550 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2022
    1. This object may be used to expose additional information about the text fragment or other fragment directives in the future.

      This would allow polyfilling behavior, but also leaks information that would otherwise stay between the user agent and the user.

      I don't actually see why there should be any feature detectability, at least in the current spec.

  2. Mar 2022
    1. I am sure Kelton approves of taxation, but I don’t see how she gets there.

      Without digging for quotes, my recollection from "The Deficit Myth" is that Kelton thinks taxes have value as a "cooling" mechanism, to control inflation, and as a redistributive mechanism, to control wealth concentration.

  3. Jan 2022
    1. and we would prefer a future where a small class of people doesn’t have disproportional power and wealth over everyone else

      I think people too often have a preference that's subtly but significantly different: they would prefer to live in a future where a small class of people doesn't have disproportionate power and wealth over them, but they do not mind—maybe even prefer—that they are a member of such a class.

  4. Dec 2021
    1. Participants in the protests of 2020 included anarchists, antifascists, communists and racial justice activists — and agents with the F.B.I.

      And people who do not typically consider themselves activists, but are disturbed by the deeply fucked up state of policing in this country.

  5. Jul 2021
    1. In an unusual move

      What is the basis for comparison? What would the usual thing to do be when selecting a panel to investigate a riot at the Capitol?

    1. That means games will no longer be tied to specific platforms or devices

      Still tied to specific platforms and devices, just not the ones that have the human interfaces.

    2. stream a game directly to a user’s device

      Stream audio and video from a remote device to a local device and stream input from the local device to the remote device.

    3. That’s the rosy future promised by cloud gaming

      Rosy, unless you find the idea of renting everything you use to be hideous.

  6. Jun 2021
    1. many Democrats had hoped to overwhelm Mr. Trump with a surge in turnout among young and nonwhite voters

      Well, those voters told you who they wanted and it wasn't Biden.

  7. May 2021
    1. Scholars who have examined working conditions in meat processing and packing industries have found that the rapid dissolution of union power, not consolidation, is responsible for worsening pay and labor conditions. In fact, workers at large meatpacking plants enjoyed substantially higher wages than those at smaller companies prior to a collapse of unions in the 1980s and 1990s.

      See point above about bargaining.

    2. This sounds logical: if farmers had more money, they’d have more of it to share with their workers. But the data makes clear that there is little to no relationship between farm profits and farm wages. When farm profits spiked in the mid-2000s, wages stayed level. When profits hit new highs in the early 2010s, wages rose slightly, then climbed as profits fell again. Philip Martin, the scholar of farm labor, attributes  the recent rise to a slowdown in immigration and state-level increases in the minimum wage, not increased generosity among hiring managers.

      Employers pocket gains from rising profits without effort. Workers have to fight and bargain for a share. As a result, it is never the case that gains are distributed fairly.

    1. Although I believe people have a right to secure and private communication, I disagree with those who extrapolate from this that we have a right to anonymous property transfer. It’s totally in the public’s legitimate interest to keep track of who owns what, and to settle which transfers of ownership are legitimate, for instance by disallowing coerced ones.

      I found this thought helpful. I had feelings like this but could not articulate them before.

  8. Aug 2020
    1. The last plague pandemic began in the mid-nineteenth century, in China, and spread to India, where it killed six million people. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the disease journeyed to America, where a Chinese resident of San Francisco was the first to die of it. Henry Gage, the governor of California at the time, tried to play down the outbreak, speculating that white people were immune to the disease; scores died.
  9. Nov 2019
    1. Set text to walker.currentNode.innerText.

      If the text that is searched is always the innerText of a text node then it seems that the search can never span node boundaries. That may be workable if the intention is that even small selections require using range matches to specify the start and end text, but it seems unfortunate to require a range—rather than an exact—match just because something spans an italicized or linked word.

    2. Let walker be a TreeWalker equal to Document.createTreeWalker().

      This should specify values for root an whatToShow.

      Two issues, in particular, that need to be addressed:

      1. "Find an exact match with context" asserts that walker.currentNode is a text node, but that will never be the case unless the walker is first initialized to point at one.
      2. Advancing the walker to the next node text node might have surprising results if this can include elements that are not rendered. The most obvious example that will almost always occur is the <head> content.
  10. Sep 2019
    1. Of course, as organizations disolve and mutate, there is nothing to stop one organization from taking over the support of  the archives another.  Forthis purpose, it would be very useful to have a syntax for putting a date into a domain name.  This would allow a system to find an archive server.  Imaging that, failing to find "info.cern.ch", one could search back and find an entry "info.cern.ch.1994" which pointed to www.w3.org as a current server holding archive information for info.cern.ch as it was in 1994, with, of course,  pointers to newer versions of the documents.

      This document talks about content negotiation being used to request an audio version of a resource, no protocol-level negotiation of time versioning appears here.

    1. Rigoberto Lara Guzmán defines SHINE as a tactic to counter our erasure by acknowledging one another and unsettling who is considered an expert.

      Ironically, I cannot find a citation for why SHINE is capitalized or what it might stand for (if it is an acronym). Anyone?

    1. On the other hand, a resource may be generic in that as a concept it is well specified but not so specifically specified that it can only be represented by a single bit stream. In this case, other URIs may exist which identify a resource more specifically. These other URIs identify resources too, and there is a relationship of genericity between the generic and the relatively specific resource.

      I was not aware of this page when the Web Annotations WG was working through its specifications. The word "Specific Resource" used in the Web Annotations Data Model Specification always seemed adequate, but now I see that it was actually quite a good fit.

    1. HTTPRange-14
    2. we can't expect english words to exist to capture exactly the concepts

      We commit, by using these terms, to "inscription error"<sup>[1]</sup>.

  11. Jun 2019
    1. This does not imply an assertion that the annotation is only valid for the image in the context of that page, it just records that the page was being viewed.

      I would write, "A scope does not imply...", to make it clear what "this" refers to.

    2. This does not imply an assertion that the annotation is only valid for the image in the context of that page, it just records that the page was being viewed.

      The use of the word "image" here is confusing because images have not been introduced in this paragraph.

