onfocus

Some weekend reads culled from soc meeds:

• Mike Monteiro: This Design Generation Has Failed - Brace yourself for this one.
• Rachel Nabors: A Counterintuitive Way to Increase Diversity in Tech - Become a manager?!
• Wired: How Liberals Amped Up a Parkland Shooting Conspiracy Theory - So frustrating, this happens constantly. (I'm even hesitant to share this article.) We all need to become better filters and only share frames that are consistent with our values. And we should all read more George Lakoff.
• Wired: How Trump Conquered Facebook—without Russian Ads
• Om Malik: The #1 reason Facebook won’t ever change
• Tim Kadlec: The Two Faces of AMP
• 30 Seconds of CSS - Neat snippets.
• Tom Critchlow: Small b blogging
• NYT: The Tyranny of Convenience
• Aeon: Against guilty pleasures: Adorno on the crimes of pop culture - I'm entertaining myself wrong.
• NPR: Back Pain May Be The Result Of Bending Over At The Waist Instead Of The Hips - I'm bending over wrong.
• HBR: Cold Showers Lead to Fewer Sick Days - I'm showering wrong.
• Quartzy: The Forgotten Art of Squatting is a Revelation for Bodies Ruined by Sitting - I'm sitting wrong.
• Best thing last week: Weird Al Yankovic's The Hamilton Polka - Nothing wrong here, flawless.

I have a whole series of enlightening yet depressing news stories to share with you this week, but I'm going to try not to share them. Instead:

• Pema Chödrön: How We Get Hooked and How We Get Unhooked - Explaining the Buddhist concept of shenpa. I really enjoyed her Getting Unstuck audiobook on this topic.
• Josh S. Rose: How To Photograph Your Son - This article reminded me why I love taking pictures. Sharing pictures online turned into a not-very-fun game for me and this is a good reminder to get back to basics.
• Wathan & Schoger: 7 Practical Tips for Cheating at Design
• keavy: Who I want to work for - As I read this I was thinking it could be also be called, How I want to work.
• Lots of cool D&D stuff happening on Kickstarter lately: Strongholds & Streaming rules supplement, Eye of the Beholder documentary, and mini dice boxes to name a few.
• Also really enjoying these short videos about D&D lore that lead game designer Mike Mearls is doing for D&D Beyond: Dwarves, Tieflings, Elves, and Warlocks.
• Best thing last week: Janelle Monáe channeling Prince in her new nsfw song Make Me Feel.

• Dan Hon: No one’s coming. It’s up to us. - There aren't enough across Medium to properly like/star/favorite this.

• Frank Chimero: Everything Easy is Hard Again - This about keeping our work legible.
• meowni.ca: Automatic visual diffing with Puppeteer - Promising method for finding layout bugs.
• caire - Content aware image resizing.

• Derek Powazek: Somewhere In Between - Derek is writing here again and it's great. (I really enjoy personal newsletters!)
• Vulture: In Conversation: Quincy Jones - 1.) Is this real life? 2.) How do I subscribe to QJ?
• Donald Borenstein: A style guide for writing about the rich - Ad in space was neat but we also need the big picture.
• Gizmodo: The House that Spied on Me - all IoT.

• NYT: Early Facebook and Google Employees Form Coalition to Fight What They Built - It's called Center for Humane Technology.
• The Guardian: 'Fiction is outperforming reality': how YouTube's algorithm distorts truth
• The Verge: Facebook hired a full-time pollster to monitor Zuckerberg’s approval ratings - Long story short, he quit because: ethics!
• Splitsider: How Facebook Is Killing Comedy
• Weaponising the Search Box, with James Bond and Friends - Social media leads to lazy journalism?

Merlin linked to this Behind the Music (?) segment about 10cc's Not in Love and it's great. They did this before digital music editing!

Lots of dystopian links for some light weekend reading!

