Publish untappd check-ins to micro.blog

{
    "type": "entry",
    "author": {
        "name": "Kh\u00fcrt Williams",
        "url": "https://islandinthenet.com/",
        "photo": null
    },
    "url": "https://islandinthenet.com/publish-untappd-check-ins-to-micro-blog/",
    "published": "2021-04-27T10:50:46-04:00",
    "content": {
        "html": "<img src=\"https://i0.wp.com/islandinthenet.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Screen-Shot-2021-04-27-at-10.34.24-AM.jpeg?fit=891%2C892&amp;quality=100&amp;ssl=1\" alt=\"screen shot from Zapier\" /><p>Carl Rustung wrote his original post, <a href=\"https://carlrustung.no/blog/insta-zapier-howto/\">Zapping Instagram pics to micro.blog</a> on Wed. January 30th, 2019. I wanted my Untappd check-ins automatically posted to my micro.blog. With some trial and error, I was able to tweak his Zap to do it for me.</p>\n<p>Here\u2019s how:</p>\n<ul><li>Set up a new <a href=\"https://micro.blog/account/apps\">access token</a> for Zapier in your micro.blog account settings.</li>\n<li>Make a new Zap. Choose Untappd for your Trigger App and trigger the zap on \u201cNew Check-In\u201d.</li>\n<li>Connect your Untappd account.</li>\n<li>Select a sample post.</li>\n<li>Add \u201cWebhooks\u201d for your Action step, and select the POST request.</li>\n</ul><img src=\"https://i0.wp.com/islandinthenet.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Screen-Shot-2021-04-27-at-10.40.00-AM.jpeg?resize=888%2C368&amp;quality=100&amp;ssl=1\" alt=\"Zapier screen shot\" />Add \u201cWebhooks\u201d for your Action step, and select the POST request.<ul><li>Use <a href=\"https://micro.blog/micropub\">micro.blog/micropub</a> as the URL and \u201cForm\u201d as the Payload Type</li>\n<li>Under Data, you\u2019re going to need 4 key-value pairs:</li>\n<li>\n<ul><li>h: entry (literally, write \u201centry\u201d)</li>\n</ul></li>\n<li>\n<ul><li>access_token: [your access token from step 1]</li>\n</ul></li>\n</ul><img src=\"https://i0.wp.com/islandinthenet.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Screen-Shot-2021-04-27-at-10.34.24-AM.jpeg?resize=891%2C892&amp;quality=100&amp;ssl=1\" alt=\"screen shot from Zapier\" />Use the Zapier tokens to create the content you want<ul><li>content: Use the Zapier tokens to create the content you want. I used the following.</li>\n</ul><pre><code><br />&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=\"https://untappd.com/user/khurtwilliams/checkin/{{110699014__checkin_id}}\"&gt;{{110699014__beer__beer_name}}&lt;/a&gt; ({{110699014__beer__beer_abv}}% ABV {{110699014__beer__beer_style}}) by &lt;a href=\"https://untappd.com/{{110699014__brewery__brewery_page_url}}\" /&gt;{{110699014__brewery__brewery_name}}&lt;/a&gt; ({{110699014__brewery__location__brewery_city}}, {{110699014__brewery__location__brewery_state}}). Rating:{{110699014__rating_score}}/5&lt;/p&gt;\n\n\n&lt;p&gt;{{110699014__checkin_comment}}&lt;/p&gt;\n\n\n&lt;p&gt;&lt;figure&gt;&lt;img src=\"{{110699014__media__items[]photo__photo_img_og}}\" alt=\"{{110699014__beer__beer_name}}\" /&gt;&lt;figcaption&gt;{{110699014__beer__beer_name}}&lt;/figcaption&gt;&lt;/figure&gt;&lt;/p&gt;\n\n\n</code></pre>\n<ul><li>Leave the rest of the inputs alone, and click Continue.</li>\n<li>Click the \u201cSend Test\u2026\u201d-button, and your sample Untappd post should appear on your micro.blog timeline.</li>\n</ul><p>You can see examples of this in my <a href=\"https://khurt.blog/categories/beer\">beer category. page</a> on micro.blog.</p>",
        "text": "Carl Rustung wrote his original post, Zapping Instagram pics to micro.blog on Wed. January 30th, 2019. I wanted my Untappd check-ins automatically posted to my micro.blog. With some trial and error, I was able to tweak his Zap to do it for me.\nHere\u2019s how:\nSet up a new access token for Zapier in your micro.blog account settings.\nMake a new Zap. Choose Untappd for your Trigger App and trigger the zap on \u201cNew Check-In\u201d.\nConnect your Untappd account.\nSelect a sample post.\nAdd \u201cWebhooks\u201d for your Action step, and select the POST request.\nAdd \u201cWebhooks\u201d for your Action step, and select the POST request.Use micro.blog/micropub as the URL and \u201cForm\u201d as the Payload Type\nUnder Data, you\u2019re going to need 4 key-value pairs:\n\nh: entry (literally, write \u201centry\u201d)\n\n\naccess_token: [your access token from step 1]\n\nUse the Zapier tokens to create the content you wantcontent: Use the Zapier tokens to create the content you want. I used the following.\n\n<p><a href=\"https://untappd.com/user/khurtwilliams/checkin/{{110699014__checkin_id}}\">{{110699014__beer__beer_name}}</a> ({{110699014__beer__beer_abv}}% ABV {{110699014__beer__beer_style}}) by <a href=\"https://untappd.com/{{110699014__brewery__brewery_page_url}}\" />{{110699014__brewery__brewery_name}}</a> ({{110699014__brewery__location__brewery_city}}, {{110699014__brewery__location__brewery_state}}). Rating:{{110699014__rating_score}}/5</p>\n\n\n<p>{{110699014__checkin_comment}}</p>\n\n\n<p><figure><img src=\"{{110699014__media__items[]photo__photo_img_og}}\" alt=\"{{110699014__beer__beer_name}}\" /><figcaption>{{110699014__beer__beer_name}}</figcaption></figure></p>\n\n\n\nLeave the rest of the inputs alone, and click Continue.\nClick the \u201cSend Test\u2026\u201d-button, and your sample Untappd post should appear on your micro.blog timeline.\nYou can see examples of this in my beer category. page on micro.blog."
    },
    "name": "Publish untappd check-ins to micro.blog",
    "post-type": "article",
    "_id": "20072444",
    "_source": "242",
    "_is_read": true
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Chris Aldrich stream.boffosocko.com/profile/chrisaldrich

{
    "type": "entry",
    "published": "2021-04-27T16:41:24+00:00",
    "url": "http://stream.boffosocko.com/2021/biswassholanki-ive-wanted-to-try-out-ghost-but-this-part",
    "syndication": [
        "https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/status/1387084741657178115"
    ],
    "in-reply-to": [
        "https://twitter.com/BiswasSholanki/status/1386937046468419584",
        "https://shobiz.hashnode.dev/webmentions-in-ghost-and-the-challenges-that-i-faced"
    ],
    "content": {
        "text": "@BiswasSholanki I've wanted to try out Ghost, but this part has been a blocker. https://indieweb.org/webmention.js might be a place to look for some inspiration. I'd invite you to join us for this upcoming event which will certainly touch on your topic: https://events.indieweb.org/2021/05/webmentions-beyond-webmention-io-zG4JpHhZShVA",
        "html": "@BiswasSholanki I've wanted to try out Ghost, but this part has been a blocker. <a href=\"https://indieweb.org/webmention.js\">https://indieweb.org/webmention.js</a> might be a place to look for some inspiration. I'd invite you to join us for this upcoming event which will certainly touch on your topic: <a href=\"https://events.indieweb.org/2021/05/webmentions-beyond-webmention-io-zG4JpHhZShVA\">https://events.indieweb.org/2021/05/webmentions-beyond-webmention-io-zG4JpHhZShVA</a>"
    },
    "author": {
        "type": "card",
        "name": "Chris Aldrich",
        "url": "http://stream.boffosocko.com/profile/chrisaldrich",
        "photo": "http://stream.boffosocko.com/file/600427b81f7785e704eadfe511a9270f/thumb.jpg"
    },
    "post-type": "reply",
    "_id": "20069366",
    "_source": "192",
    "_is_read": true
}

Chris Aldrich stream.boffosocko.com/profile/chrisaldrich

{
    "type": "entry",
    "published": "2021-04-25T22:35:55+00:00",
    "url": "http://stream.boffosocko.com/2021/sillygwailo-until-there-are-consuming-use-cases-for-it-its",
    "syndication": [
        "https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/status/1386449077072711680"
    ],
    "in-reply-to": [
        "https://twitter.com/sillygwailo/status/1386416291502645249"
    ],
    "content": {
        "text": "@sillygwailo Until there are consuming use cases for it, it's not relevant, but basic text with `h-product` and a `dt-published` for first dose datetime and `dt-updated` for subsequent boosters might make sense based on existing work? See: https://microformats.org/wiki/process",
        "html": "<a href=\"https://twitter.com/sillygwailo\">@sillygwailo</a> Until there are consuming use cases for it, it's not relevant, but basic text with `h-product` and a `dt-published` for first dose datetime and `dt-updated` for subsequent boosters might make sense based on existing work? See: <a href=\"https://microformats.org/wiki/process\">https://microformats.org/wiki/process</a>"
    },
    "author": {
        "type": "card",
        "name": "Chris Aldrich",
        "url": "http://stream.boffosocko.com/profile/chrisaldrich",
        "photo": "http://stream.boffosocko.com/file/600427b81f7785e704eadfe511a9270f/thumb.jpg"
    },
    "post-type": "reply",
    "_id": "20030535",
    "_source": "192",
    "_is_read": true
}

Chris Aldrich stream.boffosocko.com/profile/chrisaldrich

{
    "type": "entry",
    "published": "2021-04-24T18:38:31+00:00",
    "url": "http://stream.boffosocko.com/2021/andrejaenisch-sonke-ahrens-book-how-to-take-smart-notes-about",
    "syndication": [
        "https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/status/1386027365738762242"
    ],
    "in-reply-to": [
        "https://twitter.com/AndreJaenisch/status/1385861818975981569"
    ],
    "content": {
        "text": "@AndreJaenisch Sonke Ahrens' book How to Take Smart Notes about Luhmann's method is very solid (https://bookshop.org/a/17195/9781542866507). Lots of systems out there to implement it. I like @obsdmd, but other platforms listed here: https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book",
        "html": "<a href=\"https://twitter.com/AndreJaenisch\">@AndreJaenisch</a> Sonke Ahrens' book How to Take Smart Notes about Luhmann's method is very solid (<a href=\"https://bookshop.org/a/17195/9781542866507\">https://bookshop.org/a/17195/9781542866507</a>). Lots of systems out there to implement it. I like <a href=\"https://twitter.com/obsdmd\">@obsdmd</a>, but other platforms listed here: <a href=\"https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book\">https://indieweb.org/commonplace_book</a>"
    },
    "author": {
        "type": "card",
        "name": "Chris Aldrich",
        "url": "http://stream.boffosocko.com/profile/chrisaldrich",
        "photo": "http://stream.boffosocko.com/file/600427b81f7785e704eadfe511a9270f/thumb.jpg"
    },
    "post-type": "reply",
    "_id": "20007548",
    "_source": "192",
    "_is_read": true
}

