PJH Studios

Category: Technology

Mostly related to issues surrounding technology and computers, main include current events or news.

  • WikiTok to infinitely scroll Wikipedia

    WikiTok infinitely scrolls Wikipedia, randomly loading articles.

    From the developer, Isaac Gemel, Ars Technia describes WikiTok as

    … a neat way to stumble upon interesting information randomly, learn new things, and spend spare moments of boredom without reaching for an algorithmically addictive social media app. Although to be fair, WikiTok is addictive in its own way, but without an invasive algorithm tracking you and pushing you toward the lowest-common-denominator content. It’s also thrilling because you never know what’s going to pop up next.

    A fun bookmark to avoid doomscrolling.

  • More details on the Musk Coup

    Three articles regarding the ongoing Elon Musk coup.

    The newsy bits from the Verge, Elon Musk’s rapid unscheduled disassembly of the US government, particularly the GSA:

    The GSA, an agency most of us have never had to think about, is in charge of buildings, sure. But also it runs an awful lot of the technical infrastructure of the government — it is basically the feds’ IT. If the US government were a brain, the GSA is the brain stem, the part that manages heartbeats and breathing so they’re below the level of thoughts.

    The US Treasury has designated DOGE an insider threat:

    Members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team have had access to the US Treasury Department’s payment systems for over a week. On Thursday, the threat intelligence team at one of the department’s agencies recommended that DOGE members be monitored as an “insider threat.”

    And Mike Masnick sums it up, No people didn’t vote for this:

    The campaign promised economic relief: cheaper eggs and lower gas prices. Instead, voters got an unelected tech billionaire systematically dismantling federal agencies, surrounded by a coterie of 4chan edgelord trolls LARPing as cabinet secretaries, all operating without congressional oversight or constitutional authority. They voted for economic stability and got the effective end of the American Constitutional Republic instead.

  • The evil housekeeper problem

    The evil housekeeper problem refers to a concept in computer security where once somebody is in the room where your computer is, security of that device can no longer be guaranteed. And right now, we are seeing this play out in real time with Elon Musk and DOGE.

    You might think that there would be technical measures to stop someone right out of high school from coming in and changing the code to a government system. That the system could require two-factor authentication to deploy the code to the cloud. That you would need a smart card to log in to a specific system to do that. Nope—all those technical measures can be circumvented by coercion at the hands of the evil housekeeper.

  • Backing up government data sets

    Fascist bureaucrats don’t like facts that contradict their agenda. Backing up government data sets as an act of resistance.

  • 10 technologies for 2025

    MIT Technology Review posted their prognostications for what 10 technologies will make an impact in 2025. Maybe this will be the year of the robotaxi. Interestingly, cow burps, a significant source of methane, might receive relief.

    Cow burps are one of the largest sources of agricultural emissions—and one of the trickiest ones to solve. A food supplement that significantly reduces the amount of methane that cattle belch is now available in dozens of countries. Other products, which might prove even more effective, are likely on the way.

  • The best DeepSeek explainer

    Stratechery with the best DeepSeek AI explainer. It’s broad in describing the general applications and industry impacts, as well as parsing the technical bits of what they did.

  • A network of AI-generated newsletters targeting “small town America”

    Nieman Labs reports that “a network of AI-generated newsletters targeting “small town America.” All run by one person.

    It turns out Good Day Fort Collins is just one in a network of AI-generated newsletters operating in 355 cities and towns across the U.S. Not only do these hundreds of newsletters share the same exact seven testimonials, they also share the same branding, the same copy on their about pages, and the same stated mission: “to make local news more accessible and highlight extraordinary people in our community.”

    We need to add AI generated awareness to the media literacy skill set.

  • Map of whiskey producing countries

    For some time, I’ve been meaning to play with web friendly mapping and visualization tools such as d3.js, datamaps.js or crosslet.js. D3 is quickly becoming the defacto standard for displaying statistical visualizations on the web, and other libraries are hooking in to add additional capabilities, like mapping. Communicating data effectively is the future, if not right now, and being able to get that data on to the web efficiently is a valuable skill.

