340 posts tagged with wired.
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Musk DOGE engineers identified
Elon Musk’s takeover of federal government infrastructure relies on the following six software engineers: Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran. [more inside]
"It wasn’t strategy that lost the election, but the lack of message."
MetaFilter: a time capsule from another internet
Wired's Steven Levy writes about MF in his newsletter (archived): This month, the venerated site celebrates its 25th anniversary. It’s amazing it has lasted that long; it made it this far in great part thanks to West, who helped stabilize it after a near-death spiral. You could say it’s the site that time forgot—certainly I’d forgotten about it until I decided to mark its big birthday. Metafilter is a kind of digital Brigadoon; visiting it is like a form of time travel. To people who have been around a while, Metafilter seems to preserve in amber the spirit of what online used to be like. The feed is strictly chronological. It’s still text-only. Some members may be influential on Metafilter, but they don’t call themselves influencers, and they don’t sell personally branded cosmetics or garments. As founder Matt Haughey, who stepped down in 2017, says, "It's a weird throwback thing—like a cockroach that survived.”
"Not the Maya, that's not how they rolled..."
Fascinating short videos from Wired. They are a series of videos presented by experts in different fields who answer questions from the internet.
- Dr. Kory Evans Answers Fish Questions from Twitter
- Dr. Ed Barnhart Answers Questions on the Maya
- Jonna Mendez, Former CIA Chief of Disguise Answers Spy Questions
- Dr. Dorsay Armstrong Answers Questions on the Middle Ages
- Dr. Laurel Bestock answers Questions on Ancient Egypt
- Dr. Lauren Ginsburg answers Questions on Ancient Rome
Two layers of how-the-sausage-is-made
Earlier this week, a giant dump of Google documents revealed how the search advertising seller linked up adverts bought to pages they're on; then Wired published an excerpt from a book explaing the link between the advertising auctions and the disinformation sites taking money to display those adverts: How Advertising Funds Disinformation (archive). [more inside]
Biomedical Scientist Answers Pseudoscience Questions From Twitter
Immunologist Dr. Andrea Love does quick Q&A addressing a variety of pseudoscience claims as part of the Wired Tech Support series. [more inside]
The AI gift economy
Help, My Friend Got Me a Dumb AI-Generated Present - WIRED. A thoughtful reply to what art means when it’s ‘personally’ generated for you with a dive into Lewis Hyde on gift economies.
If you don’t make predictions, you’ll never know what to be surprised by
The Curse of the Long Boom (wired)
Fantastically Disruptive, But Extremely Difficult to Copy
Paying employees equally no matter where they live is a reflection of today’s internet labor market—a global landscape of suppliers and buyers who connect as if they were on the same street. “There’s a lively debate in big companies about flat salaries across geography, and, of course, I think everyone should do it,” says Rasch. “People often counter the policy with points about the different costs of living, but put simply, is it fair to pay someone who lives in a poorer part of town a lower salary? No.” from The Company Where Every Employee Earns the Same [Wired; ungated]
The Dankiest Sticky-Icky
Cannabis scientist Dr. Amber Wise answers Twitter's questions about cannabis in a seasonally-relevant video for WIRED. [more inside]
The Unbelievable Zombie Comeback of Analog Computing
"Bringing back analog computers in much more advanced forms than their historic ancestors will change the world of computing drastically and forever."... I consulted Lyle Bickley, a founding member of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. ... “A lot of Silicon Valley companies have secret projects doing analog chips,” he told me. Really? But why?
“Because they take so little power.” [more inside]
Bike Lanes good? Myths about them
The Guardian posts Ten common myths about Bike Lanes, and why they're wrong.
(archive link)
And in Wired, the Battle over Bike Lanes.
(archive link) [more inside]
(archive link)
And in Wired, the Battle over Bike Lanes.
