I worked at Twitter for about six years. In that time, the service grew from zero people to hundreds of millions of people. Jack was the…
Reads
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
👓 May 17, 2017 | Scripting News
Occam's Report for May 17: They all work for Russia, dummy.
👓 Watch the WordPress TV Ads | WordPress Marketing | Daniel McClure
Watch the first WordPress TV Ads here. They have just launched after Matt Mullenweg committed last year to really start investing in marketing WordPress.
👓 Introducing Mavo: Create web apps entirely by writing HTML! | Lea Verou
Today I finally released the project I’ve been working on for the last two years at MIT CSAIL: An HTML-based language for creating (many kinds of) web applications without programming or a server backend. It’s named Mavo after my late mother (Maria Verou), and is Open Source of course (yes, getting paid to work on open source is exactly as fun as it sounds).
👓 “MP3 is dead” missed the real, much better story | Marco.org
If you read the news, you may think the MP3 file format was recently officially “killed” somehow, and any remaining MP3 holdouts should all move to AAC now. These are all simple rewrites of Fraunhofer IIS’ announcement that they’re terminating the MP3 patent-licensing program.
Very few people got it right. The others missed what happened last month:
If the longest-running patent mentioned in the aforementioned references is taken as a measure, then the MP3 technology became patent-free in the United States on 16 April 2017 when U.S. Patent 6,009,399, held by and administered by Technicolor, expired.
MP3 is no less alive now than it was last month or will be next year — the last known MP3 patents have simply expired.
👓 As ‘Missing Richard Simmons’ podcast wraps, its creator has a theory about what happened to the fitness guru | LA Times
With the "Missing Richard Simmons" podcast coming to an end, his brother and longtime manager have stepped up to join the chorus of those saying the fitness guru, who hasn't been seen in public for three years, is fine, fine, fine.
👓 Is Richard Simmons missing? Or is he just dearly missed? | Washington Post
LOS ANGELES — Richard Simmons is gone.
His fitness studio in Beverly Hills is shuttered. On its stoop is a sun-bleached edition of the Beverly Hills Courier from January. Inside is the wreckage of a livelihood: piles of debris, tongues of pink insulation, a dusting of pulverized drywall on the ballet barres. In the middle of it all, a forlorn scale where his students measured pounds sacrificed to the oldies.
“I knew him very well, but I don’t know what happened to him,” says Germen Helleon, the proprietor of a hair salon next door, on Civic Center Drive.
👓 Help! My Best Friend Wants to Fake Her Entire Résumé to Get a Better Job. | Slate
My best friend works in a job that she is grossly overqualified for but that pays better than most entry-level positions in her field.
👓 Developers of the MP3 Have Officially Killed It | Gizmodo
MP3, the digital audio coding format, changed the way we listen to music and drove the adoption of countless new devices over the last couple of decades. And now, it’s dead. The developer of the format announced this week that it has officially terminated its licensing program.
The reporter on this one failed massively!
The IP on the mp3 has expired and so the group that owned it isn’t charging for it anymore. Sure they’d like to have everyone think it’s dead and use more “modern” things like AAC, which they can still charge for! My guess is that you’ll actually see a resurgence in mp3 format now that it’s free.
Next they’ll be saying that RSS is dead…
👓 Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian foreign minister and ambassador | Washington Post
President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State. The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said. The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump’s decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump’s meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency.
For someone who always insists he doesn’t want to tell the “bad guys” what he intends to do, this is just sounds painfully inept.
👓 Can Darwinian Evolution Explain Lamarckism? | Quanta Magazine
Answering three questions can help reveal how the “inheritance of acquired characteristic” fits into modern evolutionary theory.
👓 The New Familiar Quanta | Quanta Magazine
Today Quanta unveils a completely re-engineered and redesigned site to better serve our readers and the journalism we produce.
I’m not quite sure I’m a big fan of the new site either. The other one was a bit crisper in look and feel. The typography and readability has improved a bit though. I think it’s almost a travesty that they’ve begun using Disqus.
While nice for some, I don’t think the bookmarking functionality is worth it for me; I’ll continue to bookmark articles on my own website to read for later. Other than gaining people’s email addresses, I’m not sure what Quanta gets out of the functionality. Readers have to be regulars to even consider bothering with the functionality.
👓 Exoplanet Puzzle Cracked by Jazz Musicians | Quanta Magazine
A system of seven Earth-like exoplanets appeared to be unstable. Now their orbits have been rewritten in the music of the spheres.
I’m not sure there’s necessarily a correlation between the physics and the music other than that it’s a relationship. Perhaps there’s some interesting example one could drag out for category theory perhaps?
👓 14/05/2017, 21:55 | Colin Walker
I currently have webmentions enabled for posts from my own site; it serves as a means to highlight relevant posts or, maybe, parts of a thread.
👓 Amber | adactio.com
I really enjoyed teaching in Porto last week. It was like having a week-long series of CodeBar sessions.