February 2012
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January 2012
12 posts
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“I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it?...”
– John Perry’s How to Procrastinate and Still Get Things Done looks like a good article on the ‘active procrastination’ I wrote about yesterday. True to form, I’ll read it later.
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“Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this...”
– Robert Anton Wilson. (via Boing Boing)
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Misc. links Jan 1st - 14th
This is the Future, today: Bruce Stering and Jon Lebkowsky debate the State of the World. There’s the coming war on general computation, the reason why I think everyone should learn how to code, as that would be the only thing protecting free speech from enclosure in a walled garden of infinite bullshit. The same general movements, in turn, might also explain why fashion and style got stuck...
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“There are some people who are really good at using false dichotomies and then...”
– Jason Sweeney. Bravo!
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Twenty Eleven, Twelve
So we have come to this: twenty-twelve. That year.
In which the world is supposed to end (as pictured yesterday), the Mayan myth getting some traction here because the future seem pretty bleak in this old and impoverished southern European economy, a feeling opposite to the innocent optimism of the previous apocalypse, during the Y2K Belle Époque. The consensus here is there’s not much to...
December 2011
15 posts
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Misc. links Dec 13th - 31st
Metafilter’s Year in Writing has given me much to read in the past and coming weeks… ¶
Our Unpaid, Shadow Work: you know that last time you bought a ticket online? Or yesterday when you filled your car with gasoline yourself? Or when you went to the supermarket and scanned your own groceries’ barcodes? You are doing someone else’s job, for free. Sure, you get cheaper...
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“It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally...”
– David Foster Wallace, The Pale King. And I try, I really do!
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Misc. links Nov 25th - Dec 12th
One of the founders of Netscape demolishes the ‘startup work ethic’: while some poor geek kills himself in a orgy of work and stay-awake drugs, some venture capitalist reaps most of the rewards while doing nothing. It’s true a few of these geeks will eventually get rich, but no human being should be thought of as a race horse. People should work 100 hours a week if they like it,...
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The Debunking Handbook →
… should be mandatory in every school curricula (PDF link). (via Boing Boing)
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November 2011
12 posts
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Misc. links Oct 15th - Nov 24th
The Internet as Hyperbole - A Critical Exhamination of Adoption Rates by Gisle Hannemyr is a paper with compelling arguments against the popular perception that people adopted the Internet much faster than other new communication technologies such as radio or television. The demonstration much ICT policy is based on a meme-ified anedocte makes this a compelling read. ¶
Neal Stephenson on...
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The Social Graph is Neither →
Maciej Ceglowski explains the obvious: no computer metadata scheme can ever represent the relationships between humans with any sort of accuracy. I like the notion that social graphs inevitably fall into a kind of Uncanny Valley.
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“I’m really scared for my generation, you know. The thing that scares me most is...”
– Drake on Tumblr - Ruby Pseudo Wants a Word. (via The New Aesthetic)
Agreed. But still, Tumblr allows users to post original content, and even backpedalled on that ill-advised Tumblarity experiment (a popularity contest won by whoever ‘liked’ and ‘reblogged’ the most)....
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Little details: the menu bar
One of the things I find most satisfying while designing/developing a website is implementing those small, almost imperceptible details that can mean Quality, the Web equivalent of sophisticated stitching in clothing, and which to me feels like a particularly nice click must feel to a master watchmaker. So today, as I made a few small tweaks to this website (meaning this one, Tumblr-folk) -...
October 2011
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Misc. links Sep 27th - Oct 14th
Sorry About My Face. I too share the same problem - often my face reads bitter even if I’m actually daydreaming about nice things. And nobody takes “it’s just my face” for an answer, which leads to episodes in which I feel a significant other is acting like someone in a club suddently asking me “where are you looking at?!” and trying to pick a fight, etecetera....