(archive link) [more inside]
Every Bone in the Human Body and How They Break
“We need an online equivalent of Free Range Kids”
Cyd Harrell, at wired.com: Intrusive surveillance has become a parental rite of passage in America. But the parental panopticon is not a mark of maturity and responsibility but rather of paranoia, distrust, and devolvement. The Kid Surveillance Complex Locks Parents in a Trap. [more inside]
Artifacts from the Future (from the past)
Starting twenty years ago this month, Wired magazine tapped a bevy of designers and artists in the tech field to craft detailed satirical visions of futuristic objects for a monthly showcase at the close of each issue. Following a brief hiatus in 2008, the exercise returned in crowdsourced form, asking readers to submit their ideas for a given theme and incorporating the best ones into the following month's edition. After disappearing five years later, a 2020 redesign evolved the concept once more, asking readers to share six-word headlines, Hemingway-style (or not), on an evocative near-future story. While the new-new FOUND doesn't appear to be going anywhere, why not take some time to enjoy the history of this whimsical feature than by taking a look back at the "compleat" archived run of the series courtesy of Stuart Candy, who personally scanned the gamut of it to make a thorough retrospective for his excellent blog The Sceptical Futuryst: 2002 - 2003 - 2004 - 2005 - 2006 - 2007 - 2008 - 2009 - 2010 - Candy tells his FOUND story. More: "FOUND: The Future of..." and FOUND Photoshop Contests (2008-2013) - Six-Word Stories archive (2020-present) - a direct-link index to more and better futures inside. [more inside]
"I create mostly by weaving materials found in nature."
Charlie Baker is an artist and builder that makes many kinds of structures and art pieces out of woven branches. He was recently interviewed by Wired [YT] as part of their Obsessed video series.
One Woman’s Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia
Coffman knows the book is legit, because she happens to have a copy on loan from the library. When she goes to the cited page, she finds a paragraph that appears to confirm all the Wikipedia article’s wild claims. But then she reads the first sentence of the next paragraph: “This is, of course, nonsense.” 4100 words from Noam Cohen for Wired magazine.
Making a list, checking it twice
Hundreds of Ways to Get S#!+ Done—and We Still Don’t : "The question is, why? Not just why it’s so hard to make a to-do app that works, but why people often feel so distraught by their hunt for the perfect organizational system. I’ve written about software for years, and I can tell you that people often have surprisingly deep feelings about their apps. But rarely is a category of software linked to such vistas of despair." By Clive Thompson in Wired.
King of the Gig Hustle
WIRED offering non-journalists a residency program
"Between a pandemic, climate change, and advances in technology that continue to reshape almost every way of life, the past year has been a bellwether for work in the US. At WIRED, we believe some of the people best situated to cover this rapid evolution—from growing pains to genius pivots and everything in between—are the people who know those industries from the inside. That’s why we’re launching a new program called the WIRED Resilience Residency." Last month Wired magazine announced that it is "looking for new voices to provide an insider perspective on rapidly changing industries." [more inside]
Eternal Sunshine of the Monetized Ghost Life
"I want a chisel, not a sledgehammer, with which to delete what I no longer need. I don’t want to have to empty my photo albums just because tech companies decided to make them “smart” and create an infinite loop of grief." I Called Off My Wedding. The Internet Will Never Forget (Lauren Goode, Wired). [more inside]
Blame Corporate Memphis
"It’s become the definitive style for big tech and small startups, relentlessly imitated and increasingly parodied. [Corporate Memphis] involves the use of simple, well-bounded scenes of flat cartoon figures in action, often with a slight distortion in proportions (the most common of which being long, bendy arms) to signal that a company is fun and creative." Josh Gabert-Doyon on why every tech advert looks the same (Wired).
A Mission to Make Virtual Parties Actually Fun
Gretchen McCulloch explores the rapidly-growing world of proximity-based chat platforms (Wired) like Gather, CozyRoom, Spatial.Chat and Rambly. "What makes a party feel like a party, I've concluded, is that there are multiple conversational options that you can move between." Previously.
