Monthly Archives: July 2016

How the ‘Spicy Boi’ comments on Hillary’s Instagram shows the difficulty of dealing with trolls

Posted on July 20, 2016 | Comments Off on How the ‘Spicy Boi’ comments on Hillary’s Instagram shows the difficulty of dealing with trolls

To see what I mean, read this piece in NYMag, Everyone Is Commenting ‘Spicy Boi’ on Hillary’s Instagram. Note how the social networks cross over the various platforms. The social organization of this activity goes from platform (iFunny) to platform (Twitter) to platform (Instagram). No doubt at some point it will appear on Reddit, 4chan, and who knows where else. It’s very hard to deal with trolls when you have people on one platform (e.g. Twitter) trying to control things, yet you can have social groups planning raids, etc. on other platforms.

Three thoughts:

  • the comment section for big accounts on Instagram is next to useless. I wonder why it is even enabled for them? I think they should disable it, or give the user the option to disable it.
  • In many cases, the comment sections should be limited to such things as “Likes” or “Thumbs Up” or simple polls.
  • Social media needs to involve either really good AI or (better) really good people to moderate things. It can’t happen soon enough.

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Posted in socialmedia, twitter

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Want to understand what artificial intelligence and machine learning is?

Posted on July 15, 2016 | Comments Off on Want to understand what artificial intelligence and machine learning is?

If you want a better understanding of artificial intelligence or if you want to gain some insight into the future of machine learning, I recommend these two free reports, found here: Free AI Reports from  O’Reilly Media. There’s so much hype and speculation about AI: these reports cut through all that noise and they will give you a better understanding of what A.I. really is and where it is going.

P.S. If you like them, check out the many great non-A.I. related reports as well. You don’t have to be a technologist to be able to read them.

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Posted in advice, IT

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A primer for Pokemon Go

Posted on July 11, 2016 | Comments Off on A primer for Pokemon Go

It’s only been out for a very short time, but already there’s at least one primer for it, here: Ten Things I Wish I Knew When I Started ‘Pokémon GO’ – Forbes. If you want to leapfrog others playing it, read this and then get going.

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Posted in apps, cool, software

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For Fans of Blade Runner and Typography

Posted on July 3, 2016 | Comments Off on For Fans of Blade Runner and Typography

This article will surprise you if you are fan of Blade Runner: Blade Runner | Typeset In The Future. It speaks to a level of detail in the film that I hadn’t appreciated. Not just the typography, but a number of other aspects, too. I was surprised, since I had seen the film dozens of times and read countless articles on it.

Highly recommended for fans of type and especially fans of the film.

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Posted in film

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On the rise and roots of our current minimalism

Posted on July 2, 2016 | Comments Off on On the rise and roots of our current minimalism

Minimalism is a foreign concept to some Westerners, especially as it is practiced in parts of Japan. Indeed, this line:

Fumio Sasaki’s one-room Tokyo apartment is so stark friends liken it to an interrogation room. He owns three shirts, four pairs of trousers, four pairs of socks and a meagre scattering of various other items.

You see “interrogation room” and “meagre”, which gives you some insight into how this writer sees it. The article which this comes from (and which is linked to below) does get more insightful and you gain a better insight into Japanese minimalism, from its cultural roots to its practicality (such as the real problem of how earthquakes make home objects dangerous).

Minimalism seems to be growing as a cultural concept throughout the world, and it’s good to know more about it, how the Japanese see it, and to think about how it should differ in Western cultures. To do that, see:

Three shirts, four pairs of trousers: meet Japan’s ‘hardcore’ minimalists in The Guardian

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Posted in culture, decor

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