Bot Reckons

March 28, 2016

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.

🐦

March 21, 2016

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

March 14, 2016

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

March 7, 2016

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

February 29, 2016

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

February 22, 2016

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?  ↩

Clubbing

February 15, 2016

Hello internet friends,

my usual writing tool – Byword – is crashing on me today, so I have to write this email in a normal text editor. Like an animal!
Quite a minor incovenience, just imagine instead I had a G(r)eek Chorus that kept telling me how I should be better all the time. I mean, seriously.
Onwards.

Runkeeper – which I personally use as a Walkkeeper and Sleepkeeper – is part of Asics now. This is pretty amazing, let’s see what they do with it.

Perhaps spending a night or two with a Neanderthal was a relatively small price to pay for getting thousands of years of adaptations.

How about I put this in my OKCupid profile?

Do you know about the Sleng Teng Riddim? Me neither, but here you go, the unlikely story how a Japanese lady over at Casio influenced reggae.

Take care, everybody, thanks for reading.

Peanuts

February 8, 2016

Hello internet friends,

let’s open with a strong contender for the headline-of-the-year award: Wife crashes her own funeral, horrifying her husband, who had paid to have her killed
What a story.

Everyone on Twitter is mad about the company’s idea to move to an algorithmic timeline which showcases relevant tweets. Apparently this is how it works and tbh I think it’s a bit silly – the last time I saw a relevant tweet was probably 2010 anyway.

Last year had a lot of weird weather. Here’s a timelapse.

This is now bowling, this is ’Nam. And this time seen in photos from a North Vietnamese perspective.

Man, I can’t wait to be old. (At least where I am, 65 is also the age when most people retire? Coincidence?)

Nerd alert! Want to learn about CPU load averages? Of course you do.

And then there are a bunch of people trying to clean the trash out of the ocean. Go them!

Way back when ICQ was the biggest thing in the world I used to have an ICQ bot running with a simple markov chain. It would randomly add people[1] and talk to them and I had so much fun just reading those conversations. These days there are much better libraries for that kind of silliness and of course there is Twitter. So here is a Twitter bot markov chaining its way through my tweets.
It does interact with people, too, so that’s fun.

Take care!

  1. Remember that? It was possible to just randomly look for people on ICQ and then talk to them. Get me drunk and I’ll tell you how that worked out for me.  ↩

Prank Calls

February 1, 2016

Hello internet friends,

I am quite a big fan of looking at screens, but the scenario how the couple in this article consumes media/uses their devices scares even me.

Even though it is still absolutely inscrutable to me, the last two weeks peer pressured me into looking at Snapchat again. My post-snake-person[1] cousin, #oldguyonsnapchat, and the good people at one of the many[2] Slack chats all together managed what poor Teymur alone didn’t manage to do.
So, here we are. If you are a snap person, add me and please – and now you have to excuse me for using the same old joke that all the old people who have only a vague understanding of these new things have, use – don’t send me your genitals.

What would you do with your last day of internet?
Now that’s a fun thought experiment. The answers given in the article tend to be pretty boring, so here is mine, also pretty boring: Probably exactly what I do just now, trying to reach out to people. The internet is – and has been for almost two decades now – a way for me to connect to my friends and peers and if it just went away, I’d have to re-learn all the ways that people use to connect offline.
I might even have to use the phone to make calls, ugh.

Tempting: Every 3 Months, I Unfollow Everyone on Twitter
But probably: no. That article is via Lara who used it to justify following everyone I follow with her secondary account. It is a very special kind of hell to have a friend go through one’s Twitter follows and live-slack that experience.

Now for something completely different:

Think about an enormously muscled 1,500 to 2,000-pound animal, with horns the size of a full-grown man, which hangs out in herds of bored and testosterone-driven bachelor males, and has no fear of humans and no qualms about charging.

Lovely!

Have a good week – and don’t call Justin Bieber.

  1. How do we call these people? Oh, I know: children – for now.  ↩

  2. Are we at peak Slack, yet? We might just be, especially since I don’t feel too happy about having my corpus mined.  ↩

Bill

January 25, 2016

Hi internet friends,

I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.

Don’t be like Bill.

Space News!
The alien megastructure that is probably a bunch of comets is probably not a bunch of comets.
Apparently there is a planet in our solar system that we don’t know about. I’m not sure why they insist on calling it Planet Nine, though. You heard about Pluto? That’s messed up, right?

Chicken News!
When chickens go wild is an interesting article about wild chickens on Kauai. There is also an amusing gif.

T-Shirt News!
Someone bought 800 t-shirts and measured them. And washed them and wore them and measured them and washed them and… (Not a single someone, obviously.)

Tennis News!
Remember last week’s tennis kerfuffle? (I almost forgot, tbh.) Well, apparently “that’s what tennis players do."

Racist News!
Turns out you’re just as racist as everybody else, you are just better at hiding it. Well, at least if you’re a white American, which – let me look at my subscriber statistics – you are probably not.

Be safe, be less racist and maybe have a tea.