🦄 💩 🌩️🦖🦕: How the Littlest Communicators Use Emoji
"A couple of months ago, NPR reporter Lulu Miller tweeted a question. She knew a 5-year-old who was texting exclusively in emoji, and wondered if were there any studies about kids, too young to read, who used emoji to communicate. People wouldn't stop tagging me in the thread, but we couldn't find any existing studies, so I decided to run a survey and make a small corpus of my own." Gretchen McCulloch, author of Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language: Children Are Using Emoji for Digital-Age Language Learning (WIRED).
Getting it right (or not)
On Wired's Technique Critique, topical experts examine TV and movie clips and analyze their realism and accuracy: NASA astronaut Nicole Stott looks at 16 space scenes, then some more. Pro driver Wyatt Knox breaks down 16 driving scenes, then 18 more. Lawyer Lucy Lang breaks down 17 courtroom scenes. Surgical resident Annie Onishi breaks down 36 medical scenes, then another 22. Disease expert Brian Amman breaks down pandemic scenes. Movie accent expert Erik Singer breaks down 6 fictional languages, 28 actors playing presidents, and 17 actors playing real people. Hacker Samy Kamkar breaks down 26 hacking scenes. Robotics expert Chris Atkeson breaks down robot scenes. Former CIA Chief of Disguise Jonna Mendez breaks down 30 spy scenes. Forensics expert Matthew Steiner examines 20 crime scene investigations. [more inside]
The Devastating Decline of a Brilliant Young Coder
"It is the most common form of dementia. Still, as a man in his thirties, Lee was unusually young to be afflicted." Lee Holloway cofounded Cloudflare but is now almost completely lost to frontotemporal dementia. Single-link Wired feature by Sandra Upson.
Nothing on rideshare placement, unfortunately
Peter Ruggiero redesigns airports for a living. Hear him talk about the history of airport design and the plans to redesign LaGuardia. (SLYT)
Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet
Remember when Wikipedia was a joke?
In its first decade of life, the website appeared in as many punch lines as headlines. The Office's Michael Scott called it “the best thing ever,” because “anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject—so you know you are getting the best possible information.” Praising Wikipedia, by restating its mission, meant self-identifying as an idiot.
That was in 2007....
"It’s still so beautiful, a pink version is just one step cooler"
Trendiness and the prospect of Instagram clout have led to photogenic plants like the pink princess and monstera oblique being sold for ten or a hundred times what they were going for a decade ago, and the sale of unusual houseplants is now a big business. But with the rise in rare plants comes the rise of rare plant scams.
CollegeHumor Helped Shape Online Comedy. What Went Wrong?
The company grew from a scrappy startup to a digital media player. Now it’s clinging to life after mass layoffs. [more inside]
The Devastating Allure of Medical Miracles
After sepsis forced the amputation of Sheila Advento's hands, an intricate transplant technique made her whole again. Then came the side effects. CW: pictures and descriptions of various medical issues, including transplanted and amputated limbs
The bonkers, bristly story of how big toothbrush took over the world
One Sentence With 7 Meanings Unlocks a Mystery of Human Speech
"A fully present, disgustingly kind hello machine."
"A month ago, when I started walking, I decided to conduct an experiment. ... The idea was not to totally disconnect, but to test rational, metered uses of technology. I wanted to experience the walk as the walk, in all of its inevitably boring walkiness. ... My phone ceased to be a teleportation machine and became, instead, a context machine." Craig Mod, The Glorious, Almost-Disconnected Boredom of My Walk in Japan. [more inside]
Americans received a record-breaking 47.8 billion robocalls in 2018
"With more than 100 million calls placed every day, robocalling might well be the most ubiquitous, most hated, and least punished crime in the country."On the Trail of the Robocall King
Image compression icon, 47 years on
Finding Lena, the Patron Saint of JPEGs (Wired) - Linda Kinstler "Jeff Seideman, a former chapter president of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology, recalls that Lena’s presence at the conference caused a stir among his colleagues. “As silly as it sounds, they were surprised she was a real person,” he told me. “After some of them had spent 25 years looking at her picture, she just became this test image.” Since then, as the internet has grown to encompass billions of users and trillions of photos, no one has bothered to ask her what she makes of her image and its controversial afterlife." [more inside]
The Arctic village with very fluffy dogs
Siorapaluk, Greenland is one of the world's northermost inhabited settlements. French photographer Camille Michel spent a month there.
