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About Niche Museums
About Niche Museums
My aim is to add a new museum to this website on a regular basis. The most recently added museum is always the first item on the homepage.
·niche-museums.com·
About Niche Museums
Taking an Internet Walk
Taking an Internet Walk
analogies between the internet and physical exploration—hyperlinks as portals which skip the freeways, handmade websites as subculture, reverse image search and direct site searches as alternative path systems
The first hyperlinks pointed within their own domain, like the doors separating the rooms in your home. However, with the world wide web, the doors became portals, and pioneers mapped out site directories to guide internet travelers to the frontier of development. Reject modern interstates and embody Tarzan, Jane, or the chimpanzee to swing from link to link, blue to purple.
if you like handmade websites, you should visit Gossips Web or Brutalist Websites. These are the digital equivalent to the jazz bar, punk record store, or other physical places where subcultures gather. There’s likely one made by a devotee whatever your interest, like cyberfeminism, tiny internet sites, cozy websites, niche museums, list of lists, LA sandwiches, and much more.
·syllabusproject.org·
Taking an Internet Walk
The role of religiosity on seeking help
The role of religiosity on seeking help
religiosity, whether manipulated (Study 2) and measured (Study 1 and Study 3), decreases individuals' tendency to seek help from other people or entities. We further propose that religiosity enhances individuals' sense of control, which makes them rely more on themselves and less likely to seek help when encountering difficulties. Three studies across different contexts (i.e., applying government aid, asking for help from other people, and requesting donations from a crowdfunding platform) support our thesis.
·onlinelibrary.wiley.com·
The role of religiosity on seeking help
sonch on Twitter / X
sonch on Twitter / X
thread of a person documenting their 'improvements' to Edward Hopper's 'Nighthawks', but their AI interventions make it drastically different to the original. The poster is either trolling or artistically illiterate
·twitter.com·
sonch on Twitter / X
How Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ reached millions online
How Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ reached millions online
It also showed how efforts to suppress such information can backfire. Many of the videos on TikTok were posted after the British newspaper the Guardian, which had hosted a copy of bin Laden’s letter, removed it. Some TikTokers said the removal was proof of the letter’s wisdom and importance, leading them to further amplify it as a result.“Don’t turn the long-public ravings of a terrorist into forbidden knowledge, something people feel excited to go rediscover,” Renee DiResta, a research manager at the Stanford internet Observatory who has advised Congress on online disinformation, wrote Thursday in a post on Threads. “Let people read the murderer’s demands — this is the man some TikTok fools chose to glorify. Add more context.”
the letter didn’t rank among TikTok’s top trends. Videos with the #lettertoamerica hashtag had been seen about 2 million times — a relatively low count on a wildly popular app with 150 million accounts in the United States alone.Then that evening, the journalist Yashar Ali shared a compilation he’d made of the TikTok videos in a post on X, formerly Twitter. That post has been viewed more than 28 million times. By Thursday afternoon, when TikTok announced it had banned the hashtag and dozens of similar variations, TikTok videos tagged #lettertoamerica had gained more than 15 million views.
·washingtonpost.com·
How Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ reached millions online
Healing Ourselves to Death
Healing Ourselves to Death
The perceived ‘self’ is an amalgamation shaped by quasi-independent personalities influenced by genetics, upbringing, memories, and trauma. Much of our behavior is driven by animalistic passions and irrepressible emotions.And I think that’s what we hate: We hate not being the boss of our own heads. We hate not being in control. The puppet wishes to overpower the strings—parts of her own body—that keep her upright and sensible.
Girard told us that imitation is the texture of the human experience, that we are constantly orchestrated by desires, and that we are fluid beings who are always becoming more like who we look up to. So, in this light, trying to become the best version of yourself creates an impossible loop: You need the best version of yourself to exist so you know what to strive for in order to become it, but the best version of you can not exist if you do not become it first. Chicken and egg.
the marionette can not be its own puppeteer; that would be a paradox. Trying to improve the self is like Narcissus staring at his reflection: Neither you nor your reflection—who you want to be—changes. You can not improve yourself by staring back at yourself in the same way that a mirror can not become a portrait.1 Self-deficiency implies that external help is needed. You are imperfect at best. You can not produce something from nothing, multiply without a multiplier, or draw straight with crooked lines.
Instead of self-fulfillment or self-actualization, perhaps we are meant to self-deny so we can make room for a Savior. The reason is in its name: Christ-ian, meaning Christ-like, suggests that we shouldn’t be imitating or striving to be some imaginative best-version-of-myself, but rather, someone completely external and objectively Good to the perfect degree.
