Extenuating Circumstances

This is an auto-posted collection of public links I’ve either posted to, or favourites from Twitter, my Instapaper bookmarks and my public links posted to Pinboard.in for February 25th from 19:30 to 08:55:

• The Stillness of the Wind is a lovely, sad spin on farming games – Polygon – Oh god
• Daring Fireball: Huawei’s Mate X Foldable Phone – I’m more interested in the comparison that the Mate X is a nearly-first-gen MacBook Air.
• Overcoming Bias : Better Babblers – "Let me call styles of talking (or music, etc.) that rely mostly on low order correlations “babbling”. Babbling isn’t meaningless, but to ignorant audiences it often appears to be based on a deeper understanding than is actually the case. When done well, babbling can be entertaining, comforting, titillating, or exciting. It just isn’t usually a good place to learn deep insight." HI THESEUS, RORSCHACH HERE
• Humans Who Are Not Concentrating Are Not General Intelligences | Otium – uh oh they're on to us
• Life Off the Grid, Part 2: Playing Ultima Underworld | The Digital Antiquarian –
• My story – Leo Widrich –

This is an auto-posted collection of public links I’ve either posted to, or favourites from Twitter, my Instapaper bookmarks and my public links posted to Pinboard.in for February 24th from 13:39 to 18:03:

• Lessons from 6 software rewrite stories – Herb Caudill – Medium – Counterpoint: none of these were large “enterprise” applications
• Dirty Data, Bad Predictions: How Civil Rights Violations Impact Police Data, Predictive Policing Systems, and Justice by Rashida Richardson, Jason Schultz, Kate Crawford :: SSRN –
• The Gyllenhaal Experiment –
• The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona –
• A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture | February 2019 | Communications of the ACM –

This is an auto-posted collection of public links I’ve either posted to, or favourites from Twitter, my Instapaper bookmarks and my public links posted to Pinboard.in for February 22nd from 12:48 to 11:33:

• The Tax Consequences of John Oliver’s $15 Million Medical Debt Forgiveness | Tax Talks –
• GPT-2 As Step Toward General Intelligence https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/19/gpt-2-as-step-toward-general-intelligence/ –
• Do Neural Nets Dream Of Electric Hobbits? https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/18/do-neural-nets-dream-of-electric-hobbits/ –
• Engineering a Safer World | The MIT Press – “A new approach to safety, based on systems thinking, that is more effective, less costly, and easier to use than current techniques.” – MIT Open Access, free PDF available on same webpage
• Engineering a Safer World Home Page –
• What videogame maps can tell us about their worlds | Rock Paper Shotgun –
• When Kids Google Themselves – The Atlantic – "A personal story she wrote in third grade was also published on a class website with her name attached." Seriously, why would you do this?
• RIP Culture War Thread | Slate Star Codex – “The fact is, it’s very easy to moderate comment sections. It’s very easy to remove spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse. I do it single-handedly on this blog’s 2000+ weekly comments. r/slatestarcodex’s volunteer team of six moderators did it every day on the CW Thread, and you can scroll through week after week of multiple-thousand-post culture war thread and see how thorough a job they did.” * for certain values of “easy”

This is an auto-posted collection of public links I’ve either posted to, or favourites from Twitter, my Instapaper bookmarks and my public links posted to Pinboard.in for February 20th from 20:06 to 08:28:

• Untitled Goose Game delayed to an untitled later date – Polygon – Noooooooooo
• Four new DNA letters double life’s alphabet –
• The Agent before Agent, a lost Rockstar San Diego project – Polygon –
• Apple could be working with Goldman Sachs on a credit card | TechCrunch – “More interestingly, Apple could also be working on an Apple Wallet overhaul for this credit card. You would be able to set up spending goals (like the rings in the Activity app), get notifications about your spending habits (like Screen Time) and track your rewards. It’s unclear if Apple plans to open up those new features to other banks.”
• Tidepool | Liberate your diabetes data –

This is an auto-posted collection of my public links posted to Pinboard.in for February 20th from 15:15 to 15:49:

• Daily Science Fiction :: Only g62 Kids Will Remember These Five Moments by Leonard Dalton Richardson –
• Publications – Dominica Phetteplace – I enjoyed their “Oracle” to an almost unreasonable degree
• Citymapper just announced a subscription service for London’s muddled transport network | WIRED UK – Nice
• How 20th Century Fox uses ML to predict a movie audience | Google Cloud Blog – Maybe I don't understand this but I fail to see how this prevents getting trapped in local maxima
• White House Panel Will Study Whether Climate Change Is a National Security Threat. It Includes a Climate Denialist. – The New York Times – the implications for national emergencies are, quite frankly, staggering
• Disney (DIS) Pulls YouTube Ads Amid Concerns Over Child Voyeurs – Bloomberg – 2000-2002: omg crowdsourced moderation and flagging of content is the answer to everything!
  2019: what if… not.

