Don't Trust Your Bot

Hello internet friends,

because bots are so hot right now I wanted to open this email with one of those fake text message conversation pictures that some people use to amuse themselves.
Turns out every single generator for those things is sleazy af and wants me to like/share/log into it with Facebook. So… not today.

Onwards! Bots! Facebook Messenger has them now, Microsoft has a whole framework for them and of course they are old news for people like me who actually use Telegram.
But are bots actually good at everything? Well, not necessarily. Maybe they are not the best UI paradigm (yeah!) if it takes 73 taps instead of 16 when ordering a pizza.
For what it’s worth, I mostly don’t want to have media and commerce where I have conversations with my friends. Now that’s a problem that no clever API can solve for media and commerce companies, isn’t it?

I have no clever segue, so here’s an article about publishing articles on the web in 2016: Don’t Trust Your CMS.
Even if you’re not reading that article, take the title as an important bit of advice. (That being said, if you’re even remotely interested in putting words (or other content, ehm) on the web – and I figure most of you are or you wouldn’t still be reading this – it is worth reading. And give that I write stuff like this email in a text editor and then happily copy it into different CMSses the whole thing should be a proper warning to me, too.)

So, apparently the new Beyoncé album is really good but I’ll sure as hell not pay for Tidal to listen to it.

Heard that thing about the jet in the UK that hit a drone? Yeah, well. That’s more American Beauty than a drone.

Talking about the UK – what a bunch of humorless tossers. (I bet they’d love hearing that from a German person.)

I am a big fan of ramen – both the “good” kind and the instant one. And learning about the existence of the World Instant Noodles Association gave me great pleasure.

Now let’s learn more things!
Baby dinosaurs were not cute. (Except the little carnivores, who probably looked like this. Or more like this.)
Planes used to drop out of the sky in Iceland a lot, back in the days. And thanks to Justin Bieber that’s still a problem today.
It still takes a lot of work and ressources to produce a show for TV. At least if you want to make it right.

This one I mostly like for the title: Dolphins Are Helping Us Hunt for Aliens. It’s a bit misleading, though – they are mostly supposed to help us how to learn to communicate with beings that have a different way of expressing themselves than us. (Maybe we can use chatbots?)

I’m still not done! So much content to curate for you!
I never really cared about Indycar, but I’m a sucker for articles about the history of car racing. This one is pretty fascinating.

Phew. Now we’re done. You have a week to catch up – or at least to instapaper all the great links and feel bad about not reading them.
Have fun.

Convertibles

Hello internet friends,

while I was pretty pretty pleased with last week’s “Here are ruined things” email I also got the feedback that ~people~ will not click on links if they are presented that way. One of my friends – an online marketing viral content guru (aha!) – even suggested that this format does not convert hence the lower engagement with my content.
And we wouldn’t want that, would we? So here we go!

Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman spoke at a memorial event for Terry Pratchett – you will never guess what he revealed there.

Ayers Turbo Thrush
Ayers Turbo Thrush

The amazing story of a man trying to build his own private air force.

Machu Pichu
Machu Pichu

You will be surprised which invasive species is destroying South America!

Pixelated Butt
Pixelated Butt

Political Correctness taken too far??!!??!!

Gorillaz at the Apollo
Gorillaz at the Apollo

How Blur frontman Damon Albarn and comic artist Jamie Hewlett evolved into a cartoon simian rock band

:D
😀

She is known as the most famous stock photography model in the world – now learn what Rebecca Givens is up to next.

Cubibles
Cubibles

They decide what you get to see online – and yet they are underpaid, overworked and barely acknowledged.

Cupcakes
Cupcakes

27 Ridiculously Creative Ways To Decorate Cupcakes

Now go forth and engage!

Like4like, follow4follow! Twitter! Facebook! Medium Dot Com!


Because reasons, here are the image credits:

  • Picture of Neil Gaiman, taken by Kyle Cassidy and shared under a Creative Commons licence on Wikipedia.
  • Picture of the Ayers Thrush, shared under a Creative Commons licence on Wikipedia
  • Picture of Machu Pichu, shared under a Creative Commons licence on Flickr
  • Picture of a pixelated Rust butt, blatantly stolen from their dev blog.
  • Gorillaz at the Apollo, public domain via Wikipedia
  • Photo of Rebecca Givens, via, well, a stock photography site.
  • Picture of cubicles, public domain via Wikipedia
  • Picture of cupcakes, shared under a Creative Commons licence on Flickr

Ruined By Everything

Hello internet friends,

it’s Monday, so let’s be cheerful! To facilitate it, here are things that are ruined!

Cheered up, yet? Hm. Let’s try good stuff, then.

Better? Alright. If not, have a beverage of your choice and a moment of serenity.

Juicy!

Hello internet friends!

