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software-engineering
Kenneth Rainin Foundation Awards $100,000 Grant to Four Bay Area Artists
Brenda Wong Aoki, Christy Chan, Kyle Casey Chu and Vanessa Sanchez are this year's Rainin fellows.
san-francisco
SF is helping nonprofits buy up distressed real estate
After being priced out for years, non-tech tenants like the Bayanihan Equity Center can afford to be in the city again.
35 Years of Twin Peaks: Joan Chen, RaMell Ross, Jane Schoenbrun and more pay tribute to David Lynch
A story on Letterboxd.
film
The B2B Trap: How Silicon Valley is Funding its Own Extinction
Let me be blunt: Silicon Valley Founders and VCs have completely lost the plot. The evidence is overwhelming, and the consequences are…
tech-industry
Tracking Mayor Lurie's first 100 days in office
Mission Local has compiled all of Lurie’s substantive actions from his time in office so far — here are his major moves.
Viable System Model - Metaphorum
A short introduction into the Viable System Model and a few Videos with Stafford Beer to get started.
theory
At Embarcadero Plaza, a Giant Nude Sculpture Nobody Asked For | KQED
Marco Cochrane’s 45-foot-tall sculpture ‘R-Evolution’ will stand at Embarcadero Plaza for up to a year.
Tennis stars accuse governing bodies of ‘cartel’ to deny them more prize money
Players’ group behind lawsuit is affiliated with sports company backed by hedge fund tycoon Bill Ackman
tennis
This skateboarding economist suggests we need more skateparks and less capitalism
A skateboarder presented an unusual paper at this year's big meeting of American economists.
culture
A Childhood Neighbor Terrorized My Family. It Prepared Me for Trump’s Takeover.
It was psychological warfare.
politics
Anyone Can Push Updates to the DOGE.gov Website
"THESE 'EXPERTS' LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN."
reaction
When Did The Moving Image Stop Moving? | Defector
When I was a kid, like a lot of kids in the ‘80s, I had a View-Master. I had a few View-Masters, actually. You may have seen them before—they were these little red camera-looking things, with what looked like a visor in the middle and a little orange lever on the side. They were a […]
Amazon Has Overhauled Its Drone Delivery. Will the Public Welcome It?
A recent visit to Amazon’s overhauled drone delivery program in Arizona left me impressed by the drones, but skeptical that the public will welcome them.
drones
Matt Yglesias Is Confidently Wrong About Everything
The Biden administration’s favorite centrist pundit produces smug pseudo-analysis that cannot be considered serious thought. He ought to be permanently disregarded.
For Yglesias, the very fact that something is the D.C. political consensus is enough to treat it as correct!
What Is Privacy For?
We often want to keep some information to ourselves. But information itself may be the problem.
For Pressly, real privacy would mean not simply enabling people to participate in such decisions but mandating that far less data be made in the first place. Brought to its logical conclusion, his proposal evokes a kind of digital degrowth, a managed contraction of the Internet.
The highest compliment I can pay “The Right to Oblivion” is that it rescues privacy from the lawyers. Pressly’s version of privacy has a moral content, not just a legal one. And this gives it relevance to a broader set of intellectual and political pursuits.
the-future
Can Someone Please Write Normally About This Fascinating Woman? | Defector
Augusta Britt has had, by any reasonable accounting, an extraordinarily rich and interesting life, and seems like a vivid and fascinating person. By her mid-teens in the mid-1970s, she was a pistol-packing Arizona refugee from her own abusive family and any number of atrocious foster homes. She met the novelist Cormac McCarthy by a motel […]
Jackie Fielder's party of one
Is the new supervisor a bold, young progressive who just wants to get stuff done? Or a far-left firebrand looking to turn the system upside down?
security
Cormac McCarthy’s Secret Muse Breaks Her Silence After Half a Century: “I Loved Him. He Was My Safety.”
When he was 42, Cormac McCarthy fell in love with a 16-year-old girl he met by a motel pool. Augusta Britt would go on to become one of the most significant—and secret—inspirations in literary history, giving life to many of McCarthy’s most iconic characters across his celebrated novels and Hollywood films. For 47 years, Britt closely guarded her identity and her story. Until now.
SF election analysis: Money can’t buy you competence
Why did Daniel Lurie win? Why did Prop. D lose so badly? And how did Connie Chan survive when Dean Preston fell?
You Too Can Donate A Kidney And Still Be A Normal Cool Guy Who Pounds Brewskis | Defector
Last month in a Manhattan hospital, I got my kidney yanked out. A few weeks later in Los Angeles, I went to a show, drank two tallboys of Modelo, wobbled through a crowd of aging goths, got a ride to a bar, and walked home uphill. Donating an organ is a major life decision, but […]
dudes-rock
Exit Right - Dissent Magazine
Trump has remade Americans, and to defeat Trumpism requires nothing less than the left doing the same.
Who is Michael Moritz, and what does he want for San Francisco?
Doctors told the billionaire donor he should be gone by now. Instead, he's just getting started — and spending millions to remake the city.
That San Francisco is governed by a strong-mayor system is a “point of view,” in Moritz’s book. “And I just don’t happen to share that view.”
Moritz was born on Sept. 12, 1954, in Cardiff, Wales. His parents, Alfred and Doris, were German-Jewish refugees, and his father was a classics professor at the University of Cardiff.
Fabulous wealth did not appear to be in the cards, as Moritz went the route of the typeset drawer, heading into journalism.
In 1984, he penned the influential book “The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer.” By 1986, he was hired on by Sequoia Capital, and a storybook career ensued. He got in early on many of the companies on your phone: Google, Yahoo, PayPal, YouTube. As well as the phone itself — Apple.
Asked if he sees contradictions in his philanthropic and political giving, Moritz says he doesn’t. “The thing that gets lost on a lot of people,” he says, “is that the political stuff is a tiny percentage of the charitable giving. It takes a village, and it’s difficult to seek perfect alignment. I don’t worry about occasional overlaps.”
The jarring misstep by Moritz’s TogetherSF was, dutifully and thoroughly, covered by Moritz’s San Francisco Standard. If nothing else, Moritz could take solace that his journalists took him seriously when he told them at all-hands meetings that his own activities were fair game for reportage.
He also thinks Farrell will “be more forceful about getting uniformed officers on the street, which is the most effective, cheapest way to make everybody in San Francisco feel a lot safer.”
Democratising publishing
Thoughts on open source governance and how to create trust within technology, communities, and media.
open-source
James Vincent · Horny Robot Baby Voice: On AI Chatbots
Some of the pessimism surrounding AI chatbots stems from a belief that humans, like computers, can be hacked: that our...
artificial-intelligence
Electromagnetic Fault Injection - Circuit Cellar
A Closer Look Electromagnetic Fault Injection (EMFI) is a powerful method of inserting faults into embedded devices, but what does this give us? In this article, Colin dives into a little more detail of what sort of effects EMFI has on real devices, and expands upon a few previous articles to demonstrate some attacks on […]
The Disappearance of an Internet Domain
How geopolitics can alter digital infrastructure
tech-history