Ads on the web have many problems:

• Ad selection criteria have been abused for dissemination of propaganda, for targeted malware attacks.
• Content sites have basically lost the control over what kind of stuff they deliver through the ad-space on their site.
• Tracking is increasingly a concern for users.
• Ads bloat sites, slow down page display times and mess with peoples mobile data plans.
• Ads use power and create heat in devices with a tight power budgets (basically, anything that runs on a battery and has no fans, phones, tablets, laptops).
• Ads play unwanted video and audio, open layers and windows, popovers and popunders.
• Ads destroy usability and layout on content sites.

The market is collapsing: basically nobody is running a browser without an adblocker any more, and those that don’t adblock in their minds - clickthrough rates are nonexistent. So when everything is on fire, is there a unified group of stakeholders - content sites, browser makers, ad-industry leaders - at work to make things “better” or at least fix their broken non-business?

There is a well known Github Gist “Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know ”, which explains which things take how long.

Scaled Latency Numbers

If you scale these things down 3 billion times, a clock cycle (0.3ns) becomes a second. And suddenly things are relateable. (Tweet )

Another attempt to visualize this , not entirely unlike this XKCD .

Katie Moussouris explains teh Cyber and how it is asymmetric:

»"#Cassandra moment: Explaining that determining “cyber norms” in today’s world order misses emerging capabilities & motivations of new actors.

Forget “attribution”. Not what I mean.

Deterrence, state responsibility, etc in existing state context assumes most want to keep stability. Plenty of non-terrorist smaller states & non-state-non-criminal actors have or can acquire capabilities & would not be sanctionable, for example when we think through deterrence strategies, consider not just world order we have that prefers stability, but those who prefer destability.

Pcgamer reports “Nvidia CEO says Moore’s Law is dead and GPUs wi replace CPUs ”.

Now, Jensen Huang might be a bit biased here, but he reminded us that “GPUs are advancing at a much faster pace than CPUs” and “that GPUs will replace CPUs soon, adding that at this point, designers can hardly work out advanced parallel instruction architectures for CPUs.” So what can a modern GPU do? Well, apparently Font Rendering is still a hard problem for GPUs, and a bottleneck in modern browsers. That’s not to say it’s not being done - the linked article contains lot of pointers. And an older article about the Ubershaders basically explains how the Dolphin GameCube/Wii-Emulator uses modern GPU hardware to live-emulate 2002/2006 GPU hardware, in realtime (for a short time, while the CPU in the background creates more optimised precompiled GPU setups and code).

Computer Games are cheating

A lot of computer games are cheating, so that you can actually have fun with the game. Read the thread.

»Hey #gamedev, tell me about some brilliant mechanics in games that are hidden from the player to get across a certain feeling.«

»This is probably somewhere way down the list, but third person game thumbstick correction is a favourite. Pretty standard in AAA. (know you know but extrapolation for readers) game detects collision blocks and steers player around them, ignoring direction of input. Pioneered (I think) by insomniac but popularised by Ubi.. One of the things I’m proudest of in Volume’s controls.«

Here is a user story for implementors of security systems and platform hardening initiatives:

As any user , I never want to get a “denied” message, but a " in order to do what you want you are missing the X permission" message in order to be able to track down the root cause and request the appropriate permissions more easily.

It’s not that hard, really.

GitLab: You are not allowed to push code to this project.

Shared Space Experiment

The Guardian has an article about a Shared Space Experiment at Amsterdam Alexanderplein.

A Shared Space is an approach to urban traffic design in which segregation of traffic modes is minimized and signage or other regulation is taken away, leaving traffic participants to make up rules and agreements on the spot through interaction. Several preconditions need to be there in order for Shared Spaces to have a chance of working:

Seriously, HR people ask the weirdest questions.

“Where do you see yourself in five years?”

For a Twentysomething with no owned property and no family the truthful answer is of course “In a different company, twice removed. Not because you suck more than anywhere else, but, like, statistically.”

“Where do you see yourself in five years?” “Week 27 or 28?” – LionKingLee

That time when you finish school and university and before you settle down with dependencies that make you immobile - it is an important time in your life. Use it wisely: Change jobs every two to three years, and make it count.

Cargobike mum with child cycling independently on Upper Thames Street. Unimaginable before cycling infrastructure. – Mark Treasure

A lot of people in Germany, especially Bike Activists, are stuck in the 80ies, victims of the Kampfradler mentality. Let’s have a look at that:

The german word Kampfradler literally is made up from “Kampf” (fight) and “Radler” (cyclist) . A Kampfradler is a fighting cyclist, or confrontational cyclist. Wikipedia dates the Kampfradler to 2011, but it’s much older. I remember having used the term during my time as a student in Kiel, and that would date it to the mid-90ies at least. The Wikipedia article also puts it into the context of a bike rowdy, but it’s really older and it’s also being used by the Kampfradlers themselves with much more positive connotations.

One of the weirdest and most interesting characters in the DC Universe is Wonder Woman, because she is full of seemingly irreconcilable contradictions. Created by a man, William Moulton Marston , in 1941, her history is actually deeply rooted in the Suffragette movement of the early 20th century. Marston owes much of the ideas and the origin myth to earlier stories from that era and cosmos, through his wifes Elizabeth Holloway Marston and Olive Byrne, and through Olives Byrne’s connection with Ethel Byrne and Margaret Sanger .