Tag: internet

Link Rot

I was able to analyze ~2m externally facing links found in NYT articles since its inception in 1996. We found that 25% of deep links have rotted. If you go back to 1998, 72% of the links are dead. More than 50% of all NYT articles that contain deep links have at least 1 rotted link. The benefits of the internet and web’s flexibility—including permitting the building of walled app gardens on top of them that reject the idea of a URL entirely—now come at great risk and cost to the larger tectonic enterprise to, in Google’s early words, “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” What are we going to do about the crisis we’re in? A complementary approach to “save everything” through independent scraping is for whoever is creating a link to make sure that a copy is saved at the time the link is made. Authors of enduring documents—including scholarly papers, newspaper articles, and judicial opinions—can ask Perma to convert the links included within them into permanent ones archived at perma.cc; participating libraries treat snapshots of what’s found at those links as accessions to their collections, and undertake to preserve them indefinitely. A technical infrastructure through which authors and publishers can preserve the links they draw on is a necessary start. But the problem of digital malleability extends beyond the technical. The law should hesitate before allowing the scope of remedies for claimed infringements of rights—whether economic ones like copyright or more personal, dignitary ones like defamation—to expand naturally as the ease of changing what’s already been published increases.

QAnon loses shit

Like a flipped switch, the attitude inside online QAnon communities shifted from glee to shock and misery: “NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENED!!!”; “So now we have proof Q was total bullshit”; “I feel sick, disgusted and disappointed”; “Have we been duped???”; “You played us all”; “HOW COULD WE BELIEVE THIS FOR SO LONG? ARE WE ALL IDIOTS?”

Meanwhile, several QAnon loyalists performed medal-worthy mental gymnastics to keep their delusion alive. A few suggested that the video of Biden becoming president was a deepfake and that he was actually locked away behind bars as it played across the nation. Others posited that Biden himself had in fact been working with Trump to dismantle the deep state all along, and would be the one to sic the military on the supposed traitors. Many simply pleaded with each other to stay patient: “Q wouldn’t do this to us. He wouldn’t let us down. Don’t lose hope.”

Towards hybrid events

“It’s hard to imagine to going back to 200 shows a year on the road, which is what I’ve done for my whole adult life” Instead, he pictures a combination of in-person and virtual concerts. While a show at home is obviously different than onstage, “We’re sharing a moment, and that’s at the heart of any live musical performance.”

They are in talks with venues to partner on integrations, which would allow them to put cameras in bars and clubs across the country to stream shows even when touring resumes — along with clear restrictions, such as not offering a streaming option until the in-person show sells out.

many events in the future will be hybrid, and the more seamless the interfaces are, the more impactful.

Social media research

Increased data access would enable researchers to perform studies on a broader scale, allow for improved characterization of misinformation in real-world contexts, and facilitate the testing of interventions to prevent the spread of misinformation. The current paper highlights 15 opinions from researchers detailing these possibilities and describes research that could hypothetically be conducted if social media data were more readily available. As scientists, our findings are only as good as the dataset at our disposal, and with the current misinformation crisis, it is urgent that we have access to real-world data where misinformation is wreaking the most havoc.

Internet-free Star Trek

But, as I watched the PADDs circulate around the show, I slowly realize that they’re not actually used like iPads at all. In fact, they’re more like fancy pieces of paper. Individual PADDs correspond to specific documents like the Earth guidebook shown above. To give someone a document, people carry PADDs around and then leave them with the new owner of the document. From a 2013 point of view, these uses seem completely inside out. Each PADD is bound to an individual document rather than a person or location. This is a universe where its easier to copy physical objects (in a replicator) than digital ones.

Boomer Brains

What ss the internet doing to boomers’ brains? A naive generation gets sucked in.

“They were indoors for 6 months with nothing to do but watch Fox News and go on Facebook. And now they’re telling me, ‘Oh well, the weak just need to die and then we’ll be over this thing.’”