Houkouonchi got a call from a Verizon representative this week. “Basically he said that my bandwidth usage was excessive (like 30,000 percent higher than their average customer),” houkouonchi said. “[He] wanted to know WTF I was doing. I told him I have a full rack and run servers…”

Increasingly, then, robots will take over more and more jobs. And guess who will own all these robots? People with money, of course. As this happens, capital will become ever more powerful and labor will become ever more worthless. Those without money—most of us—will live on whatever crumbs the owners of capital allow us.

Get Plain Text is a practical utility program to process text within Mac OS: It converts copied text into plain text.

Neat, but if you use TextExpander (and real talk, who doesn’t?), you should check out my solution first.

(Via One Thing Well.)

I’m not sure I’ve ever bought a nice bottle opener, and so it’s with only slight guilt and shame that I’ve agreed to pay $42(!) for this badass hunk of brass. Relatedly, until a few minutes ago, I had no idea that “church key” was a synonym for “bottle opener”. Brilliant.

I’m not quite sure how I came across this review of Michael Rubin’s excellent Droidmaker: George Lucas And the Digital Revolution, but I’m glad I did, because it’s a good distillation of this incredible book. Years ago I got wind of Droidmaker via Michael Heilemann (a Star Wars geek), and at his behest, decided to give it a read, despite it being available only in PDF at the time, and my semi-apathy regarding George Lucas, etc. It’s not that I was anti-Lucas or anything, but this just didn’t sound like the kind of thing I’d want to spend a whole book reading about. Lucky for me, this book ended up being less about Lucas, and more about the myriad technologies he and others (including Coppola and Jobs) helped to foster.

I couldn’t stop reading it, and as soon as it was made available for Kindle (last year, I believe), I bought and read it again. It covers masterfully the digital revolution, including computers generally, sound design and engineering, editing, CGI, Pixar, video games, etc. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a book along these lines that’s more encompassing, edifying, and entertaining–its breadth and depth cannot be overstated. It’s a book about endless (mostly technical) issues of first impression, and various geniuses’ solutions to those issues.

This is the kind of book that I buy for friends to guilt them into actually reading it…and then sit back and wait for the emails and texts about what a great friend I am for bringing it to their attention.  ;)

When I first saw this Kickstarer project I was smitten (and I don’t even know how to write longhand!), but decided not to back it because they didn’t have a non-stylus option for the Ti-Click PRO model. Cut to earlier this week, when I came across this again, and noticed that their offerings had been updated to include non-stylus models. Yeah, I got in line immediately, and went with the Ti Click CLASSIC in, of course, bead-blasted matte black.

The downside is that this isn’t shipping until November.

Pure awesome.

Triage is an iPhone app for busy people who struggle to stay on top of their email. Triage doesn’t try to replace your desktop email client. It lets you use your downtime to quickly remove the noise and stress.

I’ll be honest, when I first heard about this app I thought it was a bit silly, but I’ve always thought “Triage” would be a perfect name for a lightweight email “client” and so I had to give it a shot.

I think the overriding goal here is to reduce to one the number of gestures needed to process certain email messages. With that goal in mind then, it’s odd that “archive” and “delete” are mutually-exclusive options–flicking down always “keeps” the message in your inbox (and removes it from Triage), and flicking up can be one of either “delete”, “archive”, or “mark as read”.

Of those three options, I’m using “delete”, because it makes the most sense for me, but, in the case where it’s a message I want to archive and take no other action (e.g., a receipt from Amazon), I’m left to flick down to “keep” it, which means once I jump into my actual email client I’ll need to process it again (to archive it).

Flicking left-to-right, or right-to-left do nothing. Why not? One or both of these gestures should be tied to the actions just mentioned. Imagine this: flick up = archive, flick down = keep in inbox, flick left-to-right = mark as read, and flick right-to-left = delete. Perfect.

Triage is a neat idea, and a lot of fun (and a guilt-free way to create yet another barrier between me and my inbox ;), but it could stand to gain a few more configuration options. Minimalism is a feature, until it isn’t.

