Link. Sounds like a winner.
Daily Archives: March 11, 2018
Giant viruses straddle virus-bacterium divide
Link. Protein synthesis.
Story of the Moriori
Link. Similar to Inuit?
Mauro Morandi, recluse turned naturalist.
Link. Odd but not bad.
Accessing old file formats: on-demand emulation
Link. Some of my files would be a hard challenge.
Google’s relational database in the cloud – Cloud Spanner.
Link. New to me, was introduced in 2017.
You can drag and drop some links into a Google Doc and create a hyperlink text
Link. Wish I’d known this years ago.
Error in Dreamhost WordPress one-click installs – missing code in .htaccess causes 404 errors
Link. WordPress is too complex for what I do. Still, proud I figured this out.
Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and eye disease – 2018 update.
Link. I suspect is inevitably toxic to retina, perhaps related to lysosomal autophagy in low oxygen tissues. Most of us can handle 5 years of damage but no more. Can’t separate therapeutic benefit from toxicity.
Ad-click business models are a civilizational threat. Tax the click.
Olds like me wonder “what happened?”
The current theory goes like this
1. In the 90s the Internet, especially Google, became ad-click funded. (The click is important. Not funded by dollars sold, funded by click.)
2. Slowly Google and others discovered that emotionally extreme material generated more clicks. Again, clicks, not necessarily sales. (We don’t know if this is because the material selects for ad-clickers or encourages ad-clicks. I’ve probably clicked 4 ads in my life.)
3. Ads on kitten videos and white-nationalism and “viral content” got more clicks.
4. The algorithms encoded this knowledge and began tailoring content based on interest “hints”.
Lately researchers have been quantifying this. They found emotionally engaging content drives more clicks, and it is easier to invent that content than it is to find it. So the mass web became a tool for disseminating false content.
The effect is so powerful non-researchers see it in simple YouTube tests, aided in this case by a disaffected Google engineer:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html
Basically the dark side of humanity is amplified by Pay-per-click advertising business models.
The good news is there are obvious fixes. The same fixes used for other addictive social harms like tobacco. Regulation and taxes. For example, tax click-based ad revenue heavily.
To know the enemy is to understand the fix.
YouTube recommendation always extreme: “Videos about vegetarianism led to videos about veganism. Videos about jogging led to videos about running ultramarathons.”
Link. Porn follows similar model. Google found extremes attract compulsive viewing, more ad money. On the right – white nationalist, left HIV conspiracies.