Wednesday Links
Brian Phillips lists some of the many ways tech makes our lives harder, more infuriating, etc.
4. Please, please stop asking me to verify my humanity by clicking on tiny motorcycles.
OMG YES!!!!
The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech
And John Gruber wrote about a very specific example of how tech can trigger us.
If you visit a website you should … see the website. See its content. Be able to read the article whose page you are attempting to visit. Showing a “subscribe to our newsletter” or “accept our fucking cookies” dickover to someone trying to read an article on the web makes no more sense than sending out an email newsletter that only contains a link to read the newsletter on a webpage. A webpage should show the webpage. An email should show the email. I should not have to explain this.
Want to review the last 17 NCAA tournaments and how they should have been seeded? This is guaranteed to piss you off by reminding you of at least one year your team got screwed by the NCAA’s often nonsensical seeding process. In a side conversation among KU fans I was reminded that after the 2016 screw-job, which somehow gave KU the #1 overall seed BUT ALSO put arguably the second-best team in the tournament as their #2 AND shipped them away from where everyone had assumed KU would go for months (Chicago), that the NCAA began allowing the #1 overall seed to pick its region. Fuck those guys.
Revisionist History: Re-Seeding Every NCAA Tournament Since 2011 Using WAB
It must be exhausting to be Caitlin Clark, for many reasons. We are just a few weeks into the WNBA season and she’s already at the center of multiple manufactured “controversies.” Hell, like three more have popped up since this piece was written last week.
The great Seerat Sohi tackles the situation and shows how Caitlin seemingly can’t win no matter what she does or says.
I have some issues with Clark’s behavior on the court, but I don’t think every time she chases a referee and complains about a call or talks shit to someone after dropping a 30-footer in the face should be an opportunity for a capital D Discussion.
Clark can be a sinner or a saint.
She can be a turnover-spouting disaster or a logo-hurling hero. She can be a victim, a trash-talker, a crybaby, or an unfairly maligned savior.
What the algorithm cannot afford is for her to be normal.
The Caitlin Clark Machine Is Turning on Caitlin
I will always celebrate people dunking on Elon Musk.
As I looked out onto the Spring Mountains, ancient and magnificent, I thought about how true wisdom is knowing when innovation is unnecessary. Some things, like subways, are fundamental for a reason. We figured them out in 1863, and there’s simply no reason to start from scratch. But I suppose there are two types of people in this world: those who gaze at the mountains and see their beauty, and the ones who think, “I could drill a hole through that.”
I rode Elon Musk’s Vegas Loop, the worst transit system on Earth
I fell into a YouTube rabbit hole the other night about the use of drones in the war in Ukraine. Here are two of the better vids.
The Ukrainian Stunt Pilot Hunting Russian Drones
On the Front Lines With Ukraine’s Killer Drone Pilot
Finally, an awesome use of math to reconstruct how many shots Wilt Chamberlain blocked.