Your value is not about utility.

The truth about chess playing and intelligence.

"The optimal solution to the ongoing GitHubification of Free Software would be the creation of a successfully competitive software development repository specialized to the Free Software community."

A comprehensive, technobabble free explanation of how Bluetooth contact tracing (doesn't) work and why simple solutions are often not that simple, if not outright dangerous, when applied in real life.

In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: "I've got nothing to hide." According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.

We are now several weeks into lockdown and are starting to acknowledge that this “new normal” maybe with us for a while.

As introverts settle into their newfound bliss, extroverts begin to climb the walls, and managers come up with new and increasingly creative ways of stalking their employees, there is talk of a silver lining: the skeptics may finally embrace remote work.

It shouldn't have taken a pandemic, but here we are.

Alas, as it often turns out, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

When polarizing topics are discussed in meetings, passions can run high and cloud our judgment. Learn how mental models can help you see clearly from this real-life scenario.

More Americans are being sent home to die, placing an overwhelming financial and caregiving burden on families.

The U.S. education system spent more than $26 billion on tech­nology in 2018. That’s larger than the entire Israeli military budget. By one estimate, annual global spending on technology in schools will soon total $252 billion. But the technology pushed into schools today is a threat to child development and an unredeemable waste.

A distanza di cinquant’anni dalla strage di Piazza Fontana, l’Italia è ancora sovrastata dalla stessa cappa di disinformazione: “la strategia della tensione” che, portata avanti dallo Stato o perlomeno da ampi settori dello Stato, avrebbe dovuto facilitare una “svolta a destra” della politica, fermando l’avanzata del PCI nel mondo bipolare della Guerra Fredda. La strage di Piazza Fontana fu invece l’inizio di una campagna destabilizzante contro l’Italia che, dalla Libia alla Somalia, stava guadagnando molte posizioni internazionali cavalcando il “terzomondismo”. Le bombe cessarono nei primi anni ‘90 perché, distrutti la Prima Repubblica e lo Stato imprenditore, non servivano più.

Federal public comment websites currently are unable to detect Deepfake Text once submitted. I created a computer program (a bot) that generated and submitted 1,001 deepfake comments regarding a Medicaid reform waiver to a federal public comment website, stopping submission when these comments comprised more than half of all submitted comments. I then formally withdrew the bot comments.

Elites are finding more ways to ensure that their children never run out of chances to fail.

If you already don’t want to talk to your kids about sex, then it’s probably a safe bet that you really don’t want to talk to them about pornography. But with how easily accessible porn is on the internet and the prevalence of computers, tablets and smartphones in the hands of our kids (or their friends), they will almost certainly stumble upon it at some point—and probably at a much younger age than you’d expect.

I often advocate people surrounding me to build their own side projects. I believe they can fulfill you in so many ways: for your career, your relationships, or your independence. Buffer, the company I currently work for, was itself a side project.
I’ve built myself multiple side projects. The major ones being PartyInBeijing (inactive), Nodablock (inactive), Citymayor (need to fix), and now TravelHustlers. I believe each of them contributed and lead me to my current situation: being satisfied in my career, financially, and socially.

The best designers employ specific habits, learned practices, and observed principles when they work. Here are a few of them.

1. Experts involve the user
2. Experts design elegant abstractions
3. Experts focus on the essence
4. Experts simulate continually
5. Experts look around
6. Experts reshape the problem space
7. Experts see error as opportunity
8. Experts think about what they are not designing

(read the article: nice pictures to visualize the different concepts :-))

Stretched for time, some households are starting to operate more like businesses.

The automobile took over because the legal system helped squeeze out the alternatives.

Il sistema Bedaux era un sistema di lavoro creato, durante la prima metà del Novecento, per aumentare al massimo la produzione industriale eliminando i tempi morti. Prende il nome da Charles Eugène Bedaux, ingegnere parigino morto negli Stati Uniti d'America, che caratterizzò con questo metodo la disciplina del cottimo.

Esso consisteva sostanzialmente in una campionatura del lavoro e, precisamente, nel cronometrare il tempo impiegato dall'operaio per ogni singola operazione; in seguito veniva fissata la quantità di lavoro che poteva essere effettuata in quella porzione di tempo e veniva stabilito un tempo standard che determinava la paga base.

Tens of thousands of Hongkongers took to the streets to protest what they saw as creeping tyranny from a powerful threat. But they did it in a very particular way. In Hong Kong, most people use a contactless smart card called an "Octopus card" to pay for everything from transit, to parking, and even retail purchases. It's pretty handy: Just wave your tentacular card over the sensor and make your way to the platform. But no one used their Octopus card to get around Hong Kong during the protests. The risk was that a government could view the central database of Octopus transactions to unmask these democratic ne'er-do-wells. Traveling downtown during the height of the protests? You could get put on a list, even if you just happened to be in the area.

So the savvy subversives turned to cash instead. Normally, the lines for the single-ticket machines that accept cash are populated only by a few confused tourists, while locals whiz through the turnstiles with their fintech wizardry. But on protest days, the queues teemed with young activists clutching old school paper notes. As one protestor told Quartz: "We're afraid of having our data tracked." Using cash to purchase single tickets meant that governments couldn't connect activists' activities with their Octopus accounts. It was instant anonymity. Sure, it was less convenient. And one-off physical tickets cost a little more than the Octopus equivalent. But the trade-off of avoiding persecution and jail time was well worth it.

What could protestors do in a cashless world...? If some of our eggheads had their way, the protestors would have had no choice.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”