I'm not sure I agree with *everything* you wrote above, but as I've gotten older, I find myself turning less to self-help books, articles, etc., and more to just hanging out with friends and family.
·theplurisociety.com·
Healing Ourselves to Death
Omegle's Rise and Fall - A Vision for Internet Connection
Omegle's Rise and Fall - A Vision for Internet Connection
As much as I wish circumstances were different, the stress and expense of this fight – coupled with the existing stress and expense of operating Omegle, and fighting its misuse – are simply too much. Operating Omegle is no longer sustainable, financially nor psychologically. Frankly, I don’t want to have a heart attack in my 30s. The battle for Omegle has been lost, but the war against the Internet rages on. Virtually every online communication service has been subject to the same kinds of attack as Omegle; and while some of them are much larger companies with much greater resources, they all have their breaking point somewhere. I worry that, unless the tide turns soon, the Internet I fell in love with may cease to exist, and in its place, we will have something closer to a souped-up version of TV – focused largely on passive consumption, with much less opportunity for active participation and genuine human connection.
I’ve done my best to weather the attacks, with the interests of Omegle’s users – and the broader principle – in mind. If something as simple as meeting random new people is forbidden, what’s next? That is far and away removed from anything that could be considered a reasonable compromise of the principle I outlined. Analogies are a limited tool, but a physical-world analogy might be shutting down Central Park because crime occurs there – or perhaps more provocatively, destroying the universe because it contains evil. A healthy, free society cannot endure when we are collectively afraid of each other to this extent.
In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more ornery. Maybe that has something to do with the pandemic, or with political disagreements. Whatever the reason, people have become faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other’s shared humanity. One aspect of this has been a constant barrage of attacks on communication services, Omegle included, based on the behavior of a malicious subset of users. To an extent, it is reasonable to question the policies and practices of any place where crime has occurred. I have always welcomed constructive feedback; and indeed, Omegle implemented a number of improvements based on such feedback over the years. However, the recent attacks have felt anything but constructive. The only way to please these people is to stop offering the service. Sometimes they say so, explicitly and avowedly; other times, it can be inferred from their act of setting standards that are not humanly achievable. Either way, the net result is the same.
I didn’t really know what to expect when I launched Omegle. Would anyone even care about some Web site that an 18 year old kid made in his bedroom in his parents’ house in Vermont, with no marketing budget? But it became popular almost instantly after launch, and grew organically from there, reaching millions of daily users. I believe this had something to do with meeting new people being a basic human need, and with Omegle being among the best ways to fulfill that need. As the saying goes: “If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.” Over the years, people have used Omegle to explore foreign cultures; to get advice about their lives from impartial third parties; and to help alleviate feelings of loneliness and isolation. I’ve even heard stories of soulmates meeting on Omegle, and getting married. Those are only some of the highlights. Unfortunately, there are also lowlights. Virtually every tool can be used for good or for evil, and that is especially true of communication tools, due to their innate flexibility. The telephone can be used to wish your grandmother “happy birthday”, but it can also be used to call in a bomb threat. There can be no honest accounting of Omegle without acknowledging that some people misused it, including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes.
As a young teenager, I couldn’t just waltz onto a college campus and tell a student: “Let’s debate moral philosophy!” I couldn’t walk up to a professor and say: “Tell me something interesting about microeconomics!” But online, I was able to meet those people, and have those conversations. I was also an avid Wikipedia editor; I contributed to open source software projects; and I often helped answer computer programming questions posed by people many years older than me. In short, the Internet opened the door to a much larger, more diverse, and more vibrant world than I would have otherwise been able to experience; and enabled me to be an active participant in, and contributor to, that world. All of this helped me to learn, and to grow into a more well-rounded person. Moreover, as a survivor of childhood rape, I was acutely aware that any time I interacted with someone in the physical world, I was risking my physical body. The Internet gave me a refuge from that fear. I was under no illusion that only good people used the Internet; but I knew that, if I said “no” to someone online, they couldn’t physically reach through the screen and hold a weapon to my head, or worse. I saw the miles of copper wires and fiber-optic cables between me and other people as a kind of shield – one that empowered me to be less isolated than my trauma and fear would have otherwise allowed.
