Pages Tagged “Tech Culture”
Reviews
- Farewell to Fry’s Electronics I miss two things about Fry’s Electronics: 1. Being able to walk in and grab random parts immediately. 2. The decor.
- Under the Influence
★★★★☆
Trey Ratcliff
Trey Ratcliff details a fascinating look at a side of Instagram that I’ve mostly ignored.
Blog Posts
- Marketing
In retrospect, it’s wild that so many tech people who were hyper-aware of the fact that Microsoft’s dominance in the 1990s and 2000s was due to more to marketing (“never underestimate Microsoft on marketing”) than technical merits…fell for the idea that a “marketplace of ideas” would coalesce around the best ideas, and not just the […]
- Automattic to WordPress Community: Don’t Trust Us
Automattic has announced that they are “realigning” their contributions to WordPress due to fending off “attacks” from the “community” and WP-Engine. Automatticians who contributed to core will instead focus on for-profit projects within Automattic, such as WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. Members of the âcommunityâ have said that working on these sorts of things […]
- The Other Name Was A Little Sus
IEEE has finally renamed their sustainable tech conference. Now it’s IEEE SustainTech Expo.
- Last Tweets Standing
Popped over to Twitter to delete the last handful of posts I left there when I deleted most of them back in December. Decided to leave two for now, though I might still delete them before the new TOS takes effect. Oct 2008: If only the super high-tech jet fighters had identified, clarified & classified, […]
- Privacy and Trust: Threads, Twitter and the Fediverse
Privacy has many layers. Keeping cloud files from leaking to another account is one layer. Not data-mining those files is another entirely!
- That Blue Checkmark
Twitter Blue is what happens when you start treating a tool as a status symbol, so you throw the tools away and start selling gold-plated hammers made out of thin plastic.
- Detweeting (and More)
Not that I’ve been particularly active on Twitter for quite a while now, but the way things have gotten, especially under its new owner, I decided it was finally time to go. I haven’t deleted my main account (yet), but I’ve deleted most of my tweet history, and the accounts I used for side projects, […]
- Fediverse: Beta to Production
The Twitter-to-Mastodon migration is like going from beta testing the Fediverse to production. Just like a public beta always turns up issues that were missed during development, when going to production you suddenly have a *huge* pool of new users who are going to use the system in ways you didn’t anticipate and haven’t already […]
- Twitter: Amp Up the Noise
Making the blue check mark mean ââ¬ÅThis person can afford $20/monthââ¬Â instead of ââ¬ÅThis person is who they say they areââ¬Â is only the latest way Twitter has downgraded its signal/noise ratio over the years.
- The 2022 Social Media Experience
The 2022 update: What it’s like to use Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Mastodon, Pixelfed and Instagram now.
- Bad Design: Splitting Notification Preferences
Splitting notification preferences across the app UI and the system UI is a mess for usability. But if the goal is making you see more notifications?
- May I Have Your Attention Please. All of it. FOREVER.
One thing I like about the Fediverse is that it doesn’t constantly scream for your attention to keep you online as long as possible.
- Farewell to Fry’s
I’m going to miss two things about Fry’s Electronics, which shut down this week: Being able to walk in and grab random parts immediately. The decor. And yeah, there’s nostalgia for the old days, but they’re already gone. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s they really were a one-stop shop for computers, software, appliances, […]
- Tech Giants’ Core Strategies
The Verge makes an interesting point about Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda: for the most part, Microsoft doesn’t care what hardware you run their stuff on, they just want you to buy the software. So it’s less likely to be about trying to gain Xbox exclusives and more likely to be about getting more games for […]
- Mount Doomscrolling
The way the Palantir network compromises Saruman and Denethor shows the danger in who controls the algorithm that manages your newsfeed.
- Free Software and Failed Ideals
Once upon a time, the idea that “only the code mattered” was sold as a way to be inclusive. No one would be shut out if their code was good. But building software is more than code. It’s design. Planning. Discussion. It’s figuring out use cases, misuse cases, and failure modes. It’s interacting with people. […]
- Bird, Bird, Bird
They were everywhere. But at least most of them were out of the way.
- TRON
Just watched TRON: Legacy. Realized the plot of the first movie can be summarized as “Information wants to be free.”
- Links! Alarms, Ghosts of History, Firefly Trek, WW2 Star Wars & More
Hazards of too many alarms; Merging historical and modern photos; Computer lightning safety; Allergies, Star Wars as World War II; Firefly as Star Trek, SMBC’s Logogeneplex.
- Geek Hierarchies
Another Geek Hierarchy [dead link]. This one, instead of focusing on how geeks of all stripes rank themselves [another dead link], portrays the way “mainstream society” ranks geeks. I appreciate that it includes sports geeks. I’ve never understood why it’s considered acceptable to paint yourself blue, wear cheese on your head and giant foam gloves […]
- Corporate Evolution
Hixie’s Natural Log: Evolution in the species “Companies” – Microsoft’s dominance of the industry has killed off or absorbed many smaller companies. Those that have survived are those with strategies resistant to Microsoft’s tactics. The article looks at Mozilla, Google, and Apple.
- Web Contest: 11 Years Later
While checking some dead links in the Internet Archive, I decided to see what they had of the website for the Literary Guild at UCI. This was a creative writing club we were both involved in back in college. There’s an abbreviated history of the club still online. I looked at the earliest archived copy […]
- Vanishing Realm
Every Friday, a script verifies all the links on this website. I usually check the results that evening, or sometimes during the day at work, and see which dead links I can fix. Strangely enough, this week 3 links on “What the heck is a Hyperborea?” have dropped off the face of the net. I […]
- Power of Suggestion
Surfinâ Safari posted an interesting remark that highlights the power of suggestion. There’s a tip floating around to speed up the Safari web browser by changing a hidden setting, “page load delay.” There are testimonials by people who are really impressed with how much faster Safari is after making this change. Only one problem: The […]
- Tertiary Slashdotting
Today I noticed a spike in traffic coming from a post on Spread Firefox where I had made a comment. Not a ton of traffic, just ~15 hits from the same page on the same day, but that’s unusual for traffic from SFX posts—especially old ones. I checked to see if it had climbed into […]
- Know Your Enemy (Web Browser Rivalries)
There’s a lot of misinformation out there about various web browsers. Opera can/can’t do this. Firefox can/can’t do that. There’s only so much you can do to promote one product when you only know rumors or outdated facts about another. Opera users: If someone told you that Firefox was better than Opera because it doesn’t […]