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That Sounds Way More Creepy
Jesse Pujji in a Twitter thread on why Facebook isn’t “always listening” to you and why they don’t have to:
If me and @mrsharma get lunch, FBs systems can figure it out (still anonymously of course) How? Our devices were near each other for about an hour at neither of our houses around
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Why we Argue About Die Hard
Is [REDACTED] a Christmas Movie? - Kaitlyn Tiffany
Because of the dreaded incentives of social media, we force debate upon ourselves all the time, even at the most wonderful time of the year. And we do so even when our arguments hold no promise of a resolution.
“Arguments that hold no promise of a resolution,” is
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Sewing Doubt
Tim Harford on The New Bazaar podcast:
Cigarettes smokers are going to eagerly grab onto any evidence they can to doubt the scientific consensus that's emerging. And so the tobacco lobby would say, "oh well we need more research," which of course is a good idea. They would say, “oh it&
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Where do You Post Ephemeral Thoughts?
Finding the Right Place
There’s a type of content, that I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, but for quite a long time, I’ve itched for it to find a place. There might be a word or phrase for it already, but I can only describe it as informal,
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Let’s Pretend the Last 20 Years Never Happened
Ben Thompson writing for Stratechery:
Skeptics argued for years that “That’s fine for Ben”, the insinuation being that I was some sort of unicorn. In fact, one of the most exciting stories of 2021 has been the absolute explosion in subscription-based blogs, primarily thanks to Substack, very much a web2 company. Other mediums
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My Interview with Craft VP of Engineering on Craft 2, Extensions, the Web App, and More
Craft 2.0 released a few weeks ago, and it had some things I really wanted more details about, so
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The Model is Being Pushed to Its Limits
The Verge has some new reporting that includes emails between Microsoft and Apple, negotiating what could be done to bring Xbox games to iPhones and iPads. This bit stuck out to me:
“Our proposal for bringing games through individual apps was designed to comply with App Store policies. It was denied by Apple based on
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Overly-Invasive Employee Work Tracking
Here’s a snippet from Out of Office (I’m listening to the audiobook, so this was transcribed using Draft’s new transcribe feature, and touched up by me, so it may be slightly different from the exact text in the book):
After Satariano put Hubstaff on his computer it began taking hundreds of screenshots
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Glass Added a Like Button!
Me 2 months ago on why Glass should add a like button:
Maybe this is a terrible idea and I'm in the minority here, but I really do think that I would enjoy the app more if I was able to give lower-friction reactions to people's photos. I still like
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Reasonable Precautions
This truly oddly framed article from Politico made the rounds yesterday, talking about how silly it is that she uses them:
But still, should someone who travels with the nuclear football be spending time untangling her headphone wires? The American people deserve answers!
Although they did eventually get close to the point:
While wired headphones
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Viable Mac Monitors in 2021
Casey Liss has compiled a list of viable Mac monitors, and I think it's a decent list, but I'd like to add to the discussion since I think his standards are a bit too specific.
I'm using the LG 27” IPS 4K UHD Monitor (model #: 27UP600-W.AUS) which
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Data Can be Objective, but the Story it Tells is Always Subjective
Over the past few months, I've had all of my inflation-hawk friends share the price of oil as a key indicator of the out-of-control rising prices they see out there.
All data via MacroTrends.
So it looks like a pretty strong upward trend, but what if we back up 10
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Apple Silicon is One of the Best Innovations of 2021
The top 100 new technologies of 2021 | Popular Science
The company has already updated the M1 with the new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips, which popped in October. Laptops with those guts are already outperforming pricier Mac Pros using the old architecture. It was a big swing for Apple and, at least so far,
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Fair Warning on Publishing to Ghost from Craft
I made a video last week about the developer preview for Craft extensions, and one of the things I showed was possible in that vide was publishing from Craft. Now while this is possible, the "developer preview" tag Craft puts on the page is absolutely legit, and I would not recommend most people
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Post-Hoc Myth-Making at Scale
The Token Disconnect - Stephen Diehl
After looking at this phenomenon for the last decade, I’ll give what I believe is the first rough draft of history. Silicon Valley ran dry on large breakthroughs in software, so we decided to invent the “blockchain”, a simulacrum of innovation that organically fermented from the anti-institutional themes
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The Hot New Safari Extension I'm Not Thrilled About
Vinegar - A Safari Extension To Fix YouTube Videos
It’s essentially a Safari extension that makes YouTube videos look better, and act like standard HTML videos. Which means they use Safari’s native video player, which means that you have slightly more control over the video, but at the same time you do lose some
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Web-Assed Web Apps
UX Tools performs an annual survey of designers to see what software they're using, and it's
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Find That Thing You Love to Keep You Going
This video from Vox’s Phil Edwards resonated with me a ton:
You’ve got to pick a beat to slog through. Through thick and thin, though lots of traffic and zero traffic, through all of the hits and none of the hits, from big money, no money, and somewhere in between where you have
