Octubre

Posts:

• Google and Examine.com, on how Google demotes a research-based supplements website in their fight against promoting pseudoscience.
• Twitter “Unintentionally” Used Your Phone Number for Targeted Advertising, SMS-based 2FA, apart from being susceptible to SIM jacking, also leaves your personal data at risk of being “mistakenly” handed over to advertisers.
• Mastodon 3.0: you can now move your account between instances while preserving followers and other exciting features.
• Lawsuits against God, “ When God ‘failed to turn up in court’, Penrose won the case by default”.
• Secrets of the Little Blue Box, the original Esquire phone phreaking article that popularized the topic. See also this recent talk on the topic by the 8Bit Guy.
• Reproducible Builds — a set of software development practices that create an independently-verifiable path from source to binary code. Reproducible Builds are here and are great.
• How feasible is long-range forecasting?. Not much, it seems.
• Quantum supremacy: the gloves are off. Scott Aaronson’s piece on Google’s recent quantum supremacy experiment. While not the harshest critic, Scott is usually skeptical of claims of quantum supremacy, but seems to be onboard with this one.

Videos & TV Shows:

• HBO’s Chernobyl & Personal Responsibility, by Philosophy Tube.

Podcasts:

• Criminal #125: The Less People Know About Us a continuation of #51: Money Tree (listen to that one first!!), on personal identity theft. I don’t want to spoil the episode and that description maybe seems a bit dry but trust me, it’s a fascinating story.
• The Bright Sessions, a science-fiction podcast in the form of psychologist sessions’ recordings.