Mike Masnick hits it out of the park again: "Anyone who actually understands how social media works found the Twitter Files the opposite of scandalous. They actually showed a surprising level of competence by the former team at Twitter, tasked with the impossible job of keeping 200+ million people from fighting all the time or, worse, scamming others."

https://www.thedailybeast.com/twitter-files-hucksters-are-cosplaying-as-free-speech-martyrs?ref=author

Today I'm remembering one of the coolest space things ever: Voyager 2's S-band radio receiver has been broken for 44 years, and yet we can still talk to it.

Back in 1978 the primary receiver failed, and the team discovered the backup receiver had a faulty capacitor in the PLL circuit that adjusted for Doppler shift. Since then, Voyager 2's receive bandwidth has been much narrower, and the band-pass window wanders back and forth by a few hundred Hz with temp changes.

greatly appreciating this work from @Niloufar (it tears down an online service that claims to offer "user research without the users") https://niloufars.substack.com/p/i-tried-out-syntheticusers-so-you - a couple of specific things:

- she went right at it with a consequential user research case
- she used one where she knew the results of a well-conducted qual study
- she named the stereotyping inherent in this
- she refused to call an LLM "AI" & thus avoided the hype

thank you & brava!

A wonderful Saturday read, funny, heavy, fascinating.

(Describing Zuckerberg’s real life appearance as that of “…a Styrofoam cup that a wizard decided to turn into a person but then changed his mind about halfway through” = instant pulitzer imho)

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/mark-zuckerberg-metaverse-meta-horizon-worlds.html