Noviembre y diciembre

En Español

• La perfumería ‘low-cost’ que más vende en España es un polvorín laboral a punto de estallar. Entre otras perlas la mujer del propietario de PRIMOR es la representante sindical de UGT de la empresa.

Vídeos

• Amy Coney Barrett - Philosophy Tube, on originalism and the recent SCOTUS nomination.
• Five Things You Can’t Do On British Television
• How China Broke the World’s Recycling, clickbaity title but it’s interesting nonetheles

Films & books

• Fateful Findings by Neil Breen is one of the worst movies (if not the worst) that I have ever watched. It is impressive how someone can do such a bad job at making a movie.
• Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. It never ceases to amaze me how can someone believe such an over-the-top parody of antisemitism and general conspiratorial beliefs but well, it’s 2020 I guess. The Rudy Giuliani scene was… something. Content warning for racism, antisemitism, conspiracy theories.
• House, the OST is brilliant.
• Succession, seasons 1 & 2.
• Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang.

Math & Computer Science

• Unraveling the JPEG, on how JPEG encoding works
• How Flash games shaped the video game industry, Flash nostalgia done right.
• The Exotic Programming Ideas series by Stephen Diehl is great, see in particular Part 2 (Term Rewriting) and Part 3 (Effect Systems).
• Cross-site leaks wiki on side-channel attacks on privacy and security on modern browsers.
• Unicode Security Considerations: everything you wanted to know about Unicode security.
• Unicode Identifier and Pattern Syntax: same as before but about internationalized variable and function identifiers.
• Go Type Parameters - Draft Design. The current proposal on Go generics.
• Good-bye ESNI, hello ECH!: a good step towards a more private web.
• Improving DNS Privacy with Oblivious DoH in 1.1.1.1. I hope Firefox ends up using this internally, it would allay some (justified) privacy fears by users.
• Shuffling things up: Applying Group Theory in Advent of Code: a fun article on applying some (very simple) group theory to solve shuffling problems.

Science & economics

• Breaking the Universe in Dungeons & Dragons With Physics 101, reminds me of Randall Munroe’s What If book.
• Questions About Trees on models about biodiversity.
• What Does Bill Gates’ Favorite Energy Guru, Vaclav Smil, Get Wrong? Some key important things apparently.
• No, Productivity Does Not Explain Income. I don’t love the tone of the article but the idea of comparing Gini indices is very cool.
• Property Is Only Another Name for Monopoly. I think this would be awesome for at least certain kinds of property even if applying it to personal property sounds like a terrible idea.
• The Priority Heuristic: a simple process model for how humans actually decide.

Politics & society

• The World Is Trapped in America’s Culture War.
• Face for sale: Leaks and lawsuits blight Russia facial recognition. Terrifying
• My Dad, the Pornographer.
• Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources. This is an awesome resource for checking if a source is generally reliable!
• The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free ❧ Current Affairs: on paywalls and the availability of information.
• Abolishing the Economics Nobel Isn’t Enough ❧ Current Affairs: economics is broken as a field.
• MindGeek: The secretive owner of Pornhub and RedTube
• A growing number of Americans are going hungry. A growing number of people around the world are
• The Library Freedom Project: awesome resources for libraries to promote freedom of speech and privacy.
• ‘Is anybody in there?’ Life on the inside as a locked-in patient – podcast. I only had a couple of interesting podcasts this round so this fits better here.

Politics in tech

• Ok Google: please publish your DKIM secret keys: on why Google should rotate their DKIM keys.
• Facebook Struggles to Balance Civility and Growth, with pearls such as “The results were good except that it led to a decrease in sessions, which motivated us to try a different approach,” and “that was vetoed by policy executives who feared it would disproportionately show notifications to people who shared false news from right-wing websites”.
• Secret Amazon Reports Expose the Company’s Surveillance of Labor and Environmental Groups, see also The Pinkertons Still Never Sleep and Amazon Hired Pinkertons to Union Bust
• A Prominent AI Ethics Researcher Says Google Fired Her, see also Timnit Gebru’s team at Google is going public with their side of the story and We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says.