Unless you're a front-end web developer, "nullish coalescing" and "optional chaining" probably don't mean much to you. If you're like me though, you cringe inwardly every time you read them. So, what's the big deal with them, and why are they bad?
Actually, bad is an understatement: these are simply downright evil. Nullish coalescing and optional chaining (hereafter N.C. and O.C. for short) are special operators in JavaScript that attempt to simplify traditional JavaScript syntax. To understand why they were introduc… — Read full post
Figure 1.1 - Damages from the fire totaled $100,000
On July 6th, 2020, at approximately 3:05pm, the Waukesha Fire Department responded to a local house fire. Of course, that's what their firefighters are paid to do everyday. What was odd about this fire were some of the details regarding how the fire started and the nature of the response to it. Suspicions were further intensified as the investigation began to unfold, and the puzzle pieces began pointing to a familiar culprit: smart meters.
The world is more electronic and transactional today than it has ever been before. Some would go so far as to say that the world is more connected than it's ever been before, but depending on what exactly one means by this, it's a contentious assertion.
Although the Internet has given way to many things in its nearly sixty years of existence (yes, fifty-nine, count 'em!), most of its growth has been due to the adoption of the World Wide Web, which is more than thirty-one years old now. Since then, we've seen the growth of eCommerce, through sites like Amazon and eBay which grew during the 1990s. In the 2000s, we had the rise of social networking giants, some of which have since fallen by the wayside. In recent years, the Internet has continued to become a more diverse arena for a… — Read full post
There's no shortage of articles about the messed-up things happening in today's world. Here's the headline of an article of an article from last month:
California's light bulb ban
According to the article, "The California Energy Commission voted on November 13, 2019 to ban the sale of inefficient light bulbs starting January 1, 2020."
OK, interesting enough. Even if the national government hadn't already done something similar, incandescent bulbs are certainly hard enough to find in some places, which is why, for good reason, a lot of people have or are stockpiling them.
What is annoying here is not the ban in and of itself. Although environmental legislation is usu… — Read full post
In an appropriate followup to yesterday's post on the evils of mobile apps, we thought it would be appropriate to take a closer look at a relatively new technology based completely around mobile apps: ridesharing.
Ridesharing is all the rage these days. People are increasingly ditching taxis for Ubers, Lyfts, and many other ridesharing services. The idea itself is a new take on a somewhat old idea. Indeed, people have been ridesharing since there were automobiles, though not necessarily with strangers. Certainly, modern technology has allowed this to escalate to a whole new level.
Don't get us wrong — "pure" ridesharing — carpooling, in other words — is great. Why take two vehicles out on the road when you can just take one? Carpooling not only reduces your personal … — Read full post
Here at InterLinked, we maintain a firm opposition to mobile apps, and we're not the only ones. Considering that we feel the modern "mobile culture" to be beneath us, why sink to that level of mediocrity?
Such feelings aside, however, mobile apps have had important ramifications for society, whether intended or not. Although many consumers feel that apps are all the rage these days, apps are truly one of the (many) modern evils in society.
To understand why apps are evil, let's go back to the beginning of the Internet. Actually, no need to even go back that far. Let's go back to the beginning of the World Wide Web. It may be hard to believe it now, but the "web" was only conceived by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, and the first webs… — Read full post
It is always sad when we lose a member of the EMF activist community. It is unfortunate that one of our number took her own life recently. Maria August departed this life on March 12, 2019, just shy of her 50th birthday. Sadly, many of her last birthdays here with us were not those filled with joy and jubilance, but those filled with pain and debilitation. Maria was a victim of EHS (electromagnetic hypersensitivity), an affliction that, while legitimate, nonetheless remains stigmatized and controversial. She conducted an interview with Nicolas Peneault last year regarding what it was like to live with EHS. You can read her posthumous self… — Read full post
Autonomous vehicles are seemingly all the rage in many of today's tech lines. Tech companies like Tesla and Google just won't give up, will they?
For what it's worth, the likelihood of so-called "self-driving" cars taking off is slim. Sure, tech moguls say it's the next big thing, just like 5G, the Internet of Things, "smart meters", and the multitude of other tech disasters that are sprouting up across the country, mostly financed using misappropriated public funds. But why should you believe them? Given that autonomous vehicles would most likely necessitate V2V, or "vehicle to vehicle" communications, using high-frequency millimeter waves, it's safe to say that if too many of these ever get out on the road, it will be anything but safe.
Figure 1.1 - Damages from the fire totaled $100,000