Linked List: May 26, 2022

Thursday, 26 May 2022

Roger Angell, writing for The New Yorker back in 2002, at the spry age of 81:

Preciousness almost engulfed us, back then. Tiffany’s produced a tiny silver oil can, meant to dispense vermouth. Serious debates were mounted about the cool, urban superiority of the Gibson — a Martini with an onion in it — or the classicism of the traditional olive. Travellers came home from London or Paris with funny stories about the ghastly Martinis they’d been given in the Garrick Club or at the Hotel Regina bar. And, in a stuffy little volume called “The Hour,” the historian and Harper’s columnist Bernard De Voto wrote, “You can no more keep a Martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there. The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth and one of the shortest.”

Rest in peace, good sir.

‘Our Moloch’ ★

I’ve linked to this 2012 essay by Garry Wills before, and, alas, I probably will again:

That horror cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. [...]

Its power to do good is matched by its incapacity to do anything wrong. It cannot kill. Thwarting the god is what kills. If it seems to kill, that is only because the god’s bottomless appetite for death has not been adequately fed. The answer to problems caused by guns is more guns, millions of guns, guns everywhere, carried openly, carried secretly, in bars, in churches, in offices, in government buildings. Only the lack of guns can be a curse, not their beneficent omnipresence.

U.S. gun culture as religious fundamentalism is the only way to make any sense of what we have allowed to fester.

DuckDuckGo Browser – But Not Search – Special-Cases Microsoft Trackers Due to Search Agreement ★

Lawrence Abrams, writing for Bleeping Computer:

However, while performing a security audit of the DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser, security researcher Zach Edwards discovered that while the browser blocks Google and Facebook trackers, it allowed Microsoft trackers to continue running.

Further tests showed that DuckDuckGo allowed trackers related to the bing.com and linkedin.com domains while blocking all other trackers.

In response to Edwards’ long thread on the subject, DuckDuckGo CEO and Founder Gabriel Weinberg confirmed that their browser intentionally allows Microsoft trackers third-party sites due to a search syndication agreement with Redmond.

This has led to quite the uproar on Hacker News, where Weinberg has been defending the company’s transparency surrounding the agreements with Microsoft.

Not a good look for a company that just launched a high-profile campaign, touting “the simple fact is tracking is tracking, no matter what you call it”.

To be clear, this is about DuckDuckGo’s web browser, not their search results. But still — it’s just so contrary to the core of DuckDuckGo’s brand. It’s not a good look for Microsoft either — Microsoft would be smart to alter their search syndication agreement with DuckDuckGo to allow them to treat Microsoft’s trackers just like anyone else’s in the DuckDuckGo browser.

(While I’m at it: I’ve tried DuckDuckGo’s beta browser for Mac, but I can’t abide it. They’re using WebKit and really have written their own browser application, but for reasons that escape me, they made it look like Chrome. E.g. tab close buttons are on the right, not left; and the app’s preferences aren’t in their own window, but instead open in a browser tab.)

Update: Weinberg has posted a detailed explanation on Reddit. Worth reading.

Laurene Powell Jobs on Tim Cook ★

Laurene Powell Jobs, in a succinct two paragraph piece, on Cook’s inclusion in Time magazine’s “100 most influential people” list:

Apple is Tim Cook’s life’s work, and in this work, Tim displays mastery. Tim has demonstrated more range in his leadership of one of the world’s largest companies than any contemporary CEO. Since Apple’s products and policies affect the very character of contemporary life, Tim’s job demands not only business wisdom but also philosophical wisdom. The intense pressure of setting and executing Apple’s progression with deep precision, and of taking responsibility for the company’s effects on society, is almost unimaginable. Yet Tim does it with compassion and discipline, turning to nature to replenish his spirit.

WordleBot ★

I somehow missed this until a few weeks ago, but the New York Times has a Wordle analysis tool called WordleBot. It’s not a cheating tool, but rather a tool you load (in the same browser in which you play Wordle, so it can read the game cookies) after you complete Wordle each day. (You can also submit a screenshot of a completed game.)

Because you use WordleBot after you play, it doesn’t spoil much. It just analyzes how smart and how lucky your guesses were. I have a dumb command-line tool I wrote myself months ago that does something similar, but my simple tool just lists possible solutions given what’s known (green, yellow, gray) about the puzzle so far. (My tool could be used to cheat, but I have no idea why anyone would want to.)

I say that WordleBot doesn’t spoil much because it does spoil one thing: its possible solution list is culled from the game itself. My tool uses a dictionary of all possible five-letter words from the TWL06 tournament Scrabble dictionary, with additions from a few other word list sources. It doesn’t seem right to me to assume knowledge of the 2,309 words currently in the Wordle solution list. (My list has 8,954 words.) At the very least WordleBot should use the list of allowable guesses from Wordle, not the list of actual solutions. That’s a niggle though.