∞ Cities need more trees

Published under Mango Paper, Jul 31, 2024

On top of that it just looks better. I'm certain humans have genetic biophilia, which is why we love being in nature or taking walks in the forest. Having trees around us, teeming with birds and other life just feels good. Speaking of birds, trees increase the biodiversity of insects and other small critters in urban environments. It also gives birds a safe-haven from the deadliest hunter of all: the humble house cat.

I very much agree that cities just look better with trees. That's why I fell in love with Menlo Park the place I have been living for 9 years. It's a much greener city than most of other places in Bay Area.

∞ Screen Apnea: What Happens to Our Breath When We Type, Tap, Scroll

Published under Mango Paper, Jul 5, 2024

Manoush Zomorodi, Katie Monteleone, and Sanaz Meshkinpour from NPR's Body Electric podcast:

In 2007, former Microsoft executive Linda Stone noticed something strange happening every time she'd sit down to answer emails. She was holding her breath.

"I would inhale in anticipation, but I wouldn't exhale because so many emails would be streaming in," Stone told Manoush Zomorodi in an interview for NPR's Body Electric. "And this would go on for hours."

Stone wondered how common this was and set out to investigate using "kitchen table science," as she called it. She recruited dozens of friends and colleagues to sit at her computer answering emails while she monitored their pulse and heart rate variability. Of those participants, 80% had what Stone coined "email or screen apnea" — shallow or suspended breathing while working on a screen.

80% of people has screen apnea. That's a lot.

∞ PIN Analysis

Published under Mango Paper, Jul 4, 2024

Nick Berry had a terrific analysis on 3.4 million leaked PIN numbers:

Obviously, I don’t have access to a credit card PIN number database. Instead I’m going to use a proxy. I’m going to use data condensed from released/exposed/discovered password tables and security breaches.

I was able to find almost 3.4 million four digit passwords. Every single one of the of the 10,000 combinations of digits from 0000 through to 9999 were represented in the dataset.

Fascinating observation from the following heatmap:

Heatmap of 3.4 million PIN numbers

... many people encapsulate dates in the format MMDD (such as birthdays …) for their PIN codes.

This clearly explains the lower left corner where, if you look at the heatmap, there is a huge contrast change at the height of around 30-31 (the number of days in a month), extending to 12 on the x-axis. (Thanks to zero79 for first pointing this out).

New Bots Syncing My Blog Posts

Published under Mango Umbrella, Jul 4, 2024

When Twitter was still a thing, I used to have a Twitter bot automatically tweet new posts from my blog. That went away for good.

I finally found sometime to revive some code and added a few new bots.

Now, my blog posts are automatically synced to my personal Mastodon account, Threads account, and the Telegram channel.

∞ Highlighting Journalism on Mastodon

Published under Mango Paper, Jul 3, 2024

From Eugen Rothko,

To reinforce and encourage Mastodon as the go-to place for journalism, we’re launching a new feature today. You will notice that underneath some links shared on Mastodon, the author byline can be clicked to open the author’s associated fediverse account, right in the app. This highlights writers and journalists that are active on the fediverse, and makes it easier than ever to follow them and keep up with their future work—potentially across different publications. Writers often work with different publishers over the span of their careers, but Mastodon is the perfect platform to amass a loyal audience that you, as the author, truly own, and can take with you across the fediverse.

This is such great news. I love blogs and journalism, and I hope this can help authors to reach more audiences.

Technically it's simple to enable for your website:

We’ve decided to create a new kind of OpenGraph tag—the same kind of tags you have on your website to determine which thumbnail image will appear on the preview for the page when shared on Discord, iMessage, or Mastodon. It looks like this: <meta name="fediverse:creator" content="@Gargron@mastodon.social" />.

Of course I just added my fediverse:creator tag to mangoumbrella.com adopting this feature. It's allowlist only though. Let's find out when it's rolled out to Mango Umbrella or everywhere else.

Changelog v2024.06

Published under Mango Changelog, Jul 1, 2024

This is Issue v2024.06 of Mango Changelog.

Umbrella releases

New nodes

Updated nodes

New snippets

New posts

New linked posts

∞ Jeremy on Trust

Published under Mango Paper, Jun 30, 2024

Jeremy Keith writes,

In their rush to cram in “AI” “features”, it seems to me that many companies don’t actually understand why people use their products.

Google is acting as though its greatest asset is its search engine. Same with Bing.

But their greatest asset is actually trust.

This is spot on.

When I need to search for good Asian restaurants in Bay Area, I don't trust Google nor Yelp. I open 小红书 (RED)'s search box by default. I trust it to have the results I need.

If I use a search engine I need to be able to trust that the filtering is good.

Small difference: it's not about the filtering. It's simply about the results. Not all results nowadays are indexed or even indexable by Google.

∞ Amazon Takes On Chinese Rivals Temu and Shein With Plans for New Discount Service

Published under Mango Paper, Jun 28, 2024

Tracy Qu and Sherry Qin write for WSJ:

Amazon.com plans to launch a service focused on shipping cheap fashion wear, household goods and other products directly from warehouses in China, as it faces growing competition from low-cost e-commerce platforms Temu and Shein.

In other words, Amazon to launch a Temu clone.

I have bought many things on Temu: cable organizers, painter's pyramids, craft papers, cute stickers, sanding blocks, shelf pins, a watering can, and many more. They are all expected quality for the price and I have no complaints.

∞ Juno 2.0

Published under Mango Paper, Jun 28, 2024

Christian Selig just released a jam packed update to the Juno for YouTube app:

Today I’m releasing Juno 2.0, which incorporates a ton of that community feedback, and truly brings the app to the next level through extensive improvements and new features. Using it over the last little while I have had so many moments where I catch myself smiling. Browsing and watching YouTube on visionOS through Juno is honestly just so fun, immersive, and downright futuristic, and I genuinely think the best way to watch your favorite videos.

This update also answers Google/YouTube's letter:

In April, YouTube announced it would be cracking down specifically on ad-blocking third-party apps, and weirdly, Juno got an email at the end of April from YouTube Legal that voiced some concerns. You can view the full contents of their email here: https://christianselig.com/juno-youtube-email-april-26-24.txt

Now that this update is out, hopefully this appeases Google, as they have also (as of a few days ago) filed a complaint with the App Store directly. I’ll obviously push back, as I believe Juno is just getting caught up in the crosshairs of Google’s targetting of apps that do have ad-blocking, and an app that fundamentally themes a website is nothing new, novel, or insidious.

I too don't see how Juno 1.0 violates YouTube's policy. Christian being so nice went out of the way to put extra work to appease Google, I sure hope Google isn't that stupid to shutdown Juno.

AI Drawing from Beginner to Proficient

Published under Mango Paper, Jun 19, 2024

Every time I go to a bookstore in China, I'd like to checkout the IT section. The books there simply bring me so many childhood memories.

This time, there is a new book next to the usual Photoshop tutorial books:
Stable Diffusion, AI Drawing from Beginner to Proficient.

A book titled AI Drawing with Stable Diffusion, next to other Photoshop tutorial books.

A book titled Stable Diffusion, AI Drawing from Beginner to Proficient, next to other Photoshop tutorial books.

The book market still moves fast.

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