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Curious about stuff

5th Ocean: The Southern Ocean

By Bobby Voicu

It is also the only ocean not being defined by the continents around it, but by a specific current: the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC).

The Earth has finally attained popular recognition for its fifth ocean, with a decision by the National Geographic Society to add the Southern Ocean around Antarctica to the four it recognizes already: the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and Arctic oceans.

Although the designation of the frigid waters around the icy southern continent as a separate ocean has kicked around for almost 100 years and is widely used by scientists, until now it has not had popular backing.

But on June 8 — World Oceans Day — the society announced it would henceforth be labeling the Southern Ocean as the fifth ocean on its maps of our planet.

From here: Earth’s fifth ocean just confirmed | Space.

The Impact of Work from Home

By Bobby Voicu

Of course, the people that can’t really move their jobs and that can’t really work from anywhere are the people most impacted in a negative way.

Winners? High income men in their 30s and 40s.

Losers: Entry-level workers in less established positions

If the pre-pandemic office was like a fine-dining experience—a large group enters, sits down together, and leaves several hours later—the post-pandemic office may be more like a neighborhood café. People will come and go, you’ll recognize some of them but feel estranged from others, and the office might convey a sense of both vague belonging and day-to-day transience. That’s not an ideal environment for new workers to feel welcomed into a community of peers. “Deprived of desk neighbors, impromptu coffees, and any real way to, for a lack of a better term, read everyone’s vibe,” my colleague Amanda Mull wrote last year, “new hires and young people who work remotely risk remaining unknown quantities.”

From here: Winners and Losers of the Work-From-Home Revolution – The Atlantic.

Panic’s Playdate gaming device

By Bobby Voicu

I aws pretty excited when I first heard about Playdate. Not because of the amazing games, necessarily, but because of the type of new games it could generate. And also because it looks quirky.

After about 2-3 years since they first announced it, here’s an update including their first accessory and a non-game app: Poolsuite FM.

Games I’m interested from E3 2021

By Bobby Voicu

First one, Lake. Seems like a story based walking sim (like Firewatch) and it’s something I might get into, especially if it comes on the iPad at some point:

I was never a FarCry fan, but I’m actually excited about FarCry 6:

Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong

This seems interesting: 12 minutes.

…I’ll update as they come…

Witcher Season 2 teaser

By Bobby Voicu

We don’t have a launch date for season 2 of Witcher yet, filming being delayed by COVID and everything.

Still, the teaser for season 2 is out now and it shows a little bit more focus on Ciri’s story, which is closer to the Witcher 3 game story line. And since most of the people watching Witcher, including me, know about it from that game, it will make for an interesting season, for sure.

A little bit about IG algorithms

By Bobby Voicu

It’s interesting to see an explanation from the horse’s mouth about the algorithms that drive Instagram.

One of the main misconceptions we want to clear up is the existence of “The Algorithm.” Instagram doesn’t have one algorithm that oversees what people do and don’t see on the app. We use a variety of algorithms, classifiers, and processes, each with its own purpose. We want to make the most of your time, and we believe that using technology to personalize your experience is the best way to do that.
When we first launched in 2010, Instagram was a single stream of photos in chronological order. But as more people joined and more was shared, it became impossible for most people to see everything, let alone all the posts they cared about. By 2016, people were missing 70% of all their posts in Feed, including almost half of posts from their close connections. So we developed and introduced a Feed that ranked posts based on what you care about most.
Each part of the app – Feed, Explore, Reels – uses its own algorithm tailored to how people use it. People tend to look for their closest friends in Stories, but they want to discover something entirely new in Explore. We rank things differently in different parts of the app, based on how people use them.

From here: Shedding More Light on How Instagram Works.

Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash

Zoom Towns is a great name

By Bobby Voicu

I don’t like living in big cities anymore. I like visiting and spending some time there, but I love living in a 100k+ population city. And while I moved here before the pandemic, I was so happy I made the move when it started.

