Things I Like
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What this means is that even more than it is in the advertising business, Facebook is in the surveillance business. Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind. It knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens. It’s amazing that people haven’t really understood this about the company. I’ve spent time thinking about Facebook, and the thing I keep coming back to is that its users don’t realise what it is the company does. What Facebook does is watch you, and then use what it knows about you and your behaviour to sell ads.
This is a long read, but well worth your time. I saw it linked in three different places before I finally read it and all those who praised are correct. I'm not a Facebook user and just yesterday had a conversation with friends about how I've come to realize that is my choice and because of it I miss things. I need to see people either in real life or email with them to know what's going on in their lives and to be honest, I'm OK with that. Reading this piece made me even more glad that I'm not on it.
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Could a tech company actually build cities for “all humans” that would not end up an oppressive authoritarian dystopia? If the history of urban planning is any indication, the answer is no. Any attempt that tech companies make at city planning would likely involve trying to map its complexities with some elaborate formulas. But as architect and theorist Christopher Alexander argues, when humans try to reproduce the level of complexity that emerges when a neighborhood evolves organically over time, the “richness of the living city” is replaced with a “conceptual simplicity” — a process of “compartmentalization” and “dissociation of internal elements” that over time leads to a complete breakdown of its inhabitants.
I didn't realize this was an article about Facebook when I saved it off, so yes, I read two articles about Facebook in one sitting yesterday. BUT this is a great article about cities and how we live in them, think about them, and the evolving way in which tech is trying to muscle its way in. I'm not interested in living in a city planned by Facebook, and this article made me want to read Jane Jacobs, which I've had on my list for a while.
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When accessibility is a project requirement, the best option our managers have is to invest in their team education and increase their expertise. If you integrate accessibility into the development process, it becomes a coding routine. Development time won’t increase so much if developers in your team already know what to do.
There are a lot of good thoughts here about how to make accessibility part of the development process. But I especially like the emphasis on eduction. You don't expect a developer to learn a new JavaScript framework without taking some time to learn it, so why can't we take the time to learn accessibility so we build it in from the very beginning.
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It implies that the principal achievement of A New Hope was to enable all the films and spin-offs which followed, as if it were a cathedral’s foundation stone. And that could be precisely the wrong way to see it. As enjoyable as the sequels and prequels are – some of them, at any rate – they can obscure our view of the original. To some extent, they spoil it. The Star Wars franchise may be the most successful in cinema history, but it might have been better if it had begun and ended with a single film in 1977.
I liked this article. I recently watched Rogue One and was completely disappointed. So much of the movie was bits and pieces of movies that were already made. It was boring for that reason and it made me lose all faith in the series. This article articulates quite well why.
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Next time you read one of those “geniuses wear the same uniform every day” things, ask yourself if you are in fact Albert Einstein? No? Then wear what you fucking like. Failing to take pleasure in your life will kill you quicker than deciding what to wear.
I just love Warren Ellis and I love this bit so much I had to save it for myself.
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Headings are much more than a big bold title, they provide a solid structure to the webpage. Think of headings as an outline of your webpage.
Some good reminders on why headings and structure are so important in your HTML.
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The world which lay under darkness and stillness following the closing of the lid was not the world we know. The event was over. Its devastation lay around about us. The clamoring mind and heart stilled, almost indifferent, certainly disembodied, frail, and exhausted. The hills were hushed, obliterated. Up in the sky, like a crater from some distant cataclysm, was a hollow ring.
We're in the midst of eclipse fever, living just north of totality. And I'll be up very early to see it on Monday, taking a train to Salem and hoping the weather forecast stays good and witnessing totality. Dillard's essay is amazing, but I'm excited to experience it for myself.
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But, as in-flight wi-fi speeds and entertainment options keep getting better and better, the temptation to be distracted on planes becomes greater and greater. Just like on the ground, it now takes an act of will to be bored enough on a plane to actually enter that good headspace where you can make something. For now, I stick to my rules: turn off the seat-back TV and never pay for wi-fi.
