Latitude Financial breach impacts 225,000 customers
Anil Dash: “Mastodon and the fediverse are clearly taking off, bringing in millions of new users, and also organically inspiring a wave of technical innovation that dwarfs all of the efforts that the bribes and empty promises of the Web3 crypto bubble couldn’t touch. I’m even enjoying having settled into a relatively permanent new fediverse address at @anildash@me.dm, on Medium’s new Mastodon instance, which (along with Mozilla’s similar upcoming instance) should do a lot to legitimize the nascent open system.
It’s all great to see, though of course there are huge challenges that come along with this growth, and most of them (as always, with social media) are largely about people and culture, not technology. Nothing exemplifies these opportunities and challenges better than search. Search has long been the killer app of the web, since the days of Yahoo and AltaVista on to the long reign of Google’s dominance, to today’s web where SEO is dying and TikTok is (inexplicably, to text-lovers like me) increasingly on the rise.
In that complex environment, the intentional absence of substantial search features in the fediverse, especially in the flagship Mastodon experience that defines the nascent fediverse for so many new users, seems inexplicable. But search is also a signifier to those who pioneered and established the current era of the fediverse, symbolizing the extractive and exploitative hypergrowth systems that often ruined the positivity and promise of the human web…”
The Million: “Blurb is a funny sounding word. It’s phonetically unappealing, beginning and ending with unattractive voiced bilabial stops, and its definition—an advertisement or announcement, especially a laudatory one—carries some of the same meaning as another unattractive word, blubber, which evokes excess in its dual definition as both an expostulation of unrestrained emotion as well as excess fat.
For these reasons alone, any sensible person should beware of blurbs…Few writers decline to blurb a book since, more often than not, they have been personally appealed to by the author, or the author’s editor or agent (both of whom they are likely to know). More importantly, the blurber’s name will appear on the book in conjunction with the author and other blurbers, so the blurb is as much an advertisement for the blurber as it is an endorsement of the book…
For better or worse, blurbs are here to stay. But blurbers who follow the Shteyngartian operating principle (“no hyperbole can be hyperbolic enough”) risk exposing themselves to accusations of lack of critical discernment, or integrity, or both.
And, because most blurbs emblazoned on a book’s front and back cover (or on Amazon) tend to have, at best, a tenuous relation to the reality of the text, the final watchword for readers who turn to them when considering a purchase should be: caveat emptor.”
