What I Read or Listened to This Week


Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:

  • Why I’m done with Chrome - “Where Facebook will routinely change privacy settings and apologize later, Google has upheld clear privacy policies that it doesn’t routinely change. Sure, when it collects, it collects gobs of data, but in the cases where Google explicitly makes user security and privacy promises — it tends to keep them. This seems to be changing.”

  • Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible? - “Today, Google and Facebook command roughly three-quarters of the online advertising market. Extracting pennies from pageviews is currently the name of the game for many small news publishers, though that holds disastrous consequences from a user experience standpoint.”

  • Rodney Brooks on Artificial Intelligence

  • WTF?: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us - A good read on the lessons from the early days of tech and open source can be used to improve the future. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on government as a platform.

  • Software monocultures, imperialism, and weapons of math destruction - “The underlying issue is a lack of diversity in tools and platforms. A case of having all our eggs in one basket. Of minimizing individual risk — by using the best available or most convenient system — at the cost of increasing systemic risk — because everyone else uses the same system.”

See also