(Via DF.)

A few days ago my buddy, Ben Brooks, messaged me to let me know that Webtype–a hosted font service–now offers the Nitti typeface. What?! As some of you may recall, Nitti Light is my favorite font for writing and reading, and I’ve long wanted the ability to embed it in this site.

For the last couple of years I’ve been using TypeKit to serve up Myriad Pro (for body text), Myriad Pro Semi Condensed (for article titles), and Alternate Gothic No. 2 D (for the header menu), and have no complaints whatever with the service.

That said, I now know a competitor offers Nitti Light, and I think I likely will make the switch at some point, if I can find suitable Webtype fonts for the non-body text used on this site. One thing that’s holding me back though is that it looks like, for my needs, Webtype will be about three times as expensive as Typekit.

An interesting article that confirms what you probably already intuited: humans like to feel like they are a part of something bigger than themselves, and enjoy being in the company of like-minded people.

The older I get the less I care about following sports at all. In fact, the only sports events I routinely watch are UF college football games, the Olympics, and the X Games. Sure, I’ll go to a sporting event from time to time (I’m much more likely to go when I’ve been given great tickets), and will have a good time, but it’s not something I actively seek out.

The rub here is that I love playing sports, and am about as competitive a person as you ever will meet (with regard to just about anything, really), and to that end, appreciate fully sport and athleticism (and am just as impressed as the next guy with a thread-the-needle pass, a fingertip catch, or a bicycle kick goal). But, for me, it’s a whole different ballgame (sorry) when I know I have zero affect on the outcome, and frankly, I think it’s a bit silly when adults let these games–over which they have no control–impact their lives in any measurable way.

In the same vein, I can’t help but sigh heavily (on the inside, usually ;) when I hear grown men go back and forth about some inconsequential sporting event, all the while “showing off” their knowledge of the sport by reciting utterly useless facts and statistics. I totally get that for some it’s both a hobby and a release, but I just can’t see myself, as an adult, filling my head with such trivial bullshit–there are only so many hours in the day, and I’d rather create and learn as much as possible. (Now, as a kid, I was kind of an encyclopedia when it came to the NBA, and Jordan especially.)

As with everything, though, if you find pleasure in this sort of thing, and aren’t harming others, who am I to judge how you spend your free time?

Nice find from Patrick Welker. For those curious, these separators carry through to–and look good in–the iPhone app.

The dream of AI was — and is — to create a machine that is conscious. AI means building a mechanical human being. And this goal, as supposedly rational technological projects go, is deeply strange.

Consider the ramifications of a conscious machine: one that thinks and feels like a human, an ‘electronic brain’ that dreams and ponders its own existence, falls in and out of love, writes sonnets under the moonlight, laughs when happy and cries when sad. What exactly would it be good for? What could be the point of spending billions of dollars and countless hours of precious research time in order to arrive at a replica of oneself? […]

[W]hen it comes to creating conscious simulacra of ourselves, what exactly is our motive? What deep emotions drive us to imagine, and strive to create, machines in our own image? If it is not fear, or want, or curiosity, then what is it? Are we indulging in abject narcissism? Are we being unforgivably vain? Or could it be because of love?

Dear human, please watch this video, and if it doesn’t give you the chills multiple times or cause you to tear up at least once, I implore you to educate yourself.

We aren’t long for this world.

For the past few weeks I’ve been using the awesome new service/site, Forecast, brought to us by the great folks behind Dark Sky. (Yes, Forecast was released publicly just last week, though some (all?) backers of the Dark Sky Kickstarter campaign got early access a few weeks ago.)

I remember when I first went to the site on my iPhone and was immediately put off by the fact that it was a web app, and, it seemed, there probably wasn’t going to be a native app. I grudgingly “installed” the web app and jumped into it, kind of annoyed. My jaw dropped. It was so pretty, and felt so nice. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe this was a web app. Fortunately, the icon was great too, and within a minute of using the app I had moved it to my 1×24, relegating Check the Weather (which integrates Dark Sky data) to my comically large “Weather” folder.