I'm with Kleon on this one, I love being disconnected when traveling via plane and using it as a time to catch up on reading or listening to podcasts. I'm intrigued by the idea of using it as a time for art and may do that on my next flight.
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Of course, computers and broadband by themselves don’t magically lead to college degrees and better jobs. After all, much of what people do with Internet access once they get it is hardly productive. But some of them may not be getting the training they need to make effective use of software and online services. And there are many correlations between broadband access and income levels or success in finding employment.
This is why all of us who work on the web should be advocating for internet to be a necessary utility, just as electricity is. And it's why performance and how we build sites is so important.
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Culture – like religion and nation and race – provides a source of identity for contemporary human beings. And, like all three, it can become a form of confinement, conceptual mistakes underwriting moral ones. Yet all of them can also give contours to our freedom. Social identities connect the small scale where we live our lives alongside our kith and kin with larger movements, causes, and concerns. They can make a wider world intelligible, alive, and urgent. They can expand our horizons to communities larger than the ones we personally inhabit. But our lives must make sense, too, at the largest of all scales. We live in an era in which our actions, in the realm of ideology as in the realm of technology, increasingly have global effects. When it comes to the compass of our concern and compassion, humanity as a whole is not too broad a horizon.
A super fascinating read for me. I've not spent a lot of time thinking about western civilization much, but I found the history and the tying of it all together really interesting. I'm not sure I agree with all of it, it's a lot and I'm still thinking. But it's got me interested in reading more. (via []Mandy's Tiny Letter](http://aworkinglibrary.com).)
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But here I come back to Deleuze’s “right to say nothing,” and although we can definitely say that this right is variously accessible or even inaccessible for some, I believe that it is indeed a right. For example, the push for an 8-hour workday in 1886 called for “8 hours of work, 8 hours of rest, and 8 hours of what we will.” I’m struck by the quality of things that associated with the category “What we Will”: rest, thought, flowers, sunshine.
This piece resonates really strongly with me. And I particularly like that she highlights the privilege involved in doing nothing. I live a very unscheduled life, many weekends I have no plans and no idea what I'm going to do, going with the flow. And right now, with unemployment, I'm like that most days for almost the entire day. I've been reading, thinking, journalling, and in many ways, getting ready for whatever will come next. Also this piece reminds me of one of my favorite books by Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey.
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I think that’s what’s happened with some programmers coming to CSS for the first time. They’ve heard it’s simple, so they assume it’s easy. But then when they try to use it, it doesn’t work. It must be the fault of the language, because they know that they are smart, and this is supposed to be easy. So they blame the language. They say it’s broken. And so they try to “fix” it by making it conform to a more programmatic way of thinking.
I really love the way that Keith distinguishes between simple and easy in this short post. And it points to my frustrations lately with how CSS is viewed in this industry. It may be simple, but it is not easy. And it is not a programming language, so let it be what it is, approach it with the desire to learn, and you'll have more success.
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But when I talk about building fast websites, I’ll frequently hear that low-broadband users aren’t “the primary audience,” or that “we’re not concerned with people in developing markets.” I was once asked about serving up a lightweight, data-friendly version of a product to visitors from countries with limited bandwidth; the full design could be served to everyone else. Either way, segmenting our audiences into “the ones we’re really designing for” is a kind of digital redlining. We can—and should—do much, much better than that.
Spot on, necessary reading for many in our industry.
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My first piece of advice is, please please please don’t give up on the truth. It may be under assault but it’s still alive and kicking, and it will never go out of style. Truth may not be a thing that we can always absolutely, objectively prove, but it is a thing we can aspire to. A thing we must aspire to. In our journalism, in our government, in our courts, in our businesses, in our personal lives, and in our very souls. I’ve built my life and livelihood on chasing the truth, in trying to get the facts right. I haven’t always succeeded. Sometimes I’ve failed completely. But it’s always seemed an eminently worthy cause.
I enjoyed this commencement address, some good advice in here and the defense of truth was a timely reminder.
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Those odd moments when you find in history the perfect description of the things you do today.
I read this today and then saw a tweet from Eyeo and both are so perfect. A lot of what I do is me studying and thinking and sometimes those things get shared, which is my form of teaching.