weekly reel April 21, 2019
Hi friends. Music, with awesome new Four Tet, extra chill Mammal Hands, and poppy Lip Talk.
News:
- Carl Kinsella: Reaction of the rich to the Notre Dame fire teaches us a lot about the world we live in, via Kottke.
It would be incredibly cheap to suggest that it is in some way wrong to give money for the restoration. There is a value that transcends simple economics in restoring testaments to civilisation. Better that Notre Dame remains a symbol of European history than €300 million rests in a billionaire’s bank account.
But the immediacy and magnitude of their response tells us something very important about the society we live in.
If two men in a world of more than 7 billion people can provide €300 million to restore Notre Dame, within six hours, then there is enough money in the world to feed every mouth, shelter every family and educate every child. The failure to do so is a matter of will, and a matter of system.
The failure to do so comes from our failure to recognise the mundane emergencies that claims lives all around us every single day. Works of art and architectural history and beauty rely on the ingenuity of people, and it is people who must be protected above all else.
Brick and mortar and stained-glass might burn, but they do not bleed, and they do not starve, and they do not suffer. Humans suffer. Everywhere in the world, from Paris to Persepolis, people are suffering. But their suffering is every day. It does not light up a front page, and it does not inspire immediate donations from the world's wealthiest men.
- [fr/qc] IRIS - Liberté 85 : comptez-vous vivre longtemps après le travail ?
- Tech:
- Cloudflare: Announcing AMP Real URL. This is Google horseshit of the highest, purest, undiluted grade. To quote hipsternews,
This is a "solution" to a "problem" that AMP itself created. And in the process it creates additional complexity and a new potential revenue stream for middlemen providing a service that shouldn't be necessary in the first place. Astounding. And oh yeah:
"AMP Real URL is only supported in the Chrome browser at this time, but we are optimistic it will be supported more widely as its benefit to Internet users becomes clear."
Mozilla has currently marked this proposal as "harmful". It seems to me as though Google may be ramming this one through despite objections.
- [fr] Nitot : En vrac du jeudi, 👏👏👏 semaine de vomi Facebook, oui.
- Stumbled upon Gall's law in a HN thread.
"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system."
This law is essentially an argument in favour of underspecification: it can be used to explain the success of systems like the World Wide Web and Blogosphere, which grew from simple to complex systems incrementally, and the failure of systems like CORBA, which began with complex specifications. Gall's Law has strong affinities to the practice of agile software development. Although the quote may seem to validate the merits of simple systems, it is preceded by the qualifier "A simple system may or may not work.".
- Cloudflare: Announcing AMP Real URL. This is Google horseshit of the highest, purest, undiluted grade. To quote hipsternews,