And I’m not the only one. There’s now a name for the cities/towns that allow people to work remotely while balancing a good life close to nature: Zoom towns.

Rumore bets there’s a good chance many Zoom towners will remain in their new homes, too, particularly as towns evolve alongside their latest residents.

“Once they reach this tipping point where they’re a pretty cool town with a nice coffee shop and cool bars and good restaurants – when they get over the hump and become a place – people want to stay,” she says. “So, what’s interesting about this flood of amenity migration is that it probably tipped a lot of these communities over that hump.”

Sherlin, the remote worker who traded Los Angeles for Northwest Arkansas, says she feels like she landed in the right place at the right time. “So far, I absolutely love it,” she says. “I don’t see myself leaving, but I’m going to complete the year and figure it out from there.” 

No one knows whether companies will keep remote-work policies forever, so it’s hard to predict the future of these nature-adjacent Zoom towns or the workers who’ve flocked to them. At the moment, however, for outdoors-loving workers who are able to pick up and leave, many Zoom towns have rolled out their welcome mats. Step on in.

From here: The ‘Zoom towns’ luring remote workers to rural enclaves – BBC Worklife.

Streaming on Twitch at 43

By Bobby Voicu

I’m not 43 yet, so it’s not about me, but I’ll be soon, so I wish it was about me :)

I always wanted to stream. Not because I want to make money out of it, but because I enjoy talking about games and most of my friends don’t really play a lot.

This lady, though, started to Twitch in January 2021 and has a lot of fun, apparently:

Echoing from some cavernous depth I thought I’d sealed off years ago, the voices came, whispering every negative comment I ever received in 20 years of games journalism: “She’s not funny.” “Who does she think she is?” “This is why girls shouldn’t play games.” “What kind of dickhead gives Sonic the Hedgehog 4 a 9 out of 10?” (Fair.) But there, in the chat windows popping up on my screen, were new voices. Keep going, they said. You can do it. There were lots of laughing emojis and smiley faces. I started to relax, realising that it didn’t really matter that I was rubbish at the game. This wasn’t about skill, it was about people with a shared interest having a laugh. At me, mainly, but still – a laugh’s a laugh, as all attention-craving comedians (read: all comedians) know.

I want this!

StackOverflow acquired for $1.8 Billion

By Bobby Voicu

Seeing the flurry of IPOs and acquisitions in the tech space I didn’t somehow expected StackOverflow to be sold to Naspers/Prosus. I actually think it’s the best outcome, since the buyers will probably want to increase the value of the asset and Naspers has a history of doing this successfully and not selling assets after fluffing them up a little bit.

Today we’re pleased to announce that Stack Overflow is joining Prosus. Prosus is an investment and holding company, which means that the most important part of this announcement is that Stack Overflow will continue to operate independently, with the exact same team in place that has been operating it, according to the exact same plan and the exact same business practices. Don’t expect to see major changes or awkward “synergies”. The business of Stack Overflow will continue to focus on Reach and Relevance, and Stack Overflow for Teams. The entire company is staying in place: we just have different owners now.

This is, in some ways, the best possible outcome. Stack Overflow stays independent. The company has plenty of cash on hand to expand and deliver more features and fix the old broken ones. Right now, the biggest gating factor to how fast we can do this is just how fast we can hire excellent people.

From Joel on Software

Also, the press release from Prosus:

With expertise in scaling communities in high-growth markets globally, Prosus can help accelerate Stack Overflow’s growth ambitions, with a particular focus on reaching a wider international community, while also further scaling the company’s Teams product to position Stack Overflow at the center of product and technology development within major enterprises globally.

Prosus has built a significant presence on the enterprise side with a focus on the future of workplace learning. Prosus will reach 90% of the Fortune 100 across its corporate learning companies including Stack Overflow, Skillsoft, Udemy and Codecademy.