# Links for 2019/05/07

May 7, 2019 · 4 minute read

Posted in:  social social media retrocomputing web Xanadu environment masculinity



Got quite a grab-bag of stuff this time. Been busy enough with life that
what should be a simple evening habit one night a week has gone
for...three weeks? I guess that's not so bad. It's long enough, though,
that I can't clearly remember all of the articles in my backlog. And
there are too many topics to make a coherent theme. Let's work through
them, then.

Music for this linkblog: [Twin Black Lodges][0], a generative soundscape
from mynoise.net, inspired by Twin Peaks.

[0]: https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/twinBlackLodgesSoundscapeGenerator.php

### Social Media

#### [EUnomia Critical FAQ][1]

EUnomia is an EU-funded university research study that intends to
develop tools for scoring the "trustworthiness" of users and posts on
social media. They have come under criticism for not only the general
sketchiness of their goals, but also for working closely with military
and intelligence contractors with histories of anti-immigrant work. This
FAQ represents what is known about them.

#### [Why Won't Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS?][2]

"Because it would mean banning some Republican politicians too".

Basically, it can't be done at scale using the same kind of automated
tools that they used to get rid of ISIS accounts, because the collateral
damage that they considered acceptable for that would affect people with
power and influence in the US that could come back to bite them.

It's also the case that there is significant overlap between the kind of
rhetoric used by, e.g., the Christchurch shooter (someone everyone would
want to ban) and, say, former US Rep. Steve King (someone *I* would ban,
but Twitter wouldn't). And then there's the dog whistles – the US right
generally uses coded language to merely *suggest* what the far-right
says outright.

#### [Why Google+ Failed][3]

A lot of the lessons in this are things that anyone working on social
networking software should take into account. In particular, Mastodon
and its kin use asymmetrical following, which discourages close ties.
And even though Mastodon has strict chronological timelines, it still
has infinite scroll, no concept of read/unread messages, and is
generally not reliable for messaging.

### Web tracking

#### [The New York Times sells premium ads based on how an article makes you feel][4]

This is the kind of thing that data science is used for under
surveillance capitalism. I've listed it under tracking, but this
particular offence could actually be done without tracking you
personally, just knowing what feelings an article evokes in a standard
audience.

#### [DuckDuckGo wrote a bill to stop advertisers from tracking you online][5]

Duck, bill, haha. The actual bill proposes to give the Do Not Track
standard teeth by making violations punishable. This would be somewhat
weaker than the GDPR, because it would be opt-in, but would also be less
of a pain in the ass than the GDPR-compliance features on European
websites.

### Xanadu

#### [WIRED: The Curse of Xanadu][6]

An oldie but a goodie about some of the many reasons that Xanadu never
became a successful or widely-used system. It doesn't get into some of
the reasons that basic features of Xanadu (immutable documents,
transclusion, transcopyright) would actually be *bad things* in an
open-world system.

#### [Wiki is not Xanadu][7]

An article on the original Wiki on why Wiki is not that much like
Xanadu.

### Environment

#### [The Plan to Grab the World's Carbon with Supercharged Plants][8]

Improving carbon capture through plants is a better idea than
geoengineering, as long as it's combined with massive reductions in
emissions. I'm not sure that engineering roots to decompose worse is as
good as making biochar, though.

#### [Airpods Are a Tragedy][9]

Environmentally, they're a tragedy because there is no safe way to
repair, recycle, or dispose of them. Socially, they are a tragedy,
because they are only for signalling disposable income.

### Digital typography

#### [Raster CRT Typography (according to DEC)][10]

An article on how DEC designed the fonts for their classic terminals to
play nice with and take advantage of the hardware limitations of the
displays. Interesting fact: the fonts as actually displayed are wider
than the fonts as dumped from the terminals' ROM, because of display
timing.

#### [Simulate Dot Stretching in DECTerminalModern.ttf][11]

An OTF font that simulates the "dot stretching" feature discussed in the
previous article. I am using it with Cool-Retro-Term to write this
linkblog in emacs.

### Unclassified

#### [The Anarchists Who Took The Commuter Train][12]

#### [23 Reasons Not to Reveal Your DNA][13]

#### [Posters Urge Atlanta Residents Not to Dump Trash on White Supremacists' Property][14]

#### [Get These Dependencies Off My Lawn][15]

#### [How Men Became "Emotional Gold Diggers" - Men Have No Friends and Women Bear The Burden][16]

Go well, friends. Take care of each other.


[1]: https://hub.libranet.de/wiki/paulfree14/The(20)critical(20)EUnomia(20)FAQ/Home
[2]: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3xgq5/why-wont-twitter-treat-white-supremacy-like-isis-because-it-would-mean-banning-some-republican-politicians-too
[3]: https://onezero.medium.com/why-google-failed-4b9db05b973b
[4]: https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2019/the-new-york-times-sells-premium-ads-based-on-how-an-article-makes-you-feel/
[5]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/1/18525140/do-not-track-duckduckgo-ad-tracking
[6]: https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/
[7]: http://wiki.c2.com/?WikiIsNotXanadu
[8]: https://www.wired.com/story/the-plan-to-grab-the-worlds-carbon-with-supercharged-plants/
[9]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/neaz3d/airpods-are-a-tragedy
[10]: https://www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/2019/dec-crt-typography
[11]: https://gist.github.com/epilys/95869773037d3d2235d324bd5a0484e5
[12]: https://longreads.com/2019/04/16/the-anarchists-who-took-the-commuter-train/
[13]: https://internethealthreport.org/2019/23-reasons-not-to-reveal-your-dna/
[14]: https://itsgoingdown.org/posters-urge-atlanta-residents-not-to-dump-trash-on-white-supremacists-properties/
[15]: https://www.256kilobytes.com/content/show/4399/get-these-dependencies-off-my-lawn-5-tasks-you-didnt-know-could-be-done-with-pure-html-and-css
[16]: https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a27259689/toxic-masculinity-male-friendships-emotional-labor-men-rely-on-women/