      Something like the following might have been clearer: "A scope does not imply an assertion that the annotation is only valid in the context of the resource identified as the scope."

  12. May 2019
    1. Hypothesis doesn’t have a good concept of a site owner so there’s no way to get alerts for new annotations on my posts.

      That's a very good observation.

      Once upon a time I implemented a Hypothesis branch that honored Webmention links for a "pingback" when anyone annotated your site. Sadly, I never got it in a shape to ship.

      It looks like Webmention has since become a standard.

  13. Apr 2019
    1. So in theory, one could imagine an organization that produces a different kind of document. Instead of a license for the source code, they would provide a way to say uh, let’s go with “Open Development Certified.” Projects could then submit for certification, they’d get accepted or rejected.

      This sounds a lot like the Apache trademark, to me.

  14. Dec 2018
  15. Oct 2018
  16. Jul 2018
  17. Jun 2018
    1. Aldous Huxley warned of a world in which we’d arrange sexual intercourse as we make dates for coffee, with the same politeness and obligation. That now seems like an impossibly beautiful idyll.

      It struck me as a beautiful idyll when I read Brave New World. At the time, I was probably in my late teens, a sex child at his peak.

    1. I'll walk you through everything you need to know about logs, including what is log and how to use logs for data integration, real time processing, and system building.
    2. These days, when you describe the census process one immediately wonders why we don't keep a journal of births and deaths and produce population counts either continuously or with whatever granularity is needed.

      Unless one is familiar with like, any of the actual questions the census asks.

  18. Apr 2018
    1. (== 10)

      This confused me. I'm relatively new to Haskell and did not know about sectioning. After learning that detail, this makes sense as a (right) partial application of the (==) function.

  19. Mar 2018
  20. Nov 2017
    1. Work also continues in the WebExtensions CSP area. Starting with Firefox 58, the CSP of a web page does not apply to content inserted by an extension. This allows, for example, the extension to load its own resources into a page.

      Great news for Hypothesis and other extensions that load content in-page.

      Between this and the sidebar API, Hypothesis in Firefox is closer to the original vision than ever before.

    1. In a recent interview he remarked about his home and lifestyle, "This is West Oakland, man. This is the bottoms right here."

      This area of West Oakland is known as the "Lower Bottoms". It is possible that the meaning of "bottoms" here is simply Stalin referring to the neighborhood by name.

  21. Oct 2017
    1. The most remote location on Earth has many names: It's called Point Nemo (Latin for "no one") and the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility. Most precisely, its exact coordinates are 48 degrees 52.6 minutes south latitude and 123 degrees 23.6 minutes west longitude.

      Space junk cemetery.

    1. MySQL’s replication architecture means that if bugs do cause table corruption, the problem is unlikely to cause a catastrophic failure.

      I can't follow the reasoning here. I guess it's not guaranteed to replicate the corruption like Postgres would, but it seems totally possible to trigger similar or identical corruption because the implementation of the logical statement would be similar on the replica.

    2. The bug we ran into only affected certain releases of Postgres 9.2 and has been fixed for a long time now. However, we still find it worrisome that this class of bug can happen at all. A new version of Postgres could be released at any time that has a bug of this nature, and because of the way replication works, this issue has the potential to spread into all of the databases in a replication hierarchy.

      Not really a criticism of Postgres so much as it is a criticism of software in general.

  22. Sep 2017
    1. The walls were painted a soft shade of millennial pink.

      I get that this article is all anxiety over whether millennials are ruining museums, but this sentence is garbage. "Millennial pink" is not a color.

    1. if the table they would write to is not a temporary table

      Writes are allowed on temporary tables.

  23. Aug 2017
  24. Jul 2017
    1. Cuomo agreed to help keep the plants running with the aid of a multi-billion dollar bailout to be financed by monthly surcharges on the bills of ratepayers.

      I find this confusing. If the plants are running at a deficit can't the price be raised? If the "bailout" is financed by surcharges isn't that effectively the same as an increased energy cost for consumers except that there's now the government as an additional intermediary of that transfer of funds? The only thing I can imagine is that maybe energy costs are regulated?

  25. Mar 2017
    1. These Islamic fighter groups were against the Western post-Westphalia liberal state. So was it possible that GhostSec’s actions were merely reproducing the same state structures (Althusser 2014) that ISIS and others so adamantly opposed? Or had GhostSec found a new way, a political action that shed state thinking (Bourdieu 2014)? It could be that GhostSec was effectively de-territorializing communication that had been territorialized for violence. If so, GhostSec was a piracy movement, carving out openings or temporary autonomous zones (Bey 1987) in the name of human rights. Or perhaps GhostSec was merely a privateer, “a private warrior” that generated profit from the global war on terror (de Zeeuw 2015:3).
  26. Feb 2017
    1. Felt way more appropriate to comment here than in the comments at the body of the page :).

      It was humbling to interact act with such dedicated researchers and practitioners and to watch these documents take shape.

      Thanks, everyone!

  27. Jan 2017
    1. a number of studies have found that people on welfare, black Americans included, feel that people take advantage of the system and receive benefits when they should not

      Protestant work ethic shit, undermining social safety nets for all.

    2. Despite all evidence to the contrary, blaming black culture for racial inequality remains politically dominant. And not only on the Right.
  28. Dec 2016
  29. Nov 2016
    1. Heminger estimated that it would take “over a million” new housing units “to make a dent in the shortfall.” The real challenge, he said, is “to fit that growth in the communities we cherish,” adding, in a non sequitur: “We need to change what the Bay Area looks like.”

      That's not a non-sequitur at all. If you build a bunch of things, it will change the landscape.

      This statement was totally on point and to the point: defending "neighborhood character", as more conservative voices often do, is at odds with major development.

    2. Strictly speaking, this is true. No jurisdiction can be legally compelled to designate a Priority Development Area. The region’s 191 PDAs were all nominated by local jurisdictions. San Francisco’s PDAs were unanimously approved by the Board of Supervisors in 2007.

      And yet, earlier in this article, the process is criticized for being undemocratic. Which is it, dude?

