Joseph Nuthalapati ✅ @njoseph@social.masto.host

Review from the weekend: "Bad Blood" by John Carreyrou, the definitive book about the Theranos saga by the investigative journalist who broke it.

At its peak, Theranos was valued at $10B. If the company had not been stopped, their flaky tests might have killed people--we may never know the true extent of the damage they did do to people's lives. At the heart of the story are self-delusion, blind ambition, paranoia, infatuation.

Full review here:

https://lib.reviews/review/02f8947b-e42e-4062-880d-8068483403ac

Am I the only one who childishly refuses to click "read more" on news articles in news sites?

I mean if I explicably followed a link into a news article then that means I want to read it, and clicking "read more" seems like an odd extra step.

Seems like surveillance powers are going to be reviewed by the NZ government. This would excellent time for a public education campaign to remind people that a) privacy is normal, b) encryption is the digital equivalent to drawing your blinds at night to protect your privacy, and c) breaking encryption so cops and spooks can intercept messages from potential terrorists effectively breaks it for any other purpose too.
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/11/11/wait-what-nz-spies-cops-need-more-terrorism-powers-really-after-all-that-mass-surveillance/

Burned to death because of a rumour on WhatsApp - BBC News - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-46145986

"Fake videos can now be created using a technique called a generative adversarial network, or GAN.

Although the machine learning breakthroughs in computer graphics are impressive, researchers should be more cognizant of the ramifications of what they’re creating. “It is not clear that the positive implications outweigh the negative.”

“Deep fakes are amplifying the liar’s dividend. When nothing is true, the dishonest person will thrive by saying what’s true is fake.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/12/deep-fakes-fake-news-truth

"Critics argue that a lot of the hype around indoor farming is unwarranted, saying it won’t fulfill promises of feeding an increasingly urbanized planet and reverse the environmental harm of industrialized agriculture, not least because most staples, such as corn, wheat and rice, cannot be grown viably indoors."

But you know what CAN be grown indoors? Soybeans.

Fired: software sucks; devs need to try harder
Tired: the development community is insufficiently diverse in identities and ideas to produce good software; devs need to be more diverse
Wired: #software companies have bad incentives which lead them to not care about producing good software; #FOSS needs to get better
Inspired: all software #development involves encoding our society's ideas about a problem domain; we cannot produce good software until we produce a good society

Happy anniversary to linux-libre-firmware (a repository that contains free firmware for use with GNU Linux-libre). The first commit was 1 year ago today. https://jxself.org/git/?p=linux-libre-firmware.git

@neilalexander
Simple. Web companies don't exist to give you content; they exist to send you ads. Any other idea is merely a delusion.

Sometime we were fooled with the idea of FREE CONTENT, and flew to it like flies to honey. Instead, they caught us in a trap of adverts and cookies and trackers. Before we knew it, power shifted from service providers to advertisers.

WE put them in power. WE sold our souls to them, WE clicked on "agree". It was us who ruined the web.

Recently I’ve noticed that more images here on mastodon seem to have descriptions for the vision impaired. Thanks very much to everyone who is doing this, it’s making my social media experience a heck of a lot better.

👀🎙
There’s a lot of camera covers & stickers out there.
They all miss an important detail.
Here’s a design proposal:

@aral
Despite what the US Supreme Court has said, corporations are _not_ people, so you do not need to be nice to them

Y’know, I don’t say this enough (heck, I don’t think I’ve ever said it) but thank you to those of you lovely, caring, and wonderful people on the fediverse for being there and for being you. It’s an inexplicable joy just to watch you folks being kind to each other, taking care of each other, and sharing your everyday experiences with empathy and love.

You know who you are.

Keep being awesome!

And thank you!

The older I get the more I am convinced that all forms of progress are only possible when we have free time. That is, when we are able to spend effort on things not essential to our immediate survival. We need to have spare resources to be able to risk spending them on something uncertain.

The main indicator of this to me is how the more pressure people are under to work just to survive, the less able they are to devote their energies to social or personal improvement.

thinking about how the Starbucks mermaid is slowly, but surely, getting closer, and we cannot stop her

I fed over 8,000 CNN Business headlines to a neural net to see which new headlines it would predict.
For some reason, it predicted companies behaving rather badly.

http://aiweirdness.com/post/179938486347/cnn-headlines-according-to-a-neural-net