Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?
My friends: Alistair Croll (Solve for Interesting, Tilt the Windmill, Interesting Bits, HBS, chair of Strata, Startupfest, FWD50, and Scaletechconf; author of Lean Analytics and some other books), Hugh McGuire (Rebus Foundation, PressBooks, LibriVox) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person “must see.”
Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another:
- Exploiting vulnerabilities in Cellebrite UFED and Physical Analyzer from an app’s perspective – Signal. “I’m sharing two links this week with very technical descriptions, that are actually simple and awesome. First up: Signal. You probably know this messaging app, which many people use to communicate securely (particularly since most big messaging apps, like WeChat and WhatsApp, belong to large companies with commercial and government interests). When law enforcement or investigators want to read your messages, they turn to tools from a company called Cellebrite, which ingests everything on your device and tries to make sense of it. In an interesting twist, Signal now includes malware that hacks Cellebrite. Basically: Signal can hack the software trying to hack Signal. Ah, arms races. Of course, they don’t come out and say this directly—but this blog post from Moxie Marlinspike, the person behind Signal, may be the best piece of technical trolling ever.” (Alistair for Hugh).
- Easily Transform Portraits of People into AI Aberrations Using StyleCLIP – Max Woolf’s Blog. “Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) try to make pictures that can fool us—fake portraits, computer-generated art, and more. And Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) can give text classifications of images (happy, sad, angry, etc.). Two great algorithms that, when you smush them together, let you type a sentence and generate an image. ‘Take this face and make it look like a troll/robot/serious.’ To their credit, the researchers also point out the inherent bias in the algorithms—’make it look like a teacher’ produces a female face, for example. And mostly I’m sharing this because of the clipart.” (Alistair for Mitch).
- Norm McDonald – Moth Joke – StandUpy PoPolskuPowróciły – YouTube. “I’ve been on a bit of a Norm Macdonald/YouTube kick lately. Here is one of the great jokes of all time.” (Hugh for Alistair).
- In Quebec, Child Care Is Infrastructure – Bloomberg CityLab. “It’s not all that often that Quebec is seen as a leader in policy and programs these days, but our subsidized daycare program has been a real success. Bloomberg takes a look.” (Hugh for Mitch).
- ‘I seek a kind person’: the Guardian ad that saved my Jewish father from the Nazis – The Guardian. “We are becoming very myopic and lost, as a humanity. We’re worried a little too much about ourselves and not enough about our community. This is normal. It’s a pandemic still (for most). It feels like we’re also confusing ‘freedom’ with ‘what I want’. This, in turn, makes us less concerned about how we all move forward in a positive and sustainable way. So, yeah, people have been bumming me out lately. Vaccine hesitancy, our inability to hit any form of herd immunity, how we correct a world where some people did great and many more are really suffering? Maybe we need to go back in time and read a story about a time and place when some people thought more about the future and their global community than what was easy or their rights and personal freedom. I dunno… this article really made me think and wonder…” (Mitch for Hugh).
- NHØP – Jaco before Jaco…The GREATEST Bass Player You’ve NEVER Heard Of – Rick Beato – YouTube. “There are a couple of things going on here. First, if you like music and don’t subscribe to Rick Beato‘s YouTube channel, you do not know what you’re missing. Second, no matter how much you think that you love something, you will always uncover something new and different. I’m weird. I like weird music. I like weird instruments. Case in point: the electric bass is my favorite instrument. I have a podcast where I interview bass players (you can listen to it here: Groove – The No Treble Podcast). I’d like to think that I’ve heard of almost all of the cool cats who play bass. Then, this video about Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, comes into my feed. And, I’ll admit this here, I had not heard of him. Then I watched this. Then my jaw dropped. Then I went deep (very, very deep) down the NHOP rabbit hole. I think that you will too…” (Mitch for High).
Feel free to share these links and add your picks on Twitter, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.
Are you interested in what’s next? How to decode the future? I publish between 2-3 times per week and then the Six Pixels of Separation Podcast comes out every Sunday. Feel free to subscribe (and tell your friends ;):