• Boston Review: Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans - Maybe PKD was more right than Orwell or Huxley.
• Twitter Followers Vanish Amid Inquiries Into Fake Accounts
• The Follower Factory
• TechCrunch: Social media is giving us trypophobia - trypophobia isn't really a thing though?
• Vanity Fair: “This Is Serious”: Facebook Begins Its Downward Spiral
• The Guardian: ‘Never get high on your own supply’ – why social media bosses don’t use social media

• The Conversation: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there's a likely culprit - smartphones. (saved you a click.) Seriously alarming though.
• Business Insider: Woebot is a therapy chatbot and app for depression and anxiety
• danah boyd: Panicked about Kids’ Addiction to Tech?
• Paul Ford: Know Your Ecosystems! - Yeah, but ugh.

• Cullum Smith: How To Run Your Own Mail Server
• zwischenzugs: How (and Why) I Run My Own DNS Servers
• Motherboard: More Than 750 American Communities Have Built Their Own Internet Networks
• W3C: ActivityPub - decentralized social networking protocol specification.
• iwantmyname: I miss blogrolls - me too.

• Andreas Larson: Easing Gradients - Some new tools to help put together better web gradients, hooray!
• CSS Tricks: Aspect Ratio Boxes - Using SVGs to maintain aspect ratio, neat!
• Supertrain (paging Roderick on the Line, this is in your wheelhouse)

Some links for your consideration:

• NYT: The First Woman to Translate the ‘Odyssey’ Into English - I'm 40% through her translation (thanks Kindle) and it is accessible and entertaining. The introduction alone is fascinating.
• JS things I never knew existed - same.
• Onym - Tools and resources for naming things.
• Laws of UX
• How to Deal With Bad Design Suggestions
• NYT: BlackRock’s Message: Contribute to Society, or Risk Losing Our Support
• NYT: In Some Countries, Facebook’s Fiddling Has Magnified Fake News
• Wired: It's the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech
• naked capitalism: Social Media, the 'Dopamine Loop,' and the Role of the Software Engineer

Here are some links to check out:

• Cory Doctorow: Persuasion, Adaptation, and the Arms Race for Your Attention
• Los Angeles Review of Books: The Great Attention Heist
• Globe and Mail: Your smartphone is making you stupid, antisocial and unhealthy. So why can’t you put it down?
• Washington Monthly: How to Fix Facebook—Before It Fixes Us
• John Battelle: Facebook Can’t Be Fixed. and Lost Context: How Did We End Up Here?
• NYT: Facebook Overhauls News Feed to Focus on What Friends and Family Share - PR stunt or meaningful change?
• Lauren Hallden: Towards a Bra-free Instagram Experience
• You Can’t Stay Here: The Efficacy of Reddit’s 2015 Ban Examined Through Hate Speech - tl;dr: banning hate speech on Reddit actually reduced hate speech
• David Gilbertson: I’m harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from your site. Here’s how. - a cautionary tale about relying on the trustworthiness of Node.js packages.
• Zero-Width Characters - fingerprinting text with control characters
• Slava Akhmechet: Mental models - A handy list of mental models organized by category
• Vox Media design team’s top 19 books to read this year
• There’s a reason using a period in a text message makes you sound angry - I do this. I have resting angry text syndrome. [via karigee.com]

I'm taking a break from link-sharing for a while for my own mental health. However, there are a few articles that I've been thinking about that I want to throw into the void for your consideration:

• Slate: Reconsidering “The Reactionary Mind” in the age of you-know-who
• The Atlantic: The Nationalist's Delusion
• The New Yorker: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (Feb 2017)
• TPM: There’s a Digital Media Crash. But No One Will Say It
• Caterina Fake: Participatory Media and how it was

Tragically edition.

