weekly reel October 6, 2024

Hola, and music with new GY!BE.

"NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD", by Godspeed You! Black Emperor (bandcamp.com)

News

What’s the labor share of national income?

Wikipedia: Timeline of the far future, via Kottke.

Real Engineering: The problems with China’s space program.

[fr] Médiapart : Peut-on échapper à l’austérité budgétaire ?

[fr] Clément Viktorovitch - Libéralisme : l’idéologie maquillée en bon sens, Entretien avec Sylvie Hazebroucq.

Not Just Bikes: The Amtrak train from NYC to Toronto, and how VIA Rail managed to suck even more.

How Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Harris and Walz is a masterpiece of persuasive prose: a songwriter’s practical lesson in written advocacy.

SMBC: Consciousness, Half, Cell.

Tech

Game Engineering Podcast: Casey Muratori on his work experience.

Primeagen: LiChess case study.

Primeagen interviews DHH, what an excellent chat, regardless of my non-enjoyment of Rails (too much “magic”, horror stories of ex-Shopify friends).

Boris Vallejo and the Pixel Art of the Demoscene. HN.

Bop spotter.

AI

Batshit crazy AI video hallucination, via Kottke.

Shitty tech

jwz: Legendarily predatory monopolist and AI shill Microsoft wants US taxpayers to pay for their very own nuclear reactor.

jwz: Mozilla’s CEO doubles down on them being an ad company now.

The humble hyperlink, the backbone of the entire internet, is increasingly endangered, via Kottke.

Wladimir Palant: Lies, damned lies, and Impact Hero (refoorest, allcolibri).

weekly reel September 29, 2024

O hai, passerby, and music with Zeal & Ardor, Spirit of the beehive, Leathers.

GREIF, by Zeal and Ardor (bandcamp.com)

YOU'LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING, by SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (bandcamp.com)

Ultraviolet, by LEATHERS (bandcamp.com)

News

[fr] Clément Viktorovitch : Le coût FARAMINEUX de la dissolution de l’Assemblée Nationale, Comment la France est sortie de la démocratie.

Winners of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2024, via Kottke.

Old photos of basketball games often have a pleasing blue haze ... because of cigarette smoke.

Oh the urbanity: Doug Ford’s terrible plan for cycling in Toronto.

SMBC: Neurons, Dared, Utilitarian.

The Onion: Amazon Update Says Package Now Arriving When The Sky Shatters, The Sun Shines Black, And Rivers Weep Like Men.

Games

GMTK: The secret to designing mysterious games.

Tech

Linus Akesson: Making 8-bit music from scratch at the C64 BASIC prompt.

Drew DeVault: Neurodivergence and accountability in free software.

If WordPress is to survive, Matt Mullenweg must be removed.

SPA by default.

Tech FUCK YES quote of the week

In addition to above-linked SPA by default, this tidbit from gov.uk’s service manual, via Simon Willison.

Using a client-side JavaScript framework can:

  • increase the overall size of your code base and push processing to the client-side, causing performance issues for users with a slower network connection or lower powered device
  • create a reliance on third-party code that your developers do not have control over, requiring you to make major changes to your service in order to stay up to date with changes in the framework
  • make it difficult to find people with the skills required to maintain the code, if the framework’s loses popularity over time

If you use a JavaScript framework you should:

  • be able to justify with evidence, how using JavaScript would benefit users
  • be aware of any negative impacts and be able to mitigate them
  • consider whether the benefits of using it outweigh the potential problems
  • only use the framework for parts of the user interface that cannot be built using HTML and CSS alone
  • design each part of the user interface as a separate component

Having separate components means that if the JavaScript fails to load, it will only be that single component that fails. The rest of the page will load as normal.

weekly reel September 22, 2024

Hi geeks, and music with BEAK> (thx Sam):

>>>>, by BEAK> (bandcamp.com)

News

CNN: 47-year-old Voyager 1 spacecraft just fired up thrusters it hasn’t used in decades, via DF.

[fr] Stupid Economics : Que mangerons-nous en 2050 ?

How journalists can stop sanewashing Trump and other politicians, a useful neologism. Via Kottke.

SMBC: Intelligent, Hold up, Machines art.

Tech

Asianometry: The wobbly future of the Hard Disk Drive industry.

RPS: From Blizzard to Bethesda, game unions are sweeping the industry.

AI

[fr] Monsieur Phi - Pistes de réponses scientifiques à la question “Nos IAs sont-elles conscientes ?”

Games

Kaze Emanuar: How optimizations made Mario 64 SLOWER.

Noclip Documentary: The origin story behind Counter-Strike’s most iconic maps, de_dust/2.

weekly reel September 15, 2024

Woop woop, have some fresh King Gizzard and shonkywonkydonkey / Radiohead.

Flight b741, by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard (bandcamp.com)

shonkywonkydonkey - OK Computer but everything is my voice (youtube-nocookie.com)

News

Irving Penn: Small trades.

Penny Farthing bike race (1928).

SMBC: Grounded, Sciences.

Tech

Jussi Pakkanen: On “M type” and “S type” processes in software development.

AI

The political preferences of LLMs.

Shitty tech

Neither Elon Musk nor anybody else will ever colonize Mars, via jwz.

jwz: Wherein the techbros are here to “disrupt” ordering drinks at a bar.

How to monetize a blog.

weekly reel September 7, 2024

Bonjour bonsoir geeks, and music with new Why?

The Well I Fell Into, by WHY? (bandcamp.com)

News

Ken Shirriff: The Pentium as a Navajo weaving. HN.

The banned Somersault long jump.

SMBC: Who’s a good boy?!

Tech

“Right to Repair for your body”: The rise of DIY, pirated medicine.

Casey Muratori: Zen, CUDA, and Tensor Cores, Part I: The silicon.

Fritzchens Fritz’ hi-res CPU & GPU die shots, via Casey above.

AI

Ted Chiang: Why AI isn’t going to make art.

Games

The Machinations of myhouse.wad: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.