Nelson's Linkblog 2022-05

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Hard Drive apologizes

Hilarious conclusion to the latest dumb Elon Musk thing

2022-05-31 elonmusk • funny • parody

Startup making Google-Docs-for-maps officially launches

2022-05-31 felt • launch • maps • migurski • startup • visualization

Google monopoly billing

An end of an era; Android used to let users buy things inside apps without giving Google a 30% cut of the sale. No more. (Apple has always enforced its monopoly.)

2022-05-31 amazon • android • antitrust • google • googleplay • kindle • monopoly • playstore

A terminal UI for inspecting large CSV files

2022-05-31 csv • data • datavis • via:metafilter • visualization

Rodney Brooks on cars

AI expert takes some rides in a self driving car

2022-05-30 ai • cars • cruise • mit • rodneybrooks • waymo

Laverne Cox Barbie

New doll modeled after the famous transgender actress

2022-05-30 barbie • dolls • lavernecox • lgbt • toys • trans • transgender

Popular Barbie alternative has a pair of dolls that are queer women protestors

2022-05-29 bratz • gay • lgbt • protest • toys

Viet-Cajun food

An episode of Ugly Delicious talks about Gulf Coast fusion cuisine.

2022-05-29 cajun • cooking • food • houston • neworleans • viejun • vietcajun • vietnamese

Tiny little aluminum struts for building rigid structors; 5mm!

2022-05-29 aluminum • hardware • maker • prototyping

Early PC charting software

80s and early 90s chart making software, from the before-Excel era

2022-05-27 charts • computing • datavis • graphics • history • via:flowingdata

Chinese Textbook Drama

Criticism of art in a kid's textbook in China. Sorta funny, but also an interesting window into cultural obsessions in other countries

2022-05-27 art • china • culture • funny • textbook

Generative art of imaginary sea creatures

2022-05-27 art • generative • jellyfish • via:flowingdata

Texas hypocrisy

Passionate editorial about how Texas politics hurts children and then fails to protect them

2022-05-27 children • lgbt • politics • texas • transgender • uvalde

uBlock Origin and Firefox

Ways that Firefox is the most ad-blocker-friendly browser

2022-05-26 adblocker • ads • browser • firefox • internet • ublock • web

Uvalde / trans attack

False narrative the shooter was transgender spreads via 4chan, US congressmen

2022-05-26 4chan • gosar • politics • smear • transgender • uvalde

Dune 1st edition map

Original release of Dune had an unusual map on the back cover

2022-05-25 books • dune • maps • scifi

Software to take raster images and turn them into vector art that a plotter could draw

2022-05-25 art • generation • plotter • svg

DuckDuckGo + Microsoft

So-called privacy browser has an exception letting Microsoft track its users

2022-05-25 ads • browser • microsoft • surveillance • tracking

Lovely new Netflix show that's a teen romance about two young men

2022-05-24 gay • heartstopper • lgbt • netflix • tv

Shireen Abu Akleh killing

Evidence that the Israeli military deliberately shot and killed a journalist

2022-05-24 israel • journalism • killing • palestine

Classic 8 bit computer game, a Marble Madness derivative

2022-05-24 apple2 • apple][ • games • marblemadness • retrocomputing • spindizzy

DALL-E 2 variants

Haunting set of images generated by iterating through variations the AI dreamed up

2022-05-23 ai • art • dalle2 • gan • generative • via:waxy

Death Star trench truth

We've all had the wrong idea for the last 45 years.

2022-05-23 deathstar • graphics • movies • starwars • truth

Excellent Parisian street artist has passed away

2022-05-23 france • graffiti • misstic • obituary • paris • streetart

Alex Jones' small penis

Dangerous right wing lunatic now has a penis size obsession

2022-05-23 alexjones • batshitinsane • infowars • penis

Southern Baptist sex abuse

Report commissioned by the religion finds an institutional pattern of protecting abusers

2022-05-23 baptist • morality • religion • sexualabuse • southernbaptist • tirefire

Sichuan flavor profiles

The official 23 different flavors of Sichuan food

2022-05-23 chinese • cooking • food • mala • sichuan • szechuan

Excellent album of Tejano music recorded by an old high school buddy of mine

2022-05-22 davidbeebe • marfa • music • primocarrasco • tejano

Automated text output of Jupyter notebooks so you can check just the code in to version control

2022-05-22 git • jupyter • notebooks • programming • python • versoncontrol

Switch from Shapefile

A well thought out list of problems with ESRI Shapefiles and various alternatives

2022-05-22 data • esri • geojson • geopackage • gis • shapefile • via:lobsters

Curl Impersonate

Version of the web download tool with SSL modified to be identical to major browsers

2022-05-21 curl • programming • scraping • ssl • tools • useragent • web

Daily Wire vs Heard

Ads bought to promote misogynistic media campaign

2022-05-21 amberheard • facebook • heard • johnnydepp • misogyny • propaganda • sexism

Haiti and the US

Detailed story on the occupation of Haiti by the US (in 1915, for decades) and the seizure of its gold reserves

2022-05-21 america • colonialism • haiti • history • imperialism • politics

Haiti's double debt

History of Haitian liberation punished by financial exploitation by France

2022-05-21 economics • france • haiti • history • liberation • slavery

Crypto insider trading

Total shock; unregulated market has people taking advantage of other people in a way that would be illegal if it had regulations.

