Viktorija @viktorija@nologo.social

First project using React Hooks. Really impressed, a great low-level building block that's declarative and composable. Feels much more elegant than classes/HOCs/render props, and already been able to simplify some stateful component patterns even further.

Nice to see solid progress being made on Mastodon's cross-instance account migration feature: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177#issuecomment-455547349 -- essential for it to be considered truly decentralised imo.

The "hot backup" solution is even more interesting, but not holding my breath on that one...

This might well be the creepiest #Google page ever: All the purchases a user has ever done. If the user receives a confirmation email for a purchase they made, the user is not notified that Google collected and displays this piece of information in this page. There is no explanation why they are collecting all the purchases in one page, and apparently there is no way to opt out of this or even delete the purchases from the list.

https://myaccount.google.com/purchases

Still boggles my mind: Toss a coin 256 times, noting if it's heads or tails, and convert the result into a binary number.

Congratulations, you've generated a Bitcoin private key, enabling you (after running it through a few more mathematical functions) to send and receive funds from anywhere in the world, with no central authority, no ties to your identity, no one to trust to keep your keys secure, and not even the requirement of an Internet connection. Just pure maths and cryptography...

While in the past it would have been fairly standard to learn something once and have that skill for life, with the rate of progress today (with technology, distribution of information, etc), the point at which a skill or knowledge becomes obsolete is rapidly accelerating.

There's a good documentary on Fyre Festival available on Netflix. Have to wonder what compelled him to film so much of himself committing fraud?

Not too keen on the Microsoft monoculture that's been forming in frontend dev. Write code in a MS language (TypeScript) using a MS editor (VSCode) and publish to a MS platform (GitHub).

Each of these brings very powerful network effects, making it harder for competitors to enter the market, even if they're open source.

Puts too much power in the hands of Microsoft, and is just paving the way for anticompetitive behaviour a couple of years down the line.

Black Mirror? Gatwick Airport shut down and 100,000+ passengers' flights cancelled as unidentified drones are spotted flying across the airport. Military involved to try and track down the pilots, but no luck even after 24 hours. "Every time Gatwick tries to reopen the runway, the drones reappear".

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/live/2018/dec/20/gatwick-airport-drone-travel-chaos-disruption-live-updates

"Amazon inadvertently sent 1,700 audio files containing recordings of Alexa interactions by a customer to a random person [...] “Using these files, it was fairly easy to identify the person involved and his female companion; weather queries, first names, and even someone’s last name enabled us to quickly zero in on his circle of friends,” according to the report. “Public data from Facebook and Twitter rounded out the picture.”"

https://threatpost.com/amazon-1700-alexa-voice-recordings/140201/

Creative use case for micro-targeted ads. Was wondering what other unethical uses of this technology we'd see outside of politics.

Other "packages" offered include: "Influence your colleague to find a new job", "Influence your loved ones to stop eating meat", "Influence your ex-partner to settle the divorce out of court".