I’m not so sure what to think about this whole deal with the Panama papers, yet. A lot of journalists seem to be pretty psyched by their own work, which actually is pretty impressive, so: good for them.
I have my doubts that this won’t be out of the news cycle pretty soon, though – there is always stuff happening and most people have short attention spans.

Talking about short attention spans: Chipmunks!

You might want to have a good laugh at Juicero, the Nespresso of juices, but then remember: they managed to get themselves $70m and articles not only in the tech press, but also The New York Times and Vogue.
But hey, it is ~Food Tech~

Talking about collecting a lot of investment for something ridiculous and/or non-working: Electronic Gills!
Unlike the juicer this might kill somebody, so it’s not quite as funny. On the other hand, that articles from the New York Times mentions some dangers of the ~smart juicer~:

Working with freelance welders and machinists, he built prototypes in his Brooklyn kitchen. By 2013, he had a working model, albeit one that occasionally blew apart, sending pieces of metal and food scraps flying across the room.

Boom.

Have you taken a selfie of a hoverboard lately?
Words have meanings. The only smart person in the whole Egyptair story mentions that, too. It’s an exercise for the reader to find out who she is.

Life hacks!

Be obscure.
Sleep naked.
Watch Friends.

I think we have reached peak Vice.

Have a good week.

Bot Reckons

Hello internet friends,

so many things we have learned about technology last week.
I personally had to learn that emoji might not work as email subject line. Oh well.

Mostly we had to learn that it takes about one day for the internet to ruin everything. At least we got this headline out of it: Microsoft deletes ‘teen girl’ AI after it became a Hitler-loving sex robot within 24 hours

But of course we can learn so much from it! We can learn that Microsoft has been running a bot like this in China for quite some while which did somehow not become a nazi sex bot. (I saw Nazi Sex Bot in a small underground club before they broke into the mainstream and called themselves Tokio Hotel.)
Then there are the smart people who have been doing internet-facing bots for a while, they have some reckons, too. For a good primer on text bots and how Microsoft made the most basic mistake with their Tay, look no further than this introductory article by Ben Brown. And then there’s Motherboard’s Sarah Jeong with How to Make a Bot That Isn’t Racist.
Well, good to know. My bot – and you knew I had to had one at some point – is just twitter_ebooks running with my tweets. So its baseline for terribleness is me, which of course might already be a problem.

More automated bot things!
Watch an automated deer run around GTA. And yes, people will have to learn how to drive self-driving cars.

Other stuff!
Wired has a big feature on the comedians in Silicon Valley and how the comedy business works these days.
And The Guardian has the best argument in favour of cash.

Be safe out there, have a good week.

🐦

Hello internet friends,

were you as excited as I am about long tweets to hopefully get rid of tweetstorms? (Not that this would ever happen, mostly because.) Well, I do have some bad news for you: the 140 characters are here to stay. And so are screenshots of text. Which I have seen on Medium by now, too.
What is wrong with people?

Anyway, onwards! I am sure by now everyone of you have heard of or even played the wonderful Firewatch game. If not, give it a try – it’s very pretty, not terribly expensive for a couple of hours of entertainment and it is very playable even for people who are not natural gamers.
And once you’re done with it, why not read these notes by Panic, the company that published the game, about their experience as a first time game publisher.

Everybody seems to be really into the idea of self-driving cars these days. And then there are these kinds of people who want to ruin it for everybody else.

Love emoji? Of course you do. What kind of joyless person doesn’t? Well, behind every emoji is a letter code and those are maintained by people called the Unicode Editorial Committee. And this is how that works.

We all have seen those pictures of immaculate kitchens/desks/… that our designer-y friends like to share. They tend to follow a certain aesthetic – and more often than not it is one that comes from the Kinfolk, which is apparently the last lifestyle magazine.
Do read the article, I found it fascinating how much of this comes from Mormonism, of all places. As a Dudeist this is all pretty weird in my eyes, but I guess this makes me a bit of a garbage person. But then it is very likely that these neat little photos of neat little living and work spaces are just a bit of an act – which might actually help some folks. Or maybe not.

And now for something completely different and actually great: Pigeons With Backpacks Are Fighting Air Pollution in London. I don’t have anything to add to this.

Toodles!

Scan This

Hello internet friends,

aren’t we all excited about a new week, lol.
Onwards. Or maybe not quite, yet. After all it is monday, so just for getting up and starting the week, we should get a little reward. And here it is – New Order’s Blue Monday, played on instruments from the 1930s.

I still didn’t manage to watch the new Deadpool movie but I already managed to read this think piece: Why Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine is Actually Way Better Than The 2016 Deadpool

A few weeks back a group of ~artists~ claimed they had smuggled Microsoft Kinect scanners into the Neue Museum in Berlin and used them to make a very high resolution 3D scarn of the Nefertiti bust. Turns out not so much – it is way more likely that a copy of the museum’s own scan data found its way to them.
This is quite something.