Jeremy Keith adactio.com

{
    "type": "entry",
    "published": "2021-04-23T10:09:33Z",
    "url": "https://adactio.com/links/18059",
    "category": [
        "indieweb",
        "personal",
        "publishing",
        "words",
        "writing",
        "sharing",
        "music",
        "piano"
    ],
    "bookmark-of": [
        "https://matthiasott.com/notes/no-wrong-notes"
    ],
    "content": {
        "text": "No Wrong Notes \u00b7 Matthias Ott \u2013 User Experience Designer\n\n\n\n\n  A personal website ain\u2019t got no wrong words.",
        "html": "<h3>\n<a class=\"p-name u-bookmark-of\" href=\"https://matthiasott.com/notes/no-wrong-notes\">\nNo Wrong Notes \u00b7 Matthias Ott \u2013 User Experience Designer\n</a>\n</h3>\n\n<blockquote>\n  <p>A personal website ain\u2019t got no wrong words.</p>\n</blockquote>"
    },
    "author": {
        "type": "card",
        "name": "Jeremy Keith",
        "url": "https://adactio.com/",
        "photo": "https://adactio.com/images/photo-150.jpg"
    },
    "post-type": "bookmark",
    "_id": "19971897",
    "_source": "2",
    "_is_read": true
}

Marty McGuire martymcgui.re

{
    "type": "entry",
    "published": "2021-04-19T11:39:07-0400",
    "rsvp": "yes",
    "url": "https://martymcgui.re/2021/04/19/113907/",
    "in-reply-to": [
        "https://events.indieweb.org/2021/05/webmentions-beyond-webmention-io-zG4JpHhZShVA"
    ],
    "content": {
        "text": "I'm going!Looking forward to this IndieWeb Popup! Despite my occasional salty-sounding post about Webmention I am very optimistic about their power as a tool for the web.",
        "html": "I'm going!<p>Looking forward to this IndieWeb Popup! Despite my occasional <a href=\"https://martymcgui.re/2020/07/15/what-we-talk-about-when-were-talking-about-webmentions/\">salty-sounding post about Webmention</a> I am very optimistic about their power as a tool for the web.</p>"
    },
    "author": {
        "type": "card",
        "name": "Marty McGuire",
        "url": "https://martymcgui.re/",
        "photo": "https://martymcgui.re/images/logo.jpg"
    },
    "post-type": "rsvp",
    "refs": {
        "https://events.indieweb.org/2021/05/webmentions-beyond-webmention-io-zG4JpHhZShVA": {
            "type": "entry",
            "summary": "Webmentions haven't really been revisited in some time (and with the advent of people leaning to Webmention.io). This is a chance to see what's been really wanted, what hasn't worked and where we can go with it.",
            "url": "https://events.indieweb.org/2021/05/webmentions-beyond-webmention-io-zG4JpHhZShVA",
            "name": "Webmentions Beyond Webmention.io",
            "author": {
                "type": "card",
                "name": "events.indieweb.org",
                "url": "http://events.indieweb.org",
                "photo": null
            },
            "post-type": "article"
        }
    },
    "_id": "19894123",
    "_source": "175",
    "_is_read": true
}

Manton Reece www.manton.org

How does Micro.blog even work?

{
    "type": "entry",
    "author": {
        "name": "Manton Reece",
        "url": "https://www.manton.org/",
        "photo": "https://micro.blog/manton/avatar.jpg"
    },
    "url": "https://www.manton.org/2021/04/19/how-does-microblog.html",
    "name": "How does Micro.blog even work?",
    "content": {
        "html": "<p>I\u2019ve been upgrading servers and improving performance in Micro.blog lately, a theme which will continue throughout the year to make everything as stable as possible. Sometimes this introduces new bugs or weird behavior that makes people scratch their heads. What is Micro.blog even doing? So let\u2019s look a little at the architecture.</p>\n\n<p>When you write a new post, Micro.blog saves it into a MySQL database. We currently run 2 database servers, so that we can spread some queries between them and to make backups easier. But unlike many web apps, we do not serve blogs from this database. Blogs are published to a separate server as static HTML and images, served directly by Nginx with few or no dependencies on the rest of Micro.blog. This makes your blog very fast, and means that major parts of Micro.blog can go down without affecting your blog.</p>\n\n<p>This has been a key design goal from the very beginning of Micro.blog. We host a blog for you, but it can have its own domain name and is only loosely tied to the rest of Micro.blog. This goal meant discarding some common architectures such as dynamically generating the blog when pages are requested.</p>\n\n<p>Micro.blog is really 3 separate systems combined into a single platform: a blog admin interface, a blog hosting service, and a Twitter-like timeline.</p>\n\n<p>To achieve this, Micro.blog has to translate the blog posts from Markdown to HTML. It runs all the text through <a href=\"https://gohugo.io\">Hugo</a>. It also has to put photos and podcasts in the right place. When you upload a file, Micro.blog copies it to an object storage server at the same time that it syncs the file to your blog.</p>\n\n<p>Timeline web requests and background tasks are run across a few servers, so that we can balance load and deal with outages. While Hugo wants all your Markdown and photos in a specific structure in the file system, Micro.blog maintains content in separate databases and then writes it out to the format that Hugo wants for processing.</p>\n\n<p>Any given server could have part of your content or none of it yet, so Micro.blog will have to sync everything up. It does this in multiple phases to make publishing as fast as possible, and this is the area that I\u2019ve been spending a lot of time tweaking.</p>\n\n<p>First, Micro.blog attempts to quickly publish your latest post, so that it\u2019s available at the permalink URL and included in the blog feed. If you have thousands of posts, it ignores most of them during this phase. It just wants to get your post up on the web as quickly as possible and added to the Micro.blog timeline.</p>\n\n<p>Whenever Micro.blog is processing posts, it also applies any custom themes for your blog. It never skips the Hugo step, even if your blog post content is so simple that it could be previewed with a separate Markdown filter. Every post is run through Hugo, added to the RSS or JSON Feed, and only then processed into the Micro.blog timeline.</p>\n\n<p>This round-trip journey your content takes is an important part of how Micro.blog works with external blog feeds like WordPress. We aren\u2019t interested in building a proprietary social network that is not rooted in blogs. The timeline works with blogs no matter where they are hosted.</p>\n\n<p>Next, Micro.blog will do a full publish of your blog, with the entire site, categories, photo pages, and archive. In some cases, it will combine the Markdown with any uploaded photos before processing them, but usually the uploads are already on your blog. It also keeps a copy of all the Markdown files, independent on any of the web servers, so that if possible it can update those versions without writing out potentially thousands of posts to the file system.</p>\n\n<p>This phase of publishing is the longest, although it\u2019s faster now than it has ever been. During this phase, your latest post should already be live and the timeline updated, so it\u2019s not as annoying to wait around for the archive or category pages to update.</p>\n\n<p>I\u2019m exposing more of what Micro.blog is doing behind the scenes in the <a href=\"https://micro.blog/account/logs\">logs for your account</a>. Here\u2019s a snippet from my log recently, although I\u2019ve flipped it so that it reads in chronology order instead of newest at top:</p>\n\n<pre>\n2021-04-11 16:54:25: Publish: Not queued, publishing manton\n<i>2021-04-11 16:54:25: Publish: Initial prepare for manton</i>\n2021-04-11 16:54:25: Publish: Preparing pages for manton\n2021-04-11 16:54:25: Publish: Persistent folder exists, updating for manton\n<i>2021-04-11 16:54:25: Publish: Initial posts for manton</i>\n2021-04-11 16:54:26: Publish: Linking shared content files for manton\n2021-04-11 16:54:26: Publish: Running Hugo for manton\n<i>2021-04-11 16:54:26: Publish: Initial Hugo run for manton</i>\n<i>2021-04-11 16:54:26: Publish: Initial sync for manton</i>\n<i>2021-04-11 16:54:26: Publish: Pinging manton, progress: 0.866 seconds</i>\n</pre>\n\n<p>Here, there are actually 2 overlapping background tasks. The lines with \u201cInitial\u201d (italicized above) are part of this first phase of quickly publishing your post. In this case, the round-trip from saving the content, publishing the feed, and then updating the timeline was about 1 second. Under a few seconds is kind of the gold standard we\u2019re aiming for.</p>\n\n<p>Finally, Micro.blog assembles the timeline so that it can be served quickly no matter how many people you are following. We have a Redis server that keeps the timeline for each user in a sorted set, and use that from the Micro.blog API to page between posts. Micro.blog also processes posts for @-mentions, sending Webmentions, auto-linking URLs, and other details that are beyond what I wanted to write about here.</p>\n\n<p>Could this be even better? Yes. But while I\u2019m sometimes tempted to change the architecture to something closer to WordPress\u2019s model, I know there\u2019s always more performance we can squeeze out of our current setup.</p>",
        "text": "I\u2019ve been upgrading servers and improving performance in Micro.blog lately, a theme which will continue throughout the year to make everything as stable as possible. Sometimes this introduces new bugs or weird behavior that makes people scratch their heads. What is Micro.blog even doing? So let\u2019s look a little at the architecture.\n\nWhen you write a new post, Micro.blog saves it into a MySQL database. We currently run 2 database servers, so that we can spread some queries between them and to make backups easier. But unlike many web apps, we do not serve blogs from this database. Blogs are published to a separate server as static HTML and images, served directly by Nginx with few or no dependencies on the rest of Micro.blog. This makes your blog very fast, and means that major parts of Micro.blog can go down without affecting your blog.\n\nThis has been a key design goal from the very beginning of Micro.blog. We host a blog for you, but it can have its own domain name and is only loosely tied to the rest of Micro.blog. This goal meant discarding some common architectures such as dynamically generating the blog when pages are requested.\n\nMicro.blog is really 3 separate systems combined into a single platform: a blog admin interface, a blog hosting service, and a Twitter-like timeline.\n\nTo achieve this, Micro.blog has to translate the blog posts from Markdown to HTML. It runs all the text through Hugo. It also has to put photos and podcasts in the right place. When you upload a file, Micro.blog copies it to an object storage server at the same time that it syncs the file to your blog.\n\nTimeline web requests and background tasks are run across a few servers, so that we can balance load and deal with outages. While Hugo wants all your Markdown and photos in a specific structure in the file system, Micro.blog maintains content in separate databases and then writes it out to the format that Hugo wants for processing.\n\nAny given server could have part of your content or none of it yet, so Micro.blog will have to sync everything up. It does this in multiple phases to make publishing as fast as possible, and this is the area that I\u2019ve been spending a lot of time tweaking.\n\nFirst, Micro.blog attempts to quickly publish your latest post, so that it\u2019s available at the permalink URL and included in the blog feed. If you have thousands of posts, it ignores most of them during this phase. It just wants to get your post up on the web as quickly as possible and added to the Micro.blog timeline.\n\nWhenever Micro.blog is processing posts, it also applies any custom themes for your blog. It never skips the Hugo step, even if your blog post content is so simple that it could be previewed with a separate Markdown filter. Every post is run through Hugo, added to the RSS or JSON Feed, and only then processed into the Micro.blog timeline.\n\nThis round-trip journey your content takes is an important part of how Micro.blog works with external blog feeds like WordPress. We aren\u2019t interested in building a proprietary social network that is not rooted in blogs. The timeline works with blogs no matter where they are hosted.\n\nNext, Micro.blog will do a full publish of your blog, with the entire site, categories, photo pages, and archive. In some cases, it will combine the Markdown with any uploaded photos before processing them, but usually the uploads are already on your blog. It also keeps a copy of all the Markdown files, independent on any of the web servers, so that if possible it can update those versions without writing out potentially thousands of posts to the file system.\n\nThis phase of publishing is the longest, although it\u2019s faster now than it has ever been. During this phase, your latest post should already be live and the timeline updated, so it\u2019s not as annoying to wait around for the archive or category pages to update.\n\nI\u2019m exposing more of what Micro.blog is doing behind the scenes in the logs for your account. Here\u2019s a snippet from my log recently, although I\u2019ve flipped it so that it reads in chronology order instead of newest at top:\n\n\n2021-04-11 16:54:25: Publish: Not queued, publishing manton\n2021-04-11 16:54:25: Publish: Initial prepare for manton\n2021-04-11 16:54:25: Publish: Preparing pages for manton\n2021-04-11 16:54:25: Publish: Persistent folder exists, updating for manton\n2021-04-11 16:54:25: Publish: Initial posts for manton\n2021-04-11 16:54:26: Publish: Linking shared content files for manton\n2021-04-11 16:54:26: Publish: Running Hugo for manton\n2021-04-11 16:54:26: Publish: Initial Hugo run for manton\n2021-04-11 16:54:26: Publish: Initial sync for manton\n2021-04-11 16:54:26: Publish: Pinging manton, progress: 0.866 seconds\n\n\nHere, there are actually 2 overlapping background tasks. The lines with \u201cInitial\u201d (italicized above) are part of this first phase of quickly publishing your post. In this case, the round-trip from saving the content, publishing the feed, and then updating the timeline was about 1 second. Under a few seconds is kind of the gold standard we\u2019re aiming for.\n\nFinally, Micro.blog assembles the timeline so that it can be served quickly no matter how many people you are following. We have a Redis server that keeps the timeline for each user in a sorted set, and use that from the Micro.blog API to page between posts. Micro.blog also processes posts for @-mentions, sending Webmentions, auto-linking URLs, and other details that are beyond what I wanted to write about here.\n\nCould this be even better? Yes. But while I\u2019m sometimes tempted to change the architecture to something closer to WordPress\u2019s model, I know there\u2019s always more performance we can squeeze out of our current setup."
    },
    "published": "2021-04-19T09:57:09-05:00",
    "category": [
        "Essays"
    ],
    "post-type": "article",
    "_id": "19892290",
    "_source": "12",
    "_is_read": true
}

