Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
There’s this app called Wire, which I love. It’s the most beautiful messaging app I’ve ever tried: super-clean backgrounds, a heavy emphasis on user photos and clean design, and a great mix of calling, texting, and weirdly great GIF search. It works across all the platforms I use, and it works well. It’s my ideal…
The Discovery Problem Is Solved I have a three-year-old and a one-year-old and music helps keep breakfast from turning into a food fight. So not long ago I fired up Spotify and did a quick search for “you are my sunshine.” Spotify did its thing, I picked one to play from the hundreds available and…
Peach is dead, four days after its launch. This seems as obvious as the death of Meerkat one month after its debut. One cool aspect of the modern app market is that the hype cycle can now peak in less than 24 hours. A messaging app called Peach triggered a media maelstrom on Friday afternoon, peaked at No. 85 on the…
This position paper is a development of a previous article I wrote for Model View Culture, titled: “The Politics of Trending.” Every time CNN points to “Trending” in order to discuss breaking news, we should laugh. That is, laugh at: CNN, journalists, experts, the simulacra. Smirking at the notion that privatized, opaque institutions of selective…
A trendy New Command-line Chat Playground is a Honeypot for Meta Data and Gives Web the. Peach isn’t on the web. Your profile has no❌URL. % proprietary walled garden. Private but not privacy-positive. Free as in not . — This tweet is making the rounds today, so unpacking with obligatory thinkpiece on Medium. Peach New…
FRANKFURT — Uber is rapidly expanding its ride-hailing operations across the globe. But here in this city of 690,000 — less than the population of San Francisco, Uber’s hometown — the company recently did something unusual: It retreated. In early November, Uber shut its small office in Frankfurt’s centuries-old city center after just 18 months…
‘; if (google_ads[0].bidtype == ‘CPC’) { /* insert this snippet for each ad call */ google_adnum = google_adnum + google_ads.length; } document.write(s); } } google_ad_client = ‘ca-pub-0457527031304647’; google_ad_output = ‘js’; google_max_num_ads = ‘1’; google_ad_type = ‘text’; google_feedback = ‘on’; google_skip = google_adnum; google_ad_channel = ‘1102379497’; Today, cyber means war. But back in the 1990s, it…
Last night, after nearly 5 hours of discussion and witness testimony, Austin’s City Council pulled the trigger on an amendment to the city’s code that has far-reaching implications for the future of mobility in American cities. Under pressure from those in favor of the ordinance, the Council chose to enact policy without the due diligence that thousands…
The First Person to Hack the iPhone Built a Self-Driving Car. In His Garage George Hotz is building a self-driving car by himself. By Ashlee Vance | December 16, 2015 Photographs by Peter Bohler From END BODY COPY CENTERED A few days before Thanksgiving, George Hotz, a 26-year-old hacker, invites me to his house in…
In his well-known essay On Bullshit, Harry Frankfurt defines bullshit as speech that is designed to impress but lacks a direct concern for the truth. Under such a definition, a large portion of what we read online today is likely to be bullshit. Some types of bullshit are political in nature, such as the misleading…