Tech Week: Facebook manifesto and four fascinating stories
Facebook releases a 6,000-word manifesto to make the world a better place – and turns on audio autoplay, Pixar makes free storytelling lessons available, and the Netherlands wants to prevent phone zombies from being run over.
Can I please have this course?
1. Pixar is sharing its secret to storytelling on Khan Academy
Pixar, a company with a ton of expertise in storytelling, has just released a course on Khan Academy, a non-profit online course platform. The course is a bit short, with only a couple of exercises, but more content will be added. Pixar has actually created more courses in the platform on other subjects like colour science and character modelling. If you have a dream of making a movie with a real story in it, then this course is perfect for you.
I know you'll just love the video autoplay with audio.
There are already a lot of reasons to unlike Facebook, but that hasn't kept the company from giving us another. Starting this week, videos in News Feed will autoplay with audio on. Yes. Automatic audio. After receiving positive feedback from users who have autoplay audio turned on, Facebook thought it would be a great idea to turn on the audio for all its users. But, being a thoughtful company, it is giving users the option to turn it off.
3. Some phone zombies less likely to be run over by traffic
Will they see the LED light?
A city in the Netherlands has decided to test LED lights to help highly distracted pedestrians who are detached from reality due to their smartphones. The plan is to place LED light strips on sidewalks at intersections. The light strip will turn red if it isn't safe to cross, and become green when it's good to go. Although we don't recommend doing the zombie walk, the Netherlands may soon be the safest place to do so.
4. Who's going to drive the flying cars?
It doesn't sound like something we should worry about until we get an actual flying car, but Kitty Hawk, a company trying to make personal flight possible, is trying to find flight test engineers who can conduct testing in austere outdoor environments. The applicants are required to have a private pilot's licence and be able to make sound judgments in safety-critical situations. The company also offers free food, happy hours and afternoon chocolate. Serious incentives – not to mention being the first to fly these things.
5. Facebook released a manifesto (that no one will read) and declared war on terror, again
Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg has recently published a 6,000-word manifesto detailing Facebook's ambitions on the global scale. Its aim is to describe how Facebook is going to make the world better through a number of things, including fighting against terror. Although you probably won't read it, it's interesting to see Facebook trying to make the world a better place, in addition to giving us a place to share cat videos and stalk our friends. The manifesto reminds us of the following video from the HBO show Silicon Valley.
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