This is an auto-posted collection of public links I’ve either posted to, or favourites from Twitter, my Instapaper bookmarks and my public links posted to Pinboard.in for February 19th from 15:46 to 08:18:

• 25 Ways To Kill The Toxic Ego That Will Ruin Your Life | Thought Catalog – You won’t believe number 7!
• The Surprising Value of Obvious Insights – Help make it safe for people to believe what is already true, but is unsafe to admit
• Dominica Phetteplace –
• We stayed on NT4 into the mid-aughts partially because of the lack of USB suppor… | Hacker News – *taps temple* it’s secure if you know what you’re using it for…
• Uber and GM Cruise are making their AV ‘visualization’ tools open source – The Verge – What The Machine looks like, ca. 2019
• Discovering a new form of communication in the brain The Daily –

This is an auto-posted collection of my public links posted to Pinboard.in for February 18th from 14:05 to 14:52:

• Jack Schulze on Playdeo – "Playdeo is making television you can touch: a new space, inside video, where you can play"

  Television you can touch! That either took no time at all, or a very long time.

• Jack Schulze on pixel scarcity –
• Jack Shulze on the camera – " there isn’t a sensor, or set of signals more heavily under development than the camera’s" from https://medium.com/playdeo/introducing-playdeo-abf0bebbc53e
• Emoji are showing up in court cases exponentially, and courts aren’t prepared – The Verge – "[but] emoji are a critical part of communication, and in cases where transcripts of online communication are being read to the jury, they need to be characterized as well instead of being skipped over." OMG NOW IMAGINING A BUDDY PROCEDURAL WHERE ONE OF THE BUDDIES IS THE FORENSIC LINGUIST SPECIALIZING IN EMOJI and the other buddy is the LAWYER or COP or STRAIGHT PERSON WHO IS ALL what do you mean emoji are important
• Opinion | No, You Can’t Ignore Email. It’s Rude. – The New York Times – "Remember that a short reply is kinder and more professional than none at all. If you have too much on your plate, come clean: “I don’t have the bandwidth to add this.” If it’s not your expertise, just say so: “Sorry, this isn’t in my wheelhouse.” And if you want to say no, just say “no.”" – would that it were that simple. Organizational psychologist is missing the bit from psychology that might *prevent* people from saying "no" or "I can't do this". Or, hey, today's two minute shame is about…
• Otto von Bismarck – Wikiquote – Politics is the art of the possible
• In which Casaleggio reveals he is a political leader – "Casaleggio explained that the aim of this new project was to experiment with communication dynamics on the company’s intranet. Casaleggio would select topics from the firm’s internal forum and as…
• What Happens When Techno-Utopians Actually Run a Country | WIRED – "Rather than offer an ideology or platform, Five Star offered a wholesale rebuke of the country’s entrenched, highly paid, careerist political class—left, right, and center. And it married that disdain to a grand techno-utopian project: Through an online voting and debate portal, Five Star was building a direct democracy on the internet. The long-term goal was to replace Parliament altogether—to automate it out of existence." – Hi, I'm 40 this year and I have a sinking feeling about how this article ends

This is an auto-posted collection of public links I’ve either posted to, or favourites from Twitter, my Instapaper bookmarks and my public links posted to Pinboard.in for February 17th from 16:59 to 11:04:

• Introducing Playdeo – Playdeo – Medium – Many good quotes here.
• [1508.01745] Semantically Conditioned LSTM-based Natural Language Generation for Spoken Dialogue Systems –
• (1) @mikko on Twitter: “Big medical data breach today in Sweden. https://t.co/JOjdBfB8T9” / Twitter –
• Using data from the Kepler mission to scientifically imagine star systems — Steve’s Real Blog –
• Making a Roguelike Using Ncurses with Swift — Part 1 – Nnnnngh

This is an auto-posted collection of my public links posted to Pinboard.in for February 17th from 00:30 to 15:21:

• foone/SierraDeathGenerator: Generate death screens from Sierra games – This creates GAME OVER/YOU DIED screens as seen in Sierra Online's SCI engine, as well as lots of other fake videogame screenshots from many, many games.
• vinta/awesome-python: A curated list of awesome Python frameworks, libraries, software and resources –
• OpenAI Trains Language Model, Mass Hysteria Ensues – Approximately Correct –
• October the First Is Too Late – Wikipedia –
• cyber.dhs.gov – CISA blog –

This is an auto-posted collection of public links I’ve either posted to, or favourites from Twitter, my Instapaper bookmarks and my public links posted to Pinboard.in for February 14th from 10:58 to 23:27:

• Better Language Models and Their Implications –
• Researchers, scared by their own work, hold back “deepfakes for text” AI | Ars Technica –
• Alphabet unit seeks share of property taxes for Toronto smart city | Reuters – What
• Heaven’s Vault preview: an ouroboros of wordery | Rock Paper Shotgun –
• Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Headquarters – The New York Times – What a colossal waste of time for everyone