    1. Consuming and propagating my culture and history as if it were an internet meme might seem revolutionary on the surface; but, in reality, it’s just another form of capitalist consumption and isn’t revolutionary, at all.

      Reminds me I really mean to read "The Rebel Sell".

    2. Castro’s commitment to fighting racism in Cuba wasn’t as much an explicit mission as it was a convenient byproduct of adopting the Soviet model of governance — when you start to eliminate private property, mechanisms of systemic racism are rendered impotent.

      I love this paragraph.

  30. Sep 2016
    1. Is this the example we want for them?

      This piece could have been stronger if it didn't end with a question.

      "This is not the example we want for them."

    1. It's far better, Dweck says, to encourage a growth mindset, in which children believe that brains and talent are merely a starting point, and that abilities can be developed through hard work and continued intellectual risk-taking.
    1. Note: A future level of CSS may introduce ways to create custom highlight pseudo-elements.

      Oh my god, yes please!

    1. He leaned back, rather pleased with his line. It might even mean something, he thought.

      This line is poking fun at the character, implying a narcissistic concern with his own intelligence, but in my life I've found that saying something that seems to resonate with meaning and that one has not before experienced is a rare, beautiful feeling.

  31. Aug 2016
    1. Intentions are irrelevant. Schelling’s principle is illustrated in a short, interactive game, “The Parable of the Polygons.”

      Would have been nice to credit the creator, Nicky Case, who makes lots of great things.

    2. When Robertson started out, they were hosting small rummage sales and bake sales. But by the 2008 recession, PTA fundraising had graduated to silent auctions. The money from fundraising was enough to allow Grattan to maintain its academics and actually expand its staff and its infrastructure in the midst of statewide budget cuts.

      Let's just highlight a root problem here, then: "statewide budget cuts".

      Why should any public school ever have to do fundraising?

    1. Again, the assertion that a whistleblower was murdered by an operative for a major political party cannot be proven at this time.

      But this writer will raise its specter for the third or fourth time in this article, just in case the implied accusation isn't sinking in yet.

    2. It is also certainly a bit coincidental that within days of the conspiracy going viral, Seth Rich’s family made a public statement asking for rumors about his death to stop.

      How is this in any way coincidental? The most normal causal relation is in effect here.

    3. We’ve already seen Intercept writer Barrett Brown receive prison time for essentially hyperlinking to leaked information in an article.

      Sort. of. There's also the bit where he threatened an FBI agent.

    1. That was in 1960. If computing power doubles every two years, we’ve undergone about 25 doubling times since then, suggesting that we ought to be able to perform Glushkov’s calculations in three years – or three days, if we give him a lab of three hundred sixty five computers to work with.

      The last part of this sentence seems ignorant of Amdahl's Law.

    2. But second, a sense of what could have been. What if Stalin hadn’t murdered most of the competent people? What if entire fields of science hadn’t been banned for silly reasons? What if Kantorovich had been able to make the Soviet leadership base its economic planning around linear programming? How might history have turned out differently?

      I asked my brother, who writes about Soviet economics, whether he ever had this sense of sadness at what could have been. He responded that in his experience everyone who studies the period shares this feeling.

    3. First, amazement that the Soviet economy got as far as it did, given how incredibly screwed up it was.

      I feel this.

  32. Jul 2016
  33. May 2016
    1. What we need to do in artificial intelligence is turn back to psychology. Brute force is great; we're using it in a lot of ways, like speech recognition, license plate recognition, and for categorization, but there are still some things that people do a lot better. We should be studying human beings to understand how they do it better.

      For a more technical take on this thought, see Why Knowledge Representation Matters.

  34. Apr 2016
    1. If you accuse someone of pretending because you would have to be pretending to be that way, that’s not feminism. That’s using the guise of feminism as subterfuge to actually attack other women.
    1. one of the roles of philosophy over the past two and half millennia has been to prepare the ground for the birth and eventual intellectual independence of a number of scientific disciplines. But contra what you seem to think, this hasn’t stopped with the Scientific Revolution, or with the advent of quantum mechanics. Physics became independent with Galileo and Newton (so much so that the latter actually inspired David Hume and Immanuel Kant to do something akin to natural philosophizing in ethics and metaphysics); biology awaited Darwin (whose mentor, William Whewell, was a prominent philosopher, and the guy who coined the term “scientist,” in analogy to artist, of all things); psychology spun out of its philosophical cocoon thanks to William James, as recently (by the standards of the history of philosophy) as the late 19th century. Linguistics followed through a few decades later (ask Chomsky); and cognitive science is still deeply entwined with philosophy of mind (see any book by Daniel Dennett). Do you see a pattern of, ahem, progress there? And the story doesn’t end with the newly gained independence of a given field of empirical research. As soon as physics, biology, psychology, linguistics and cognitive science came into their own, philosophers turned to the analysis (and sometimes even criticism) of those same fields seen from the outside: hence the astounding growth during the last century of so called “philosophies of”: of physics (and, more specifically, even of quantum physics), of biology (particularly of evolutionary biology), of psychology, of language, and of mind.

      Massimo Pigliucci skewering Neil deGrasse Tyson for outright dismissal of philosophy.

    1. You can always use the entire link, but note that the appended URL (shown here in green) is optional.

      Does this mean that annotations that target multiple URLs is off the table?

    1. Many Russian immigrants work in the tech industry, according to Kliger, since math and engineering were popular college majors among Jews in Russia.
      1. Get education provided for free by your socialist government
      2. Move to US
      3. Put government-provided education skills to use
      4. Declare your success completely the result of your own tenacity and inherent worth
      5. Denounce the candidate whose policies would provide the same opportunities to a new generation
    2. Like with any immigrant group, the political views of Russians in the United States range widely.

      should be followed with, "... yet we nevertheless decided to paint them with a broad brush in the headline for this article."

    3. “I don’t like big government,” Sundeyeva said. She made two circles with her thumbs and forefingers and pressed them against each other so they touched, like binoculars. This Venn diagram represents the interests of people and government, she said. “They don’t have very much in common.”

