Worthwhile initiative! Knowledge is the first step to participation. Here in Helsinki, I regularly listen to the weekly English-language podcast All Points North from the public service YLE. It covers local news stories, especially those relevant to expats & immigrants. It helps me to at least be aware of policy issues that might affect me.

From this contrived self-help setup, I take away that our human ability to ignore “factors” flexibly works in our best interest.

I got invited to a churchboat trip, but unfortunately I can’t attend. Hopefully another opportunity comes along, it seems fun!

Hey Readup, I impulsively wrote something (a blog post?) on a quirky writing platform I discovered a while back.

Don’t leave an airport luggage area when you notice your bag is damaged.

I had to see them in action! Here’s a fun family jig and here an impressive performance by the older kids. I hope each of these kids can live the future they want!

Though King Ghezo refused to end slavery in his kingdom, he gave the girl to Forbes as a symbol of goodwill.

What a strange response to the request of ending slavery!

Cheers!

Interesting development. Is this industry bundling up, overall?

Good steps for the web! And an interesting peek under the hood of an engineering-focused startup. Browser features can’t always be taken for granted, let alone modern ones. Building a business on them is courageous.

I actually applaud Musk for realizing that just selling ads & data won't make Twitter sustainable. And yes, the blue checkmark verification process may have been problematically elitist and arbitrary in the past.

But the new blue/gold checkmarks system only intensifies these problems, and it creates more of them:

• Blue checkmarks have now become completely meaningless with regards to account authenticity. Keeping them "blue" only serves to fool and confuse people who still believe in their old meaning and status, which is a shady business practice.
• For an actual verification process (the gold checkmark), one has to pay $ 1000, which is very elitist, if not arbitrary.

What I think would have made much more sense: providing a strong identity verification process for those who pay the $ 8/mo. Not immediately granting them the blue checkmark. And for the sake of consistency, formalising that accounts with more than 1 million followers get the process for free. At least then the checkmarks would have still meant something.

I love this trend. More local & “federated”. More control over your data and experience. Coming from a place of high skepticism of Big Social Tech, I am late to try Mastodon, but I have taken my first steps last week. My overall impression, so far, is very positive! I hope to share more soon.

How revenge on a human extinction level was encoded into a system and entrusted to a single fallible human. This area of thinking gets woefully absurd.

I’ve been experimenting with this wonderfully playful watercolor map for a work project.

The highways stuck out though, and I was wondering if I could easily produce a version without them… maybe not. This looks pretty involved!

It was a smart way to interpret market signals.

This sounds really damaging to many children & their futures, as well as LGBTQ people in general. Regressive…

In March, a Florida judge blocked the government’s request to overrule an injunction on the implementation of the “Stop Woke” Act in the state’s public universities and colleges.

If I’m counting right, there are three negations in this sentence. So the judge blocked Woke.

Doing some archeology!

Cool initiative. Intriguing that he's not disclosing the exact travel destinations and intending to transfer the whole operation into local hands.

This creator of an open-source comic book series, which I used to follow 6+ years ago, already had a larger following on Mastodon than on Twitter. Interesting!

I've generally not been active on big social media, but I'm still interested in trying out Mastodon at some point soon. It seems to have retained the uptick from the recent Twitter drama. I'm curious if the back-to-the-basics approach on Mastodon provides a much different experience from today's hyper-personalized (ad) feeds.

Really interesting history of two impactful chemical inventions, and what they tell about the risks of innovation even today. It took me some days to read this amid distraction, but I'm happy I finished it!

A remarkable element: the number of times in this story that scientists asked the question "Will deploying this new technology end the world?", and took some time to reach consensus. Good that this question is being debated.

Points out real challenges & opportunities, but I still wouldn’t be as optimistic that all the issues in even the large language models will be solved in a few years. There’s just so much to account for. I have enjoyed Gates’ book recommendations in the past, so I might check out one of the mentioned books!

I saw this hashtag in a to me unknown script trending on #1 on Twitter yesterday, and got curious. Thai Twitter sure is loud! Maybe I saw it because I turned off trend personalization years ago.

I agree with the others: prepping marinades for some days to come!

I’ll force the co-founders of my current endeavor to read this too. It’s a hyper-relevant story for anyone trying to build a peer-to-peer sharing platform, in our case, to share access to one’s garden with travellers (though our platform is plenty different from Buy Nothing).

I see both the extreme irony in turning “Buy Nothing” into a business, as well as the well-intentioned desire to control the values and mission of your ideological offspring, and wanting to earn a living off hard work supporting tens of thousands of its followers.

I finished the book Bad Blood by John Carreyrou yesterday, about the blood testing company Theranos' malpractices and the people involved in them. The book ended in such a dramatic way that I had to find out what the legal endgame was for Holmes & Balwani. 11 years is long, but it seems commensurate to their crimes.

This final sentencing statement is hard to read because it was not edited. It seems to emphasize Holmes' defrauding of investors over her putting patients at risk, reasonably following what she was also convicted of. Yet, judging from the book, she was equally complicit in the latter.

Alright, I’ll read the Gates article!

Stratechery makes you feel like you can understand big (bad) things that happen in the tech industry.

Having interacted with this remarkable human on Readup and beyond, it was fascinating to read a proper account of his background! Angels Among Us looks like something to be very proud of indeed.

Programming is the purest expression of creativity which means if you’re a creative, you should want to be a programmer.”

Not sure if it works that way, but I self-indulgently smiled at this nonetheless.

You'll have to take a look at the article source for the images. I can not distinguish those "synthesized photos" from real ones. Exciting and disturbing at the same time!

Satisfyingly critical take! Reminds me of the second-best-ever article on Readup about dropshipping, from 2020.

I'd be curious to hear a real story of someone who followed the advice of one of these YouTubers and then was able to fulfill their life dreams. Then again, I'm not going to look for it, especially not on YouTube. The risk of fake stories is too high.

Captivating! We’re witnessing a major turning point in two lives. I wonder how the title connects to the story.

Concise and encouraging guidelines for hiring people onto technical knowledge worker roles!

I found this document randomly inside outdated npm docs in Dash. It seems to have been deleted in 2020 when Npm, Inc. was acquired by GitHub/Microsoft, a fact I only learned about now.