weekly reel October 1, 2023

Woop woop. This week’s 🎵 is new Grails.

Anches En Maat by Grails (bandcamp.com)

News

Stunning high-resolution Lidar images of rivers & deltas, and photos of storms and clouds from a 767 pilot.

Oh The Urbanity: What happened when Rotterdam banned housing investors.

SMBC: Inspired by nature, Your powers.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Drew DeVault: The forbidden topics.

The tyranny of the marginal user: Why consumer software gets worse, not better, over time (HN).

Google Ads team begging for worse search results, so that Ads team can hit their goals (direct link to US gov. PDF).

Dan Olson: This is financial advice (HN).

weekly reel September 24, 2023

Hey geeks, time for newsnewsnews.

News

McSweeney’s: Son, You’re Old Enough to Know the Truth, There is No Such Thing as the “Invisible Hand of the Market”.

Vox: Why large delivery vans still rule in urban U.S., while e-bikes took over Europe cities deliveries, via Kottke. As usual: lack of regulation.

Games

Matt’s Ramblings - Speedrun science: Beating Quake with code.

Escapist: The making of EVE Online.

Force Gaming: “Live Service” games suck.

weekly reel September 17, 2023

Bonjour bonsoir, and music with Fishbach.

Avec les yeux by Fishbach (bandcamp.com)

News

Story of the US electric tramway in the 1920s (continued).

Stunning JWST image of a grand-design spiral galaxy.

[fr] Passé sauvage - Qui a inventé le voile obligatoire ?

SMBC: Meditation, Peace, History, Ambition.

Tech

[fr] Nitot : Non, la nouvelle Apple Watch n’est pas neutre en carbone.

Scott Alexander - Book review: Elon Musk, and comments. Also, Elon Musk moving servers.

Cory Doctorow: Greenwashing set Canada on fire, thx James.

Aardvark'd: The Fog Creek documentary, 18 years later.

AI

Ars Technica: Funky AI-generated spiraling medieval village captivates social media, whoa.

An acronym to describe the bundle of ideologies behind the AI dreams and nightmares pushed by AI gurus: TESECREAL. Via Nelson.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Unity’s enshittification is now at full capacity. RPS 1, RPS 2, RPS 3, GoL 1, GoL 2, GoL 3, GoL 4, GoL 5, GoL 6, Muta, Jimquisition and Casey Muratori, Skill Up (video). Learned via cmuratori’s notes that (emphasis mine):

In Unity’s case, paying attention to their quarterly investor materials tells you many things that aren’t as common knowledge as they should be. As a small example, most developers think Unity is primarily in the business of selling game engines.

They’re not! Less than half of Unity’s revenue comes from game engines. Over half comes from advertising. Their bottom line is more affected by the advertising market than it is by how many developers buy their engine.

EDIT Sep. 22: Unity: An open letter to our community (HN, Muta 2), with a partial reversal and slightly less-weasely excuses than before. Fuck them anyways, they will retry bullshit like this, it’s just a matter of time given the garbage direction they’ve been taking (see above quote). Move to community-built-and-supported engines!

EDIT Sep. 23: And they keep gaslighting! Now they pretend the removal of their ToS on GitHub was done because “views were so low” and are “genuinely disappointed at how our removal of the ToS has been framed across the internet”. This, friends, is 100% pure undiluted bullshit corporate gaslighting. Have a “genuine” fuck you, assholes. Devs still not exactly thrilled and still waving fuckbye to Unity, see e.g. BallisticNG abandoning their Switch port or Godot funding jumping from 25k€/month to 50k€/month.

Reddit activity plummeted after the protests.

weekly reel September 10, 2023

Hola friends, and music with Clown Core.

Clown Core - Hell (youtube-nocookie.com)

Clown Core - Computers (youtube-nocookie.com)

News

[fr] Clément Viktorovitch : L’appel à la bienveillance, une forme de violence.

SMBC: Productivity tips.

Tech

OpenGL vs. Direct3D - Servan Keondjian & Casey Muratori. 👏 historical perspective on API design.

AI

Perplexity: interactive LLM visualization, neat. Via Nelson.

Shitty tech ℹ️

StarLink.

weekly reel September 3, 2023

Yo, here are some news news news, listening to Rone.

L(oo)ping by Rone (bandcamp.com)

News

[fr] Science Étonnante - Techniques pour mieux apprendre et étudier.

Kottke: In America, the cheese is dead.

SMBC: Introducing the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves-Weinersmith voting mechanism, AI consciousness threshold, Stress.

Tech

CoRecursive #091: The science of learning to code.

EXPI by p01, 1kb JS demo that won this year’s Assembly.

Games

Quake Speedruns Explained: E2M3 and the hardest trick in Quake.

Jim Stephanie Sterling: No sex please, we’re straight.

AI

Drew DeVault: AI crap.