[nonostantement #59] - believing in meritocracy is bad for you / the new old social network / dollar street
Welcome to nonostantement: a random newsletter that gives you personal recommendations of cool stuff.
A Few Simple Steps to Vastly Increase Your Privacy Online
"Don't worry, the faster browsing and smug satisfaction of being a savvy internet user will make up for the discomfort of changing your routines."Facebook Stored Millions of Passwords in Plaintext—Change Yours Now
"[...] Facebook acknowledged a bug in its password management systems that caused hundreds of millions of user passwords for Facebook, Facebook Lite, and Instagram to be stored as plaintext in an internal platform. This means that thousands of Facebook employees could have searched for and found them."Psychiatry’s Incurable Hubris
"The biology of mental illness is still a mystery, but practitioners don’t want to admit it."Instagram Is the Internet’s New Home for Hate
"As other social networks wage a very public war against misinformation, it’s thriving on Instagram."A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you
"Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called ‘grit’, depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing."[Video] - Inside The Belarus Chernobyl Zone | Abandoned Graveyards and Haunted Houses
"[...] the real unexplored Chernobyl zone instead. The one across the border in Belarus. No tour guides here."[Video] - The Truth About Wasabi
"Most sushi eaters—even in Japan—are actually being served a mixture of ground horseradish and green food coloring splashed with a hint of Chinese mustard. Worldwide, experts believe that this imposter combination masquerades as wasabi about 99% of the time."Ghost towers: half of new-build luxury London flats fail to sell
"More than half of the 1,900 ultra-luxury apartments built in London last year failed to sell, raising fears that the capital will be left with dozens of 'posh ghost towers'."[Video] - Some of the safer rides at Coney Island in the 1930s and 1940s.
The New Social Network That Isn’t New at All
"[...] my new social network is an email newsletter. Every week or so, I blast it out to a few thousand people who have signed up to read my musings. Some of them email back, occasionally leading to a thoughtful conversation. It’s still early in the experiment, but I think I love it."How Wired's Multiplatform Strategy Is Increasing Engagement and Revenue
"The days of big redesigns with art directors staying up all night and things pinned to the wall and late night decisions on fonts, those days are done."India wants exclusive rights to the tonnes of data lying with e-commerce firms in the country
"India and its citizens have a sovereign right to their data. This right cannot be extended to non-Indians (the same way that non-Indians do not have any prima facie right or claim to, say, an Indian coal mine). This understanding flows from the acknowledgement that data about an Indian is his/her own."Dollar Street - photos as data to kill country stereotypes
"In the news people in other cultures seem stranger than they are. We visited 264 families in 50 countries and collected 30,000 photos."Every Noise at Once
"Every Noise at Once is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 2,837 genres by Spotify as of 2019-03-18."
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