• Mike Monteiro: One person’s history of Twitter, from beginning to end
• The Atlantic: Twitter's Harassment Problem Is Baked Into Its Design
• Twitter: A Calendar of Our Safety Work
• BuzzFeed: How People Inside Facebook Are Reacting To The Company’s Election Crisis
• Bridget Phetasy: How to Listen to Women When They Share Their Stories of Sexual Assault
• PressThink: Normalizing Trump: An incredibly brief explainer
• Charged: WiFi is broken - Everything must be updated!
• The Uncomfortable - A collection of deliberately inconvenient objects. Everything new is old again.
• Brian Fies: A Fire Story - A comic artist's house burned down in the Santa Rosa fires and he told his story in comic form.
• Wired: Equifax Deserves the Corporate Death Penalty

Dreary edition.

Feeling heartbroken about the devastation in Sonoma County where I used to live. I'm sure you've seen pictures and heard stories by now. They're going to need help.

• The Atlantic: What Facebook Did to American Democracy - Alexis Madrigal: "The information systems that people use to process news have been rerouted through Facebook, and in the process, mostly broken and hidden from view."
• BuzzFeed: Climbing Out Of Facebook's Reality Hole
• BuzzFeed: Facebook Says Its Fake News Label Helps Reduce The Spread Of A Fake Story By 80% - The lag time to identify is about three days though.

• Recode: Dear @Jack: It’s time to suspend Donald Trump from Twitter
• GQ: Twitter Should Shut Down Donald Trump’s Account Before He Starts a Nuclear War
• Politico: Twitter deleted data potentially crucial to Russia probes
• Vanity Fair: Why Twitter Silenced One Of Harvey Weinstein's Accusers

• Washington Post: Google uncovers Russian-bought ads on YouTube, Gmail and other platforms
• Washington Post: Pierre Omidyar: 6 ways social media has become a direct threat to democracy
• Rambling Space: Apple created the attention sinkhole. Here are some ways to fix it.

• Thrive Global: The Secret of Happiness and Living a Good Life - by Tim O'Reilly. I really like "Will what is necessary..."
• Hackernoon: Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How machine learning finds your new music - Discovery Weekly is absolutely my favorite Spotify feature. Its picks are uncanny. Here's why.
• A Dictionary of American Slang (1926) - Some capital slang in this old chestnut from the 20s. Part of the new Sonny Bono Memorial Collection of copyright-questionable works at the Internet Archive.
• The Rock Test: A Hack for Men Who Don’t Want To Be Accused of Sexual Harassment - Not only is this hilarious on its own, it was tweeted out by The Rock.

I took a day off from Twitter yesterday and it was fantastic. I highly recommend social media fasting. I have already uninstalled Twitter and Facebook apps from my phone but I'm such a creature of habit I had to block twitter.com from myself in various hosts files and with parental controls on my iPhone. Of course I can easliy undo these, but that little speedbump from my mammal brain reminds my lizard brain that I'm trying to stay away. I need to find a way to make breaking that addiction a regular habit. har har.

Bad times edition.

• The Atlantic: Google and Facebook Failed Us - Current algorithms can't handle breaking news.
• @zchamu: Twitter shittery, and how we are all doomed: a thread. - Twitter leadership refuses to accept the paradox of tolerance.
• @yonatanzunger: I worked on policy issues at G+ and YT for years... - Context for Twitter leadership's intransigence.
• Infowarzel: The Milo Emails: Don't Make The Gamergate Mistake Again - Some context for the important article about Breitbart by Joseph Bernstein at BuzzFeed.

• The Atlantic: Death at a Penn State Fraternity - Excellent reporting on a painful and infuriating story.
• Wall Street Journal: Yahoo Triples Estimate of Breached Accounts to 3 Billion - The price of centralization.
• Engadget: Former Equifax CEO blames breach on one IT employee - No, you "can't fix stupid" as one Senator suggests but you can make massive data aggregation illegal. Maybe the bigger stupid is the fact that Equifax exists at all.
• The Guardian: 'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

• The World of Tomorrow - Fantastic first issue of a new online comic set in the early Internet days. Subscribe!
• Calling Bullshit - An open course by two professors at the University of Washington about identifying and countering bullshit in our media diets. We should all take this.
• Japanese Vending Machines at Night Juxtaposed with a Wintry Hokkaido Landscape - Escape into wintery convenient stillness through these photographs.
• Optical Effects in User Interfaces (for True Nerds) - *raises hand*.

