What I'm reading 4/25-5/2

2016-05-02

Satire Is Satire Even When People Fall For It, Mr. Jarvis - Ken White

  1. "Again, the joke is not only at the expense of Jeff Jarvis. The joke is, in part, at the expense of people who read carelessly."

  2. "I don't think ethics require satirists to pitch to the lowest possible common denominator, to make their satire ABC-at-8:00-PM obvious."

  3. "For years I've been trying to figure out who made this point: all satire is a shared joke between the writer and the reader at the expense of a hypothetical third person — the dupe — who takes it literally."

  4. "Remember: only things that could reasonably be understood as provably false statements of fact can be defamatory. Satire is not a statement of fact."

Decline of the English Murder - George Orwell

  1. "Jones and Hulten committed their murder to the tune of V1, and were convicted to the tune of V2."

  2. "The murderer should be a little man of the professional class — a dentist or a solicitor, say — living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs, and preferably in a semi-detached house, which will allow the neighbours to hear suspicious sounds through the wall."

Pop Goes the Digital Media Bubble - Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery

  1. "If we're going to have a functioning democracy, we'll need a press that can turn over rocks, and the days of that being financed by deep-pocketed media companies are drawing to a close."

  2. "A whole class of future-of-news pundits made a living pontificating about how 'legacy media' were getting their lunch eaten by digital-native startups."

  3. "What keeps them from making money now is that online advertising pays pennies."

Elixir RAM and the Template of Doom - Evan Miller

  1. "That is, the first template is delivered to the client in tiny 410 byte chunks — but when the empty string is included, the second template (along with the HTTP response headers) is flattened into one big 410 kilobyte string instead. Verrrrrrrry interesting."

  2. "But the Erlang VM, clever as it is, does produce some oddities. From my highly informal testing, it looks like ERL_SMALL_IO_BIN_LIMIT in particular should be cranked up a bit, perhaps to 512 bytes"

Traffic to Wikipedia terrorism entries plunged after Snowden revelations, study finds - Joseph Menn

  1. "Internet traffic to Wikipedia pages summarizing knowledge about terror groups and their tools plunged nearly 30 percent after revelations of widespread Web monitoring by the U.S. National Security Agency, suggesting that concerns about government snooping are hurting the ordinary pursuit of information."

Unmasking the Men Behind Zero Hedge, Wall Street's Renegade Blog - Tracy Alloway and Luke Kawa

  1. "With that in mind, the website has argued that 'pseudonymous speech' is necessary amid an atmosphere of stifled public dissent—hence the 'Tyler Durden' alias was born."

  2. "'What you are reading at Zero Hedge is nonsense. And you shouldn't support it,' Lokey wrote in an e-mail. 'Two guys who live a lifestyle you only dream of are pretending to speak for you.'"

Kinds and some type-foo - Eugene Yokota

  1. "In other words, (Functor) is a type constructor that accepts another type constructor. This is analogous to a higher-order function, and thus called higher-kinded type."

The MakerBot Obituary - Brian Benchoff

  1. "Including the 2015 yearly report, Stratasys has taken a total goodwill impairment charge of nearly one Billion dollars for MakerBot. Keep in mind Stratasys acquired MakerBot for $403 Million in stock. Stratasys has written off nearly double the value it paid through the failures of the MakerBot brand."

  2. "Throw money at anything, and the vultures will start circling."

Segfaults are our friends and teachers - Kamal Marhubi

  1. "I vaguely remembered that stacks on Linux default to 8MB. Could the segfault be from going past the stack limit?"

  2. "Segmentation faults are raised by the memory management unit (MMU), which is a piece of hardware!"