Jeremy Keith adactio.com

{
    "type": "entry",
    "published": "2021-04-19T09:53:59Z",
    "url": "https://adactio.com/links/18034",
    "category": [
        "css",
        "custom",
        "properties",
        "theming",
        "naming",
        "webcomponents",
        "conventions",
        "styling",
        "frontend",
        "development"
    ],
    "bookmark-of": [
        "https://github.com/castastrophe/wc-theming-standards/wiki"
    ],
    "content": {
        "text": "Home \u00b7 castastrophe/wc-theming-standards Wiki\n\n\n\nI really like the idea of a shared convention for styling web components with custom properties\u2014feels like BEM meets microformats.",
        "html": "<h3>\n<a class=\"p-name u-bookmark-of\" href=\"https://github.com/castastrophe/wc-theming-standards/wiki\">\nHome \u00b7 castastrophe/wc-theming-standards Wiki\n</a>\n</h3>\n\n<p>I really like the idea of a shared convention for styling web components with custom properties\u2014feels like BEM meets microformats.</p>"
    },
    "author": {
        "type": "card",
        "name": "Jeremy Keith",
        "url": "https://adactio.com/",
        "photo": "https://adactio.com/images/photo-150.jpg"
    },
    "post-type": "bookmark",
    "_id": "19886084",
    "_source": "2",
    "_is_read": true
}

fluffy rambles: Shoulder, unpacking, gardening, etc.

{
    "type": "entry",
    "author": {
        "name": "fluffy",
        "url": "http://beesbuzz.biz/",
        "photo": null
    },
    "url": "http://beesbuzz.biz/blog/9665-Shoulder-unpacking-gardening-etc",
    "published": "2021-04-16T21:28:23-07:00",
    "content": {
        "html": "<p>Wellp, I managed to screw up my shoulder again. <a href=\"http://beesbuzz.biz/blog/6013-Another-pain-another-frustration\">Last time</a> was probably from me using my cane on a fairly long walk, and this time was probably due to me overdoing it with my <a href=\"https://amzn.to/2Qxv65U\">weed puller</a> (which requires a snapping motion that does similar things to my cane). Bleah. At least this time I know stretches and things that might help, and I found <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SsM9PWWYc\">a bunch more</a> which feel like they\u2019re helping. Hopefully I\u2019ll still feel well enough to get my second shot of vaccine tomorrow. (Which will probably have me feeling pretty much immobile for a few days anyway.)</p>\n\n\n<p>I\u2019ve sort of stalled on unpacking, and I haven\u2019t found my Wacom tablet yet. I really want to work on comics though. Maybe I\u2019ll give <a href=\"https://www.macrumors.com/guide/sidecar/\">Sidecar</a> another shot. Although with my shoulder pain I don\u2019t think holding a stylus is a good idea at all right now.</p><p>I\u2019ve also been pretty unmotivated to work on music. I\u2019ve had my usual every-day-a-new-song-scrap thing happen but I\u2019m in a sort of quiescent period when it comes to actually doing more. Mostly because all of my music stuff is down in the basement and I don\u2019t feel like going through the hassle of setting up a recording environment right now and I feel like just like\u2026 waiting until the condo sells and I can build a proper studio.</p><p>And on that note, the condo is off the market temporarily, for Reasons not worth getting into. It\u2019ll hopefully be relisted sometime next week, probably at a lower price (i.e. where I wanted to list it in the first place), so maybe there\u2019ll be a better chance of it selling soon.</p><p>In happier news, we\u2019ve finally managed to hire a manager for my team. She doesn\u2019t start until June, though. But still, having some actual direction will be nice.</p><p>Also at work I gave a talk on IndieWeb which went over really well. I hope I can get more folks interested in it, and maybe I can eventually parlay this into becoming an IndieWeb advocate/developer/whatever. I can dream, anyway.</p><p>Oh and the weed puller arrived on the same day as my <a href=\"https://amzn.to/3ssdN3s\">composter</a>, which is now full of weeds and kitchen scraps and hopefully in a few weeks I\u2019ll have come nice compost to fill my <a href=\"https://www.homedepot.com/p/Greenes-Fence-2-ft-x-4-ft-x-10-5-in-Original-Pine-Raised-Garden-Bed-RCP24484T/315634141\">raised beds</a> with! I feel like playing hundreds of hours of Animal Crossing has prepared me for this. (And also with the random interactions with my neighbors, who continue to be people I\u2019m glad to live near.)</p><p>The raised beds arrive next week, and I\u2019m going to try the <a href=\"https://dengarden.com/gardening/How-to-Make-a-Raised-Bed-Lasagna-Garden\">lasagna method</a> to fill them. Fortunately I still have a lot of paper and cardboard left over from the move!</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://beesbuzz.biz/blog/9665-Shoulder-unpacking-gardening-etc#comments\">comments</a></p>",
        "text": "Wellp, I managed to screw up my shoulder again. Last time was probably from me using my cane on a fairly long walk, and this time was probably due to me overdoing it with my weed puller (which requires a snapping motion that does similar things to my cane). Bleah. At least this time I know stretches and things that might help, and I found a bunch more which feel like they\u2019re helping. Hopefully I\u2019ll still feel well enough to get my second shot of vaccine tomorrow. (Which will probably have me feeling pretty much immobile for a few days anyway.)\n\n\nI\u2019ve sort of stalled on unpacking, and I haven\u2019t found my Wacom tablet yet. I really want to work on comics though. Maybe I\u2019ll give Sidecar another shot. Although with my shoulder pain I don\u2019t think holding a stylus is a good idea at all right now.I\u2019ve also been pretty unmotivated to work on music. I\u2019ve had my usual every-day-a-new-song-scrap thing happen but I\u2019m in a sort of quiescent period when it comes to actually doing more. Mostly because all of my music stuff is down in the basement and I don\u2019t feel like going through the hassle of setting up a recording environment right now and I feel like just like\u2026 waiting until the condo sells and I can build a proper studio.And on that note, the condo is off the market temporarily, for Reasons not worth getting into. It\u2019ll hopefully be relisted sometime next week, probably at a lower price (i.e. where I wanted to list it in the first place), so maybe there\u2019ll be a better chance of it selling soon.In happier news, we\u2019ve finally managed to hire a manager for my team. She doesn\u2019t start until June, though. But still, having some actual direction will be nice.Also at work I gave a talk on IndieWeb which went over really well. I hope I can get more folks interested in it, and maybe I can eventually parlay this into becoming an IndieWeb advocate/developer/whatever. I can dream, anyway.Oh and the weed puller arrived on the same day as my composter, which is now full of weeds and kitchen scraps and hopefully in a few weeks I\u2019ll have come nice compost to fill my raised beds with! I feel like playing hundreds of hours of Animal Crossing has prepared me for this. (And also with the random interactions with my neighbors, who continue to be people I\u2019m glad to live near.)The raised beds arrive next week, and I\u2019m going to try the lasagna method to fill them. Fortunately I still have a lot of paper and cardboard left over from the move!\n\ncomments"
    },
    "name": "fluffy rambles: Shoulder, unpacking, gardening, etc.",
    "post-type": "article",
    "_id": "19840606",
    "_source": "3782",
    "_is_read": true
}

