Google engineer writes men's rights diatribe. Google fires him. Discussion ensues. Also: Deepmind vs. Starcraft, get a new phone every 30 days, Amazon's secret brands, Instagram depression, and the 8th best tech writer in the US.
- Stacey's thing: Mighty
- Jeff's number: 3 day podcast festival in NYC
Reads, Listens
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
👓 Vladimir Voevodsky, Fields Medalist, Dies at 51 | IAS
The Institute for Advanced Study is deeply saddened by the passing of Vladimir Voevodsky, Professor in the School of Mathematics. Voevodsky, a truly extraordinary and original mathematician, made many contributions to the field of mathematics, earning him numerous honors and awards, including the Fields Medal. Celebrated for tackling the most difficult problems in abstract algebraic geometry, Voevodsky focused on the homotopy theory of schemes, algebraic K-theory, and interrelations between algebraic geometry, and algebraic topology. He made one of the most outstanding advances in algebraic geometry in the past few decades by developing new cohomology theories for algebraic varieties. Among the consequences of his work are the solutions of the Milnor and Bloch-Kato Conjectures. More recently he became interested in type-theoretic formalizations of mathematics and automated proof verification. He was working on new foundations of mathematics based on homotopy-theoretic semantics of Martin-Löf type theories. His new "Univalence Axiom" has had a dramatic impact in both mathematics and computer science.
Sad to hear of Dr. Voevodsky’s passing just as I was starting into my studies of algebraic geometry…
👓 A Micro.blog #FollowFriday, Part I Among the Stones
For those of us wanting to leave Twitter and other silos behind and focus more on microblogging on our own domains, discovering new people to follow can be a little tricky. Manton Reece has a Discover tab on Micro.blog to find people, but the service is still in its infancy. Colin Devroe suggested a #FollowFriday movement. I’ll start off with two bloggers I’m enjoying. Feel free to use webmentions for your own lists! Please correct me if anyone else has started this, I haven’t had great connectivity for the last few weeks.
Jimmy has added me to his list of recommendations. Perhaps I missed the webmention/notification for it while I was moving, but I saw it organically anyway–since I follow him myself. His list has several people that I also follow pretty closely, so I’m honored to be included.
It also reminds me that I ought to get to work on keeping a following list of my own or add a follow post type to my site eventually. Perhaps something to think about over WordCamp LA and IndieWebCamp NYC this weekend?
👓 Ikea has bought TaskRabbit | Recode
Swedish home goods giant Ikea Group has bought TaskRabbit, according to sources close to the situation. The price of the deal could not be determined, but the contract labor marketplace company has raised about $50 million since it was founded nine years ago. Sources added that TaskRabbit will become an independent subsidiary within Ikea and that CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot and its staff would remain.
👓 How to Set a Default Fallback Image for WordPress Post Thumbnails | WP Beginner
Do you want to set a default fallback image for WordPress post thumbnails? Featured images also known as post thumbnails are very useful in engaging users and making your articles more noticeable on social media. In this article, we will show you how to set a default fallback image for WordPress post thumbnails.
I probably ought to be doing something like this, particularly for some of the social stream posts which re-use the featured image in other places on the site.
🎧 This Week in Google: #416 Mr. Nutter Butter Has a Message for You | TWiT.TV
US Digital Service - making government better. Alphabet Q2 earnings up, stocks down. Chrome's ad blocker is available to devs. Not everybody likes Google's plan to track offline sales. Is privacy a fad? Facebook hits 2 billion users. Bitcoin splits, and miners revolt. ACLU supports John Oliver. Millennials confused by discovery of broadcast TV. Jeff's Number: $600/head SV restaurant with gold-flecked steaks Matt Cutt's Thing: Hack the Pentagon! Kevin Marks' Stuff: IndieWeb.org, Liberty Foundation, extra thumb prosthetic
Awesome to see/hear Matt Cutts return to the show.
🎧 This Week in Google: #415 Sinkhole Ahead! | TWiT.TV
No more "OK Google" search on Chromebooks? Facebook profit spikes 71%, laws of Australia trump laws of mathematics? Waze is now on Android Auto, and more.
Interesting that all the growth in mobile ads has recently gone to Facebook and Google. I’m surprised that no one else is eating up even a small piece of the pie.
I also loved the story about the Australian prime minister, in a post-fact world, indicating that the laws of mathematics don’t take precedence over those of Australia.
🎧 This Week in Google: #414 Never a Freshman | TWiT.TV
Musical Podcasts. Google Glass for Enterprise. New Google Feed. Better Google Analytics. Facebook News Subscription. Amazon Meal Kits, Spark, Treasure Truck, and Outfit Compare. Samsung Bixby arrives in the US. Net Neutrality Day results.
Musical podcasts sound like an interesting proposition, but are likely better as a larger production stream. I’m curious what the budget was for the piece and how they’re monetizing it?
I’ve been wondering about Bixby on my Samsung 8, but somehow I’ve never really bothered to use it. It doesn’t seem as interesting or as easy to use as my Amazon Alexa. Perhaps it’s time to dig into it a bit? I have been enjoying some minor Alexa use on my phone recently. I’m curious how they compare now.
👓 Three Decades Later, We’re Getting a Coming To America Sequel | Vulture
Jonathan Levine will direct and Kenya Barris will write a sequel to ‘Coming to America’, which is being developed with cooperation from Eddie Murphy.
👓 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
🎧 This Week in Google: #413 You Never Know What’s Not Going to Happen | TWIT.TV
Today is the Net Neutrality Day of Action. Go to BattleForTheNet.com and write your congressperson. Also, The Pixel XL 2 may feature a squeezable frame. Allo is coming to the desktop in "a few weeks." Android 7.1 has "Panic Detection" mode. Facebook will sell ads in Messenger. Amazon Prime Day sales up 60% over last year's record-setting haul - with Echo Dot as the top-selling item. Samsung Galaxy Note 8 may explode onto the scene on August 23rd. Make Nokia great again. China teleports matter to space. Jeff's Numbers: Google spends $800,000 on newsbots that write 30,000 articles a month in the UK. Google doesn't owe France 1.1bn euros in back taxes. Danny's Stuff: Silk Vault Slim Wallet Case, The Big Sick Stacey's Thing: Fibaro HomeKit Sensors
👓 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?