Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The gamer punches in play after endless play of the Atari classic Space Invaders. Though an interminable chain of failures, the gamer adapts the gameplay strategy to reach for the highest score. But this is no human with a joystick in a 1970s basement. Artificial intelligence is learning to play Atari games. The Atari addict…
Breasts swing. They sag. They flop. They canmove.Over the years, many games have tried to emulate the way breasts behave. There’s even a term for it: “Breast physics.” If you’ve played games that have breast physics, you’ve probably seen how uncommon it is for games to show breasts that move like what they actually are:…
If attending a code school can be life-changing for the average student, imagine what the prospect would mean to womyn of color. Since our communities are among the most impoverished, we stand to gain the most from the flexible, high-paying jobs of today’s tech empire. But in an industry where black, Latina, and indigenous womyn…
A helpful reader mentioned to me the other day that an interesting issue has cropped up in discussions within Github on the WordPress “Press This” tool. For those not familiar with this tool, go to “Tools” > “Available Tools” within your WordPress installation, where you’ll find a bookmarklet that you can add to your browser’s…
I just finished reading “More Awesome Than Money” by Jim Dwyer about the rise and “fall” of Diaspora as a viable alternative to Facebook. I’ve often thought of Diaspora* as something that “came and went”; much of the story had passed when I heard about it, but while the project started in 2010, the story…
The WordPress REST API is a huge initiative and feature plugin being developed for the core WordPress project. But it can be a bit confusing if you don’t know much about it yet. Let’s discuss what this project is, why it’s important, and how to get involved. The WordPress REST API project is the most exciting…
I really dislike the new Tumblr editor, for a variety of technical reasons. For example, if I create a blockquote with paragraph breaks (HTML <p> and </p>) in the HTML edit view, returning to the Rich Text view converts those to breaks (<br>), and then the paragraphs have no space between them. Grrr. But M.G…
7166 Twitter Facebook Email Share via email The World’s Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who is Going Broke Werner Koch’s code powers the email encryption programs around the world. If only somebody would pay him for the work. GooglePlus LinkedIn Reddit The World’s Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who is Going…
August 19, 2014 Aram Zucker-Scharff will be walking through PressForward, a Sloan Foundation-funded open-source WordPress plugin designed to help WP users aggregate content across the internet. The plugin collects and archives content from across the web, allowing users to subscribe to RSS feeds, view lists of articles, read them in full, and then discuss and…
Last September, I went to Chicago for a conference. On the third day of the conference, I slipped away to my friend Max’s apartment on a mission. The mission was to gather together a lot of very smart people who don’t work in news — and ask them to design a new news homepage. By news homepage,…