      It's my firm belief that "big" vs "small" government is a juvenile argument. It's much more productive to ask what things government does well and what things it doesn't. Make it as large as necessary to handle the things it does well.

      While a statement like "I don't like big government" basically renders this person's politics dismally weak to me, I'll try to read the rest of the article anyway.

  35. Mar 2016
    1. How is criticism on Slate an act of legitimate commentary, while criticism on News Genius is inherently an act of abuse? How can Slate, a website whose existence has been built partly atop commentary on the writing of others, come down against this activity?

      The argument is that Slate, having contributors that imbue it with a self-awareness within a cultural and legal landscape that articulates the role of media in society, is disinclined to be abusive in order to maintain good standing as a media entity. So, too, the individual contributors.

      Biddle is exaggerating this claim to set up a straw argument by turning it into a claim that "criticism on News Genius is inherently an act of abuse".

    2. began as a means of clumsily and at times mockingly trying to explain black lyrics to other white people

      I find this a little reductive, neglectful of the lyrical nuance and recursion of hip hop that renders it potentially inscrutable to a variety of listeners, increasingly so with its growing popularity, fragmentation and influence.

    1. But when you create a tool that pastes commentary directly on top of my work without letting me opt-in and without providing a way for people to turn off the annotation on their pages, you are being irresponsible.

      I'm going to disagree with this.

      The annotations are opt-in.

    2. I have no established relationship of trust and respect with the denizens of the internet.

      And no obligation to engage with them, promote their platform, or pay attention to their notes.

    3. A creator receives no notification if someone has annotated their content.

      Ironically, notifications are one of the most abuse-prone features of social media. It's why Twitter lets you opt to get mentions only from people you follow. It's part of why many platforms let you block people.

    4. they can then go and scribble whatever they want on my website using Genius.

      The language "on my website" here is a bit confused. They scribble on an overlay (one of any number, if you include groups as in Hypothesis -- does Genius have groups now?).

    1. He could afford to lose one or two of them narrowly, but then he’d need to make up ground elsewhere — he’d probably have to win California by double digits, for example.

      Challenge accepted.

    1. Not even 48 hours after my tweets first went viral, a Bay Area paper published an editorial blasting BART for "playing politics" with service disruptions. Well, I hate to break it to you, but public transit has always been about politics, and pretending otherwise is either willful ignorance or cynical maneuvering that seeks to capitalize on people's general loathing of the political process. 

      Yes! You can't express opinions about infrastructure / government / regulation / zoning / (anything?) / etc without being political!

    1. Hypothes.is was launched in July 2011 by coder Dan Whaley, who built an open platform that allows anybody to take notes on top of any web page.

      Hypothesis is the work of many individuals and community members. See the GitHub project page.

    2. These funds allowed Whaley to hire a dozen staffers, and it also allows Hypothes.is to have a server that houses all of the annotations that users create.

      Hypothesis is hosted on Amazon Web Services and can be deployed by individuals or organizations wishing to host their own annotations.

  36. Feb 2016
    1. The emotional and affective dimensions of racism are of course very important, and we all have a responsibility to treat members of all races with dignity, respect, and equality. But politics are about policy, about the material dimensions of society, and there is no way in which policy can ensure that everyone act with personal and social fairness towards people of color. Indeed: my argument has long been that the anti-racist project has suffered because following the initial successes of the Civil Rights movement, our conception of fighting racism switched from enacting laws and enforcing material equality, such as with the Voting Rights act or the Fair Housing Act, to a vague idea that we should all hold hands across racial lines. In other words, racism switched from being popularly conceived of as a problem of the material world to being a problem of mind, and the fight against racism stopped being waged in material terms and instead became about people feeling and thinking the right things.
    1. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.

      This sentence seems as quotable to me as the one about the "master's tools", and more self-explanatory.

    2. Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference -- those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older -- know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support

      I've been familiar with the phrase "for the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" for a while, but had never read it in the original context.

      It seems to me that Lorde is talking about any number of structures that enforce or maintain oppressive orders. The most immediate such structure to this context appears to be a discourse that presumes difference must be "other" one against another and thereby systematically overlooks difference to generalize about women — fear of being oppressive counter-intuitively leading to oppression.

    3. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist

      What a great, simple critique of bullshit "solidarity" cries.

      Of course, it raises for me feelings of discomfort because I've observed that even those who frequently profess to value difference within a community often still believe it important that the community present a unified face when perceived by outside groups.

      Even within a single company, this sort of philosophy manifests frequently as executives fighting viciously with one another while smiling and acting as though they are all of one mind when presenting to the rest of the company.

    1. Audre Lorde wasn’t denouncing math when she referred to “the master’s tools.”

      Great quote.

    2. Let’s not mitigate our censure with cutesy fraternal nicknames.

      Nice.

    1. PageFair, which sells services to publishers to measure and attempt to counteract adblocking and contributed to the report, has estimated that total lost revenue from adblocking grew from $5.8bn to $10.7bn between 2014 and 2015 in the US, $1.6bn to $3.6bn over the same period in the UK.

      This seems to be talking about lost revenue to publishers, not products and services being advertised.

    1. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

      Of course, the cynics would rather not admit that it's possible for a human whose basic needs are met to consider that benefit divided unselfishly is still non-zero benefit, or is possibly even greater than selfish benefit.

    1. each of us a little Ozymandias of cat videos and Pornhub

      I was first introduced to Ozymandias only recently, care of Joanna Newsom.<sup>[1](http://genius.com/7610305)</sup>

    2. At some dark day in the future, when considered versus the Google Caliphate, the NSA may even come to be seen by some as the “public option.” “At least it is accountable in principle to some parliamentary limits,” they will say, “rather than merely stockholder avarice and flimsy user agreements.”

      In the last few years I've come to understand that my tolerance for most forms of surveillance should be considered in terms of my confidence in the judiciary.

    3. If the panopticon effect is when you don’t know if you are being watched or not, and so you behave as if you are, then the inverse panopticon effect is when you know you are being watched but act as if you aren’t. This is today’s surveillance culture: exhibitionism in bad faith.

      This has an accelerative effect on cultural change at the margins of battlegrounds from which the State is retreating. Previously forbidden behavior can become quickly recognized as commonplace.

    4. Ask yourself: Is that User “Anonymous” because he is dissolved into a vital machinic plurality, or because public identification threatens individual self-mastery, sense of autonomy, social unaccountability, and so forth? The former and the latter are two very different politics, yet they use the same masks and the same software suite.

      A return to the anonymity issue.

    5. Everyday interactions replay the Turing Test over and over. Is there a person behind this machine, and if so, how much? In time, the answer will matter less, and the postulation of human (or even carbon-based life) as the threshold measure of intelligence and as the qualifying gauge of a political ethics may seem like tasteless vestigial racism, replaced by less anthropocentric frames of reference.

      That's beautiful. I only hope the transition isn't jarring and the rate of expansion for compassion matches or exceeds that of cognition.

    6. Some plural User subject that is conjoined by a proxy link or other means could be composed of different types of addressable subjects: two humans in different countries, or a human and a sensor, a sensor and a bot, a human and a robot and a sensor, a whatever and a whatever. In principle, any one of these subcomponents could not only be part of multiple conjoined positions, but might not even know or need to know which meta-User they contribute to, any more than the microbial biome in your gut needs to know your name.

      Anonymity is not a binary, it is the limit of dissolution into a coherent plural subject.

    7. The result is the pre-paranoia of withdrawal into an atomic and anomic dream of self-mastery that elsewhere we call the “neoliberal subject.”
    8. But as more data is added to the diagram that quantifies the outside world’s impact on his person—the health of the microbial biome in his gut, immediate and long-term environmental conditions, his various epidemiological contexts, and so on—the quality of everything that is “not him” comes to overcode and overwhelm any notion of himself as a withdrawn and self-contained agent. Like Theseus’s Paradox—where after every component of a thing has been replaced, nothing original remains but a metaphysical husk—the User is confronted with the existential lesson that at any point he is only the intersection of many streams.

      [above] "over-individuation and his ultimate pluralization"

    9. It is important as well to recognize that “platforms” are not only a technical architecture; they are also an institutional form. They centralize (like states), scaffolding the terms of participation according to rigid but universal protocols, even as they decentralize (like markets), coordinating economies not through the superimposition of fixed plans but through interoperable and emergent interaction.

      Platforms centralize/standardize interface definition and thereby decentralize flow.

    10. Where should sovereignty reside if not in what is in-between us—derived not from each of us individually but from what draws the world through us?

      Language?

  37. Jan 2016
    1. In this regard, it’s interesting to note that the viewing of TV programs at the time of their broadcast went up 20% with the advent of Twitter, indicating a desire to consume collaboratively. My ten year experience with social reading suggests that we might see a similar increase if long-form texts began appearing in platforms enabling people to gather in the margins with trusted friends and colleagues.
  38. Dec 2015
    1. “You may not feel it for a year or two years,” warned CSFN president George Wooding of the slippery slope to a denser, taller west side. “But one day it’ll be in your backyard, and you won’t know what hit you.”

      Wow. Quite literal admission of NIMBYism.

  39. Nov 2015
    1. For now, scientists are careful to characterize the quest as purely descriptive; they want to know how these human microbiomes affect our bodies.

      Editors, not so much. The idea that something is derailing our evolution is much more attention-grabbing.

  40. Oct 2015
    1. So before Clinton says Snowden "could have been a whistleblower," she might want to double-check with a lawyer.

      Clinton has a law degree.

    1. If Barack Obama was capable of muscling through the sort of laws that the labor movement—and Barack Obama—would like to see enacted, he would not have to give labor leaders a summit. He could give them political victories. But that does not seem to be the reality of the moment. So we all got invited to the White House instead, to talk about “outreach strategies” and to “#StartTheConvo” on labor issues. I did not get the impression that the conversation needed more starting. We all seemed pretty well decided on what we wanted. Left unspoken was the fact that the working class will not be getting what it wants, any time soon.

      Hurts to read.

    1. I'm open to arguments against it

      It's maybe superfluous since either it's the starting point or it's the last match returned.

    2. textDistance of type unsigned short

      This might be easier to work with if it were a float between [0,1]. That would be used to calculate an edit threshold based on the length of the pattern.

    3. (often 32 characters)

      This seems like strange language to have here.

    4. Working with an index would be easier than working with a range, and I'm not sure what having a range gets us.

      Working with a Range is more informative, I think, because it gives direct access to the node containing the cursor. But a referenceNode property could also be exposed. Then you're stuck with maybe pointerBeforeReferenceNode like the Gecko/WebKit/Blink implementations of NodeIterator.

    5. Unicode code points? Graphemes?

      This his serious performance implications for JS, I think, but we'll have to deal with that.

    6. Can you get that easily from another Web Platform feature?

      There is likely to be more than one such selector, and possibly very many. I think probably the answer is no.

    7. All of these use cases share the a fundamental requirement for a API to find text.

      "share ~the~ a fundamental"

    8. A designer may wish to find and style a range of text without changing the markup.

      This one is awkward to me. Can't put my finger on why.

  41. Sep 2015
    1. Two parties could use it to exchange any other information, within minutes and with no need for a third party to verify it.

      Actually, there is great need for a third party to verify it. It is verification itself that secures permanent inclusion in the block chain. Even the immediately preceding paragraph describes the block chain as "a ... ledger ... that is verified and shared by a global network".

      It is, in fact, many many many third parties that verify and that's why it's at all reliable.

    1. Examining a sample of states, Neal found that from 1985 to 2000, the likelihood of a long prison sentence nearly doubled for drug possession, tripled for drug trafficking
    2. Banishment continues long after one’s actual time behind bars has ended, making housing and employment hard to secure.

      Voting rights are also at risk. Here is a map of the law in each state regarding felon disenfranchisement. Maine and Vermont are the only states that don't strip their felons of the right to vote.

      What is also horrifying is that prison populations are often counted in the allocation of representation to districts. So, by pulling minorities out of the city and putting them in prisons in rural parts of the state and removing their right to vote power is pulled toward the rural districts that are dependent upon the prison industry for local jobs and we find ourselves in a modern 3/5ths compromise.

