Interesting Reads for the Week Ending June 4th

Here’s to week two of my now-regular interesting reads of the week posts.

The Rules

Here are the rules for what articles I choose to include in this weekly roundup:

1. It can’t be anything I wrote.
2. It has to be something I actually read. Nothing that simply had an interesting headline.
3. I have to have read it since the previous post. It does not have to be something that was written in the past week.
4. It has to be something I read online. In other words, it has to be a webpage with a URL.

The Reads

It was bound to happen. A bitcoin mining operation was discovered because it was thought to be a marijuana farm. Something about the amount of electricity being used. But instead of grow lights, it was just a bunch of bitcoin mining equipment. Oh, and they were stealing the electricity. Here’s the Wall Street Journal article and Bloomberg article on it. (If you get an ugly popup or something else that prevents you from reading either article, try clearing your cookies for the site or using reader mode in your browser.)

Mass customization is taking over manufacturing. And it will continue to do so. That’s the point of Fast Company’s article The store of the future won’t have any merchandise at all. Essentially, Ralph Lauren plans on having stores that make your clothing on-demand. And, of course, it’s made by machines. This will allow you to choose among more color combinations than ever before. Plus, it will reduce waste.

Although, that probably means fewer clearance sales…

In tech news, Stack Overflow has been sold to tech giant Prosus for $1.8 billion. That’s billion with a bee. Stack Overflow talked about it in their own blog post on the subject.

Somewhat locally, the City of New Carlisle is installing a bunch of “storywalks.” It’s also launched a brand-new website. (Source: Springfield News-Sun City of New Carlisle to install StoryWalk, launch new website

New Carlisle is about a 15-minute drive from where I live, so I’ll have to take the kids to see these storywalks sometime.

I enjoyed Tom Critchlow’s 2018 article Small b blogging. The part where he stated “And remember that you are your own audience!” really resonated with me - the primary audience of my blog and this website is me. I write to practice. I write because I might reference it sometime in the future.

The fact that it’s publicly available and other people might find use in it is just a bonus.

And finally, Employees Are Quitting Instead of Giving Up Working From Home.