The roads are not for pedestrians.
(via Chris Bruntlett)
Category: Blog
Happy Veteran’s Day
My Mom shared a few photos from my Dad’s 22 years of military service. He was in the Navy and Wisconsin National Guard. He has retired from the military now after serving multiple tours of duty in Iraq.
Launchnik
Coming up with an idea for a successful startup used to be difficult. But then Uber came along. That made coming up with a startup ideas as simple as saying “Uber for [fill in the blank].” But you still had to come up with a clever name and flashy website before you could launch your dream startup.
Launchnik fixes that. It is like Uber for startup ideas. All you have to do is click ‘Go!’ and the site comes up with an Uber-based startup idea, a Web 2.0 company name, and a splash page.
After that, all you need to do is find a VC to fund it.
Web standards for the future
W3C released a short animated video celebrating the benefits of web standards and the open web.
Earth and Moon
(via Reddit)
XOXO 2014 videos
I’ve been watching (listening really) to the videos from this year’s XOXO. There were some some excellent speakers and talks at the festival.
Too Many Cooks
I can’t, in good conscience, recommend anyone watch Too Many Cooks, the 1980s sitcom intro parody. And not just because it’s an 11-minute YouTube video (who has time for that?).
The video has its own brand of weird. I watched it with my wife the other day, and now she’s understandably trying to keep me away from the Internet. But the song and idea of it has been stuck in my head for days now.
Thank you Andy for unleashing it on my corner of the Internet.
AI is coming
Nick Bilton is worried about the threat of artificial intelligence.
Right now these artificially intelligent machines are pretty cute and innocent, but as they are given more power in society, these machines may not take long to spiral out of control.
In the beginning, the glitches will be small but eventful. Maybe a rogue computer momentarily derails the stock market, causing billions in damage. Or a driverless car freezes on the highway because a software update goes awry.
But the upheavals can escalate quickly and become scarier and even cataclysmic. Imagine how a medical robot, originally programmed to rid cancer, could conclude that the best way to obliterate cancer is to exterminate humans who are genetically prone to the disease.
The human capacity for inventing destructive technology has an unknown limit. But so is its capacity for inventing technology that makes life better. The likely progression is that AI will first be developed for use in war, but its masters will lose control, and the emergent superintelligence will become net benefit to humanity.
My baby girl’s laugh
I could listen to this again and again.
EFF secure messaging score card
The EFF published a scorecard that shows which messaging apps keep messages most secure.
In the face of widespread Internet surveillance, we need a secure and practical means of talking to each other from our phones and computers. Many companies offer “secure messaging” products—but are these systems actually secure? We decided to find out, in the first phase of a new EFF Campaign for Secure & Usable Crypto.
I shouldn’t be surprised how insecure most of these are, but I am surprised how obscure the secure one are. (via Daring Fireball)