Chris Aldrich stream.boffosocko.com/profile/chrisaldrich

{
    "type": "entry",
    "published": "2021-04-16T06:15:06+00:00",
    "url": "http://stream.boffosocko.com/2021/jaybearca-the-webmention-plugin-only-does-notifications-you-also-need",
    "syndication": [
        "https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/status/1382941111975620610"
    ],
    "in-reply-to": [
        "https://jaybear.ca/14670/",
        "https://twitter.com/jaybearca/status/1382924534819393536"
    ],
    "content": {
        "text": "@jaybearca The Webmention plugin only does notifications. You also need the semantic linkbacks plugin for the parser which will give you the richer data you're looking for. \nhttps://wordpress.org/plugins/semantic-linkbacks/",
        "html": "@jaybearca The Webmention plugin only does notifications. You also need the semantic linkbacks plugin for the parser which will give you the richer data you're looking for. <br /><a href=\"https://wordpress.org/plugins/semantic-linkbacks/\">https://wordpress.org/plugins/semantic-linkbacks/</a><br /><br />"
    },
    "author": {
        "type": "card",
        "name": "Chris Aldrich",
        "url": "http://stream.boffosocko.com/profile/chrisaldrich",
        "photo": "http://stream.boffosocko.com/file/600427b81f7785e704eadfe511a9270f/thumb.jpg"
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    "post-type": "reply",
    "_id": "19815531",
    "_source": "192",
    "_is_read": true
}

Manton Reece www.manton.org

Micro.blog RSVPs with Webmention

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    "type": "entry",
    "author": {
        "name": "Manton Reece",
        "url": "https://www.manton.org/",
        "photo": "https://micro.blog/manton/avatar.jpg"
    },
    "url": "https://www.manton.org/2021/04/15/microblog-rsvps-with.html",
    "name": "Micro.blog RSVPs with Webmention",
    "content": {
        "html": "<p>Micro.blog sends Webmentions to external blogs when you \u201creply\u201d to a post inside Micro.blog. It marks up your reply with Microformats, discovers the Webmention endpoint for the post you\u2019re replying to, and sends the Webmention. This allows your Micro.blog replies to be included as comments on blogs hosted by other platforms, like WordPress.</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://indieweb.org/rsvp\">An RSVP</a> is a special type of reply used to indicate whether you\u2019re attending an event. By posting RSVPs to your own blog, you can attach them to existing posts or just have your own copy of the data. As more bloggers use RSVPs, we could eventually have a more distributed, IndieWeb-friendly system instead of relying on Facebook or Evite.</p>\n\n<p>How to create an RSVP on Micro.blog? We don\u2019t currently have an RSVP button in Micro.blog, because Webmention-enabled events are still rare enough that it would take up a lot of the Micro.blog UI, potentially cluttering the interface.</p>\n\n<p>You\u2019ll need a little bit of HTML to create an RSVP. First, add a link to where you want to send the Webmention. Instead of using Markdown for the link, use HTML and add the Microformats <code>class=\"u-in-reply-to\"</code> to mark the link as a reply to another URL:</p>\n\n<pre><code>Looking forward to this &lt;a href=\"...\" class=\"u-in-reply-to\"&gt;Webmentions pop-up session&lt;/a&gt; next month.\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>Then, to make this an RSVP, add a <code>data</code> tag somewhere in the post with \u201cyes\u201d, \u201cmaybe\u201d, or \u201cno\u201d:</p>\n\n<pre><code>&lt;data class=\"p-rsvp\" value=\"yes\" /&gt;\n</code></pre>\n\n<p>I like to use <code>data</code> because it\u2019s invisible when displayed in a web browser, but it could be a <code>span</code> or other HTML tag. You can see a full example of this if you view the HTML source of <a href=\"https://www.manton.org/2021/04/13/looking-forward-to.html\">my post here</a>, RSVP-ing to an IndieWeb online event.</p>\n\n<p>When you publish the post, Micro.blog will automatically notice the <code>u-in-reply-to</code>, find the Webmention endpoint for the post you\u2019re linking to, and send the Webmention for you. Micro.blog themes also handle the other details, like including your name and profile photo.</p>",
        "text": "Micro.blog sends Webmentions to external blogs when you \u201creply\u201d to a post inside Micro.blog. It marks up your reply with Microformats, discovers the Webmention endpoint for the post you\u2019re replying to, and sends the Webmention. This allows your Micro.blog replies to be included as comments on blogs hosted by other platforms, like WordPress.\n\nAn RSVP is a special type of reply used to indicate whether you\u2019re attending an event. By posting RSVPs to your own blog, you can attach them to existing posts or just have your own copy of the data. As more bloggers use RSVPs, we could eventually have a more distributed, IndieWeb-friendly system instead of relying on Facebook or Evite.\n\nHow to create an RSVP on Micro.blog? We don\u2019t currently have an RSVP button in Micro.blog, because Webmention-enabled events are still rare enough that it would take up a lot of the Micro.blog UI, potentially cluttering the interface.\n\nYou\u2019ll need a little bit of HTML to create an RSVP. First, add a link to where you want to send the Webmention. Instead of using Markdown for the link, use HTML and add the Microformats class=\"u-in-reply-to\" to mark the link as a reply to another URL:\n\nLooking forward to this <a href=\"...\" class=\"u-in-reply-to\">Webmentions pop-up session</a> next month.\n\n\nThen, to make this an RSVP, add a data tag somewhere in the post with \u201cyes\u201d, \u201cmaybe\u201d, or \u201cno\u201d:\n\n<data class=\"p-rsvp\" value=\"yes\" />\n\n\nI like to use data because it\u2019s invisible when displayed in a web browser, but it could be a span or other HTML tag. You can see a full example of this if you view the HTML source of my post here, RSVP-ing to an IndieWeb online event.\n\nWhen you publish the post, Micro.blog will automatically notice the u-in-reply-to, find the Webmention endpoint for the post you\u2019re linking to, and send the Webmention for you. Micro.blog themes also handle the other details, like including your name and profile photo."
    },
    "published": "2021-04-15T16:37:14-05:00",
    "category": [
        "Essays"
    ],
    "post-type": "article",
    "_id": "19810307",
    "_source": "12",
    "_is_read": true
}

Aaron Parecki aaronparecki.com

How to Sign Users In with IndieAuth

{
    "type": "entry",
    "published": "2021-04-13T21:15:45-07:00",
    "summary": "This post will show you step by step how you can let people log in to your website with their own IndieAuth website so you don't need to worry about user accounts or passwords.",
    "url": "https://aaronparecki.com/2021/04/13/26/indieauth",
    "category": [
        "indieauth",
        "indieweb",
        "oauth"
    ],
    "syndication": [
        "https://micro.blog/aaronpk/11319738",
        "https://news.indieweb.org/en"
    ],
    "name": "How to Sign Users In with IndieAuth",
    "author": {
        "type": "card",
        "name": "Aaron Parecki",
        "url": "https://aaronparecki.com/",
        "photo": "https://aperture-media.p3k.io/aaronparecki.com/41061f9de825966faa22e9c42830e1d4a614a321213b4575b9488aa93f89817a.jpg"
    },
    "post-type": "article",
    "_id": "19758665",
    "_source": "16",
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}

Manton Reece www.manton.org

{
    "type": "entry",
    "author": {
        "name": "Manton Reece",
        "url": "https://www.manton.org/",
        "photo": "https://micro.blog/manton/avatar.jpg"
    },
    "url": "https://www.manton.org/2021/04/13/looking-forward-to.html",
    "content": {
        "html": "<p>Looking forward to this <a href=\"https://events.indieweb.org/2021/05/webmentions-beyond-webmention-io-zG4JpHhZShVA\" class=\"u-in-reply-to\">Webmentions pop-up session</a> next month. </p>",
        "text": "Looking forward to this Webmentions pop-up session next month."
    },
    "published": "2021-04-13T17:03:51-05:00",
    "post-type": "note",
    "_id": "19753877",
    "_source": "12",
    "_is_read": true
}

{
    "type": "entry",
    "url": "https://v2.jacky.wtf/post/5832bbcb-b152-49d8-bff2-d41997719210",
    "content": {
        "text": "In the midst of a re-write of how my site works and in passing conversation in the IndieWeb chat, I think about how to 'show' the IndieWeb as something people can invest in versus a collection of things that...",
        "html": "<p>In the midst of a re-write of how my site works and <a href=\"https://chat.indieweb.org/meta/2021-04-09#t1617992930428800\">in passing conversation in the IndieWeb chat</a>, I think about how to 'show' the IndieWeb as something people can invest in versus a collection of things that...</p>"
    },
    "post-type": "note",
    "_id": "19663685",
    "_source": "1886",
    "_is_read": true
}

{
    "type": "entry",
    "url": "https://v2.jacky.wtf/post/11e8c6f0-d513-4623-b167-502d764a9896",
    "content": {
        "text": "In the midst of a re-write of how my site works and in passing conversation in the IndieWeb chat, I think about how to 'show' the IndieWeb as something people can invest in versus a collection of things that...",
        "html": "<p>In the midst of a re-write of how my site works and <a href=\"https://chat.indieweb.org/meta/2021-04-09#t1617992930428800\">in passing conversation in the IndieWeb chat</a>, I think about how to 'show' the IndieWeb as something people can invest in versus a collection of things that...</p>"
    },
    "post-type": "note",
    "_id": "19663686",
    "_source": "1886",
    "_is_read": true
}

