Have been using Startpage.com in combination with DuckDuckGo as an alternative to Google. They just launched a new design which is pretty neat.
A look at voice-activated speakers powered by “intelligent assistants” and news consumption(/coercion?). Read more in the industry report from Reuters.
TIL : there is an Alexa microwave, and it can reorder your popcorn when you run low. What? 😩
Via @kottke: “How AI Agents Cheat” - There’s some funny ones. 🤡
Via @BrunoLatourAIME and The Guardian on changes to how standard kilogram is defined: ““If aliens ever visit Earth what else would we talk about other than physics?” said Schlamming…”.
New York Times article on Yuval Harari by @NellieBowles “The futurist philosopher Yuval Noah Harari thinks Silicon Valley is an engine of dystopian ruin. So why do the digital elite adore him so?”.
Great article via Aeon on link between increased oranges demand and organised crime: “Sicily’s mafia sprang from the growing global market for lemons – a tale with sour parallels for consumers today” Read more here.
Openculture on the creation of a new online database with works from overlooked female artists from the 15-17th century. More making invisible works visible?
“Despite celebrations this year that the Berlin Wall had now been down for longer than it was ever up, Europe has now completed the equivalent length of six Berlin walls during the same period” (note that actually it should say EU member states though) Read the full article from The Independent here.
An article on refugee abuse made me think of Judith Butler on the Abu Ghraib prison questioning what it “means to become ethically responsive, to consider and attend to the suffering of others, and, more generally, of which frames permit for the representability of the human and which do not”.