The chaotic rollout of Twitter’s new verification program proves a stunning example of bad UX design — After pausing the release to avoid disrupting the U.S. midterm elections, Twitter launched their new verification system on Wednesday: Anyone willing to pay 8 bucks a month for Twitter Blue would now receive the long coveted (by some) “blue check mark,” which, of course, is actually a white check mark…

Within Two Days of Taking Over Twitter, Elon Musk Tweeted Political Disinformation or “Pink Slime” — “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes” — often attributed to Mark Twain This Sunday morning, within two days of taking over Twitter, Elon Musk himself posted the sort of disinformation people feared had become characteristic of the platform — for tens…

Left-handed dentists remind us how the environments we learn and work within can have a profound impact upon our lives — My dentist and I bonded over a shared characteristic recently, when we discovered we’re both left-handed*. This topic came up when he mentioned how he had everything set up to assist him as a southpaw. He said that everything had been set up for right-handed people when he attended dental…

Musk has been trying to forge his own reality via Twitter. But the self-professed “free speech” exemplar seems to be setting himself on fire with his own speech along the way. — It’s Thursday, June 30th at 8:14pm, still light here in Brooklyn, hot and steamy, and Elon Musk hasn’t tweeted in nine days. People are noticing. The press are noticing. Now, this absence wouldn’t normally be that weird: A billionaire owner of five companies, not tweeting from an attention-deficit friendly social…

We built ourselves a digital panopticon. Now it may haunt our most personal healthcare decisions. — Roe v. Wade is gone. Almost 50 years in effect and it’s gone. Just like that. Of course, it wasn’t really an instantaneous development: A voting mass of highly-politicized anti-abortion Americans had been working on reversing Roe for decades. We’ve all—most of us—been working on something else for decades, too…

It’s not a mistake for AIs and algorithms to approach categorization issues with care, particularly where gender is concerned — The alt text for this image is absolutely, 100% factually correct. That is a person in a suit and tie. If this alt text is a system-generated snippet of alt-text, then the system got it right. No mistakes were made. Nothing is broken. That’s not what one critic of the…

“The metaverse” already sounds dated. Because we’re already living in it. — Here’s a prediction: The term “metaverse” will sound silly and old-fashioned before too long. Like “cyberspace” or “the information superhighway” or “surfing the web.” Why? …

A growing source of evidence-based information about transgender people, providing links to specific studies and other helpful resources — Currently, many individuals and organizations have launched an all-out attack on transgender people, likely in an attempt, not just to stigmatize trans people as they’re finally gaining acceptance, but also to stimulate support for those critics’ broader political agendas.