Happy New Year! My resolution for 2019: stop using Twitter. It's sometimes fun and occasionally insightful, but more often it's neither. The last thing the world needs is more tweets. I'll continue exploring ideas in person and by writing in venues that permit some nuance. Bye :).

"99 Good News Stories You Probably Didn't Hear About in 2018": An end-of-year balm.

"52 things I learned in 2018": Eclectic and often extraordinary.

"The Biggest Tech Lies of 2018": It sure has been a bad year for those of us arguing that technology can make the word a better place.

"It is not that parliamentary government has failed. Or that plebiscitary democracy has failed. But this way of trying to combine parliamentary government with plebiscitary democracy has failed" – David Runciman:

"What Europeans talk about when they talk about Brexit": Perhaps the most interesting thing I've read on this topic.

"We should replace Facebook with personal websites": Wow, if only the creators of the web had thought of that.

Fake reviews, stitch-ups of rival sellers and a Kafkaesque bureaucracy dispensing arbitrary 'justice'. Just another day on Amazon Marketplace:

"Whether we like it or not, Policy with a capital P is coming to the Internet world next year": Long overdue, though I don't trust Politicians with a capital P to get it anywhere near right.

"Congress votes to make open government data the default in the United States": Yay! :).

Many, perhaps most, web users are now bots pretending to be humans. To say nothing of all those humans masquerading as AI. "What's gone from the internet. isn't truth, but trust":

The world's oldest known person was Jeanne Calment, who lived for 122 years. Except she probably didn't. Her preternaturally long life may have been no more than an elaborate tax and insurance scam:

The TM Landry university admissions scandal makes you "wonder if anything would truly be lost if the gates of the elite academy were thrown open to a much wider range of people": Thought-provoking.

What's changed since the Brexit vote? An interactive quiz from the ONS: Geeky (in a good way, obviously).

"The UK's immigration system is currently a malfunctioning mess." And the government's white paper on post-Brexit immigration doesn't improve matters:

Q: What do you call Santa’s little helpers? A: Subordinate clauses. (Courtesy of the LRB: Merry Christmas!.

"It's not Facebook's culture of competition that's the problem, but their culture of corruption, which is a function of monopolies":

"With Microsoft's decision to. switch to Chromium, control over the Web has [effectively]] been ceded to Google." That's bad news for the web and its users:

How to quit Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon (all at the same time): Telling, though not surprising, that Google proved the hardest to do without.

AI J-pop singers: Other languages available (or will be soon, I assume).