The Death of the Mind

New York’s luxury real-estate market has been in freefall for years, and now the city’s super-luxe buildings are sitting empty — even as property prices in the city remain stubbornly high, prompting 300 New Yorkers to move out of the city every day, and filling the homeless shelters to capacity and beyond. New York — like most overpriced cities — has failed to build enough low- and middle-income housing of the sort that people use…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/18/a-luxury-product.html

Curious about past computer architectures? Software engineer [Fabien Sanglard] has been experimenting with porting Another World, an action-adventure platformer, to different machines and comparing the results in his “Polygons of Another World” project. The results are pretty interesting. Due to the game’s polygon-based graphics, optimizations vary widely across different architectures, with tricks allowing the software to run on hardware released five years before the game’s publication. The consoles explored are primarily from the early ’90s,…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2020/01/17/exploring-early-90s-video-game-architecture-with-another-world/

This piece originally appeared on Fast Company. In 2019, we proved face recognition surveillance isn’t inevitable. Now, it’s time for Congress to rein in the technology once and for all. Last year, communities banded together to prove that they can — and will — defend their privacy rights. As part of ACLU-led campaigns, three California cities — San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland — as well as three Massachusetts municipalities — Somerville, Northhampton, and Brookline —…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/2019-was-the-year-we-proved-face-recognition-surveillance-isnt-inevitable

We’ve pointed out for years that there’s always been some level of confusion about the boundaries of the “non-commercial” tag on a Creative Commons license. There are lots of things that are kind of fuzzy about it. Does it mean you just can’t sell the work? Or does it mean you can’t even use it on a website if that website has ads on it? Indeed, we’ve worried that the non-commercial license created a bit…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200103/23403543677/appeals-court-makes-right-call-regarding-non-commercial-creative-commons-licenses.shtml

This week, the Communications Workers of America — one of the largest industrial unions in the country — launched the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees (CODE), which seeks to unionize people working for game and tech companies. The CWA forged an alliance with the grassroots labor group Game Workers Unite (a similar deal was struck in Toronto between the CWA and the local GWU chapter). Two fulltime CWA staffers are charged with assisting tech and…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/09/no-more-crunch.html

(Someone stumbled upon my 2010 decade retrospective post and suggested I write a followup…) This has been a big decade for me. Ten years ago, I’d been in an increasingly stale job for several years too long. I was tired of living in the city, and had a yurt as a weekend relief valve. I had the feeling a big change was coming. Four months on and I quit my job, despite the ongoing financial…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/2020_hindsight/