An annotated digest of the top “Hacker” “News” posts for the second week of August, 2022.

(A tribute^[1] to the seemingly ended webshit weekly series from n-gate.)

Did you know that with macOS Ventura, Clarus the Dogcow has at long last returned home? Recently, while doing something else, I accidentally hit Cmd+Shift+P which opened the Page Setup dialog. I was greeted, surprisingly, with a new high-resolution version of the classic Clarus icon that I’d never seen before. I looked at it briefly, and then closed the dialog and went back to whatever I was doing before. I had assumed that because I’d been in a 3rd-party app at the time, that the Clarus icon was just some easter egg the developer had left. But a little while later, I got to thinking. What were the chances that someone went to the trouble of customizing the Page Setup dialog, of all things, just for an easter egg? Zero, it turns out. That dialog shows Clarus on the page preview in every app.

I am subscribed to Marques Brownlee on YouTube. I watch almost every one of his videos. YouTube is smart. It knows this, it recommends me almost all of his videos. But not this one. No matter how many times I refresh the page. No matter how far down the page I scroll. Despite the fact that the video has gotten 2.3 million views in 16 hours, performing better than a number of his recent videos. Despite the fact that it’s recommending me videos that are from people I am not subscribed to, videos that are years old, videos that I have watched before, videos that are about politics, videos that are about the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

This is what algorithmic bias looks like. Algorithms are not neutral.^[1]

TL;DR: I made an awesome FOSS clone of typing.io that you can check out at type.shadowfacts.net and the source of which you can see here.

I’ve used typing.io on and off for almost a year now, usually when I’m bored and have nothing else to do. Unfortunately, I recently completed the Java file, the C++ file, and the JavaScript file (that last one took too much time, jQuery has weird coding formatting standards, IMO) meaning I’ve completed pretty much everything that interests me. Now if you want to upload your own code to type, you have to pay $9.99 a month, which, frankly, is ridiculous. $10 a month to be able to upload code to a website only to have more than the 17 default files (one for each langauge) when I could build my own clone.