Trying to visit this on my phone, all I get is a poorly formatted “one more step” page that asks me to complete a captcha that loads mostly off the side of the screen so I have to scroll to see it, which makes it jump around. Whenever I manage to beat the captcha, it just redirects me to archive.is, which looks exactly the same and I have to beat another captcha, and the whole process begins again.
I remember a bunch of friends being upset about this. Apparently it's an outrage that your friends can do this, and perfectly fine that facebook probably does it all the time.
The scope of behavior Facebook is capable of obtaining is probably beyond comprehension for most users. Having a slice of that scope opened up and dissected publicly is quite creepy; despite intellectually understanding how much data Facebook has about them, actually seeing that data in use creates a much more visceral reaction that simply intellect can not create.
Having somebody intentionally look into your life, individually, because of some possibly perverse or unwanted interest in you is extremely creepy.
Having a large company store some data you generated in a server farm somewhere while a mindless algorithm does some math with that data to shuffle a few ads around for you to see is utterly banal and not creepy.
> Having a large company store some data you generated in a server farm somewhere
... and make it a available for somebody to intentionally look into your life, individually, because of some possibly perverse or unwanted interest in you
It's a mistake to think we can't improve on something because someone smart built it. In my academic community, everyone fights with LaTeX and I can only say with confidence that one person I know has mastered it. Everyone else just hacks at their document until it's close enough.
That could also describe the process by which the majority of computer code is written when you consider everything that involves coding these days. The situation is not likely to change with new tools.
Fair point. I hack LaTeX because I like to, but it's a perishable skill and requires fairly regular use. But that's not really the way (in my opinion) you should be using it. When I designed the layout for my lecture notes, that was a couple of months of on-again off-again tweaking and building a style document and macros. Now, I have a trivial to use template that any of my colleagues could use. After a few years, it's pretty stable, but I still tweak it from time to time and note (pleasantly, given how rare this sort of thing is with code) that my decade old documents still compile just fine with the tweaked version.
When I wrote my thesis, I didn't hack LaTeX - I downloaded the style file and template and just started writing. Someone else maintains those files, and hundreds of Masters' and Doctoral candidates use them without major issues (other than those who've never used anything by Word, but who the hell wants to design for them?)
That person who mastered it? Get them to spend a few dozen hours putting together a bullet proof style. That's how you do it.
Final note: I don't think something built by someone smart can't be improved on. But I do think you need to have a pretty solid understanding of why they did it the way they did before you get to call what you're doing an improvement. And an awful lot of critiques of TeX/LaTeX seem to come from a place of ignorance (frequently the "why isn't it like Word?" ignorance that tend to end the conversation for me).
Yes. I haven't been following the outcome, so that might be resolved but my latest info bit is that it's currently a minefield. Comic Sans is a viable alternative for most use cases though.
There was a nice post about Atlassian's choice of Mercurial over Git on their blog: https://blogs.atlassian.com/2012/02/mercurial-vs-git-why-mer... Their argument about a windows version doesn't seem to hold today. There seems to be a first-class Windows version of git.
Yes it does. Adding encryption, even if it can be broken through sheer computational power, still increases the price tag associated with spying, therefore increasing the barrier to spying.