Ben Werdmüller werd.io/profile/benwerd

{
    "type": "entry",
    "published": "2021-04-09T16:21:07+00:00",
    "url": "https://werd.io/2021/turning-off-syndication-to-twitter-at-least",
    "content": {
        "text": "Turning off syndication to Twitter, at least for today. If you're reading this, it's via my indieweb feed on my Known site, or on Micro.blog."
    },
    "author": {
        "type": "card",
        "name": "Ben Werdm\u00fcller",
        "url": "https://werd.io/profile/benwerd",
        "photo": "https://werd.io/file/5d388c5fb16ea14aac640912/thumb.jpg"
    },
    "post-type": "note",
    "_id": "19658557",
    "_source": "191",
    "_is_read": true
}

Christopher Chelpka christopherchelpka.com

{
    "type": "entry",
    "author": {
        "name": "Christopher Chelpka",
        "url": "https://christopherchelpka.com",
        "photo": "https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/6298c8cd5b76684bd44569eadc18838c?s=96&d=https%3A%2F%2Fmicro.blog%2Fimages%2Fblank_avatar.png"
    },
    "url": "https://www.christopherchelpka.com/2021/04/06/now-that-you.html",
    "content": {
        "html": "<p>Now that you know why posting for \u201cfree\u201d on MySpaceBook isn\u2019t a good idea. Check out Micro.blog. I just paid for another year, again. Totally worth it. Micro.blog is the easy way to #indieweb.</p>",
        "text": "Now that you know why posting for \u201cfree\u201d on MySpaceBook isn\u2019t a good idea. Check out Micro.blog. I just paid for another year, again. Totally worth it. Micro.blog is the easy way to #indieweb."
    },
    "published": "2021-04-07T05:00:07+00:00",
    "post-type": "note",
    "_id": "33380025",
    "_source": "7224",
    "_is_read": true
}

Jeremy Keith adactio.com

{
    "type": "entry",
    "published": "2021-04-06T18:33:36Z",
    "url": "https://adactio.com/links/18009",
    "category": [
        "code",
        "coding",
        "indieweb",
        "maintenance",
        "personal",
        "websites",
        "tinkering",
        "covid-19",
        "coronavirus",
        "hacking",
        "wired"
    ],
    "bookmark-of": [
        "https://www.wired.com/story/healing-power-javascript-code-programming/"
    ],
    "content": {
        "text": "The Healing Power of Javascript | WIRED\n\n\n\nI can very much relate to what Craig is saying here.",
        "html": "<h3>\n<a class=\"p-name u-bookmark-of\" href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/healing-power-javascript-code-programming/\">\nThe Healing Power of Javascript | WIRED\n</a>\n</h3>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://adactio.com/journal/16585\">I can very much relate</a> to what Craig is saying here.</p>"
    },
    "author": {
        "type": "card",
        "name": "Jeremy Keith",
        "url": "https://adactio.com/",
        "photo": "https://adactio.com/images/photo-150.jpg"
    },
    "post-type": "bookmark",
    "_id": "19579521",
    "_source": "2",
    "_is_read": true
}

Mike Taylor bear.im

Checking on code 2021 Edition

{
    "type": "entry",
    "published": "2021-04-04T21:05:41Z",
    "url": "https://bear.im/bearlog/2021/094/checking-on-code-2021-edition.html",
    "category": [
        "code, indieweb"
    ],
    "name": "Checking on code 2021 Edition",
    "content": {
        "text": "I was updating the Let's Encrypt cert and realized that my back-end code had failed to start... you would think that someone who has Ops and SRE skills would setup proper monitors... :)\n\nThat reminded me to run some Webmention Rocks! validations...\n\nTest 1\nTest 2\nTest 3\nTest 4\nTest 5\nTest 6\nTest 7\nTest 8\nTest 9\nTest 10\nTest 11\nTest 12\nTest 13\nTest 14\nTest 15\nTest 16\nTest 17\nTest 18\nTest 19\nTest 20\nTest 21\nTest 22",
        "html": "<p>I was updating the Let's Encrypt cert and realized that my back-end code had failed to start... you would think that someone who has Ops and SRE skills would setup proper monitors... :)</p>\n\n<p>That reminded me to run some Webmention Rocks! validations...</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://webmention.rocks/test/1\">Test 1</a>\n<a href=\"https://webmention.rocks/test/2\">Test 2</a>\n<a href=\"https://webmention.rocks/test/3\">Test 3</a>\n<a href=\"https://webmention.rocks/test/4\">Test 4</a>\n<a href=\"https://webmention.rocks/test/5\">Test 5</a>\n<a href=\"https://webmention.rocks/test/6\">Test 6</a>\n<a href=\"https://webmention.rocks/test/7\">Test 7</a>\n<a href=\"https://webmention.rocks/test/8\">Test 8</a>\n<a href=\"https://webmention.rocks/test/9\">Test 9</a>\n<a href=\"https://webmention.rocks/test/10\">Test 10</a>\n<a href=\"https://webmention.rocks/test/11\">Test 11</a>\n<a href=\"https://webmention.rocks/test/12\">Test 12</a>\n<a href=\"https://webmention.rocks/test/13\">Test 13</a>\n<a href=\"https://webmention.rocks/test/14\">Test 14</a>\n<a href=\"https://webmention.rocks/test/15\">Test 15</a>\n<a href=\"https://webmention.rocks/test/16\">Test 16</a>\n<a href=\"https://webmention.rocks/test/17\">Test 17</a>\n<a href=\"https://webmention.rocks/test/18\">Test 18</a>\n<a href=\"https://webmention.rocks/test/19\">Test 19</a>\n<a href=\"https://webmention.rocks/test/20\">Test 20</a>\n<a href=\"https://webmention.rocks/test/21\">Test 21</a>\n<a href=\"https://webmention.rocks/test/22\">Test 22</a></p>"
    },
    "author": {
        "type": "card",
        "name": "Mike Taylor",
        "url": "https://bear.im/",
        "photo": "https://bear.im/images/bear_145x145.jpg"
    },
    "post-type": "article",
    "_id": "19535591",
    "_source": "190",
    "_is_read": true
}

