onfocus

"The warmongers are never ruined by their mistakes."

Justified outrage at the media's willful ignorance of recent history.

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.

Get thee to this list. So many feels retracing these footprints. I wasn’t walking alone this whole decade—the weird web was carrying me.

This sure feels like an iconic photo that sums up the impeachment hearings in so many ways. Twitter people had fun with the Morrissey remix. And Alexandra Petri is a national treasure: Foolproof ways to be not guilty of crimes.

People are greedy. That's why we can't have nice things. Here’s more about why this is horrible from the EFF: Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG.

The Our Fake History podcast tells the true stories behind untrue things we believe about history. I really enjoyed this episode about the absurdist secret society The Clampers and a hoax they accidentally (?) perpetrated involving an artifact Sir Francis Drake left in California in 1579.

Henbane will be the name of my next metal band.

DARN, prior art.

Cory Doctorow on the legacy of Internet pioneer John Perry Barlow: “...treat the internet with the gravitas that it is due, as a system that could be a force for great human flourishing, but only if we ensure that it isn’t used to snuff out human dignity and agency.”

20 years!? This is like when you find out your favorite album in college is 20 years old. And also you were in that band.

Sometimes you need to read a good rant about medieval history and this is one of those.

"In fact, medieval people loved a bath and can in many ways be considered a bathing culture, much in the way that say, Japan is now. Medieval people also very much valued being clean generally in an almost religious way."

Someone should tell Dennis.

I really enjoyed this history lesson / manifesto / questioning. (lesfesquesto?) As the author says, "I find that both building and designing is a constant cycle of having a question and trying to find the answer." This offers some interesting questions including: what potentially important ideas have we forgotten and how can we use computers to iterate faster?

"It is the choice between thinking that whatever is happening in reality is, by definition, acceptable, and thinking that some actual events in our current reality are fundamentally incompatible with our concept of ourselves..."

I think this is an important concept that I'm trying to understand. I wish there was a term for this idea: If the problem was really bad someone would have stopped it already. My hunch is this line of thinking is pervasive.