·omegle.com·
Omegle's Rise and Fall - A Vision for Internet Connection
It's true. Your devices are listening to you - Hacker News
It's true. Your devices are listening to you - Hacker News
Perspectives on what this claim might actually mean in practice
To me it's pretty clearly the same targeted advertising available anywhere with the extra claim of using "voice data". It doesn't say what the voice data is or where it comes from. They could say that when people do google searches using Siri/OkGoogle/the microphone option on Google - it's information they would use in an anonymized way to target ads, or rather Google does on your behalf, and it's technically a derivative of voice data.
I'm skeptical this is what people might think it is. To be clear, I think most readers would interpret this as "your phone is surreptiously listening to you via your microphone." If that were true, then there would be telltale signs of resource draw. Handling rich audio data has practical costs, whether battery, CPU, network, memory, and/or disk; that data has to be stored, transmitted, and processed somehow. I've never seen analysis that shows that's happening. Not to mention this capability is beyond what audio capture APIs in Android and iOS offer, as far as I know.
·news.ycombinator.com·
It's true. Your devices are listening to you - Hacker News
The business value of design
The business value of design
The importance of user-centricity, demands a broad-based view of where design can make a difference. We live in a world where your smartphone can warn you to leave early for your next appointment because of traffic, and your house knows when you’ll be home and therefore when to turn on the heat. The boundaries between products and services are merging into integrated experiences.
Our research suggests that overcoming isolationist tendencies is extremely valuable. One of the strongest correlations we uncovered linked top financial performers and companies that said they could break down functional silos and integrate designers with other functions. This was particularly notable in consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) businesses, where respondents from companies that were top-quartile integrators reported compound annual growth rates some seven percentage points above those that were weakest in this respect.
·mckinsey.com·
The business value of design
Design giant Ideo cuts a third of staff and closes offices as the era of design thinking ends
Design giant Ideo cuts a third of staff and closes offices as the era of design thinking ends
Ford, once a big client, now has its own internal design lab modeled by Ideo to emulate the design firm’s own process.
Meanwhile, issues that Ideo often speaks on publicly, like DEI and the environment, simply do not generate much revenue. The source estimates Ideo did all of $2 million in climate-related work in the past year.
·fastcompany.com·
Design giant Ideo cuts a third of staff and closes offices as the era of design thinking ends
Ideo breaks its silence on design thinking’s critics
Ideo breaks its silence on design thinking’s critics
criticisms of design thinking discussed in an interview with Fast Company Innovation Festival, Ideo partner and leader of its Cambridge, Massachusetts, office Michael Hendrix
By Katharine Schwab4 minute ReadOver the last year, Ideo’s philosophy of “design thinking“–a codified, six-step process to solve problems creatively–has come under fire. It’s been called bullshit, the opposite of inclusive design, and a failed experiment. It’s even been compared to syphilis.Ideo as an institution has rarely responded to critiques of design thinking or acknowledged its flaws. But at the Fast Company Innovation Festival, Ideo partner and leader of its Cambridge, Massachusetts, office Michael Hendrix had a frank conversation with Co.Design senior writer Mark Wilson about why design thinking has gotten so much flack.“I think it’s fair to critique design thinking, just as it’s fair to critique any other design strategy,” Hendrix says. “There’s of course many poor examples of design thinking, and there’s great examples. Just like there’s poor examples of industrial design and graphic design and different processes within organizations.”Part of the problem is that many people use the design thinking methodology in superficial ways. Hendrix calls it the “theater of innovation.” Companies know they need to be more creative and innovative, and because they’re looking for fast ways to achieve those goals, they cut corners.“We get a lot of the materials that look like innovation, or look like they make us more creative,” Hendrix says. “That could be anything from getting a bunch of Sharpie markers and Post-its and putting them in rooms for brainstorms, to having new dress codes, to programming play into the week. They all could be good tools to serve up creativity or innovation, they all could be methods of design thinking, but without some kind of history or strategy to tie them together, and track their progress, track their impact, they end up being a theatrical thing that people can point to and say, ‘oh we did that.'”
“If you make something rigid and formulaic, it could absolutely fail,” he says. “You want to rely on milestones in the creative process, but you don’t want it to be a reactive process that loses its soul.”
“There is a real need to build respect for one another and trust in the safety of sharing ideas so you can move forward,” Hendrix says. “Knowing when to bring judgments is important. Cultures that are highly judgy, that have hierarchy, that are rewarding the person who is the smartest person in the room, don’t do well with this kind of methodology.”
·fastcompany.com·
Ideo breaks its silence on design thinking’s critics