Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
When Mark Zuckerberg announced he would give away 99% of his Facebook shares — currently worth around $45 billion — the initial impulse from many was to assume the money would all go to charity. Indeed, very many news organizations described the donation as either going to charity, or a charitable trust. Not so, a…
The fate of troubled Internet portal Yahoo Inc. may be decided in a marathon series of board meetings this week. Yahoo’s board plans to weigh a potential sale of the company’s core business during a series of meetings beginning Wednesday and continuing through Friday, people familiar with the matter said. The board is expected to…
This morning, Telegram users on WhatsApp noticed something strange. The chat app was blocking any links to Telegram.me, a rival chat app that grew popular in the wake of earlier WhatsApp outages. The URLs still appeared as messages, but they did not register as hyperlinks and users were blocked from copying them to paste into another app…
In a savvy PR maneuver, today Mark Zuckerberg used the birth of his daughter Max to advertise to the world the fact that he’s decided to give away 99% of his Facebook shares (roughly $45 billion today) to charity (over the course of the rest of his life, not all at once). It sounds angelic,…
According to at least one online analytics provider—namely, comScore—the Washington Post surpassed the New York Times in web traffic in October, with roughly 67 million unique visitors compared to about 66 million for the Times. This is interesting in part because the Post has closed the readership gap with its New York-based competitor at a…
Welcome Adobe Animate CC, a new era for Flash Professional For nearly two decades, Flash Professional has been the standard for producing rich animations on the web. Because of the emergence of HTML5 and demand for animations that leverage web standards, we completely rewrote the tool over the past few years to incorporate native HTML5…
is this thing on? can you hear me now? Man, living in the future was supposed to include jet packs and flying cars, but instead all we got was terrorists who keep thinking of innovative ways to blow stuff up so we to take off our goddamn shoes at the airport. Oh, and we got…
Nick Bostrom, a philosopher focussed on A.I. risks, says, “The very long-term future of humanity may be relatively easy to predict.” Credit Illustration by Todd St. John Barrier Status: ‘none’ I. Omens Last year, a curious nonfiction book became a Times best-seller: a dense meditation on artificial intelligence by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who…
Early one weekend morning in January 2014, Janet was sleeping fitfully in her parents’ home in Toronto. A junior studying elementary education at a nearby college, she had gone home for the weekend in a state of nervous collapse. For months, someone going by the name ‘‘Obnoxious’’ had been harassing her online. He had called…
When James Kennicott, now 86, was young, he loved ice-skating on the river near his home in Waterloo, Iowa. One day, the ice cracked under his feet and he plunged into the water below. He didn’t have hot water at home. So he broke into his school to take a hot shower. “I think that…