markjgsmith

2019/05/19 #

Today’s links:

• A Times Square Billboard Went Up in Flames and Somehow Continued to Display Adsgizmodo.com #

• ‘Boycott Apple’ movement gains new traction in China as US trade dispute continues - Having an iphone is in some places becomming unpatriotic, Huawei is preferred the alternative9to5mac.com #

• Eurovision’s voting system is totally broken. Here's how to fix it - But the bloc / political voting is all part of what makes eurovision eurovision, it wouldn't be as fun if you didn't have that to shout at the TV screen about, the fact that it's just a song competition means that it doesn't really matter, but it gets you thinking about how politics works in quite a visual and literal waywww.wired.co.uk #

• There are a lot of similarities between snowboarding/skying and writing code using a version control system - Everytime you start writing files that aren't checked in you are going off-piste, most of the time you just go a little off piste to catch a jump or scoop around a cool set of trees, but occasionally you find yourself properly off-piste, in the middle of nowhere, really really far away from the main piste, files everywhere, it's dangerous, in the worste caes you delete files you needed by accident and all your tests stop working, and when it's really bad you are completely out of energy stuck in 3 feet of snow, you have to take off your board and walk back to normality - Occasionally it's unnavoidable because you haven't built the chair lift for this part of the software yet and so it's not possible to check in nice little chunks of changes, you got to just plough through the trees and deep snow until you get to where you got to get to, and deal with the added strain on your brain - When you do get to the other piste it's pretty cool though, you have some lunch and then it's back to regular coding again - Also snowboarding and skying is a lot more fun than programming, don't let silly analogies like this one make you think that sitting in a chair on front of a computer is in some way coolen.wikipedia.org #

• Googlers fighting to keep ‘Old Google’ and say in decision-making - I think a lot of people, myself included are worried about how the big tech companies seem to repurpose software so for example advertising software becomes surveiilance software, but that wasn't what we were suporting when these companies started out9to5google.com #

• Police ask McDonald's to halt milkshake sales during Farage rallywww.theguardian.com #

• I just discovered Sinon matchers yesterday, really useful in unit tests to do either more fuzzy or more specific matching of expected valuessinonjs.org #

• Jim Carey and his use abortion to save abortion wierd art humour - It does highlight something that might be important that I hadn't thought of until now - Since abortion is essentially legal murder, if you were to use Facebook-like targeting and behaviour modification, you might be able to target very specific demographics and bump up the abortion rates, and if you have some powerfull AI that could give you better than average predictions of political party affiliation (for example), it might be possible to serupticiously setup a situation where a lot more of a certain type of people get born and raised - Probably quite outlandish, but then again the future is very uncertain in these times of fast development, seems to me that this sort of thing might be worryingly hard to detecti.redd.it #

• Think I finally figured out how to do the internet archive properly - 0 7,14,21 * * * curl https://web.archive.org/save/http://links.markjgsmith.comarchive.org #

• Grumpy cat's death marks the end of the joyful internetwww.wired.com #

• Grumpy Cat RIP - A look back at the life of famous catwww.bbc.co.uk #

• Rocket scientist explains how we could move our planettheconversation.com #