Links and Photos (14 March 2024)
– Baldur
Bjarnason
New book #
The big news yesterday was the release of a new compilation book that collects the best of twenty-five years of my writing on innovation and digital transformation. (And some writing on creativity and other useless stuff.)
Links #
- “Microsoft says Kremlin-backed hackers accessed its source and internal systems | Ars Technica”. Whatever else you can say about Microsoft, at least they’re consistent. They have always been and will always be, the absolute worst at software security.
- “Research Suggests A Large Proportion Of Web Material In Languages Other Than English Is Machine Translations Of Poor Quality Texts”. In other words, however bad the problems are that AI is creating for English-language material, they are probably worse in languages found less commonly online.
- “My Books Keep Getting Banned (An Update) — Malinda Lo”
- “Access by a thousand curb cuts - Eric Eggert”- “Epic’s App Store developer account restored in Europe once again – Six Colors”. Turns out you can’t just tell a multinational organisation to fuck off if it controls the banking and taxation system for a big chunk of your global market.
- “The quiet, pervasive devaluation of frontend - Josh Collinsworth blog”
- “Nielsen needs to think again - Tink - Léonie Watson”- “Ian Betteridge - On Apple terminating Epic’s E.U. Developer Account”- “Muse retrospective”. I have too many thoughts on this but the short version is that while it’s a great overview of the sorts of problems software startups run into, IMO the reasons cited didn’t actually caused its failure. The big one is it launched too early with too little user research and testing
- “Why Anthony Hobday’s sentence-style form is bad UX (and what to do instead) – Adam Silver – designer, London, UK”
- “The Money Is In All The Wrong Places | Defector”. “The reality is that the people with the most money have devised, at every turn, new and more bulletproof ways for them to make and keep more money, and for the people who make things to make less.”
- “The Public Is Rapidly Turning Against AI, Polling Shows”. That an extremely biased poll (76% of the public trusts tech cos? Riiight) couldn’t juice up the numbers on “AI” should tell you something.
- “Churn”. “The main reason Web Components aren’t going to save you from the JS treadmill, however, is that the JS treadmill is first and foremost a cultural product.”
Photos #
Cat #
These two neighbours of mine, siblings, were out playing in the sun today.
Old photos #
Going through old photos from my iPhone era (the gap between my Canon era and my Fuji era) for Reasons and I’m finding that I prefer the rendering of the iPhone 6 plus to my current phone, the 13
The photos from the 13 constantly feel bland, oversharp, and generic
More cat #
My sister has sent me another batch of photos of her cat, Kolka, being very relaxed. Hard to imagine that this cat was semi-feral and hid from all people when she first arrived
