The End of Crowdsourcing With Russian bots on Twitter, the attack on Rotten Tomatoes scores, the deluge of fake comments sent to the FCC, and even attacks on a DARPA Network Challenge, I think 2018 is the beginning of the end for crowdsourcing. There are two problems to solve, the first is that some of these systems are trying to extract a signal from noisy data, and it only takes a small number of bad actors to intentionally inject a strong signal into that data stream and overwhelm the real signal.

Michael Singletary Hoping this post, syndication, and backfeeding works as expected! Welcome!

Chris Aldrich has the honor of being the first sender of an organic incoming Webmention received on bitworking.org, which you can see on this post. I say “organic” because I’ve been using all the testing tools listed on the indieweb.org site to test my implementation.

Chris Aldrich I suspect that next, with a tad bit of parsing using microformats, you can add some display elements to your webmentions to indicate the author, their url, date/time, and actually include the reply text to have a better UI for them. Indeed, my current implementation just shows the validated Webmention links, and my plan is to slowly enhance them over time. I think, just like in the case of the basic Webmention support, Will Norris may have my back again and have already done the heavy lifting for Microformats and Go.

Test 1 Test 2 Test 3 Test 4 Test 5 Test 6 Test 7 Test 8 Test 9 Test 10 Test 11 Test 12 Test 13 Test 14 Test 15 Test 16 Test 17 Test 18 Test 19 Test 20 Test 21 Test 22 Test 23

Ryan Barrett celebrating over 1 Million Webmentions in the wild. Not bad for a specification that only became a recommendation a year ago.

Feel free to ignore, just testing WebMentions. Updated to include a second link,

Drew McLellan has gone WebMention-only. It’s an interesting idea, though I will still probably build a comment system for this blog and replace Disqus.

Via Joel Spolsky, I learned that Facebook was pivoting away from engagement. Meanwhile Twitter continues to be Twitter, and Uber continues to be an ethical cesspool.

Brent Simmons asks Ten years ago or more we had several blog-specific search engines and services: Technorati, BlogBridge, and others. One of the great things about these services was not just being able to search for something but being able to set up persistent searches: that is, you’d get a search as an RSS feed, and in your feed reader you’d get results from all over the place on the thing you’re searching for.

In A Decade of Silos Has Throttled Open Content Distribution Louis Gray says: To properly make the Web as desirable and viable a platform for publishing, we need to work together to fix the distribution and discovery gaps, make content fantastic on mobile for creation and consumption, and allow for engagement that is as simple as a Like. Totally agree. I’m in the process of implementing WebMention on the blog, in the hope that it gets more traction.

According to the Chrome dev console loading a single page of my blog takes 58 requests and loads 1.1MB, the majority of which comes from Disqus. I think it’s time to write my own comment system for the blog.

Updated Rules for Settlers of Catan. The card for Longest Road has been discontinued. Instead, Largest Settlement will be declared a player and may take a turn and collect resource cards on behalf of its builder. This rule, Catanians United, gives official personhood status to settlements and classifies rolls as speech. The whole list is great.

2018: Some Hope Great post from Brent Simmons on getting off the Twitter/Facebook train. A little Apple-centric, but you get the idea.

RealWorld example apps is a great idea: See how the exact same Medium.com clone (called Conduit) is built using any of our supported frontends and backends. Yes, you can mix and match them, because they all adhere to the same API spec And it looks like porting the app over to Vanilla JS is already underway.

I spent some time over the holidays porting web framework sample apps over to vanilla JS. I’ll add the same caveat here that I also included in the code: The code works w/o polyfils in Chrome. To get it to run in a wider range of browsers you will need to add polyfills and, depending on the target browser version, compile the JS back to an older version of ES, and run a prefixer on the CSS.

As the current political situation unwinds there are things to watch for: Now that the GOP mega-donors have their tax cut, do Republicans become more open to impeaching Trump? He is a huge liability for the 2018 mid-terms and impeachment might improve their odds as a way of distancing themselves from him. As impeachment for Trump looks more and more likely, look for WikiLeaks to start dumping compromising information on Trump.

Table of contents An Introduction to Geometric Algebra over R^2 Geometric Algebra applied to Physics The Shoelace Formula via Geometric Algebra

Now that Custom Elements has reached v1 and is starting to appear in browsers, let's make some elements. We'll start with one of the simplest elements possible, a busy spinner, or activity indicator. Caveats: No accessibility. spinner-bw { display: none; border-radius: 50%; width: 2em; height: 2em; border: 0.4em solid #a6cee3; border-left: 0.4em solid #1f78b4; animation: spinner-bw-spin 1.5s infinite linear; } spinner-bw[active] { display: inline-block; } @keyframes spinner-bw-spin { 0% { transform: rotate(0deg); } 100% { transform: rotate(360deg); } } window.

This is L-Systems with Redux and StateReflector, but now with more organization around updating the state and around efficiently updating the DOM to changes in the state. That is, a simple app for drawing L-Systems, where making changes to the parameters (Length, Angle) is stored in the URL fragment identifier, thus creating a permalink for any selections a user makes. The state of the page is kept in a Redux state store and we use StateTools.