• Keep your computer cool this summer (well, it's summer here!) by dunking the whole thing in a tank of coolant that costs $18 a litre.  (AnandTech)
  
  The kit costs $2450.  That does not include the computer.  The computer is extra.
  
  
• This is not technical itself, but a social psychology study of clustering effects in social networks is certainly of interest, and the clusterfuck that the researchers managed to generate doubly so.
  
  
  
  
  The summary notes that moderate conservative voices on Twitter - the Center Right - are overwhelmed by the Extreme Right.  (Medium)
  
  What it does not note is what the definition of the Extreme Right is that is used by this study.  And that is because there is no definition used by the study.
  
  What they did was label certain Twitter accounts as Extreme Right, and then those accounts that follow them get tagged as Extreme Right as well.
  
  And the first example - there are only two - the first example of an Extreme Right account they give is The Heritage Foundation which is middle-of-the-road classical liberalism.
  
  Part one and part two are available for download as PDFs.  Part two consists entirely of interviews with journalists, if you needed a clearer idea of where this was going.
  
  The only bright spot in this farrago of academic malfeasance is page 22 of part one which notes that everybody hates the New York Times.
  
  
• Speaking of Medium, it takes five clicks and a page reload to reply to a comment - starting from the individual post page.  This is the competition?
  
  
• The Big 5 tech companies are worth $5 trillion.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  If you're playing Fantasy Stockmarket, short Google.  The company is rotten to the core.
  
  
• The old internet died and we did nothing.  (BuzzFeed)
  
  Don't know about you, BuzzFeed, but my posts from 2003 are still intact.
  
  And - hah, just thought of something.  I have a backup of every tweet I posted before Twitter nuked my account.  I'm about to launch my own social network....
  
  
• Samsung TVs may upload screenshots for automatic content recognition.  (Hacker News)
  
  I'll likely get a 4K TV this year.  I have 4K monitors - plural - because I use them all day for work, but my TV is still 720p.
  
  It will be a cheap, no-name device as devoid of intelligence as I can find.  If it can't even automatically switch to the active input, I'm okay with that.

• An interesting who-knew-what-when piece on the FISA abuse scandal.  (The Epoch Times)
  
  Is the Epoch Times trustworthy?  I don't know.  They were implicated in a fake news ring on Facebook recently.  (The Verge)  But they were implicated by Facebook and I don't trust Facebook either.
  
  But this article links to the PDF of the related court order - on the .gov site, not their own copy - and provides page references for the claims it makes.  That is refreshing.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 02 2020 04:13 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 02 2020 04:17 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 02 2020 05:01 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 02 2020 11:09 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 02 2020 01:11 PM (Iwkd4)

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