Four short links: 4 August 2017
Chinese Spamsorship, History of Intelligence, Patreon Numbers, and Javascript WTFs
- Quackspeak Ascendant (Cory Doctorow) — China’s approach to networked control is one of three dominant strategies used in the world: in Russia, they fill the channel with an untanglable mess of lies and truth, leading people to give up on understanding the situation; for the west’s alt-right trolls, the strategy is to be so outrageous that you get picked up and retransmitted by every channel, which lets you reach the tiny minority of otherwise too-thin-spread, broken people and recruit them to your cause; and in China, it’s quackspeak, this anodyne, happy-talk-style chatter about nothing much.
- Intelligence: A History — If we’ve absorbed the idea that the more intelligent can colonize the less intelligent as a right, then it’s natural that we’d fear enslavement by our super-smart creations. If we justify our own positions of power and prosperity by virtue of our intellect, it’s understandable that we see superior AI as an existential threat. (via Sam Kinsley)
- Inside Patreon — Half its patrons and creators joined in the past year, and it’s set to process $150 million in 2017, compared to $100 million total over the past three years.
- WTFJS — A list of funny and tricky examples of JavaScript.