Ben Werdmüller werd.io/profile/benwerd

Reading, watching, playing, using: March, 2021

{
    "type": "entry",
    "published": "2021-04-01T14:45:19+00:00",
    "url": "https://werd.io/2021/reading-watching-playing-using-march-2021",
    "name": "Reading, watching, playing, using: March, 2021",
    "content": {
        "text": "This is my monthly roundup of the media I consumed and found interesting. Here's my list for March, 2021: a month where, at least in the United States, mass vaccination started to present the light at the end of the tunnel for the pandemic.BooksThe Death of Vivek Oji, by Akwaeke Emezi. Beautiful and sad; a tale of someone trying to be themselves in a context that won\u2019t allow it, and of love and allyship becoming their own kinds of oppression. Despite the tragedy at the heart of the novel, it resonates with triumphant humanism, too. Emotional and sonorous and just about perfect.Something That May Shock and Discredit You, by Daniel M. Lavery . A very personal book; powerful in a way that sneaks up on you with seemingly-banal interludes that add up to a meaningful whole. I\u2019ve been a fan of his ever since The Toast, but this is something else entirely.The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson. It starts with a catastrophe - an extrapolation of climate change and the very dark places it might lead us - but then takes us on an exploration of how we might deal with it. It\u2019s an informed celebration of invention, resolve, and the human spirit. If I have a criticism, it\u2019s that it sometimes is far too utopian and engages in technological determinism, but what a change that makes. I\u2019ve even forgiven its extensive passages on decentralized social networking (something I know a thing or two about) and blockchain, the wrongness of which casts doubt on the technical robustness of other climate solutions presented. This is hard economic science fiction, and yet, a very human book.The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett. A near-perfect novel about identity and how the stories we tell about ourselves both define and disguise us. Modern, nuanced, and rich in a way that lingers long afterwards.Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, by Cathy Park Hong. A challenging, complicated book that provides a much-needed perspective via the author\u2019s Asian American experience. I was drawn in by the first half, and again by the deservedly angry final essay. The rest of the second half is dedicated to her experiences as an artist, which are not always likable. But why should they be? She doesn\u2019t owe anybody anything, and her honesty is a gift that deserves attention.Notable ArticlesBusinessImagine Your Flexible Office Work Future. \"The C-Suite has had \u201cflexibility\u201d for years. If companies don\u2019t expand it to other workers, they\u2019ll find jobs elsewhere.\"The End of Indie. \"Unfortunately, as we\u2019ve sought to lean more aggressively into scaling our investments and ideas behind an \u201cIndie Economy\u201d we\u2019ve not found that same level of enthusiasm from the institutional LP market.\"Four-Day Work Week Gains Popularity Around the World. \"So last spring the company told everyone to sign off around lunchtime every Friday to ease into the weekend. The experiment was so successful\u2014sales, employee engagement, and client satisfaction all rose\u2014that in January, Awin decided to go a step further, rolling out a four-day week for the entire company with no cuts in salaries or benefits. \u201cWe firmly believe that happy, engaged, and well-balanced employees produce much better work,\u201d says Chief Executive Officer Adam Ross. They \u201cfind ways to work smarter, and they\u2019re just as productive.\u201d\" Honestly, what's the downside?An alternative to competition. \u201cAnd all we have to do is get enough customers to make our business work. That's it. That's how we stay alive. Not by taking marketshare away from anyone, not by siphoning off users, not by spending gobs of cash to convince people to switch. We simply have our own economics to worry about, and if we get that right, we're golden.\u201d I like this way of thinking.What Ended Indie. The discussion of GAAP accounting here - and in particular its shortcomings - is very familiar to me.For Creators, Everything Is for Sale. \u201cA rash of new start-ups are making it easier for digital creators to monetize every aspect of their life \u2014 down to what they eat, who they hang out with and who they respond to on TikTok.\u201d It\u2019s like an episode of Black Mirror.In a First, Uber Agrees to Classify British Drivers as \u2018Workers\u2019. \u201cUber said it would reclassify more than 70,000 drivers in Britain as workers who will receive a minimum wage, vacation pay and access to a pension plan.\u201d Everywhere, please.The Personal Finance and Investment Advice Fallacy. \u201cThe personal finance circuit and the hustle economy are some of the most public acts of cruelty in capitalism. It exists to kick people when they\u2019re down - telling those who are suffering because inherent unfairness of capitalism (where so much is based on where you are born, when you were born and whom you are born to) that it\u2019s their fault, and that the reason they\u2019re doing badly is because they haven\u2019t taken the right advice or done the right thing.\u201dESGs, sustainable investing are not as green as touted, investor says. \u201cThe financial services industry is duping the American public with its pro-environment, sustainable investing practices. This multitrillion dollar arena of socially conscious investing is being presented as something it's not. In essence, Wall Street is greenwashing the economic system and, in the process, creating a deadly distraction. I should know; I was at the heart of it.\u201dGreen investing is a fraud. \u201cTake \"Environmental, Social, and Governance\" (ESG) funds, pitched as a way to save for retirement without annihilating the planet you're planning to retire on. These were once so promising that they panicked the finance sector, so much so that the world's carbon barons convinced Trump to propose a law making it illegal to direct your investment dollars into an ESG.\u201d Instead, ESG funds were gutted of their impact and are now largely marketing concerns.CultureBeeple sold an NFT for $69 million. Just, ugh.The internet didn\u2019t kill counterculture\u2014you just won\u2019t find it on Instagram. \"Taken from the title of Chinese sci-fi writer Liu Cixin\u2019s 2008 book, \u201cthe dark forest\u201d region of the web is becoming increasingly important as a space of online communication for users of all ages and political persuasions. In part, this is because it is less sociologically stressful than the clearnet zone, where one is subject to peer, employer, and state exposure. It also now includes Discord servers, paid newsletters (e.g., Substack), encrypted group messaging (via Telegram, etc.), gaming communities, podcasts, and other off-clearnet message board forums and social media.\"You\u2019re probably using the wrong dictionary. \u201cA book where you can enter \u201csport\u201d and end up with \u201ca diversion of the field\u201d \u2014 this is in fact the opposite of what I\u2019d known a dictionary to be. This is a book that transmutes plain words into language that\u2019s finer and more vivid and sometimes more rare. No wonder McPhee wrote with it by his side. No wonder he looked up words he knew, versus words he didn\u2019t, in a ratio of \u201cat least ninety-nine to one.\u201d\u201dMediaJournalism is a public service. So why doesn\u2019t it represent the public?. \"All of this is to say, getting into a four-year university depends largely on generational wealth, which a myriad of immigrant households and historically marginalized racial minorities are still struggling to build. Those on the unlucky side of the gap see disadvantages compound from the start. I come from a family that lived below the poverty line, and that likely helped me earn a full scholarship to Boston University. This stroke of luck has changed my life, but it\u2019s important to acknowledge that the hurdles don\u2019t end there.\"America is learning to rebalance its news diet post-Trump. \"Nearly halfway through President Biden's first 100 days, data shows that Americans are learning to wean themselves off of news \u2014 and especially politics.\"Nearly Half of Digital Subscribers Are \u2018Zombies,\u2019 Medill Analysis Finds. \u201cSpiegel found that 49% of digital subscribers didn\u2019t go to the websites they had paid for even once a month, putting them in a category known in news-industry slang as \u201czombies.\u201d Concern is growing about this problem because even though the living dead may still pay for local news, they seem like a weak foundation to build a future on.\u201d It makes me wonder why they subscribe; I suspect it\u2019s closer to why people donate to charity than because they want to be constantly engaged with the content.Here's why Substack's scam worked so well. \u201cFor all we know, every single one of Substack\u2019s top newsletters is supported by money from Substack. Until Substack reveals who exactly is on its payroll, its promises that anyone can make money on a newsletter are tainted.\u201dAAJA Guidance on Atlanta Shootings. \u201cWe urge newsrooms to cover the shootings in the context of the current rise in attacks on Asian Americans. These shootings have come during a time of increasing attacks on the AAPI community, and heightened fear among AAPI communities across the country.\u201dPoliticsWomen in Congress on the Capitol riot: 23 lawmakers on what happened to them during the insurrection. \"As the events of the deadly riot are examined in the impeachment trial, here is what almost two dozen lawmakers told The 19th about January 6, in their own words.\" Really harrowing.ScienceA Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed For Human Children. Cuttlefish can pass the marshmallow test. Can you?Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial images. \"Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity. Given the widespread use of facial recognition, our findings have critical implications for the protection of privacy and civil liberties.\" Kind of terrifying.Study: Preservative Used in Pop-Tarts and Hundreds of Popular Foods May Harm the Immune System. \"A food preservative used to prolong the shelf life of Pop-Tarts, Rice Krispies Treats, Cheez-Its and almost 1,250 other popular processed foods may harm the immune system, according to a new peer-reviewed study by Environmental Working Group.\" And: \"Recently published research has also found a link between high levels of PFAS in the blood and the severity of Covid-19.\"How mRNA Technology Could Change the World. \"For decades, researchers have struggled to design a workable vaccine for HIV, and many observers considered this field a dead end. But a new paper argues that these repeated failures forced HIV-vaccine researchers to spend a lot of time and money on strange and unproven vaccine techniques\u2014such as synthetic mRNA and the viral-vector technology that powers the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Nearly 90 percent of COVID-19 vaccines that made it to clinical trials used technology that \u201ccould be traced back to prototypes tested in HIV vaccine trials,\u201d Jeffrey E. Harris, the economist at MIT who authored the paper, wrote.\"Stanford Scientists Reverse Engineer Moderna Vaccine, Post Code on Github. \u201cWe didn't reverse engineer the vaccine. We posted the putative sequence of two synthetic RNA molecules that have become sufficiently prevalent in the general environment of medicine and human biology in 2021.\u201dSocietyHow to have better arguments online. Not just online: \u201cWhen we\u2019re in an argument with someone, we should be thinking about how they can change their mind and look good \u2013 maintain or even enhance their face \u2013 at the same time. Often this is very hard to do in the moment of the dispute itself, when opinion and face are bound even more tightly together than they are before or after (the writer Rachel Cusk defines an argument as \u201can emergency of self-definition\u201d). However, by showing that we have listened to and respected our interlocutor\u2019s point of view, we make it more likely that they will come around at some later point. If and when they do, we should avoid scolding them for not agreeing with us all along.\u201dNew study finds not knowing how to flirt is the main reason behind \"involuntary singlehood\". \"Among the participants who indicated that they were involuntarily single, the most important factor by far was their lack of flirting skills. Following this factor, in decreasing order, were skills in perceiving signals of interest, \u201cmating effort,\u201d and choosiness. These last three factors were all relatively similar in their degree of impact.\"Harry and Meghan: The union of two great houses, the Windsors and the Celebrities, is complete. \u201cHaving a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who\u2019s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it\u2019s like having a neighbour who\u2019s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.\u201dPrivate Schools Are Indefensible. I agree with the headline. They simply shouldn\u2019t exist. This is an excellent piece that dives into some reasons why.What the Pandemic Is Doing to Our Brains. \u201cThe pandemic is still too young to have yielded rigorous, peer-reviewed studies about its effects on cognitive function. But the brain scientists I spoke with told me they can extrapolate based on earlier work about trauma, boredom, stress, and inactivity, all of which do a host of very bad things to a mammal\u2019s brain.\u201dHospitals Hide Pricing Data From Search Results. Hospitals have to list pricing by law - but they explicitly add noindex, nofollow tags to pricing pages so they can't be searched and discovered. Seems like an opportunity for someone to build an open dataset.Evanston, Illinois, becomes first U.S. city to pay reparations to Black residents. \"The Chicago suburb\u2019s City Council voted 8-1 to distribute $400,000 to eligible black households. Each qualifying household would receive $25,000 for home repairs or down payments on property.