2022-05-21 binance • cryptocurrency • fraud • frontrunning • insidertrading • scam

Homage to the Pixel

Spare generative art; AI picks colors based on word prompts

2022-05-21 ai • color • gan • generativeart • medialab • nft • tomwhite

Larry Ellison vs. election

Oracle head involved in effort to overthrow the 2020 election

2022-05-20 coup • ellison • oracle • politics • votingrights

Depp-Heard trial impact

How the ongoing spectacle of misogyny and abuse is, once again, moving the Overton window on horrible social behavior online

2022-05-20 amberheard • extremism • johhnydepp • misogyny • radicalization • sexism

f-strings for readable regex

Nice modern Python syntax for composing complex regular expressions

2022-05-20 fstrings • programming • python • regex • via:reddit

Thomas election tampering

Supreme Court Justice's wife directly tried to overthrow the election in Arizona

2022-05-20 arizona • coup • politics • supremecourt • thomas • votingrights

Michigan vote tampering

Republican politician accessed or tried to get access to vote counting machines

2022-05-20 elections • fraud • michigan • politics • votingrights

Paxton disclosure violation

One of the more petty forms of lawbreaking from Texas' attorney general, but still illegal

2022-05-19 corruption • fraud • paxton • politics • texas

The Trumpy right wing gets more explicitly violent and extremist

2022-05-19 civilwar • coup • darkmaga • jan6 • maga • politics • trump

Rust: A Critical Retrospective

Famed hardware hacker Bunnie writes up his experience after writing 100k lines of Rust code for a kernel

2022-05-19 hacking • kernel • languages • programming • rust

Monkeypox and gay men

Early outbreaks seem to be spreading among men who have sex with men

2022-05-19 disease • gay • health • lgbt • monkeypox • nightmarememories

US census quality

Some data quantifying how flawed the mismanaged 2020 census was

2022-05-19 census • data • politics • quality • trump

a16z as pump and dump

Scathing review of a prominent VC fund's cryptocurrency marketing, accusing it of being financial fraud

2022-05-19 a16z • cryptocurrency • fraud • pmarca • scam • vc

Amber Heard backlash

Thoughtful editorial on the virulent spread of misogyny in the face of facts. (CW: domestic abuse.)

2022-05-19 abuse • amberheard • johnnydepp • misogyny • propaganda

Coming later this year, a sassy movie about gay life

2022-05-19 bros • gay • lgbt • movies

Glitch + Fastly

A step forward for the innovative development company

2022-05-19 anildash • business • fastly • glitch • internet • merger • tech

Stablegains fraud

A Y Combinator company lost its customers money during the Terra/Luna debacle

2022-05-19 cryptocurrency • fraud • stablegains • terraluna • ust • ycombinator

Electric car company does poorly in Environmental, Social, and Governance rankings because of its history of worker abuse and bad policies

2022-05-18 elonmusk • esg • governance • ranking • tesla

American disinformation

Modest effort to help the US fight disinformation is derailed by American disinformation peddlers

2022-05-18 america • dhs • disinformation • hate • jankowicz • politics • propaganda

A gay lumberjack game from Robert Yang. Perhaps more interesting to read about than play.

2022-05-18 games • gay • lgbt • lumberjack • robertyang

Dragonscale solar

An innovative solar panel technology Google is using on its new office roof

2022-05-17 google • prism • solar • solarpanel

Impossible Chimerical Colors

Fun optical illusion

2022-05-17 chimericalcolors • cognitivescience • color • retina • vision

MiamiCoin failure

Mayor of Miami marketed an official Miami city coin. Its' value is collapsing

2022-05-16 cryptocurrency • florida • fraud • miami • money • republicans • scam

Details on how the election in Georgia is basically a proxy for the GOP trying to undermine American elections

2022-05-16 america • coup • elections • fraud • politics • trump • votingrights

Google Maps vs Māori

5 years ago Google promised to fix voice pronunciation for names in New Zealand and collected data from volunteers. They've never delivered.