Bleak edition.

• CNN: San Juan mayor: 'Dammit, this is not a good news story'
• James Fallows: From Donald Trump, a New Low
• Time: How to Help Puerto Rico: 12 Effective Ways to Donate Money

• The Guardian: Facebook's war on free will
• New York Times: Zuckerberg’s Preposterous Defense of Facebook
• Washington Post: Russian operatives used Facebook ads to exploit America’s racial and religious divisions
• BuzzFeed: Mark Zuckerberg Can’t Stop You From Reading This Because The Algorithms Have Already Won

• Bloomberg: What Is Trump Worth to Twitter? One Analyst Estimates $2 Billion
• John Warren Hanawalt: If Twitter won’t #BanTrump, it’s time to #DeleteTwitter.
• New York Times: Senator Berates Twitter Over ‘Inadequate’ Inquiry Into Russian Meddling
• Be Nice To Bears: Twitter Adds 280 Characters

• Eric Reid: Why Colin Kaepernick and I Decided to Take a Knee
• CNN: Bob Costas: 'Preposterous' to say criticism of NFL kneeling protests not tied to race
• Business Insider: Gregg Popovich says the US has become 'an embarrassment to the world' in speech slamming Trump and white privilege
• MTV: Black Flag: On the History of the American Flag in Black Protest Art

• Logo Crunch - helps lower the resolution of images for favicons, app icons, etc.
• Data Viz Project - a collection of data visualization types.
• AtF Spark - sparklines font.
• Before and After: Why Animal Shelters Need Good Photographers
• Accessibility for Everyone by Laura Kalbag - new from A Book Apart

• The Atlantic: My 150 Writing Mentors and Me
• Erin Kissane: Writing Well about Terrible People
• Why Is 10 Past 10 the Default Setting for Clocks and Watches in Advertisements? A Psychological Experiment
• Button it. - a gallery of Soviet control rooms.
• Leadership

Links: everything is terrible, no commentary edition.

• Wikipedia: Imminent lawless action
• New York Times: A Pardon for Arpaio Would Put Trump in Uncharted Territory - Narrator: and here we are.
• NPR: A Reformed White Nationalist Speaks Out On Charlottesville
• Reuters: U.S. state election officials still in the dark on Russian hacking
• 4 Thoughts About Trump’s Phoenix Speech And The Media
• The Baffler: The President of Blank Sucking Nullity
• ProPublica: Despite Disavowals, Leading Tech Companies Help Extremist Sites Monetize Hate
• Wired: The Alt-Right Can't Disown Charlottesville
• Globe and Mail: There aren’t ‘many sides.’ There is only one right side, and Trump is not on it

And in more tech-related news...

• The Verge: Medium will now pay writers based on how many claps they get
• Track Changes: Decentralize It! - I clapped several times for this.
• Did This Book Buy Its Way Onto The New York Times Bestseller List?
• A Designer Life: Stop Using The Cup of Coffee vs. $0.99 App Analogy
• MIT Technology Review: Eliminating the Human
• Wired: The Great Tech Panic: The Internet Is the Uncanniest Valley
• Data & Society: Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online
• EPJ Data Science: Instagram photos reveal predictive markers of depression
• Google will offer help when searching for 'clinical depression'

Games are fun?

• Longreads: Here at the End of All Things
• The Believer: Destroy All Monsters

And because we're all trading nuclear fallout tips now I guess?

• Ready.gov: Nuclear Blast
• Racked: How Washing Your Hair Could Help You Survive a Nuclear Blast
• Business Insider: Nuclear fallout safety: Getting in a car is the worst thing you can do

Maybe some music will help: