I just got round to reading this account of the legal shambles a couple of white hat hackers were dropped into when their clients, the state of Iowa, decided to abandon and ignore them. It's a gripping read.
MoMA just uploaded an amazingly clear film from 1902 showing the suspended railway in Wuppertal. It's still impressive today but it must have been something 118 years ago.
I was completely out of the loop with TikTok and the various allegations concerning it. This substantial take from Stratechery gave me a much clearer picture.
On the hypocrisy and deviousness of the fossil-fuel companies:
It’s here that British Petroleum, or BP, first promoted and soon successfully popularized the term “carbon footprint" in the early aughts. The company unveiled its “carbon footprint calculator” in 2004 so one could assess how their normal daily life — going to work, buying food, and (gasp) traveling — is largely responsible for heating the globe.
I knew about the anti-litter campaigns being funded by the packaging producers but I didn't know the carbon footprint was a similar industry invention. All created to put the focus on individual responsibility and cloak the oil industry's.
I was struggling to get quicklook previews of markdown documents in macOS Catalina to work due to the new enhanced security checking. The various open source and self-install solutions out there all failed, even after following all kinds of convoluted procedures.
The solution was PreviewMarkdown which installs via the app store and satisfies all of Apple's new security requirements. It costs $1 which is worth the no-hassle install.
I'm not always a fan of Tim O'Reilly's views from the Silicon Valley bubble. Even so, his article on the "post-covid future" is worth putting some time aside for.
So, when you read stories—and there are many—speculating or predicting when and how we will return to “normal”, discount them heavily. The future will not be like the past. The comfortable Victorian and Georgian world complete with grand country houses, a globe-spanning British empire, and lords and commoners each knowing their place, was swept away by the events that began in the summer of 1914 (and that with Britain on the “winning” side of both world wars.) So too, our comfortable “American century” of conspicuous consumer consumption, global tourism, and ever-increasing stock and home prices may be gone forever.
