Tag: Reading.am

🎧 Episode 21: We Don’t Need No Education | The Remnant

Listened to Episode 21: We Don’t Need No Education by Jonah Goldberg from The Remnant | National Review
Bryan Caplan joins The Remnant to discuss his latest book, The Case Against Education.

Some interesting thought about education in America. There are some simple take aways from this, but there’s also some very complex interactions that may not be quite as easy to tease solutions out of the data. Bookmarking some of Bryan Caplan’s work to read in the future.

It wasn’t mentioned in the episode, but this reminds me of one of the other major problems in American education compared with other countries. In many countries in the early high school years children make a choice to train for a trade versus to continue education to go to college.

👓 The Tech ‘Regrets’ Industry | Audrey Watters

Read The Tech 'Regrets' Industry by Audrey WattersAudrey Watters (Audrey Watters)
Silicon Valley has lost some of its shine in recent months, what with the “fake news” and the bots and the hacks and the hate speech. All the promises about the democratization of information and power ring a little hollow nowadays. I’d say they rang a little hollow all along. Of course that’s what I’d say. I’ve been saying it for years now. There’s a new tale that’s being told with increasing frequency these days, in which tech industry executives and employees come forward – sometimes quite sheepishly, sometimes quite boldly – and admit that they have regrets, that they’re no longer “believers,” that they now recognize their work has been damaging to individuals and to society at large, that they were wrong. These aren’t apologies as much as they’re confessions.
An essay about technologists saying the equivalent of “Do as I say, not as I do.” and “Don’t pay any attention to that man behind the curtain.”

👓 I Cracked Facebook’s New Algorithm And Tortured My Friends | Buzzfeed

Read How I Cracked Facebook’s New Algorithm And Tortured My Friends by Katie Notopoulos (BuzzFeed)
Or, how to lose friends and influence people.
Black box algorithms are simply the bane of the world. How hard would it be to give us some manual and granular control over our own feeds. That’s really the next killer app. If the rise of the independent and decentralized web isn’t the thing that kills social media, it’s going to be a company that figures out how to act more human and give people the ability to control what they read.

👓 Web Application Outage Details | Simplenote

Read Web Application Outage Details (Simplenote)
Tuesday at about 4:50pm Pacific time our web application at app.simplenote.com went down, displaying a generic 404 error message. We discovered shortly after that Google Cloud Platform, which hosts the web application, had shut down the site due to a DMCA notice for allegedly infringing content that...
A bit crazy for a major web app to go down for a silly reason like this.

👓 My POSSE plan for evolving my site | Dries Buytaert

Read My POSSE plan for evolving my site by Dries BuytaertDries Buytaert (dri.es)
How I plan to evolve my site to take back control over my data and reclaim my blog as my thought space.
An excellent layout of itches for improving a website.

👓 Federal Judge Says Embedding a Tweet Can Be Copyright Infringement | EFF

Read Federal Judge Says Embedding a Tweet Can Be Copyright Infringement (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
Rejecting years of settled precedent, a federal court in New York has ruled [PDF] that you could infringe copyright simply by embedding a tweet in a web page. Even worse, the logic of the ruling applies to all in-line linking, not just embedding tweets. If adopted by other courts, this legally and...
This is an insane bit of news and could have some chilling effects on all areas of the web.

🎧 Tracy Chou | The Atlantic Interview

Listened to Tracy Chou by Jeffrey Goldberg from The Atlantic Interview
The Atlantic's editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg revisits a persistent problem in the tech industry: Why is it so difficult for people who aren't white and male? He talks with Tracy Chou, an engineer and long-time veteran of the start-up world whose current work focuses on that problem. She discusses her own experiences with harassment and discrimination, and why those experiences didn't drive her out of tech, as they did for many others.

🎧 Robert Siegel | The Atlantic Interview

Listened to Robert Siegel by Jeffrey Goldberg from The Atlantic Interview
For thirty years, Robert Siegel has given us the afternoon news. Having started his career in public radio when it was a scrappy enterprise, he's spent the past three decades shaping NPR as host of All Things Considered. He retired this week, at a time when NPR plays a critical role in educating the electorate. Jeffrey Goldberg, Atlantic’s editor in chief, turns the microphone on Robert Siegel for a change.

Wherein Jeffrey Goldberg right properly suckers Robert Siegel into recording bumpers and intros for his new podcast. Siegel gives an interesting interview the day after he leaves NPR, though I hope that he get’s re-interviewed again when he’s “old” and doesn’t care anymore.

One of my favorite parts of these podcasts are the somewhat snarky bumpers Jeffrey Goldberg puts onto the the end encouraging people to give reviews and subscribe. I kind of wish he’d let loose a bit more and inject some of this kind of snark into the interviews too.

🎧 Eric Garcetti | The Atlantic Interview

Listened to Eric Garcetti by Jeffrey Goldberg from The Atlantic Interview
The Atlantic's editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg talks with Mayor Eric Garcetti about what people misunderstand about Los Angeles, whether a mayor could win the presidency, and where he goes to find the best tacos.