\"TechnologyClubhouse Harassment, and Tech's Move from Enthusiast to Industrial Press. \u201cI believe that a lot of the people in tech who are having this vacuous, oafish discussion of the media has as \u201chaters\u201d are actually just mad that they can\u2019t say or do what they want and that every action they have isn\u2019t the most important thing in the world.\u201dGoogle will end behavioral targeting, profile-building in its ad products. \"Google helped create and grow the digital ad ecosystem that relied on tracking and targeting ads to people across the web. Now, up against pressure from regulators around data privacy and antitrust, Google will stop enabling cross-site tracking and targeting of individuals outside its own properties such as in inventory it sells through its Google AdX display and video ad exchange.\" Big changes are coming.The SOC2 Starting Seven. \"Here\u2019s how we\u2019ll try to help: with Seven Things you can do now that will simplify SOC2 for you down the road while making your life, or at least your security posture, materially better in the immediacy.\" File under \"things I wish I'd read a year ago\".Lying to the ghost in the machine. \u201cThe point I'd like to make is that ready-trained NNs like GPT-3 or CLIP are often tailored as the basis of specific recognizer applications and then may end up deployed in public situations, much as shitty internet-of-things gizmos usually run on an elderly, unpatched ARM linux kernel with an old version of OpenSSH and busybox installed, and hard-wired root login credentials. This is the future of security holes in our internet-connected appliances: metaphorically, cameras that you can fool by slapping a sticker labelled \"THIS IS NOT THE DROID YOU ARE LOOKING FOR\" on the front of the droid the camera is in fact looking for.\u201dT-Mobile to Step Up Ad Targeting of Cellphone Customers. 'Wireless carrier tells subscribers it could share their masked browsing, app data and online activity with advertisers unless they opt out.\" As a previously-happy T-Mobile customer, I'm outraged by this.He got Facebook hooked on AI. Now he can't fix its misinformation addiction. \u201cI began video-calling Qui\u00f1onero regularly. I also spoke to Facebook executives, current and former employees, industry peers, and external experts. Many spoke on condition of anonymity because they\u2019d signed nondisclosure agreements or feared retaliation. I wanted to know: What was Qui\u00f1onero\u2019s team doing to rein in the hate and lies on its platform?\u201d Surprise, surprise: that\u2019s not what Facebook wanted to talk about.The Mobile Performance Inequality Gap, 2021. \u201cWhatever progress runtimes and networks have made in the past half-decade, browsers are stubbornly situated in the devices carried by real-world users, and the single most important thing to understand about the landscape of devices your sites will run on is that they are not new phones.\u201dOne Year in the IndieWeb. I'm pretty much an indieweb zealot. These experiences are fair and representative of the community, it seems to me.The Dao of DAOs. \u201cAfter a contentious debate, the Ethereum core team, led by Vitalik Buterin, released a hard fork of the Ethereum blockchain. It was essentially a new version in which everything was the same, except in the forked version, the heist never happened.\u201d A very telling paragraph. How decentralized is it, really, if the core team can vanish away transactions, regardless of the reason? (Hint: every blockchain can do this.)In 2020, Two Thirds of Google Searches Ended Without a Click. Fuel for Google being more of a publisher than a referrer these days.The End of AMP. \u201cIf you\u2019re currently using AMP, you\u2019ll be able to get rid of that monstrosity in May, and if you aren\u2019t, you\u2019ll now be competing for search positions previously unavailable to you. For publishers, it is a win-win.\u201d FINALLY.",
        "html": "<p>This is my monthly roundup of the media I consumed and found interesting. Here's my list for March, 2021: a month where, at least in the United States, mass vaccination started to present the light at the end of the tunnel for the pandemic.</p><h3>Books</h3><p><a href=\"https://bookshop.org/books/the-death-of-vivek-oji/9780525541608\">The Death of Vivek Oji, by Akwaeke Emezi</a>. Beautiful and sad; a tale of someone trying to be themselves in a context that won\u2019t allow it, and of love and allyship becoming their own kinds of oppression. Despite the tragedy at the heart of the novel, it resonates with triumphant humanism, too. Emotional and sonorous and just about perfect.</p><p><a href=\"https://bookshop.org/books/something-that-may-shock-and-discredit-you-9781982105228/9781982105211\">Something That May Shock and Discredit You, by Daniel M. Lavery </a>. A very personal book; powerful in a way that sneaks up on you with seemingly-banal interludes that add up to a meaningful whole. I\u2019ve been a fan of his ever since The Toast, but this is something else entirely.</p><p><a href=\"https://bookshop.org/books/the-ministry-for-the-future/9780316300131\">The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson</a>. It starts with a catastrophe - an extrapolation of climate change and the very dark places it might lead us - but then takes us on an exploration of how we might deal with it. It\u2019s an informed celebration of invention, resolve, and the human spirit. If I have a criticism, it\u2019s that it sometimes is far too utopian and engages in technological determinism, but what a change that makes. I\u2019ve even forgiven its extensive passages on decentralized social networking (something I know a thing or two about) and blockchain, the wrongness of which casts doubt on the technical robustness of other climate solutions presented. This is hard economic science fiction, and yet, a very human book.</p><p><a href=\"https://bookshop.org/books/the-vanishing-half-9780525536291/9780525536291\">The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett</a>. A near-perfect novel about identity and how the stories we tell about ourselves both define and disguise us. Modern, nuanced, and rich in a way that lingers long afterwards.</p><p><a href=\"https://bookshop.org/books/minor-feelings-an-asian-american-reckoning/9781984820365\">Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, by Cathy Park Hong</a>. A challenging, complicated book that provides a much-needed perspective via the author\u2019s Asian American experience. I was drawn in by the first half, and again by the deservedly angry final essay. The rest of the second half is dedicated to her experiences as an artist, which are not always likable. But why should they be? She doesn\u2019t owe anybody anything, and her honesty is a gift that deserves attention.</p><h3>Notable Articles</h3><h4>Business</h4><p><a href=\"https://annehelen.substack.com/p/imagine-your-flexible-office-work\">Imagine Your Flexible Office Work Future</a>. \"The C-Suite has had \u201cflexibility\u201d for years. If companies don\u2019t expand it to other workers, they\u2019ll find jobs elsewhere.\"</p><p><a href=\"https://medium.com/@bryce/the-end-of-indie-6e1b92d90b09\">The End of Indie</a>. \"Unfortunately, as we\u2019ve sought to lean more aggressively into scaling our investments and ideas behind an \u201cIndie Economy\u201d we\u2019ve not found that same level of enthusiasm from the institutional LP market.\"</p><p><a href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-02/four-day-work-week-gains-popularity-around-the-world\">Four-Day Work Week Gains Popularity Around the World</a>. \"So last spring the company told everyone to sign off around lunchtime every Friday to ease into the weekend. The experiment was so successful\u2014sales, employee engagement, and client satisfaction all rose\u2014that in January, Awin decided to go a step further, rolling out a four-day week for the entire company with no cuts in salaries or benefits. \u201cWe firmly believe that happy, engaged, and well-balanced employees produce much better work,\u201d says Chief Executive Officer Adam Ross. They \u201cfind ways to work smarter, and they\u2019re just as productive.\u201d\" Honestly, what's the downside?</p><p><a href=\"https://world.hey.com/jason/an-alternative-to-competition-ff57f4bc\">An alternative to competition</a>. \u201cAnd all we have to do is get enough customers to make our business work. That's it. That's how we stay alive. Not by taking marketshare away from anyone, not by siphoning off users, not by spending gobs of cash to convince people to switch. We simply have our own economics to worry about, and if we get that right, we're golden.\u201d I like this way of thinking.</p><p><a href=\"https://medium.com/@bryce/what-ended-indie-76575463934d\">What Ended Indie</a>. The discussion of GAAP accounting here - and in particular its shortcomings - is very familiar to me.</p><p><a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/10/style/creators-selling-selves.html\">For Creators, Everything Is for Sale</a>. \u201cA rash of new start-ups are making it easier for digital creators to monetize every aspect of their life \u2014 down to what they eat, who they hang out with and who they respond to on TikTok.\u201d It\u2019s like an episode of Black Mirror.</p><p><a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/technology/uber-uk-drivers-worker-status.html?referringSource=articleShare\">In a First, Uber Agrees to Classify British Drivers as \u2018Workers\u2019</a>. \u201cUber said it would reclassify more than 70,000 drivers in Britain as workers who will receive a minimum wage, vacation pay and access to a pension plan.\u201d Everywhere, please.</p><p><a href=\"https://ez.substack.com/p/the-personal-finance-and-investment\">The Personal Finance and Investment Advice Fallacy</a>. \u201cThe personal finance circuit and the hustle economy are some of the most public acts of cruelty in capitalism. It exists to kick people when they\u2019re down - telling those who are suffering because inherent unfairness of capitalism (where so much is based on where you are born, when you were born and whom you are born to) that it\u2019s their fault, and that the reason they\u2019re doing badly is because they haven\u2019t taken the right advice or done the right thing.\u201d</p><p><a href=\"https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/03/16/wall-street-esg-sustainable-investing-greenwashing-column/6948923002/\">ESGs, sustainable investing are not as green as touted, investor says</a>. \u201cThe financial services industry is duping the American public with its pro-environment, sustainable investing practices. This multitrillion dollar arena of socially conscious investing is being presented as something it's not. In essence, Wall Street is greenwashing the economic system and, in the process, creating a deadly distraction. I should know; I was at the heart of it.\u201d</p><p><a href=\"https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/24/greenwashing/\">Green investing is a fraud</a>. \u201cTake \"Environmental, Social, and Governance\" (ESG) funds, pitched as a way to save for retirement without annihilating the planet you're planning to retire on. These were once so promising that they panicked the finance sector, so much so that the world's carbon barons convinced Trump to propose a law making it illegal to direct your investment dollars into an ESG.\u201d Instead, ESG funds were gutted of their impact and are now largely marketing concerns.</p><h4>Culture</h4><p><a href=\"https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/11/22325054/beeple-christies-nft-sale-cost-everydays-69-million\">Beeple sold an NFT for $69 million</a>. Just, ugh.</p><p><a href=\"https://www.documentjournal.com/2021/01/the-internet-didnt-kill-counterculture-you-just-wont-find-it-on-instagram/\">The internet didn\u2019t kill counterculture\u2014you just won\u2019t find it on Instagram</a>. \"Taken from the title of Chinese sci-fi writer Liu Cixin\u2019s 2008 book, \u201cthe dark forest\u201d region of the web is becoming increasingly important as a space of online communication for users of all ages and political persuasions. In part, this is because it is less sociologically stressful than the clearnet zone, where one is subject to peer, employer, and state exposure. It also now includes Discord servers, paid newsletters (e.g., Substack), encrypted group messaging (via Telegram, etc.), gaming communities, podcasts, and other off-clearnet message board forums and social media.\"</p><p><a href=\"https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary\">You\u2019re probably using the wrong dictionary</a>. \u201cA book where you can enter \u201csport\u201d and end up with \u201ca diversion of the field\u201d \u2014 this is in fact the opposite of what I\u2019d known a dictionary to be. This is a book that transmutes plain words into language that\u2019s finer and more vivid and sometimes more rare. No wonder McPhee wrote with it by his side. No wonder he looked up words he knew, versus words he didn\u2019t, in a ratio of \u201cat least ninety-nine to one.\u201d\u201d</p><h4>Media</h4><p><a href=\"https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2021/journalism-is-a-public-service-so-why-doesnt-it-represent-the-public/\">Journalism is a public service. So why doesn\u2019t it represent the public?</a>. \"All of this is to say, getting into a four-year university depends largely on generational wealth, which a myriad of immigrant households and historically marginalized racial minorities are still struggling to build. Those on the unlucky side of the gap see disadvantages compound from the start. I come from a family that lived below the poverty line, and that likely helped me earn a full scholarship to Boston University. This stroke of luck has changed my life, but it\u2019s important to acknowledge that the hurdles don\u2019t end there.