Some Things I Read Last Week Jan 16 — Jan 22
The battle against nipples, the surprising design of the NYC Subway, new tech in Augmented Reality, and more in this week’s edition of Some Things I Read Last Week.
In case you missed last week:
Interesting
They were removed to help keep tweets to 140 characters.
Don’t you hate it when you mean to hit “Save”, but you accidentally hit “Delete Forever”?
Looks like I might need to update my Ancestry.com
Society, Culture, & Politics
It’s disgusting that Obama literally waited till the last minute to do this, but I’m glad that she will finally get some of the freedom that she deserves.
As men working in tech, we need to address the misogyny in our field, and make drastic changes to course correct.
Trying to ban women’s nipples is not just sexists, but an effort in futility.
I had never heard Sammus before, but I’m loving her lyrics and her beats.
Sammus is just as likely to rap about retro video games or Harry Potter as she is about racially driven police violence or female sexual liberation.
Before rejoicing, it’s important to realize that Washington doesn’t want to admit any association to Stuxnet, and they’d prefer this all ended as quietly as possible.
An unfortunate and unsurprising change.
Trump has a 100 day plan? So does the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and theirs involves protecting our safety, privacy, and liberty.
Technology
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had nothing but glowing things to say about Tesla’s Autopilot system.
What can’t a SNES play?
A preface before reading, the high speed trading referred to in this article is an artifact of the bitcoin exchanges, not of bitcoin itself.
IPFS is an exciting new technology that may be the future of the decentralized internet. In the mean time, it’s already showing how it can improve existing systems like software distribution.
The world of Javascript seems to be constantly changing. Here’s some of the projects to keep an eye on as we head into 2017.
If you’re looking into using a VPN to avoid prying eyes, check out this comprehensive comparison of VPN providers.
How Google is using basic statistics to find malware.
Design
The New York City Subway System is a classic example of beautifully thought out, user centric design. This articles goes over the history and thought involved.
The article does a good job of covering Fitts’s law in practice; giving a better understanding for why users have trouble using your mobile app.
This article made me realize why some of secondary and accent colors looked a bit off. It’s a pretty basic idea, but very helpful.
Chat based interfaces are all the rage right now. Here are some great tips to help you get started.
Don’t want to make flow diagrams in Visio? Try Sketch.
Virtual Reality
We’re in the early days of building the VR web, and it’s going to take lots of innovations like this to take us to the next level.
Listening to some people talk about VR really reminds me of this article.
This article sent me down a rabbit hole to see how far true, diffraction grating based, holograms have come since I used to play with them in the early 2000s. It’ll be interesting to see if any of this tech makes it into consumer AR hardware.
Taking art from Tiltbrush and putting it into a Unity project just got easier.
Artificial Intelligence
A great walkthrough that shows how easy it is to get started in AI, and a glimpse into how driverless cars view the world.
Keras makes deep learning AI 10x easier, so I couldn’t be more excited about this announcement.
