Hellooooo and music, with a pretty cool live from Four Tet, and new Lingua Ignota. Also, Montréal frendz, Godspeed play in November at La Tulipe, so this is your reminder to buy tickets and listen to their latest stuff, LOUD.

On the news,

• Tokyo subway’s humble duct-tape typographer, cooooool. Via kottke.
• SSC / Scott Alexander: Against against billionaire philanthropy, and comments highlights.
• [fr] IRIS : De nos cotes de crédit au crédit social chinois, on y vient.
• r/askphilo: Research on the philosophy & narrative behind games, cool papers linked.
• SSC: Announcing the second annual Adversarial Collaboration Contest.
• Kottke: Cars! What’s the matter with cars today?
• [fr] Nitot : En vrac environnement & tech pour les 17 ans du Standblog.
• Tech:
  • Craig Mod: Fast software, the best software, YES.
  • r/SSC discusses Why do many older people struggle with computers?
    • ... which links to interesting Coding 2 Learn: Kids can't use computers... and this is why it should worry you.
  • Microsoft, Google and Apple clouds banned in Germany’s schools, fuck yeah Germany. Reddit.
  • DF: Superhuman and email privacy, 👍 summary.
  • ZDNet: GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions. Reddit.

Hi geeks. Music: hey, I had missed new Gonzo!

News:

• Kottke is on a streak of interesting links this week (I mean, even more than regular already super interesting 😄):
  • NYT: 25 works of art that define the contemporary age.
  • A demonstration of 16 levels of piano playing complexity, pretty cooool.
  • Rating vs ranking and the forced scarcity of American excellence.
• Tech:
  • Robin Sloan on the scale and feedback of social media platforms, 👍👍👍👍👍. Via waxy.
  • Passive neural net encoded in glass recognizing digits, whoa. Via jwz.

¡Hola! Music, with Yoann Bourgeois dancing to Vanessa Wagner's piano.

On the news,

• Moving the world to a 4 day workweek – an interview with Aidan Harper of the 4 day week campaign. HN.
• SSC / Scott Alexander: Gay rites are civil rites, on progressives social justice as "civil religion". 👍.
• Climate Stripes, via Kottke.
• Reddit answers How much bandwidth does the spinal cord have?
• Kottke: America’s Cars are heavily subsidized, dangerous, and mandatory.
• [fr] Nitot : En vrac techno, En vrac environnement.
• SMBC: Odie 😄.
• Tech:
  • Maciej Cegłowski: I can't stop winning! (HN) is fucking amazing, what a beautiful human being. His attitude & humor are a breath of fresh air amid the sinister of interweb giants. Go read the entire thing, here's a tidbit:

    My grandpa sometimes said "you have to help your fate along", and I always liked this worldview very much, for the way it bolted a work ethic onto fatalism. Things happen, but you can always take credit for tenacity.

    A one-person business is an exercise in long-term anxiety management, so I would say if you are already an anxious person, go ahead and start a business. You're not going to feel any worse. You've already got the main skill set of staying up and worrying, so you might as well make some money.

    Running an online service solo puts one in the coffin corner between the Dunning Kruger effect and impostor syndrome. On some days you feel the correct but paralyzing sense that you are in way over your head. On other days, you'll feel like you're surfing on waves of liquid competence, doing flips, until you destroy something important.

    In between the two is a zone of narrow, focused productivity that I hope one day to find. [...]

    What does the future hold for Pinboard? Death! The bus that one day comes for us all! The skeletal, icy hand on an unprepared shoulder! Pain, a flash of light, then numbing darkness. So back up your bookmarks.

  • NYT: Google’s 4000-word privacy policy is a history of the internet. HN.
  • Facebook’s $5 billion FTC fine is an embarrassing joke.
  • Google promises reCaptcha isn’t exploiting users. Should you trust it? No, of course. Reddit.
  • Eric S. Raymond: Contributor Agreements considered harmful. HN.

    [Clickwrap agreements] are not magic bullets, because nothing is. But they have one virtue CLAs and CAs do not: they do no harm.

Hi frendz. Music, with Yonathan Gat, merci Marianne.

Around the interwebs,

• Derek Sivers: Doors and windows and what’s real.
• Tech:
  • RPS: Chinese publisher Indievent lose their business license after Devotion pooh furore, whoa.
  • Motherboard: China is forcing tourists to install text-stealing malware at its border. Oh well, Soon In The West Too™, I guess.
  • Reminder: Choose boring technology. HN.
  • Superhuman is spying on you. HN.

Bonjour bonsoir, friends. These weeks music is: Flavien Berger, new Thom Yorke, Angel Bat Dawid, Raven, Jesus Horse, and Shh...Diam!

On the news,

• [fr] Environnement :
  • Nitot : Le déni climatique.
  • Nitot : En vrac sur l'environnement, la politique et l'économie.
  • Clim : de l'invention d'un "cinglé" à un problème de santé publique.
• Kottke: Uncompetitive purposefulness and infinity cake, 👍.
• Kottke: The Apollo 11 mission in realtime.
• SMBC: Teaching.
• Pretty great Scott Alexander / Slate Star Codex on knowledge & tradition:
  • Epistemic learned helplessness, on how aiming at broadly & constantly believing arguments is insane, because arguments are easy to make and the time to evaluate them is limited.
  • Book review: The secret of our success and List of passages I highlighted in my copy of “The secret of our success” are helping me reconcile with tradition. They demonstrate why today's standard "demand logical justification for everything" rationalism should give tradition a break, because the value of many traditional practices is impossible to figure out / experiment within the span of a lifetime. The examples from the highlights are fascinating, I'm buying and devouring this book.
  • Asymmetric weapons gone bad offers guidelines to integrate our civilization's rationality with traditions.
  • Addendum to “Enormous nutshell”: competing selectors draws parallels with right vs. left wing.
• Tech:
  • Mozilla announces Track THIS, a cute search engine bomb. If the trend continues, I predict a divorce with Google sweet ad dollarz by end 2019, and they'll find money elsewhere (gosh, they could even ask their users for some?!), and it will be a good thing further aligning Mozilla with users interests. HN blah.
  • Meanwhile, Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side, of course yes. HN, which points to this reCAPTCHA demo I didn't know about, which lets you see your reCAPTCHA score.
    My results: Using Firefox with uBlock and Cookie-Autodelete I get 0.1. Using Chrome, even incognito and with uBlock I get 0.7. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻. Fuck you, Google, this is blatant bullying, technically unjustifiable abuse of your stranglehold over the whole web platform.
  • [fr] Nitot : En vrac sur la technologie.
  • EA: "We don't call them loot boxes", they're "surprise mechanics". 🖕.
  • r/SubSimulatorGPT2is a subreddit where "all posts and comments in this subreddit are generated automatically using fine-tuned versions of the GPT-2 language model from OpenAI". Via SSC.
  • Wired: Microsoft's ebook apocalypse shows the dark side of DRM. HN.