\"</p><p><a href=\"https://www.axios.com/politics-media-trump-biden-e423fd1f-f239-4581-9338-32d514977d3d.html\">America is learning to rebalance its news diet post-Trump</a>. \"Nearly halfway through President Biden's first 100 days, data shows that Americans are learning to wean themselves off of news \u2014 and especially politics.\"</p><p><a href=\"https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/posts/2021/03/01/zombies/\">Nearly Half of Digital Subscribers Are \u2018Zombies,\u2019 Medill Analysis Finds</a>. \u201cSpiegel found that 49% of digital subscribers didn\u2019t go to the websites they had paid for even once a month, putting them in a category known in news-industry slang as \u201czombies.\u201d Concern is growing about this problem because even though the living dead may still pay for local news, they seem like a weak foundation to build a future on.\u201d It makes me wonder why they subscribe; I suspect it\u2019s closer to why people donate to charity than because they want to be constantly engaged with the content.</p><p><a href=\"https://thehypothesis.substack.com/p/heres-why-substacks-scam-worked-so\">Here's why Substack's scam worked so well</a>. \u201cFor all we know, every single one of Substack\u2019s top newsletters is supported by money from Substack. Until Substack reveals who exactly is on its payroll, its promises that anyone can make money on a newsletter are tainted.\u201d</p><p><a href=\"https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FKZ-75jmhQS4UbAaASPgynowlkjFuIxkcAqIIwi7Ydk/edit\">AAJA Guidance on Atlanta Shootings</a>. \u201cWe urge newsrooms to cover the shootings in the context of the current rise in attacks on Asian Americans. These shootings have come during a time of increasing attacks on the AAPI community, and heightened fear among AAPI communities across the country.\u201d</p><h4>Politics</h4><p><a href=\"https://19thnews.org/2021/02/women-in-congress-capitol-riot/\">Women in Congress on the Capitol riot: 23 lawmakers on what happened to them during the insurrection</a>. \"As the events of the deadly riot are examined in the impeachment trial, here is what almost two dozen lawmakers told The 19th about January 6, in their own words.\" Really harrowing.</p><h4>Science</h4><p><a href=\"https://www.sciencealert.com/cuttlefish-can-pass-a-cognitive-test-designed-for-children\">A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed For Human Children</a>. Cuttlefish can pass the marshmallow test. Can you?</p><p><a href=\"https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-79310-1\">Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial images</a>. \"Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity. Given the widespread use of facial recognition, our findings have critical implications for the protection of privacy and civil liberties.\" Kind of terrifying.</p><p><a href=\"https://www.ewg.org/release/study-preservative-used-pop-tarts-and-hundreds-popular-foods-may-harm-immune-system\">Study: Preservative Used in Pop-Tarts and Hundreds of Popular Foods May Harm the Immune System</a>. \"A food preservative used to prolong the shelf life of Pop-Tarts, Rice Krispies Treats, Cheez-Its and almost 1,250 other popular processed foods may harm the immune system, according to a new peer-reviewed study by Environmental Working Group.\" And: \"Recently published research has also found a link between high levels of PFAS in the blood and the severity of Covid-19.\"</p><p><a href=\"https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/how-mrna-technology-could-change-world/618431/\">How mRNA Technology Could Change the World</a>. \"For decades, researchers have struggled to design a workable vaccine for HIV, and many observers considered this field a dead end. But a new paper argues that these repeated failures forced HIV-vaccine researchers to spend a lot of time and money on strange and unproven vaccine techniques\u2014such as synthetic mRNA and the viral-vector technology that powers the Johnson &amp; Johnson vaccine. Nearly 90 percent of COVID-19 vaccines that made it to clinical trials used technology that \u201ccould be traced back to prototypes tested in HIV vaccine trials,\u201d Jeffrey E. Harris, the economist at MIT who authored the paper, wrote.\"</p><p><a href=\"https://www.vice.com/en/article/7k9gya/stanford-scientists-reverse-engineer-moderna-vaccine-post-code-on-github?utm_content=1617026621&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_source=motherboard_twitter\">Stanford Scientists Reverse Engineer Moderna Vaccine, Post Code on Github</a>. \u201cWe didn't reverse engineer the vaccine. We posted the putative sequence of two synthetic RNA molecules that have become sufficiently prevalent in the general environment of medicine and human biology in 2021.\u201d</p><h4>Society</h4><p><a href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/feb/16/how-to-have-better-arguments-social-media-politics-conflict?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other\">How to have better arguments online</a>. Not just online: \u201cWhen we\u2019re in an argument with someone, we should be thinking about how they can change their mind and look good \u2013 maintain or even enhance their face \u2013 at the same time. Often this is very hard to do in the moment of the dispute itself, when opinion and face are bound even more tightly together than they are before or after (the writer Rachel Cusk defines an argument as \u201can emergency of self-definition\u201d). However, by showing that we have listened to and respected our interlocutor\u2019s point of view, we make it more likely that they will come around at some later point. If and when they do, we should avoid scolding them for not agreeing with us all along.\u201d</p><p><a href=\"https://www.psychnewsdaily.com/new-study-finds-not-knowing-how-to-flirt-is-the-main-reason-behind-involuntary-singlehood/\">New study finds not knowing how to flirt is the main reason behind \"involuntary singlehood\"</a>. \"Among the participants who indicated that they were involuntarily single, the most important factor by far was their lack of flirting skills. Following this factor, in decreasing order, were skills in perceiving signals of interest, \u201cmating effort,\u201d and choosiness. These last three factors were all relatively similar in their degree of impact.\"</p><p><a href=\"https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio-web/harry-and-meghan-the-union-of-two-great-houses-the-windsors-and-the-celebrities-is-complete-1.4504502?mode=amp&amp;fbclid=IwAR3w6y23DD51xRN2FaG9fPJAmUNWdbVVwHelIyKZPskWLZ_rl2-PFXqrmzY\">Harry and Meghan: The union of two great houses, the Windsors and the Celebrities, is complete</a>. \u201cHaving a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who\u2019s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it\u2019s like having a neighbour who\u2019s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.\u201d</p><p><a href=\"https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/private-schools-are-indefensible/618078/\">Private Schools Are Indefensible</a>. I agree with the headline. They simply shouldn\u2019t exist. This is an excellent piece that dives into some reasons why.</p><p><a href=\"https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/03/what-pandemic-doing-our-brains/618221/\">What the Pandemic Is Doing to Our Brains</a>. \u201cThe pandemic is still too young to have yielded rigorous, peer-reviewed studies about its effects on cognitive function. But the brain scientists I spoke with told me they can extrapolate based on earlier work about trauma, boredom, stress, and inactivity, all of which do a host of very bad things to a mammal\u2019s brain.\u201d</p><p><a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/hospitals-hide-pricing-data-from-search-results-11616405402\">Hospitals Hide Pricing Data From Search Results</a>. Hospitals have to list pricing by law - but they explicitly add noindex, nofollow tags to pricing pages so they can't be searched and discovered. Seems like an opportunity for someone to build an open dataset.</p><p><a href=\"https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/evanston-illinois-becomes-first-u-s-city-pay-reparations-blacks-n1261791\">Evanston, Illinois, becomes first U.S. city to pay reparations to Black residents</a>. \"The Chicago suburb\u2019s City Council voted 8-1 to distribute $400,000 to eligible black households. Each qualifying household would receive $25,000 for home repairs or down payments on property.\"</p><h4>Technology</h4><p><a href=\"https://ez.substack.com/p/clubhouse-harassment-and-techs-move\">Clubhouse Harassment, and Tech's Move from Enthusiast to Industrial Press</a>. \u201cI believe that a lot of the people in tech who are having this vacuous, oafish discussion of the media has as \u201chaters\u201d are actually just mad that they can\u2019t say or do what they want and that every action they have isn\u2019t the most important thing in the world.\u201d</p><p><a href=\"https://digiday.com/media/we-will-not-build-alternate-identifiers-in-drastic-shift-google-will-end-behavioral-targeting-profile-building-in-its-ad-products/\">Google will end behavioral targeting, profile-building in its ad products</a>. \"Google helped create and grow the digital ad ecosystem that relied on tracking and targeting ads to people across the web. Now, up against pressure from regulators around data privacy and antitrust, Google will stop enabling cross-site tracking and targeting of individuals outside its own properties such as in inventory it sells through its Google AdX display and video ad exchange.\" Big changes are coming.</p><p><a href=\"https://latacora.micro.blog/2020/03/12/the-soc-starting.html\">The SOC2 Starting Seven</a>. \"Here\u2019s how we\u2019ll try to help: with Seven Things you can do now that will simplify SOC2 for you down the road while making your life, or at least your security posture, materially better in the immediacy.\" File under \"things I wish I'd read a year ago\".</p><p><a href=\"http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/03/lying-to-the-ghost-in-the-mach.html\">Lying to the ghost in the machine</a>. \u201cThe point I'd like to make is that ready-trained NNs like GPT-3 or CLIP are often tailored as the basis of specific recognizer applications and then may end up deployed in public situations, much as shitty internet-of-things gizmos usually run on an elderly, unpatched ARM linux kernel with an old version of OpenSSH and busybox installed, and hard-wired root login credentials. This is the future of security holes in our internet-connected appliances: metaphorically, cameras that you can fool by slapping a sticker labelled \"THIS IS NOT THE DROID YOU ARE LOOKING FOR\" on the front of the droid the camera is in fact looking for.\u201d</p><p><a href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/t-mobile-to-step-up-ad-targeting-of-cellphone-customers-11615285803\">T-Mobile to Step Up Ad Targeting of Cellphone Customers</a>. 'Wireless carrier tells subscribers it could share their masked browsing, app data and online activity with advertisers unless they opt out.\" As a previously-happy T-Mobile customer, I'm outraged by this.</p><p><a href=\"https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/11/1020600/facebook-responsible-ai-misinformation/\">He got Facebook hooked on AI. Now he can't fix its misinformation addiction</a>. \u201cI began video-calling Qui\u00f1onero regularly. I also spoke to Facebook executives, current and former employees, industry peers, and external experts. Many spoke on condition of anonymity because they\u2019d signed nondisclosure agreements or feared retaliation. I wanted to know: What was Qui\u00f1onero\u2019s team doing to rein in the hate and lies on its platform?\u201d Surprise, surprise: that\u2019s not what Facebook wanted to talk about.</p><p><a href=\"https://infrequently.org/2021/03/the-performance-inequality-gap/\">The Mobile Performance Inequality Gap, 2021</a>. \u201cWhatever progress runtimes and networks have made in the past half-decade, browsers are stubbornly situated in the devices carried by real-world users, and the single most important thing to understand about the landscape of devices your sites will run on is that they are not new phones.\u201d</p><p><a href=\"https://theadhocracy.co.uk/wrote/one-year-in-the-indieweb\">One Year in the IndieWeb</a>. I'm pretty much an indieweb zealot. These experiences are fair and representative of the community, it seems to me.</p><p><a href=\"https://www.newsblur.com/newsletters/story/8094476:9c80ba\">The Dao of DAOs</a>. \u201cAfter a contentious debate, the Ethereum core team, led by Vitalik Buterin, released a hard fork of the Ethereum blockchain. It was essentially a new version in which everything was the same, except in the forked version, the heist never happened.\u201d A very telling paragraph. How decentralized is it, really, if the core team can vanish away transactions, regardless of the reason? (Hint: every blockchain can do this.)</p><p><a href=\"https://sparktoro.com/blog/in-2020-two-thirds-of-google-searches-ended-without-a-click/\">In 2020, Two Thirds of Google Searches Ended Without a Click</a>. Fuel for Google being more of a publisher than a referrer these days.</p><p><a href=\"https://www.lafoo.com/the-end-of-amp/\">The End of AMP</a>. \u201cIf you\u2019re currently using AMP, you\u2019ll be able to get rid of that monstrosity in May, and if you aren\u2019t, you\u2019ll now be competing for search positions previously unavailable to you. For publishers, it is a win-win.\u201d FINALLY.</p>"
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    "author": {
        "type": "card",
        "name": "Ben Werdm\u00fcller",
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        "photo": "https://werd.io/file/5d388c5fb16ea14aac640912/thumb.jpg"
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    "_id": "19467880",
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