There was an interesting question about the difference between Mexican and Mexican-Americans protesting/marching and Irish-American immigrants celebrating events like St. Patrick’s day. While these seem to be drastically different to mainstream Americans now, the primary difference between the two is over 100 years of the change of perception. Not many will easily recall the harsh history and racial slurs that Irish immigrants endured over a century ago and even fewer will appreciate the racial differences from that time period in which the Irish were also not considered “white”. It’s amazing the difference a hundred years of progress and change will effect. If only we could learn from the past and be a lot more open-minded.

I also really appreciate the subtle response about Los Angeles having experienced its own “Ferguson moment” over a decade ago with the Rodney King and other race-related riots, but that we experienced them without the benefit (or maybe harm) of social media amplifying them.

This episode had an odd audio effect that made Garcetti sound a bit “far away”. Perhaps it was potting him up/down between questions that created the problem? Either way, a small blip in an otherwise solidly produced podcast.

🎧 Jonah Goldberg | The Atlantic Interview

Listened to Jonah Goldberg by Jeffrey Goldberg from The Atlantic Interview
Writer Jonah Goldberg talks with The Atlantic's editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg about being a conservative without a party in the age of Donald Trump. Jonah says there are many factors contributing to the dysfunction and paralysis in the Republican Party, and that thinkers and leaders on the right may have a very small window to fix these problems before the party disintegrates. Jeffrey and Jonah also discuss the experience of waiting in television green rooms.

Maybe I’m reading to or listening to all the wrong sources because I feel like I’m missing candid and open discussions like this one. Here Jonah Goldberg does an excellent job of discussing many of the unspoken problems within the Republican party right now. I wish there was more reporting on issues like these, though the problem is the way people providing their opinions are being vilified by some at the far right of what we used to know as the Republican party.

I’ll have to sample a bit of Jonah Goldberg’s podcast The Remnant for some additional insight to what is happening here. The sad and painful title of the show gives me a good idea of what I might expect.

Game theory gives me some hope that a centrist party may come out of the ashes of the 2016 election to provide some better pragmatic leadership.

👓 Porn star who alleged Trump affair: I can now tell my story | AP News

Read Porn star who alleged Trump affair: I can now tell my story by Jake Pearson and Jeff Horwitz (AP News)
NEW YORK (AP) — Stormy Daniels, the porn star whom Donald Trump’s attorney acknowledges paying $130,000 just before Election Day, believes she is now free to discuss an alleged sexual encounter with the man who is now president, her manager told The Associated Press Wednesday. At the same time, developments in the bizarre case are fueling questions about whether such a payment could violate federal campaign finance laws. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, believes that Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, invalidated a non-disclosure agreement after two news stories were published Tuesday: one in which Cohen told The New York Times he made the six-figure payment with his personal funds, and another in the Daily Beast, which reported that Cohen was shopping a book proposal that would touch on Daniels’ story, said the manager, Gina Rodriguez.

👓 FAQ: What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon? | Salon

Read FAQ: What happens when I choose to “Suppress Ads” on Salon? (salon.com)
Like most media companies, Salon pays its bills through advertising and we profoundly appreciate our advertising partners and sponsors. In this traditional arrangement between reader and publisher, we are able to offer our readers a free reading experience in exchange for serving them ads. This relationship — of free or subsidized content in exchange for advertising — is not new; journalism has subsisted on this relationship for well over a century. This quid pro quo arrangement, ideally, benefits both readers and media. Yet in the past two decades, shifting tides in the media and advertising industries threw a wrench in this equation.
Just the other day I was reading about third party plugins that injected code that allowed websites to mine for bitcoin in the background. Now publications are actively doing this in the background as a means of making money? In addition to the silliness of the bitcoin part, this just sounds like poor editorial judgment all around.

🎧 Richard Plepler | The Atlantic Interview

Listened to Richard Plepler by Jeffrey Goldberg from The Atlantic Interview
The chairman and CEO of HBO talks with The Atlantic's editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg about what shows he should watch next. They also discuss how HBO has tried to develop a healthy company culture within a highly sexualized industry, the high-stakes business of making great TV, and what happened at the end of the Sopranos.

I feel like the first 5 minutes of the interview were missing. Compared to others in the series, this particular episode was awfully bland. I suspect it’s the case that CEOs rarely ever make good interviews because they’re generally hamstrung in what they can and can’t say in settings like these.

🎧 Jake Tapper | The Atlantic Interview

Listened to Jake Tapper by Jeffrey Goldberg from The Atlantic Interview
The Atlantic's editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg talks with the CNN anchor Jake Tapper about learning from mistakes in journalism, watching the media destroy someone you know, and what President Trump is getting right.

Transcript

Some interesting insight on Tapper’s sense of fairness here. I appreciate the level of comfort between the two participants here and it’s interesting to hear about their personal relationship a bit as context as well. My favorite part was the revelation of Tapper’s brief relationship with Monica Lewinsky and how he viewed her treatment in the media as a result of the experience. It certainly reminds us all that the world needs more humanizing instead of less.