Yo, and music with new Atsuko Chiba.

News

That bit at timestamp 32m24s of hbomber - Climate denial: A measured response, where a journalist interviews Patrick Moore about Roundup, is fabulous. Other good episodes of his “A measured response” series: Vaccines and autism, and The war on Christmas. Also, Woke brands and Speedrunning is awesome summed up in Hbomberguy @ XOXO Fest 2019.

xkcd: Runtime, SMBC: Drugs.

Tech

Verge: Getty Images is suing the creators of AI art tool Stable Diffusion for scraping its content.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Verge: “Extremely hardcore” Twitter.

Woop woop, frendz, and music with Joni Void + Maya Kuroki.

AI

[fr] Monsieur Phi : De quoi ChatGPT est-il vraiment capable ?

Ars Technica: Microsoft’s new AI can simulate anyone’s voice with 3 seconds of audio.

Lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion, and HN blah.

AI-created stills for movies that don’t exist: David Cronenberg’s Galaxy of Flesh (1985), Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Tron (1976).

Tech

Bruce Schneier: Decarbonizing PoW cryptocurrencies through taxation.

Asianometry: How semiconductors ruined East Germany.

MIT: We now understand why Roman concrete is so durable, long-lasting, and self-repairing. Via Kottke.

[pdf] Field Guide to NOTAMs, a tastily-presented snark about the irrelevant crap that goes into official pilot notifications. Said differently, “notification overload”, but for airplane pilots instead of your phone. Via Nelson.

Streamer Mikkaa simultaneously beats 2 Elden Rings with a controller and a dance mat.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Good reminder by Nick: “Smart” home devices are security & privacy trash. IT’S ALSO RIDICULOUSLY FRAGILE AND MOSTLY-USELESS OBSCENE FIRST-WORLD TECHNO-GADGETO-BABBLE BULLSHIT, GODDAMNIT. MORE TECH ≠ BETTER, ever dared thinking about it?

Bonjour bonsoir, and music with Genghis Tron, merci Sam.

News

Maciej Cegłowski: Why not [humans on] Mars, 👏👏👏.

[fr] INA - « Qui aurait pu prédire la crise climatique ? », merci Berthe.

Winners of the 2022 BigPicture natural world photo competition, and 2022 Close-up photographer of the year. Both via Kottke.

SMBC: Art, Yer mom, Imagination.

Tech

The strangest computer manual ever written.

LambHoot: The Big Fat Greek reason I haven’t played Hades, Violence in VR video games, Caught in a Dongo Adventure.

Jean-Michel Jarre’s “Oxygene pt. 4” in 19kb of JS code, via waxy.

Limmy’s show: Top secret came up while discussing the LastPass breach, thx James.

Shitty tech ℹ️

The expanding “Dark Forest” and generative AI, via waxy.

Apple fined 8.5 million $ for illegally collecting iPhone data for ads.

Feliz año nuevo, nerdz, and music with Janel Leppin, merci Juju.

News

Tom7 - PAC-TOM: Running every street in Pittsburgh.

SMBC: Oops, JPEG, Real life.

Tech

[fr] Jérôme Denis & David Pontille : La maintenance ou l’art invisible de faire durer les choses.

Ferd: A bridge over a river never crossed, and the idea of Falsework, “a temporary structure used to support a permanent structure while it is not self-supporting” 👍.

Wladimir Palant: South Korea’s online security dead end.

Kottke: Super Mario Bros was designed on graph paper.

The Needling: Portland startup to mine artisanal Bitcoin using only slide rules and graph paper 😄, via jwz.

jwz: Floppy disc assembly line.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Josh Strife Hayes: Abusive game monetization strategies.

🎄, geeks, and music with Black Ox Orkestar.

News

[fr] Homo Fabulus - Climat : comment faire pour que les gens se bougent (une fois qu’ils ont été bien informés).

[fr] Stupid Economics : L’impossible transformation de l’Éducation Nationale.

[fr] Osons causer - Nucléaire : un atout pour l’indépendance de la France ?

Oh the urbanity: Airbnb decimates housing affordability (but it doesn’t have to)

Photos of GY!BE playing at a Mexican restaurant in Manchester UK, November 1998, via r/gybe.

Paul Fairie: The 2022 headline of the year nominees.

SMBC: Artificial Incompetence, Ceremony.

Tech

Bryan Cantrill: The container revolution: Reflections after the first decade (2016), Zebras all the way down (2017), Hardware/software co-design: The coming golden age (2021)

Asianometry: The dawn and dusk of Sun Microsystems.

Technology Connections: The optical audio of sound-on-film.

Danny Spencer: Can Doom run it? An adding machine in Doom. HN, which links to a similar thing in Quake.

NYT: The “Luddite” club, a group of NYC teens opting out of smartphones and social media, via waxy.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Hyperloop as a “Gadgetbahn”: Futuristic transportation that looks cool but is unnecessarily complicated and is definitely not built for real people.