“If I look even more tired than usual, it might be this man’s fault.
He said, like addicts do when they blame the drug producers instead of facing their own weak will.

New section alert!

Interesting links for which I couldn’t think of a little paragraph so I just dump them on you in the hope that you still find them as interesting as I did

The Myth of the Barter Economy – Adam Smith said that quid-pro-quo exchange systems preceded economies based on currency, but there’s no evidence that he was right.

The roots of Tim Cook’s activism lie in rural Alabama

Why Nobody Can Build an Email Killer

You are welcome.

Looking back one year and trying to figure out what happened since then

I said the name of that section would change, didn’t I? Well, here you go. Do they have courses on naming things better?

Last year around this time we were thinking about how our attention is being monetized and oh boy, did nothing change.
It is a big war on the web though – on the one hand, we have publishers, who fight ad-blocking in every way they can and on the other hand we have the first browser vendor who ships a (preview) version of their main product with ad-blocking built in.

Be safe, everybody. And maybe don’t go viral for the wrong reasons.

Onwards

Hello internet friends!

I have been doing this for two years now and it is still fun – I sincerely hope it is for you, too. Thanks for reading my little zine! And… onwards!

If you have a bit of time and want to know about the Millennium Falcon, here is something for you.
Actually it might be a good idea to take a day off and read through all of Kitbashed. Probably the best Star Wars page out there.

I have mentioned before that I use Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist on random as one of my three alarms.[1]
I hardly ever use their “Fresh Finds” playlists, though, but apparently they are pretty good, too. And fuelled by an army of hipsters. Probably they are better at the whole music thing than the Army of Lovers.

Remember last week’s cyborg rats? Turns out they might be our own future when it comes to navigating the increasingly complex transit systems out there.
Most people I know use Google Maps or some other transit app for those by now, so we’re already halfway there.

We have all seen that video/gif[2] of some dude with VR goggles while a young lady looks disinterested into the camera. We all had a bit of a giggle and moved one. Turns out the young lady – Eva Hoerth – is a VR researcher and was pretty surprised by suddenly becoming a meme. She also seems to be smart and funny, so that’s an entertaining article to read.

New section alert!

One Year Follow-Up[3]

Last year around this time, we were all thinking about the colors of a dress. While we all just rolled our eyes and forgot about it again, actual scientists kept thinking about it.

Be safe out there.


  1. And yes, I am a three alarms person. I am also a snooze person and a person who likes to sleep. Because sleep – that’s where I’m a viking.  ↩

  2. Isn’t it all the same these days?  ↩

  3. I’ll rename this.  ↩

Leap

Hello internet friends,

seems like Mr DiCaprio finally got his pity oscar.
Congratulations.

Most people don’t know this, but this newsletter is now a well-funded startup in a swanky loft office with exposed brick walls. “Dominik, how is this possible?” you might wonder and I am not above sharing my path to success: Motivational posters.

Did that make you laugh? I have bad news for you.

Back in the days when we had to walk uphill through the snow both ways and all we had was crappy shareware games, I used to play some sort of fighting game with robots. The Japanese decided to make it real – and honestly a lot more awesome.
Just look at that chicken robot. A lot less scary than that Boston Dynamics robot.

There is a new Raspberry Pi in town, this one with WiFi and Bluetooth on board. By now the specs look good enough to replace most office computers – for a fraction of the price. I’m not sure what happened to the idea of running Windows on these things, though.

Or well, we could just put these things into animals and create cyborgs. (This one might actually be more scary than the Boston Dynamics robot.)

Sleep well.

Shrimp Emoji

Hello internet friends,

I actually quite enjoy flying. I like airports[1] and I am fascinated by the machinery and logistics of the whole system. I don’t mind sitting in a tube with a whole lot of people, breathing recycled air and never feeling quite comfortable, because after all – hello! flying! – but even this might have its limits. And nowadays these limits are being closed to being reached – with the first few airlines pondering non-stop flights from Europe to Australia.

I happily use Tumblr without thinking too much – I look at a bunch of photos on my dashboard, reblog a bunch, like some, yay. Except for the fact that I am quite annoyed that they took away the comment feature, Tumblr is where I go for mindless but always positive time wasting.
This might be a sign of my age, though – because for young people, Tumblr is serious business.

I did mention her before, but since I see her face almost every day, here we go again, a new article about Ariane, the stock model who is everywhere. And apparently this is her Instagram account. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Good news! Drinking more coffee may reverse liver damage from booze.

I had Chris Dixon’s What’s Next in Computing? sitting open in a tab all day and now that I scrolled over it – come on, lol, reading the whole thing? – I will recommend that you read through the article. After all, the future of computing is also very much the future of our lives.
And me personally? Maybe I’ll see how I can retire to some remote island and/or mountain, far away from all these things.

Let’s learn about the secret double meanings of emoji! And then have another coffee and a good week ahead.


  1. With some exceptions. But isn’t that always the case?  ↩