This whole TikTok acquisition is reminding me of when Flip Video got bought by Cisco and shut down two years later. I really miss my FlipCam 💔.

Software Development and the False Promise of Science

Richard Marmorstein on software developers and their lack of citing good sources:

You have opinions – strong opinions – on questions such as “do microservices encourage modular code design?” and “should software projects stick to a ‘novelty budget’?” and “should composition be preferred to inheritance?”. But are your opinions backed by peer-reviewed analyses of hypotheses subjected to statistical tests of empirical data? Not really. Your view that software projects should stick to a ‘novelty budget’, for instance, is backed by your experience reading about this idea in some rando’s blog post and the argument seeming plausible in light of the recent bankruptcy of your friend’s web startup built on WebAssembly, CockroachDB, Elixir and Unikernels.

Richard Marmorstein (13 October 2019)

A love letter to personal websites

Tobias van Schneider’s love letter to his personal website:

In those days, our website was our home. An extension of ourselves. Every day we visited our page, tweaked it a bit here, adjusted something there, stood back and admired it. Our site was a little corner of the internet we could own.

Fast forward to now and a website almost feels old fashioned. Our social profiles are all-consuming. Curating our Instagram page is our second job. We almost feel an obligation to share our work there, in addition to our personal lives. Our little corner of the internet? It now collects cobwebs.

Scooter's aren't as "eco-friendly" as they claim to be

The study concludes that dockless scooters generally produce more greenhouse-gas emissions per passenger mile than a standard diesel bus with high ridership, an electric moped, an electric bicycle, a bicycle—or, of course, a walk.

The paper found that scooters do produce about half the emissions of a standard automobile, at around 200 grams of carbon dioxide per mile compared with nearly 415. But, crucially, the researchers found in a survey of e-scooter riders in Raleigh, North Carolina, that only 34% would have otherwise used a personal car or ride-sharing service. Nearly half would have biked or walked, 11% would have taken the bus, and 7% would have simply skipped the trip.

Temple, J. (2019, August 2). Sorry, scooters aren’t so climate-friendly after all. Retrieved August 8, 2019, from technologyreview.com