2022-05-16 māori • google • maori • maps • texttospeech • voice

Sweet gay teen drama TV

2022-05-15 gay • heartstopper • lgbt • netflix • romance • tv

Elden Ring survey

Interesting view of what people liked from the game

2022-05-15 eldenring • games • survey • via:reddit

Data sovereignty as a principle for doing speech recognition development and other tech projects at Te Hiku Media

2022-05-15 māori • ai • colonialism • ethics • kiwifoo • mahelona • maoro

Gamer -> terrorist

Some cultural details of the Buffalo murderer's engagement with 4chan, Discord, etc

2022-05-15 4chan • 8chan • culture • discord • games • hate • racism • terrorism • tirefire

El Salvador Bitcoin

Tracking a country's gambling on magic beans via the president's tweets

2022-05-15 bitcoin • elsalvador • fraud • imf • politics

Tether’s De-Pegging

Detailed data on some evidence that the Tether stablecoin is under sell pressure

2022-05-14 bitfinex • fraud • markets • stablecoin • tether • usdt

Vitiligo Barbie

New diversity of dolls, including one with the skin color variation vitiligo

2022-05-14 barbie • diversity • dolls • mattel • vitiligo

Game diversity space tool

Activision Blizzard releases a quantification of measuring character diversity. Well intentioned but maybe clumsy?

2022-05-13 blizzard • diversity • games • overwatch

Covid in North Korea

Yet another misery being visited on the victims of the DPRK

2022-05-13 covid • health • northkorea

About sqlite-utils

Nice writeup of a tool that will turn data in files into a sqlite database

2022-05-13 csv • data • import • json • scraping • sqlite

A web based JSON viewer with support for decoding image blobs

2022-05-12 browser • development • json • webapp

Ford F-150 Lightning

A review from a drive

2022-05-11 cars • electriccar • ev • ford • review • truck

How Ben Got His Penis

Detailed article about phalloplasty, bottom surgery for FTM transmen (and others). Sympathetic and frank.

2022-05-11 ftm • lgbt • medical • penis • phalloplasty • trans • transgender

AP CS pseudocode

Tests for high school students include a bizarre pseudocode for problems

2022-05-09 ap • code • computerscience • programming • pseudocode • tests

Plausible anonymous Hacker News comment says Salesforce is sunsetting Heroku

2022-05-09 hackernews • heroku • hosting • salesforce

Charles David Keeling

Climate scientist famous for confirming increasing CO2 levels

2022-05-08 climate • climatechange • co2 • globalwarming • keelingcurve • maunaloa • science

Official consensus data for global CO2 levels, just hit a new record of 420ppm (average)

2022-05-08 apocalypse • climate • climatechange • co2 • globalwarming • maunaloa

TSM Reginald investigation

One of the big League of Legends team owners is in the middle of a scandal about being a giant jerk and bully

2022-05-08 bullying • doublelift • esports • games • leagueoflegend • lol • reginald • tsm

Biofrost comes out

League of Legends pro player comes out gay, sounds like he's had a hard time of it.

2022-05-08 biofrost • games • gay • homophobia • leagueoflegends • lgbt • lol

Crypto money laundering

Tornado Cash and Blender operate completely transparently as money laundering for, among other things, the North Korean hacking / theft group.

2022-05-07 crime • cryptocurrency • fraud • moneylaundering • northkorea • tumbler

Eid al-Fitr photos

Nice collection of folks in the Muslim world celebrating the end of Ramadan

2022-05-07 celebration • eid • eidalfitr • feast • iftar • islam • muslim • photos • ramadan

Wildbit acquisition

Privately held tech company that does Postmarc and DMARC gives 10% of proceeds to employees in an acquisition despite not having any obligation to.

2022-05-07 acquisition • dmarc • email • intuit • mailchimp • postmark • wildbit

Hometown Buffet

An unusual bit of food writing about going to a chain buffet restaurant in Van Nuys with her kids at 4pm before the divorced father takes them

2022-05-07 divorce • family • food • helenrosner • hobu • la • vannuys

Facebook ending location history

Facebook tracks your location. They'll no longer collect and show you that data. Sounds like they will still collect it for their advertising though.

2022-05-07 ads • facebook • location • maps • privacy

Texas v children

Goal is to stop educating some children in Texas. The cruelty is the point.

2022-05-06 children • education • hate • immigrants • racism • texas

Twitter’s Board Gave Up

A sharp read on the failure of Agarwal and Twitter's board to have any sort of conviction or plan

2022-05-02 agarwal • elonmusk • jack • twitter

California marijuana market

Big paper article about a collapse in the bulk market for weed growers

2022-05-01 california • economics • marijuana • weed

Mistaken paternity

Data on when one's father isn't who you think. It varies by culture.

2022-05-01 data • family • paternity • research • socialscience