    3. From the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s, America’s incarceration rate doubled, from about 150 people per 100,000 to about 300 per 100,000. From the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s, it doubled again. By 2007, it had reached a historic high of 767 people per 100,000, before registering a modest decline to 707 people per 100,000 in 2012. In absolute terms, America’s prison and jail population from 1970 until today has increased sevenfold, from some 300,000 people to 2.2 million. The United States now accounts for less than 5 percent of the world’s inhabitants—and about 25 percent of its incarcerated inhabitants. In 2000, one in 10 black males between the ages of 20 and 40 was incarcerated—10 times the rate of their white peers. In 2010, a third of all black male high-school dropouts between the ages of 20 and 39 were imprisoned, compared with only 13 percent of their white peers.

      Lately, I've found myself frustrated in conversations where someone expresses that the government is a bunch of thugs with guns. Law enforcement and military are thugs with guns, but there's nothing anywhere that says our country has to have a military and law enforcement apparatus that is off leash.

    4. He began pushing for a minimum income for all American families. Nixon promoted Moynihan’s proposal—called the Family Assistance Plan—before the American public in a television address in August of 1969, and officially presented it to Congress in October.

      This is a lovely thing to remember as the partisan reactions to a universal basic income observable today seem very different.

    1. Unlike many of my peers, I do think that there are direct and relevant connections between efforts by progressive students to regulate content Look: I have already said more about trigger warnings than I want to. I will simply note that every trigger warning necessarily contains ideological presumptions and political baggage. Someone I know said “I don’t want to ban American Sniper on campus, but I do want it to carry a trigger warning as war propaganda and Islamaphobia.” That trigger warning preempts the very critical conversation that we should be having about it! It’s a classic “when did you stop beating your wife?” tactic. It’s tautological; it presumes precisely the issue in question. Clint Eastwood, who made the damn movie, called it an antiwar film. I disagree with him; I quite despised it, actually, and for political reasons most of all. But I don’t pretend that my opinion on this question amounts to proof positive. Every trigger warning ever devised makes presumptions about the nature of trauma, the treatment of PTSD, and which kinds of content are potentially offensive. You would think that a bunch of close-reading academics would recognize that.
  42. Aug 2015
    1. Connoisseurscallforthecontemplationofcomplexityalmostforitsownsake,orremindeveryonethatthingsaremoresubtlethantheyseem,orthanyoujustsaid.eattractivethingaboutthismoveisthatitisliterallyalwaysavailabletothepersonwhowantstomakeit.eoryisfoundedonabstraction,abstractionmeansthrowingawaydetailforthesakeofabitofgenerality,andsothingsarealways“morecomplicatedthanthat”—foranyvalueof“that”.

      Saying that reality is more complicated than an abstract theory accounts for is tautological.

    1. But politics is about who shows up. The fossil fuel interests that are threatened show up. Nerds like Urban, vaguely repulsed by politics, do not.

      A thousand times yes that "politics is about who shows up."

    2. However, for various reasons, aggrieved older white men still punch above their weight, politically speaking.

      I find the sentence funny, but the reality is terrifying.

    3. So perhaps a simpler way of putting the conclusion is that the Republican Party is motivated by a general philosophy while Democrats are motivated by specific policies they want to achieve.

      This is also the source of so much hate toward Republicans spouted by Democrats. It's not uncommon to hear about Republicans who "vote against their own interest". However, voting against one's own interests is a radical and amazing thing to do. If everyone who held significant privilege and power voted against their own interests we might have a more equitable world.

    4. The right-wing base has a coherent position on climate change: It's a hoax, so we shouldn't do anything about it. The left-wing base has a coherent position: It's happening, so we should do something about it. The "centrist" position, shared by conservative Democrats and the few remaining moderate Republicans, is that it's happening but we shouldn't do anything about it. That's not centrist in any meaningful ideological sense; instead, like most areas of overlap between the parties, it is corporatist.

      The worst possible outcome.

    5. What's really being measured is heterogeneity of opinion, not centrism.
    6. There are two broad narratives about politics that can be glimpsed between the lines here. Both are, in the argot of the day, problematic.

      The two paragraphs that follow are spot on. Nerds think government doesn't do anything right and they see government as this monolith thing apart from themselves rather than something they can and should work to affect, rather than circumvent.

      One thing I got out of reading Graeber's "Democracy Project" was the idea that it is not rational people that inhabit the middle of the political spectrum. Most people are more radical than the media makes it seem. The media reinforces the narrative that if you hold strong political opinions you are a radical. Your neighbors think you're crazy. You should probably just follow the herd, more.

      While there are definitely fundamentalists at the political extremes, there are also great thinkers.

    7. A voter with one extreme conservative opinion (round up and expel all illegal immigrants immediately) and one extreme liberal opinion (institute a 100 percent tax on wealth over a million dollars) will be marked, for the purposes of polling, as a moderate.
    8. Their favorite billionaires are nerds.

      I don't think I ever had a "favorite billionaire" growing up. Come to think of it, I never had an answer for "who is your idol?" I think for a while I said "Jim Carrey" because I loved the "Ace Ventura" movies.

    1. So, rather than an exploration of a work in which instructor and student collaborate on meaning-making, Education Genius maintains a hierarchical divide between teacher and learner.

      I wonder if this stems from the misguided assumptions of the MOOC, that education can be distributed en masse rather than requiring careful collaboration and community management.

    1. Genius provides no such mission statement or philosophical norms for its users, despite explicitly invoking Wikipedia as a model.

      Hypothesis also lacks clear guidelines for our community, such as there is one (there will probably instead be many), but we've begun to work on it. It's important.

    2. Hegemonic online voting systems are not useful mechanisms for the creation of equitable online communities, which is a prerequisite for more nuanced and sophisticated collaborative textual interpretation.

      So true. Early design drafts of Hypothesis assumed the typical up/down voting, but I've been pretty opposed to adding it.

