Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Photo credit: AP My smart colleague George Dvorsky over at Gizmodo published a defense of “radical life extension” this morning. This is a largely pseudo- or quasi-scientific pursuit favored by billionaire parasite Peter Thiel (among others), based upon the idea that, essentially, death is a pathology rather than a natural fact of existence, and thus…
Image: HBO Wikileaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange blatantly lied about publishing only the “last four digits” of credit card numbers from democratic donors during an appearance on the HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday. “We did not publish full credit card numbers of donors,” Assange said in response to a torrent of criticism…
Photo: Heisenberg Media/Flickr Billionaire douchebag Peter Thiel has plenty of crazy ideas, but his commitment to radical life extension isn’t one of them. Without question, Thiel clings to some rather obnoxious ideas. An ardent libertopian and admirer of the pseudo-intellectual Ayn Rand, the tech mogul believes that freedom and democracy are incompatible, and he questions…
In 2015, then-Twitter CEO Dick Costolo secretly ordered employees to filter out abusive and hateful replies to President Barack Obama during a Q&A session, sources tell BuzzFeed News. According to these sources, the May 2015 #AskPOTUS town hall came out of Twitter senior leadership’s frustration with the fact that platforms like Reddit had become home…
For nearly its entire existence, Twitter has not just tolerated abuse and hate speech, it’s virtually been optimized to accommodate it. With public backlash at an all-time high and growth stagnating, what is the platform that declared itself “the free speech wing of the free speech party” to do? BuzzFeed News talks to the people…
I don’t normally post about politics (I’m not particularly savvy about polling, which is where data science has had the largest impact on politics). But this weekend I saw a hypothesis about Donald Trump’s twitter account that simply begged to be investigated with data: Every non-hyperbolic tweet is from iPhone (his staff). Every hyperbolic tweet…
Walt Mossberg is a legend. I mean it—he’s someone I’ve tried to emulate for most of my professional career. He’s made a great living testing gadgets, hanging out with influential technologists, and giving everyday people advice on how to better use their consumer electronics. But lately, it seems like Mossberg’s love affair with tech is…
Last week I happened upon a very bad tweet and it’s been haunting me ever since, filling me with a quiet and persistent rage I can only release through the art of the written word. From the deranged mind of Silicon Valley’s Balaji Srinivasan—member of the board of Andreessen Horowitz and CEO of some Bitcoin…
Just four months after causing outrage over a similarly offensive selfie lens, Snapchat has incurred the wrath of its users by enabling what many see as, effectively, a yellowface lens. According to Mic, users called out the social platform on Twitter yesterday, saying the lens caused people’s faces to look like racist Asian caricatures. While Snapchat has…
Today we’re excited to announce the release of PressForward 4.0. Our newest release continues our move toward a dependency injected structure and brings significant performance upgrades as well as several feature enhancements. Updates to the Open Graph library, the methodology for building nominations in the Nominate This Bookmarklet, and changes to how post meta is…