    Like all skills, you need experience, and as a beginner it’s often best to dive in and muck around. It’s helpful, too, to have a purpose, or an itch to scratch when playing around with new tools. In my case, I wanted to create a map of countries that produce whisk(e)y.

    First, I needed which countries produced whiskey. There’s no real definitive list, thus I used a composite of sources. And by produce, I mean distill. Also, I may have missed some countries or left them off if I could not corroborate what info I did find. Note, Scotland, Wales, England are part of the United Kingdom.

    Next, I chose datamaps.js as my mapping tool. It looked straight forward and minimal. Tweaking a few settings, I set the default map color to grey and whiskey producing countries to red. To tell the tool to flag countries, you use an international three letter abbreviation and assign it an attribute. For example, here’s the designation for Australia:

    AUS: {
    fillKey: 'MAKES'
    }

    Datamaps.js can also add other contextual information in its rollover of a country. Say you know how many distilleries there are for a country, you can add an additional property.

    Below is a screenshot of the map. Click here to view the map of whiskey producers in the world.

    whiskeymap
    Countries colored red are those that distill whisk(e)y.

  • An internet dialogue about music, creation and ownership

    Emily White, an NPR intern, kicked off the discussion early in the week, stating she never made the transition from physical to digital consumption of music.

    I never went through the transition from physical to digital. I’m almost 21, and since I first began to love music I’ve been spoiled by the Internet.

    I am an avid music listener, concertgoer, and college radio DJ. My world is music-centric. I’ve only bought 15 CDs in my lifetime. Yet, my entire iTunes library exceeds 11,000 songs.

    Then, Camper  Van Beethoven and Cracker founder, David Lowery, responds with a nearly 3,000 word essay regarding the ethics and philosophy of creating music (or art) and being compensated.

    Rather, fairness for musicians is a problem that requires each of us to individually look at our own actions, values and choices and try to anticipate the consequences of our choices. I would suggest to you that, like so many other policies in our society, it is up to us individually to put pressure on our governments and private corporations to act ethically and fairly when it comes to artists rights. Not the other way around. We cannot wait for these entities to act in the myriad little transactions that make up an ethical life. I’d suggest to you that, as a 21-year old adult who wants to work in the music business, it is especially important for you to come to grips with these very personal ethical issues.

    But Jonathan Coulton takes the idea further in a different direction, using Legos to speculate what may happen with physical goods if 3D printers proliferated.

    Your kid loves Legos. He’s got an X-wing fighter kit that he’s super excited about, and as he’s putting it together, one of the little pointy laser turret pieces on the tips of the wings slips out of his hands and falls down the central air conditioning vent. No problem. You fire up the old internet, and you find www.legowarez.to, the small crazy place where all of the Lego nuts go to obsessively upload and catalog 3D scans of every lego piece that has ever existed. This site is ad supported, and some douchebag in Nigeria is getting rich off it. But you find the file for the piece you need, you download it, and a few minutes later you’ve printed out a replacement piece.

    Jay Frank gets curious and uses Google Trends to seek out data about potential piracy.

    Google, as the worldwide leader in search results, is a strong indicator of actual file trade demand. In fact, industry watchdog Moses Avalon argued such this week at New Music Seminar. Yet, when I went to look on Google Insights to see the level of demand for free music by David Lowery’s group Camper Van Beethoven, the message I get is, “Not enough search volume to show graphs.”This basically means, from what I can gather, that less than 50 people per monthin the entire world are even showing intent to steal his music. Statisticians basically refer to this as essentially zero.

    In the broader sense, creators deserve to be paid for their work, regardless of the medium or method of distribution. The transition to legal, digital services to do this is only a recent development. Upon discovering Spotify, friends marveled, “How is this legal? There’s so much.” But if there’s no demand for an artist’s work, irrelevancy seems a much steeper price despite whatever medium the art is in.

  • Google and Duck Duck Go search results comparison

    I couldn’t remember what Apple’s pricing was for their print on demand publishing for books.  So, I googled.

    That’s… not helpful.  Let’s try Duck Duck Go.

    Helpful, easy to see what I need, and answers my question. (Note: screenshots are same size.)

    Just for fun, I blocked out all the non-search result content for the Google version.

    Pitiful.