    1. The United States Federal Trade Commission and any of the 50 state attorney generals (or even a privacy commissioner in one of the many countries that now has privacy commissioners to enforce privacy laws) could go after Google or one of the the thousands of other websites that have posted deceptive P3P policies. However, to date, no regulators have announced that they are investigating any website for a deceptive P3P policy. For their part, a number of companies and industry groups have said that circumventing IE’s privacy controls is an acceptable thing to do because they consider the P3P standard to be dead (even though Microsoft still makes active use of it in the latest version of their browser and W3C has not retired it).

      That seems pretty dead.

    1. The internet has the exact opposite problem of every other medium. Instead of going from something for everybody to something for a large series of hyper-specialized niches, we're navigating the choppy seas where once stood an archipelago and increasingly stands a continent. As TV and music and even publishing become the internet, the internet is becoming everything else — and it's taking so much of what seemed to make it special with it.

      Should we expect / can we hope for a backlash?

    2. Now, however, our articles increasingly seem to be individual insects trapped in someone else's web.

      Ooh, I like this metaphor. Whose web are they trapped in?

    3. Gawker was the site that gave no fucks. It exposed secrets and reported on gossip and became a witty, trashy tabloid that thumbed its nose at the pomposity of old media.

      A more explicitly gossip oriented site was "ValleyWag", relaunched in 2013 as a property of Gawker Media.

    4. Social media has, essentially, turned every content provider into a syndicator.

      RSS and Atom did that, but modern "social media" has turned aggregation of syndicated content into a business.

    5. The problem is scale. A larger, general-interest site can't be built purely atop longform, because longform takes time — both for writers to produce and readers to read. Therefore, as both Buzzfeed and Gawker realized early on, well-done longform could be the steak, but it couldn't be the meal.

      Why is it a problem if things take longer to read and write?

      I suspect the answer has to do with the monetization terms in play. Too much of advertising is still based on page views rather than time on page. As a result, it's extremely beneficial to have users return to the site daily and spend 15 minutes reading 5 stupid listicles rather than returning to the site once a week to spend an hour and a half reading a couple articles. This also motivates the obnoxious pagination common on news sites.

    6. It's an internet driven not by human beings, but by content, at all costs.

      This line obscures the issues. We have to come to terms with the idea that human beings often want a "quick jolt of emotion" and promote greater self-awareness about media consumption and our own psychology.

    7. The online aggregation site ViralNova sold to Zealot Networks for $100 million.

      Oh, dear. After the wild success of UpWorthy there was a flood of sites with "viral" and "worthy" in the name and I learned to block all of them out of my consciousness, immediately banning each from my Facebook Newsfeed the first time I saw it.

    1. In order to avoid the confused deputy problem, asubject must be careful to maintain the associationbetween each authority and its intended purpose. Using the key analogy, one could imagine immediatelyattaching a label to each key upon receiving it, wherethe label describes the purpose for which the key is tobe used. In order to know the purpose for a key, thesubject must understand the context in which the key is received; for example, labelling is not possible if keysmagically appear on the key ring without the subject’sknowledge.
    2. Even if one can distinguish the keys, decidingto try all available keys puts one at risk of becoming aconfused deputy.
    3. We would argue that the “true” capability model is the object-capability model, because all known major capability systems take the object-based approach (forexamples, see [1, 4, 9, 11, 16, 17, 19, 21]). In all ofthese systems, a capability is an object reference–not something that behaves like a key or ticket in the realworld. Definitive books on capability-based systems[6, 16] also describe these systems from the object-capability perspective, and explicitly characterize themas “object-based”.
    4. The claim that capability systemsin general cannotenforce the *-Property appears to be based on themisunderstanding that capabilities and data are notdistinguishable.
    5. Theonly capability Bob holds to a lower level is a readcapability, so the *-Property is enforced. The onlycapability Alice holds to a higher level is a writecapability, so the Simple Security Property is enforced

      This paragraph would be clearer if the capabilities were written out fully:

      The only capability Bob holds to a lower level is a "read data" capability, so the *-Property is enforced. The only capability Alice holds to a higher level is a "write data" capability, so the Simple Security Property is enforced.

      Maybe. But it still seems confused. As though the properties are in the wrong sentences.

      Nonetheless, both properties are enforced.

    6. we examine three different models thathave been used to describe capabilities, and define a set of seven security properties that capture the distinctions among them
    1. I feel that there is a great benefit to fixing this question at the spec level. Otherwise, what happens? I read a web page, I like it and I am going to annotate it as being a great one -- but first I have to find out whether the URI my browser is used, conceptually by the author of the page, to represent some abstract idea?
    1. Support for Clinton also looks very different from support for Sanders.

      Except the charts that follow don't show the same survey questions being asked.

      "I'm not enthusiastic about her candidacy" is a very different answer from "I don't think he could win".

    1. But in the days of Michelangelo or whatever, art could be bankrolled by large organizations for a public or unifying purpose, so I think that Blockbuster movies could be like the cathedrals of now.

      The American, secular religion is mass media consumption.

    2. It’s not art, but it borrows a lot from art

      Interesting backpedaling from the previous answer. So, is advertising art?

    3. You have these weird extreme emotions like jealousies and affections for things that no normal person would, so I find them really interesting and almost beautiful in that way, like surrealist films.
    4. that’s more twisted and twerked into a version of the way we [think of food] as a dominant culture

      "twerked"?? Amazing.

    1. If we think in terms of what we ourselves control

      This confirms my earlier annotations. It admits that the engineers don't have control over other things: how to allocate their time, whether to fix un-triaged bugs, if they can help out with operations and deployment, etc, etc.

    2. In the worst case, an engineer blocked on code review can't make any progress at all, because the work allocated to him/her is serialized on the review. I do my best to make sure everybody has a few potential threads of execution available to them, but sometimes this isn't possible and in this case code reviews amount to synchronous barriers to getting other work done.

      I believe that the only way someone can be 100% blocked is if they are not empowered or not imaginative. There are always things to be done, even if it's totally external like running errands so that you don't have to skip out on some afternoon later in the week. More often, there are internal things available: fix small bugs, spruce up documentation, tidy up some packaging issue, help with bug triage, respond to support requests, etc. In a startup environment, there is always something the engineer can do. In a large, corporate environment ... well, your engineers may be powerless cogs and that's depressing.

