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Peak ads, MetaFilter’s Google Problems, and the need to scale back.

[…] the full gamut of a true sharing economy[—]from the controversial Lyfts and Airbnbs to the individuals who run home businesses knitting scarves and baking pies without traditional employment safety nets or the corporate muscle of Big Sharing. While the former wields the power to get its way, defining “the sharing economy” at the expense of workers and consumers, sole proprietors and nonprofit collectives are often the ones facing real legal problems that they can’t afford to solve. The benefits big disruptive “sharing economy” players might be making for themselves are not exactly trickling down.

"The Hum" refers to a mysterious sound heard in places around the world by a small fraction of a local population. It's characterized by a persistent and invasive low-frequency rumbling or droning noise often accompanied by vibrations.

I don’t care about advancing the state of the art. I care about being a creative person who lives a good life and does projects that make me happy.

there are certain technical issues that are still misunderstood by many

Surveillance as a business model is the only thing that makes a site like Facebook possible.

Objects accumulate meanings because of the associations and feelings we bring to them.

We cannot champion Network Neutrality without admitting that the Internet is no Utopia.

But this kind of obsolescence has a way of creeping up on you. Even the researchers involved with CD preservation efforts at the Library of Congress say that academics started thinking about this kind of work later than they should have. "We really haven't focused as much on 20th-century media because you just think there are multiple copies of things. People just assumed it's more widely distributed."

Here’s one way to help create the “right to be forgotten”: Have your online utterances vanish after a period of time.

To enumerate great works of software that are deeply influential.

I found what I believe is the very first true “me irl” published on the Internet. And it’s a doozy.

Start with the understanding that contracts benefit both parties. Generally people go into a business arrangement with the best of intentions and a lot of assumptions. A contract makes those assumptions explicit by documenting the terms of engagement clearly.

The ‘moral economy’ of Record Store Day.

Instead of years of local/subcultural prep work resulting in a sudden mainstream (or midcult) explosion, we see the sauce simmering, and see all the ingredients that go into it. And as a result, we don’t call it sauce. We just see the ingredients, and don’t think they need to be reclassified. Indie rock changed enough between 1994 and 2014 (waaaaaaaay fewer guitars) that you’d think it’d be called something different, but we still call it “indie rock,” because we didn’t get to see a big, dramatic moment with a big, dramatic break. If everything’s always connected, it becomes much harder to see meaningful divisions.

Most men would never go on a shooting rampage, because they believed that they were owed sex by women. Most men. Sadly, not all men.

So: Do you make room for transient joy? Does it impede your deep thoughts, or does it inspire them, like a spark to wick?

The brogrammer becomes the flat, oppressive ideal, and the fact that "bro" was originally a term of complex, critical affection within a community is lost, replaced by a distorting mirror in which people see themselves reflected as comic Hollywood caricatures, while disavowing their own, very real participation in what remain very real cultural issues.

The president is correct that there is a long history of black leaders addressing "personal responsibility." But as a diagnosis for what has historically gone wrong in black communities, the tradition is erroneous.

I don’t know anything about music theory, not what an E or an A means in terms of sound. But through the crucial context Ross gives, and his descriptions, I don’t need to. My Lai to Manson, this is not going to be a happy work. The E “longs for resolution”, signifying tension. It does what all great music writing should do, make you desperate to hear the music being described.

Bay Area sound critic Marc Weidenbaum—acoustic historian, noise futurist, music instructor, and writer of a brand new book about Aphex Twin—has been blogging about music, electronics, and everyday sounds at his blog Disquiet here at Gizmodo for the last few months.

Why do we listen to our favourite music over and over again? Because repeated sounds work magic in our brains.

Thanks to Twitter, the hashtag has become an important linguistic shortcut. But while everyone from Robin Thicke to Beyoncé has used the symbol as part of their art, only a few have truly taken advantage of its culture-jamming possibilities.

Seven high-resolution photos every seven days. Commercial use OK.

150 monochrome social icon vectors.

48 line-art icon vectors.

A freshly updated icon font set that you can use with CSS on your next Foundation project.

250+ pictogram vectors.

200+ icon vectors.

Environmentally focused icons.