The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Technical Debt and Technical Wealth
I read “Forget Technical Debt. Here’s How to Build Technical Wealth.” Lemons? Make lemonade. Works almost every time.
The write up begins with a reminder that recent code which is tough to improve is a version of legacy code. I understand. I highlighted this statement:
Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Technical Debt — Old Legacy Systems That Crash”
How Obama and Google plan to rig Election 2016
But the way we elect presidents changed forever with Obama. Problem is, that change has gone right over most of our heads. While roughly 50% of Americans were reeling in shock over how a largely absentee senator could be elected president back in 2008, Obama and search engine goliath Google were working out the details on how to make digital Democrat presidency a permanent fixture in our lives.
Continue reading “Phantom Phixer: How Google Will Rig the Election…”
The Yahooing of Alphabet Google
I read “Google Isn’t Safe from Yahoo’s Fate.” I learned in this article:
Google is on the wrong side of major trends in the digital advertising industry: Google captures direct response dollars as digital ad spend shifts up the funnel, its focus is still on browsers and websites as engagement is moving into apps and feeds, Google is deeply dependent on search during a shift to serendipitous discovery and ads designed to interrupt the user’s attention are being replaced by advertising designed to engage them. Its competitor, Facebook, is on the right side of all these trends.
As revisionist, autocratic states like Russia sharpen their use—and abuse—of disinformation, liberal democracies are failing to keep pace. The Kremlin’s use of information as a weapon is not new, but its sophistication and intensity are increasing. Belatedly, the West has begun to realize that disinformation poses a serious threat to the United States and its European allies, primarily the “frontline states”—Poland, the Baltic states, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Ukraine—but also to Western Europe and North America.
A Famed Hacker Is Grading Thousands of Programs — and May Revolutionize Software in the Process
Bottom line up front: Firefox and Microsoft suck.
They are called “pirate libraries,” but one would be better-served envisioning Robin Hood than Blackbeard. Atlas Obscura takes a look at these floaters of scientific-journal copyrights in, “The Rise of Pirate Libraries.” These are not physical libraries, but virtual ones, where researchers and other curious folks can study articles otherwise accessible only through expensive scientific journal paywalls. Reporter Sarah Laskow writes:
“The creators of these repositories are a small group who try to keep a low profile, since distributing copyrighted material in this way is illegal. Many of them are academics. The largest pirate libraries have come from Russia’s cultural orbit, but the documents they collect are used by people around the world, in countries both wealthy and poor. Pirate libraries have become so popular that in 2015, Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers in America, went to court to try to shut down two of the most popular, Sci-Hub and Library Genesis.
Palantir Thiel: An If Then Chess Move?
I read “The Peter Principle: Why Thiel’s GOP Convention Speech Will Be about Him and Not about Silicon Valley.” Interesting write up but I think the “about” part is possibly incorrect. I think the speech just might have been about Palantir, procurement, and displacing the traditional US government defense contractors. The stakes are not ego; the stakes are hundreds of millions in technology business. Silicon Valley and money. It is possible that some Palantir-think informs the political enthusiasms of Mr. Thiel.
Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Palantir Thiel & Trump – Displacing Old Tech & Old Complex?”