    3. In the best case, an engineer blocked on code review is able to make progress on some other change, at the cost of (1) context switching and (2) increased memory allocation.

      In all cases an engineer must context switch and increase memory allocation to execute a code review unless they were otherwise idle!! So, I think this is a non-argument.

    1. Developers above the junior level, no matter their demographics, have a huge number of choices. It's rarely worth it to be The First. But now they're not! You've removed a significant barrier to hiring at the upper levels, by hiring first at the lower levels.

      Huge insight here.

  43. Jul 2015
    1. At the start of my PhD, I took a class in composition in which we were recommended, in everything we wrote, to “tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em; tell ’em; then tell ’em what you told ’em.” Despite the catchiness of the formulation, this seemed to me useful only as a means of artificially bulking out a sickly word count.

      I think it's a helpful comprehension aid for distracted readers, too.

    2. aggravatingly

      annoyingly

    3. the weird, and weirdly popular, phenomenon in which people record themselves carefully and lovingly removing products from their packaging

      Supposedly this is an ASMR trigger for some viewers.

    4. And although this is a phenomenon that has been exponentially accelerated by the advent of the Internet, it isn’t by any means a new one.

      I find this to be such a commonly true construction that I default apply it to anything anyone says that suggests the Internet has changed X or Y as a test of sorts. Remove the word "Internet". Does it hold true? Probably.

    5. I will find myself clicking the link and having a quick read of the piece before doing, at considerable length and with considerable rigor, precisely what I have been warned against, precisely because I have been warned against it. There’s presumably some kind of masochistic imperative at work here—the perverse compulsion of masochism, that is, without any of the perverse pleasure.

      There also might be an ego-boosting motivation here. Verifying that the comments are, indeed, awful makes you feel like you, and your friend who shared the article, are above those lowly commentators.

    1. The greater your expertise, the more influence you have; the greater your influence, the more nectar you earn.

      Why do so many services get this wrong? What is the origin of the concept of meritocracy? Why does it appeal to so many such that it's generally assumed to be the goal, such that we focus criticisms on where meritocracies fall short rather than whether they are even worth pursuing?

      Why does anyone believe people with valuable perspectives and ideas need be promoted and rewarded, anyway?

      Flatten it all. Power comes from coordination, not subordination.

    2. It's fitting that this page would have an endorsement quote from Alain De Botton. His writing, much like this site, is full of metaphors that tug at emotions through association but fail to convey any coherent meaning.

      Look at us! Busy little bees in a hive! Making honey! Getting nectar! Making Colonies!

      Wait... what are we doing? What's that you say? We're workers? This is a company? I thought it was a colony! Can I give you my nectar for some cash? No? But I can't eat this nectar, it's virtual! Why didn't I just ask for a real wage!?

    1. Were points annotated by multiple readers more likely to generate discussions with responses?

      This would be super useful to know. It would lend some guidance to the assumption we've made that it's important to show how many times something has been annotated, when in fact in may have no bearing on a reader's desire to engage with others' annotations on that anchor.

    2. What effect does an author’s writing style have on a reader’s annotation style?

      For instance, maybe people tend to answer questions posed by the author. I wonder.

    3. The on-line annotations were also more likely to be anchored in complete sentences.

      This seems odd. Maybe the interface in some way pushed them toward this? For instance, I sometimes think the way that Hypothesis shows the quote in the annotation card severs it from its context in such a way as to make it seem out of place when highlighting just that portion seemed fine inline.

    4. for example, between a highlight and an underline

      I imagine this might have something to do with tools available and personal preference, too, but have similar semantics regardless.

    5. that only a small fraction of the informal personal annotations are ever shared with others

      Probably most aren't ever revisited, either.

    6. Which annotations will people want to intentionally share? Will other readers be able to make sense of these annotations?

      Key questions.

    1. inevitability

      A little too "What Technology Wants" for me. I feel like it dis-empowers the user population that ultimately chooses these things.

    2. de-lamination

      Lamination as in laminar, like flow, i.e. smooth? So, de-smoothifying?

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laminar_flow

    3. Seeing like a State

      It's near the top of my list, but I haven't started it yet. Perhaps I should revisit this article after I have more context.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

    4. horizontal loop geometry of the modern state system

      Anyone have any clue what this means?

    5. My interest in the geopolitics of planetary-scale computation focuses less on issues of personal privacy and state surveillance than on how it distorts and deforms traditional Westphalian modes of political geography, jurisdiction, and sovereignty, and produces new territories in its image.

      Setting up the theme of the piece. We are outside the zeitgeist dialogue of late-capitalism state power. This is anthropological.

    1. In five years we might be able to make a new paint that changes color depending on time of day or season.

      What would that mean for team #blackandblue?

    2. More and more, designers, and even just people in their day-to-day lives, are using color in a more original way.

      I've recently been struggling with the realization that I look better in simple, classic tones like black and dark blues and the like but I really love walking around in outrageous colorblocking.

      I could probably go with dropping the brightness a little bit, but keeping the hue diversity.

    1. An honest environmental organization, having discovered these low concentrations, might have reconsidered its opposition to Bt crops. But Greenpeace simply changed its rationale. Having argued in its 1999 lawsuit that Bt crops produced too much toxin, Greenpeace now reversed itself. In its report on the German and Spanish corn, the organization complained that Bt crops produced too little toxin to be effective. It argued, in essence, that the Bt in transgenic crops was unsafe for humans but insufficient to kill bugs.

      Yo, fuck Greenpeace.

    2. Third, there are valid concerns about some aspects of GE agriculture, such as herbicides, monocultures, and patents. But none of these concerns is fundamentally about genetic engineering.

      Totally. Whenever I end up in conversations about GMOs I steer the conversation toward monoculture and intellectual property. These are issues I have concerns about and I think the labeling wars are hurting our chances for useful dialog here. I don't want labeling. I want biodiversity.