From “Heavy Purchasers” of Pregnancy Tests to the Depression-Prone: We Found 650,000 Ways Advertisers Label You – The Markup. If you spend any time online, you probably have some idea that the digital advertising industry is constantly collecting data about you, including a lot of personal information, and sorting you into specialized categories so you’re more likely to buy the things they advertise to you. But in a rare look at just how deep—and weird—the rabbit hole of targeted advertising gets, The Markup has analyzed a database of 650,000 of these audience segments, newly unearthed on the website of Microsoft’s ad platform Xandr. (more)

Erin Kissane has been writing, editing bodies of knowledge, and nurturing communities online for 20 years. In early 2020, she co-founded and co-led the COVID Tracking Project (COVID-19) at The Atlantic, a crisis public health data project that organized the efforts of hundreds of volunteers to assemble the cleanest, most thorough, and most accessible dataset on the pandemic in the United States. Before that, she built inter-organizational connections and connections between newsroom technology, design, and data teams for OpenNews, an organization launched from the Knight Foundation and Mozilla Foundation. https://erinkissane.com/

Pinetta: a federated pinboard thingy. (more)

Henry Farrell: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Mastodon. Erin Kissane wrote a great essay on the differences between Mastodon and Bluesky. ((2023-04-30) Kissane Blue Skies Over Mastodon) (more)

Erin Kissane: Patterns, prophets & priests. I’ve been working on communication and community online for a couple of decades, but the past few years have shaken up my understanding of what we’re really doing here. (more)

Erin Kissane: All this unmobilized love. Straight out of undergrad, I applied to a bookselling job and didn’t get it, so I started working in tech (more)

Erin Kissane: Matches, pebbles, hair, salt. Two years ago, I left the most meaningful and by far the most wrenching job I’ve ever had. I wrote about it before we wound down, and afterward said almost nothing. (more)

Scott Alexander: Attempts To Put Statistics In Context, Put Into Context. There are many statistics that are much higher than you would intuitively think, and many other statistics that are much lower than you would intuitively think. A dishonest person can use one of these for “context”, and then you will incorrectly think the effect is very high or very low. (more)

An Interview With Ted Kaehler. The following is an interview conducted via email (September 2021) with Ted Kaehler, who was in the unique position to have worked extensively both on Smalltalk and HyperCard. (more)

Erin Kissane: Blue Skies Over Mastodon. In the early 80s, my mom worked a couple shifts a month at a little small-town food co-op that smelled like nutritional mummy. (more)

Dan Hon: s15e01: Marks on Flat Planes. Yes, I suppose I have thoughts about Apple Vision Pro just like everybody goddamn else and I don’t know – I’m just tired? (more)

Erin Kissane: Tomorrow & tomorrow & tomorrow. Nothing of any importance happens in a building or a town except what is defined within the patterns which repeat themselves. —Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building. At the core of Christopher Alexander’s work is the belief that the shape and character of our spaces cannot help but influence the events that repeat inside them (more)

When something is overdone, typically because of weird incentives.

iatrogenic, baby - Product Quality (more)

Venkatesh Rao on his Iron Man-inspired Schlep Asset Puzzle Insight Package Aesthetic (SAPIPA) FrameWork: Understanding the interaction of these 3+3 input and output elements can make a big difference to how you attack complex problems (Problem Solving, Grand Challenge)... Complex problems contain three sub-problems: schlep, puzzle and package... When you solve complex problems right, you are left with three corresponding intangible things of value: an asset, an insight and an aesthetic, which make the solutions both durable and generative (the solutions gradually and intelligently expand to occupy bigger problem spaces, realizing the potential of the original specific solution)... My definition of a good solution to a complex problem is one that solves the immediate problem, is built to last and generates more potential than it uses. The more I think about complex problems, the more I get convinced that the built to last part is critical. Almost all failures are caused by not aiming for durability... Good solutions have three parts, an asset that is the fruit of the Schlep Work, an insight that is at the heart of how the puzzle is solved (which, in the best cases, will apply to a bigger class of similar puzzles that can be solved with sufficient imagination), and an aesthetic that determines how the solution is put together into a package. (more)

android app for connecting devices (mac to android, android-to-android, etc.)

complex problem problem-solving approach embracing uncertainty, from Saras Sarasvathy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saras_Sarasvathy

Taylor Pearson on How Entrepreneurs Figure Out What They Want: Effectual Reasoning (which he later re-framed as Effective Entrepreneur) (more)

Is there any fiction today that is also heroic (hero's journey in service of the Transcendentals, not swords) and instructional? Triangulating among (more)

Ray Kurzweil novel: Danielle: Chronicles of a Superheroine ISBN:1614756392 https://www.danielleworld.com/ (more)