future

MIT News
"But it seems those who are asymptomatic may not be entirely free of changes wrought by the virus. MIT researchers have now found that people who are asymptomatic may differ from healthy individuals in the way that they cough. These differences are not decipherable to the human ear. But it turns out that they can be picked up by artificial intelligence."
Whoa if true. This is some living in the future stuff.
Vox
"Until there’s a vaccine, the US either needs economically ruinous levels of social distancing, a digital surveillance state of shocking size and scope, or a mass testing apparatus of even more shocking size and intrusiveness."
This is what’s keeping me up worrying at night. And stories like: There Is No Plan for the End of the Coronavirus Crisis:
"But while it may not be possible to pinpoint a date, or a month, at which point we can expect to transition out of bunker living, no one seems to have any sense of how we’ll arrive at that determination, how much we will have wanted to contain the outbreak, at what levels, before moving forward, and what steps moving forward would then entail."
No plan.
Signal v. Noise Signal v. Noise
A note from our dystopian present where software ate everything and humans are API endpoints rather than driving the system:
"A future that plans on everything going right so no one has to think about what happens when things go wrong. Because computers don’t make mistakes. An automated future where no one actually knows how things work. A future where people are so far removed from the process that they stand around powerless, unable to take the reigns."
Not a big deal for watching movies but this could be tragic applied to more critical areas of our lives. It's good to watch out for this and push back on it.
jeffhuang.com jeffhuang.com
The web is becoming more and more ephemeral.
"Vanished are amazing pieces of writing on kuro5hin about tech culture, and a collection of mathematical puzzles and their associated discussion by academics that my father introduced me to; gone are Woodman's Reverse Engineering tutorials from my high school years, where I first tasted the feeling of dominance over software; even my most recent bookmark, a series of posts on Google+ exposing usb-c chargers' non-compliance with the specification, disappeared."
This article includes some steps you can take that could help preserve what you publish. Complex frameworks, walled-gardens, and serverless publishing trade away endurance for convenience.
  • (MeFi's own) hoder became a human time capsule spending six years in an Iranian prison for blogging. He's shocked by the state of the Web: "The web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking."
  • "Counting from the earthquake of 1700, we are now three hundred and fifteen years into a two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle." Happy Monday!
  • In this Long Now talk Kevin Kelly wonders if the networked machines are working for us or if we're working for the networked machines.
  • This is a nice take on the idea that Everything is Amazing and Nobody is Happy. "Science fiction didn’t see the mobile phone coming. It certainly didn’t see the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make amazing things happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards." [via merlin] See Also: The future is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed.
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