“Block with abandon.” That’s Andy Baio’s New Year’s Resolution. “I spent far too many emotional cycles last year on people arguing with me in bad faith, diving i...
Reads
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
👓 Sci-Hub Loses Domain Names, But Remains Resilient | TorrentFreak
Sci-Hub, often referred to as the "Pirate Bay of Science," lost three of its domain names this week. The suspensions are likely the result of the lost court case against the American Chemical Society. Despite the setback, Sci-Hub remains resilient, pointing out that there are other ways to access the site including its own custom DNS servers.
👓 Storify Bites the Dust. If You Have WordPress, You Don’t Need Another Third Party Clown Service | CogDogBlog
How many more times do people have to get stiffed by a free web service that just bites the dust and leaves you bubkas? What follows is a monster post. You will find me ranting ar companies like St…
👓 A Clarification | Sam Altman
I made a point in this post inelegantly in a way that was easy to misunderstand, so I’d like to clarify it. I didn’t mean that we need to tolerate brilliant homophobic jerks in the lab so...
👓 E Pur Si Muove | Sam Altman
Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. I didn’t feel...
👓 The 'Star Wars' Refresher You Are Looking for Before 'The Last Jedi' | Hollywood Reporter
In case you need a reminder of where all the main players were the last time we saw them...
👓 Further thoughts the future of owning my reading | Eddie Hinkle
Eddie Hinkle (eddiehinkle.com)As I’ve been doing my 100 Day of Reading Chapters challenge I’ve been thinking about my use of Goodreads and the various functions I use it for: Adding books I want to read. Prioritizing the next books I’m interested in. Typically these are rated as: “Next, High, Medium, Low, Someday”. Add...
👓 What happens when you put a hackathon on a bus? An awesome podcast | The Next Web
It’s a bit of an unusual one. In all my time at TNW, I don’t think I’ve ever written a blog about a podcast I’ve been listening to, but hear me out. I’m a big fan of Gimlet Media’s StartUp podcast. This week, it’s been following StartupBus: a five-day hackathon on wheels, where coders build …
👓 Meditations on my Grandfather | David Shanske
David Shanske (david.shanske.com)Unlike many of my posts, this one is not being syndicated to social media, as they automatically do. Some of you heard that Monday, December 4th, my grandfather passed away. I flew to Florida on the first flight the following morning to be with my family. While it was not unexpected that my grandfat...
👓 Logs populi or, Thanks, Netflix! | Vicki Boykis
Tech is already cynical about data collection, but the public is just starting to understand its implications.
👓 Love for Math | Stephanie Hurlburt
I'll never forget my dad taking me to Stanford to look at the math proofs the PhD students there had published. The logic puzzles he'd tell me every night. He was an astrophysicist, and would often to take me to his lab to check out what they were working on. I participated in mathematics competitio...
👓 Statistics, we have a problem. | Kristian Lum – Medium
Recently, while browsing Twitter, I saw a few machine learning researchers post about an incident at one of their big conferences (NIPS)…
Ugh…
👓 Announcing PressForward 5.0! | PressForward
👓 We messed up. We’re sorry, and we’re not rolling out the fees change. | The Patreon Blog
We’ve heard you loud and clear. We’re not going to rollout the changes to our payments system that we announced last week. We still have to fix the problems that those changes addressed, but we’re going to fix them in a different way, and we’re going to work with you to come up with the specifics, as we should have done the first time around. Many of you lost patrons, and you lost income. No apology will make up for that, but nevertheless, I’m sorry.
It is our core belief that you should own the relationships with your fans. These are your businesses, and they are your fans.
I almost want to continue reading this as: “Yet, you’re all still stuck on our silo and we intend to keep taking a percentage for keeping you in business…”
If they were really all-in on helping the way they’re signaling here, they would be building it in a decentralized way that allows creators to take their patrons with them to another platform. They would also be expanding on features, which they don’t seem to be doing much of. I get the need to watch the bottom line and work on scaling, but they should also continue innovating and experimenting, particularly for the smaller fish who could become bigger fish.
👓 Owning my Reading and 100 Days of Reading Chapters | Eddie Hinckle
Eddie Hinkle (eddiehinkle.com)One of my goals in 2018 is to own my reading data rather than using Goodreads for all of that information. This will allow me to track information the way I want rather than have to do it like Goodreads wants me to. My eventual goal is to have something like what Xavier made, but for now I’m going...
Reading even a chapter a day can be a useful and powerful thing. I ought to be doing this as a near term goal instead of just trying to generally always “read more.”