Featured Links - January 8, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about. It's a longer than usual this week because of the holiday hiatus.

A foggy winter country scene

• Siberia’s ice is melting, revealing its past and endangering its future (gift link). "Siberia is heating up around twice as quickly as other parts of the world. The rapid change is causing the frozen ground known as permafrost that coats about two-thirds of Russia to thaw for the first time in ages."
• What We Lost When Twitter Became X (archive.ph link). "As a former Twitter employee, I watched Elon Musk undermine one of the Internet’s most paradoxical, special places."
• 1 Key Element Gives The 2000 Dune Miniseries An Advantage Over Villeneuve's Dune Films. "Over two decades later, one key element still gives the 2000 Dune miniseries a huge advantage over Denis Villeneuve's Dune films. Here's what to know." The 2000 miniseries is well worth tracking down and watching; it's available on YouTube. 
• How The Beatles helped turn the Pentax Spotmatic into an iconic camera. "The Pentax SLR had huge influence on a generation of photographers - including the Fab Four."
• Unpredicting 2024. From science fiction author and futurist, Karl Schroeder: 'If we reframe the coming year around one simple idea—expect surprises—then it becomes clear that predictions are irrelevant and can even be dangerous when they lead us to rely on eventualities that don’t happen. Because the future we care about is the dimension of surprise, by definition we can’t predict it. So ignore all those “predictions for 2024” articles, they’re not going to help.'
• SOTP: State-of-the-Pandemic. "The pandemic's 2nd biggest wave of infections and what the JN.1 variant is telling us." A detailed look at current conditions and future possibilities from Eric Topol. 
• How Standard Ebppls Serves Millions of Requests Per Month with a 2GB VPS; Or a Paen to the Classic Web. "Standard Ebooks is a project that takes transcriptions of public domain literature, like the kind typically available at Project Gutenberg, and creates beautiful, modern ebooks out of them using a detailed style manual. Volunteers from all over the world work to produce these ebooks, and then we release them free of cost and free of copyright restrictions."
• 2024 Fediverse Predictions from Tim Chambers. "These are fun and like seeing the tech predictions starting to pop up in a lot of other places."
• Why U.S. streets are becoming deadlier for pedestrians. "Pedestrian deaths in the United States have been going up since 2009. Over 3,000 more pedestrians died in 2021 than in 2009, a trend that's not mirrored in other industrialized countries, where pedestrian fatalities are actually declining. Even stranger these deaths in the U.S. occur more frequently in the evening. So, why are so many pedestrians dying at night in the United States?"
• The fall of Firefox: Mozilla's once-popular web browser slides into irrelevance. "With its market share hitting a new low, can Firefox rise from the ashes or is this the end?" 
• Elon Musk Has Used Illegal Drugs, Worrying Leaders at Tesla and SpaceX. (Archive.ph link) "Some executives and board members fear the billionaire’s use of drugs—including LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms and ketamine—could harm his companies." I wouldn't be surprised to see him off the board of Tesla and SpaceX because of this.