I can’t say that this web app is the most native-feeling web app out there (because, frankly I don’t regularly use any other web apps on my phone), but man, it has impressed me beyond words.

I think it’s safe to say that us lovers of Dark Sky have been hoping for these guys to eventually offer longer-term forecasting, because it was clear they were onto something with their approach to next-hour predictions, which have proven to be, for me at least, eerily accurate. Clearly, the further out you go, the less accurate your predictions are going to be, but I just get the feeling that if anyone’s capable of succeeding here, it’s these guys, and so far, the (multi-)day projections have been no worse than those provided by the million other weather apps I’ve used.

While the web app is phenomenal, I do still hope they have plans to release a native version, and offer us the option to get rid of that little ad they show on the weekly forecast. (It sounds like an upcoming version of the Dark Sky app will incorporate these longer-range forecasts, and so maybe all of this is moot.)

At rest, the claws of T. robustus, found on the hind feet only, are nestled inside a mass of connective tissue. A chunk of collagen forms a bond between the claw’s sharp point and a small piece of bone at the tip of the frog’s toe.

The other end of the claw is connected to a muscle. Blackburn and his colleagues believe that when the animal is attacked, it contracts this muscle, which pulls the claw downwards. The sharp point then breaks away from the bony tip and cuts through the toe pad, emerging on the underside.

What Darwin and Turing had both discovered, in their different ways, was the existence of competence without comprehension. This inverted the deeply plausible assumption that comprehension is in fact the source of all advanced competence. […]

Why indulge in this “sorta [understands]” talk? Because when we analyze – or synthesize – this stack of ever more competent levels, we need to keep track of two facts about each level: what it is and what it does. What it is can be described in terms of the structural organization of the parts from which it is made – so long as we can assume that the parts function as they are supposed to function. What it does is some (cognitive) function that it (sorta) performs – well enough so that at the next level up, we can make the assumption that we have in our inventory a smarter building block that performs just that function – sorta, good enough to use.

This is the key to breaking the back of the mind-bogglingly complex question of how a mind could ever be composed of material mechanisms. What we might call the sorta operator is, in cognitive science, the parallel of Darwin’s gradualism in evolutionary processes. Before there were bacteria there were sorta bacteria, and before there were mammals there were sorta mammals and before there were dogs there were sorta dogs, and so forth. We need Darwin’s gradualism to explain the huge difference between an ape and an apple, and we need Turing’s gradualism to explain the huge difference between a humanoid robot and hand calculator.

Penn Jillette:

Religion cannot and should not be replaced by atheism. Religion needs to go away and not be replaced by anything. Atheism is not a religion. It’s the absence of religion, and that’s a wonderful thing.

Religion is not morality. Theists ask me, “If there’s no god, what would stop me from raping and killing everyone I want to.” My answer is always: “I, myself, have raped and killed everyone I want to … and the number for both is zero.” Behaving morally because of a hope of reward or a fear of punishment is not morality. Morality is not bribery or threats. Religion is bribery and threats. Humans have morality. We don’t need religion.

Charles Darwin made the intriguing claim that among the naturalists he knew it was consistently the case that the better a researcher got to know a certain species, the more each individual animal’s actions appeared attributable to “reason and the less to unlearnt instinct.” The more you knew, the more you suspected that they were rational. That marks an important pivot, that thought, insofar as it took place in the mind of someone devoted to extremely close and meticulous study of living animals, a mind that had trained itself not to sentimentalize. […]

If we put aside the self-awareness standard—and really, how arbitrary and arrogant is that, to take the attribute of consciousness we happen to possess over all creatures and set it atop the hierarchy, proclaiming it the very definition of consciousness—it becomes possible to say at least the following: the overwhelming tendency of all this scientific work, of its results, has been toward more consciousness. More species having it, and species having more of it than assumed. […]

The animal kingdom is symphonic with mental activity, and of its millions of wavelengths, we’re born able to understand the minutest sliver. The least we can do is have a proper respect for our ignorance.