senator, who has found himself increasingly at odds with President Trump, said he he hadn’t planned to serve more than two terms in office. But is there more at work in the departure of this influential senator than simple adherence to a self-imposed term limit? What does it portend for the Republican Party establishment, Trump and the future of the party? There are a few ways to think about it.
👓 Ergodic | John D. Cook
Roughly speaking, an ergodic system is one that mixes well. You get the same result whether you average its values over time or over space. This morning I ran across the etymology of the word ergodic.
I’d read this before, but had a nice reminder about it this morning.
👓 Technology preview: Private contact discovery for Signal | Signal
At Signal, we’ve been thinking about the difficulty of private contact discovery for a long time. We’ve been working on strategies to improve our current design, and today we’ve published a new private contact discovery service. Using this service, Signal clients will be able to efficiently and scalably determine whether the contacts in their address book are Signal users without revealing the contacts in their address book to the Signal service.
There’s a lot of work involved here, but this is an intriguing proposition for doing contact discovery in social media while maintaining privacy. I can’t wait to see which silos follow suit, but I’m even more curious if any adventurous IndieWeb creators will travel down this road?
h/t cryptographer Matthew Green
Private contact discovery for Signal. Make no mistake: what Moxie is doing here is going to revolutionize messaging. https://t.co/RjAMWIpXui
— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) September 26, 2017
In short: your contact list will no longer be available to Signal servers. If you trust Intel SGX this wipes out a load of info leakage.
— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) September 26, 2017
👓 Giving you more characters to express yourself | Twitter
We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we're doing something new: we're going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming (which is all except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean).
I’m sure I could say something flip, like my own website doesn’t impose any arbitrary limits like this on me, but honestly, where Twitter is involved, it’s just become painfully old.
I have taken to always posting on my own website(s) first–where the sky is the proverbial limit–and only then syndicating out to places like Twitter. While Twitter’s got a reasonable network and there are lots of interesting people who might not otherwise be online interacting, I really haven’t been using Twitter as much in the past two years as I had previously. This change isn’t going to affect me at all from a publishing perspective. There are much more valuable tools to be using now. (Though I do wish the rest of the web would catch up on some of the new technologies they’re really missing out on.)
I do appreciate that it will allow some others who don’t have their own websites some more flexibility. I’m hoping that the Twitter apps that handle notifications add the extra content as Twitter’s own mobile app notifications cut off even before the 140 character limit, which makes them painful to use from a UI perspective.
If nothing else, it’s nice to see them iterating a little, but they need to be doing it at a faster velocity.
👓 Secret Service protection for Donald Trump Jr. reactivated: report | The Hill
Jr. reportedly has his Secret Service protection back, sources told CNN. The news comes after a previous report that Trump Jr. gave up his protection from the Secret Service because of privacy concerns. A senior administration official told The New York Times earlier this month the Secret Service had stopped protecting Trump Jr.
I’m curious what prompted the de-activation and then a subsequent re-activation so close to each other. Makes me wonder which body(ies) he may have disposed of in the interim?
👓 Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js | 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…
👓 Decentralized Web Pt 3: Join the IndieWeb | Michael McCallister: Notes from the Metaverse
In recent months, I’ve been learning a lot about the “IndieWeb,” an idea spread by folks who understand that the Web offers a unique platform where ordinary people without the financial clout of the 20th century publishing industry could still potentially reach millions with their ideas.
But to be honest, I’m not sure I can tell you why — and how — to join up any better than Chris Aldrich did in this piece on AltPlatform. So just go over there now.
I know Michael has been working at the IndieWeb bit for a while, so this is some nice praise.
👓 Here’s Why Steve Bannon Wears So Many Shirts | The Cut
His spokesperson and other highly knowledgeable play sources attempt to explain the former presidential counselor’s questionable fashion choice.
👓 Why I’m leaving a Research I University for a Liberal Arts College | AMS Blogs
I knew at a pretty early stage in my life — my freshman year of college, to be exact — that I wanted to become a research mathematician. I have degrees from fancy research universities…
👓 The History of the Future of Learning Objects and Intelligent Machines | Audrey Watters
Audrey Watters (Hack Education)This talk was delivered at MIT for Justin Reich’s Comparative Media Studies class “Learning, Media, and Technology.” The full slide deck is available here.
👓 Ex-C.I.A. Official Resigns After Harvard Courts Chelsea Manning | New York Times
The dean of the Kennedy School said the selection of Ms. Manning for a fellowship had been a mistake, after protests from current and former C.I.A. officials.
👓 How To Make Homemade Sauerkraut in a Mason Jar | Kitchn
When life gives you cabbage, you make sauerkraut.
👓 Is Tribalism a Natural Malfunction? | Nautilus
What computers teach us about getting along. From an office at Carnegie Mellon, my colleague John Miller and I had evolved a computer program with a taste for genocide.
This article reminds me that I need to go back to reading Fukuyama’s two volume series (Origins of Political Order) and apply more math to it as a model. I can see some interesting evolution of political structures spread throughout the modern world and still want a more concrete answer for the jumps between them. I suspect that some of our world problems are between more advanced political economies and less advanced (more tribalistic ones — read Middle Eastern as well as some third world nations) which are working on different life-ways. Are there punctuated equilibrium between the political structures of economies like the graph in this paper? What becomes the tipping point that pushes one from one region to the next?
I also feel a bit like our current political climate has changed so significantly in the past 20 years that it’s possible we (America) may be regressing.
Check out this referenced paper:
🔖 Barasz, M., et al. Robust cooperation in the Prisoner’s Dilemma: Program equilibrium via provability logic. arXiv 1401.5577 (2014).
👓 The First Species to Have Every Individual’s Genome Sequenced | The Atlantic
It’s an endearing, giant, flightless, New Zealand parrot, and it’s a poster child for the quantified-self movement.
