µ-Posts (What is this?)

Cool talk by Bartosz Milewski on defunctionalization, called Replacing functions with data (he also wrote a blog post on the topic). In particular, I liked the idea at the end that, since functions can't be serialised, defunctionalization can help with distributed computation.

Edit: There was also an interesting talk "Deconstructing Lambdas" by Chris Penner on a related topic.

The end of my first day of quarantine. I'm staying in my flat and eating food powder. It feels a bit like being an astronaut with an abundance of gravity. 🙂 It's thirteen more days to go, wish me luck!

We’re proud to officially announce the Fairphone 3+ 🙌 It has improved cameras, upgraded software and even more fair materials, but here’s the twist: The exact same modules can also be used to upgrade the Fairphone 3. 🌍 📱 Read more: https://bit.ly/2D2uIpJ

I'm supporting Matt's initiative to make RSS great again. It's one my favourite web technologies. I used it already on my first ever website I made in 2005.

What it's like to fly these days? Despite Ryanair claiming that it's completely safe, they do absolutely nothing to remind people to keep the 2m distance in the queue. Also, I could only find two disinfection points at Stansted airport and those that I found were completely used up. I would expect the flight industry (i.e. airlines and airports alike) to behave more responsibly in the current circumstances.

Australians have suprise me. They came up with a fairly reasonable proposal to redraw the relationship of news organisations with Facebook and Google. See the explanation at politico.eu.

It looks much more sensible than the recent EU regulation that I wrote about earlier.

A nice talk by rysiek about decentralisation and about his project called samizdat. He also stresses the importance of static websites.

The talk itself can be found here and the transcript/notes of the talk here.

This is pure gold, a fairy tale about social networks and the current state of the web: The Serfs of Facebook, by Zach Alberico 😀

#HongKong swiftly approves a law effectively extending the Great Firewall of China to Hong Kong. There is no doubt that this is the end of Hong Kong that we know today. Source: https://protonmail.com/blog/china-censorship-hong-kong/

Wow, Replika.ai is yet another of Black Mirror's predictions coming true. See the review by Quartz on youtube.

This is scary https://www.nothingprivate.ml/

Edit: also check out https://amiunique.org/fp and https://panopticlick.eff.org/.

We all carry symbols of modern-day slavery in our pockets https://ethical.net/technology/the-slavery-supported-the-device-in-your-pocket/

I missed this great news from a couple of months back. The EU has standardised what #repairability means. Soon we might see score (on scale from A to E) when buying electronics evaluating its repeatability. https://de.ifixit.com/News/35879/repairability-standard-en45554

Olympus is selling their camera division, according to the official News Release.

(Despite saying the opposite less than two months ago on imaging-resource.com)

If Spotify chooses to continue on their current path of exclusive content it will break interoperability with other podcast apps and force listeners of those shows to use the Spotify podcast client. I suspect that many listeners will also transfer their existing subscriptions into Spotify to avoid needing two separate podcast clients.