A “book” is just the endpoint of a latticework of complex infrastructure
Targeted Advertising Is Ruining the Internet and Breaking the World
45, a.k.a. Cheeto, a.k.a. the Manchurian Combover
Voldemorting: The act of never speaking the name of someone truly terrible. E.g. ‘Don’t bother sending me those links, I’m Voldemorting those losers!’Wired's Resident Linguist Gretchen McCulloch writes about the "anti-SEO" practice of using different names for entities whose attention you don't want to attract.
Today in Prisoner Monetization
Five part musical harmony
Working with "Amazing Grace", musician Jacob Collier discusses and demonstrates five levels of understanding of harmony - from child level to expert (with an expert who I'll leave as a surprise). [more inside]
“Akha” starts with the letter “A”
The English Wikipedia entry for human gets at least 5,000 views a day. Wired examines how its current main illustration, a photo of a couple from the Akha community in Thailand, came to replace the Pioneer plaque as a representation of all human beings. On-wiki discussions about the perfect illustration are extensive and ongoing.
Future farms, today: autonomous agriculture and robot-assisted fieldwork
Wired is looking to the (near) future of farming in a series of pieces out recently: from the autonomous, multi-purpose "farm bot" that is capable of performing 100-plus jobs, from hay baler and seeder to rock picker and manure spreader, via an arsenal of tool modules [YouTube], farmer-assisting robotic lettuce picker and other advanced technologies to improve farm and orchard efficiencies (Wired video), to how new Phone-Powered AI Spots Sick Plants With Remarkable Accuracy and a quick look at 6 ways of extending the shelf-life of foods. The first article cites a 2016 Goldman-Sachs "Equity Research" report (PDF) that provides some context and forecasts for where there are current inefficiencies that this AgTech is now working to address. [more inside]
Two Legs Good, Tank Treads Better
badday.mpg
The strange history of one of the internet's first viral videos. Seems he wasn't having as bad a day as we thought.
"a strange sort of journalist who could only exist in this time period"
Feinberg says that she would love, above all else, to “catch Donald Trump Jr. stealing valor,” the act in which a civilian poses fraudulently as a member or veteran of the armed forces. “Don Jr. humiliating himself in general is a good story,” she deadpans. Feinberg has also been scraping the internet, in vain, for the digital slime trail of Stephen Miller and Jared Kushner, who, she says, don’t have any sort of online presence, “which seems impossible given their age,” she tells me. “It’s driven me nuts.”The Columbia Journalism Review profiles Ashley Feinberg. [more inside]
" In 2017, tech workers are the world’s villain."
The Other Tech Bubble Erin Griffith, formerly of Fortune, writes at Wired about the technology bubble we're not talking about—the one insulating Silicon Valley and its startup founders and funders, from criticism.
The digital arms race in DDoS is inexorably linked to Minecraft
How a Dorm Room Minecraft Scam Brought Down the Internet (Wired) “They just got greedy—they thought, ‘If we can knock off our competitors, we can corner the market on both servers and mitigation,’” Walton says.
In fact, according to court documents, the primary driver behind the original creation of Mirai was creating "a weapon capable of initiating powerful denial-of-service attacks against business competitors and others against whom White and his coconspirators held grudges.” [more inside]
What does self care mean?
True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from. [more inside]