The problem with Netflix recommendations is they assume I liked a show just because I watched 13 hours of it.
I tried to organize a hide-and-seek tournament, but it was a complete failure. Good players are hard to find.
We’re about to enter the Digital Dark Ages
The Business Insider – Online archives are vanishing — and they’re taking our history with them. “The long-promised digital apocalypsehas finally arrived, and it was heralded by a blog post. Published on July 18, the post’s headline sounded pretty arcane. “Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available,” it declared.
I know, I know — not exactly an attack of alien zombies from the death dimension. But the news nevertheless freaked me out. It means another swath of the web is about to disappear. Here’s the gist: Google used to have an online service that generated pithy, user-friendly versions of long, commercially unwieldy uniform resource locators — the key addresses that identify everything on the web. Shorter URLs are easier to track and better for online commerce. Google stopped shortening addresses back in 2019, but the concise URLs it had already created kept right on doing their job. Click on one and it would take you to the right webpage, the way it’s supposed to.
No more. In the blog post, Google announced that as of next year, all of the existing shortened URLs are getting turned off. Poof. And on the web, if your URL doesn’t work, you might as well not exist. You are unreachable. Without laborious renaming, everything behind those links — billions of them, a decade of digital content — will become inaccessible. Gone. Ask not for whom the 404 message tolls. Now, rendering a bunch of web content invisible isn’t the end of days. Not by itself. The problem is, this kind of thing keeps happening. And it’s getting worse. Social networks go bankrupt. Digital journalism sites close up shop. Companies pull their online products.
Links rot. Files get not found. The cloud, as wags have noted, is really just “someone else’s computers.” And when clouds get turned off, not even the silver lining is left to tell the tale. Maybe none of this matters much right now. But it will. The internet has become the default archive of our history and culture. And the whole thing is burning down before our eyes, like the Library of Alexandria — only worse. For the first time since people started carving letters into rocks, we’re making a time with no history. We’re about to enter the Digital Dark Ages.
Attempts to quantify the scope of the problem are heartbreaking. Half of links in US Supreme Court decisions no longer lead to the information being cited. A report in 2021 found that a full quarter of the more than 2.2 million hyperlinks on The New York Times website were broken. Even worse, the Pew Research Center estimates that a quarter of everything put on the webfrom 2013 to 2023 is inaccessible — meaning almost 40% of the web as it existed in 2013 is simply not there today, a decade later…”
How Silicon Valley is disrupting democracy
MIT Technology Review – “Two books explore the price we’ve paid in handing over unprecedented power to Big Tech—and explain why it’s imperative we start taking it back. The internet loves a good neologism, especially if it can capture a purported vibe shift or explain a new trend. In 2013, the columnist Adrian Wooldridge coined a word that eventually did both. Writing for theEconomist, he warned of the coming “techlash,” a revolt against Silicon Valley’s rich and powerful fueled by the public’s growing realization that these “sovereigns of cyberspace” weren’t the benevolent bright-future bringers they claimed to be.
While Wooldridge didn’t say precisely when this techlash would arrive, it’s clear today that a dramatic shift in public opinion toward Big Tech and its leaders did in fact happen—and is arguably still happening. Say what you will about the legions of Elon Musk acolytes on X, but if an industry and its executives can bring together the likes of Elizabeth Warren and Lindsey Graham in shared condemnation, it’s definitely not winning many popularity contests. To be clear, there have always been critics of Silicon Valley’s very real excesses and abuses. But for the better part of the last two decades, many of those voices of dissent were either written off as hopeless Luddites and haters of progress or drowned out by a louder and far more numerous group of techno-optimists. Today, those same critics (along with many new ones) have entered the fray once more, rearmed with popular Substacks, media columns, and—increasingly—book deals.
Two of the more recent additions to the flourishing techlash genre—Rob Lalka’s The Venture Alchemists: How Big Tech Turned Profits into Power and Marietje Schaake’s The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley—serve as excellent reminders of why it started in the first place. Together, the books chronicle the rise of an industry that is increasingly using its unprecedented wealth and power to undermine democracy, and they outline what we can do to start taking some of that power back…”
