O hai, weirdos, and music with Marika Hackman.

News

Photos of New York City’s subway in 1970-1980, via nelson.

Cat Graffam: Using MS Paint to remake the Windows XP wallpaper.

SMBC: Toxic, Infidelity, Immortal, Bad bad girl.

Software

Drew DeVault: So you want to compete with, or replace, open source.

Asianometry: The big data center water problem.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Molly White: Follow the crypto, “a new project to track cryptocurrency industry spending to influence 2024 elections in the United States”. Announcement, source code.

Hi friends, and music with Thom Yorke.

News

[fr] Clément Viktorovitch : Pour une nouvelle constitution.

Asianometry: China’s sinking land problem.

Not Just Bikes: The secret to Japan’s great cities: good zoning, street design, traffic & parking restrictions, kei cars.

Pixel Mirror, “a faceted crystal that turns everything viewed through it into pixel art”. Via waxy.

SMBC: Like that.

Software

Jacob Kaplan-Moss: All I need to know about engineering leadership I learned from “Leave No Trace”. Also, Just use PostgreSQL for everything.

Booting Linux off of Google Drive, via Brodie.

xkcd #2958 - Remote cod execution.

AI

Simon Willison: Jevons paradox applied to AI + software engineering.

Simon Willison: Quoting Jim Covello, Goldman Sachs.

Maggie Appleton @ Local-First Conf: Home-cooked software and “barefoot programmers” (YouTube video).

Shitty tech ℹ️

Time: Inside the health crisis of a Texas bitcoin town, via jwz.

Bonjour bonsoir, geeks, and music with new Islands.

News

[fr] Clément Viktorovitch : Marine Le Pen achève la destruction du langage entamée par Macron.

Asianometry: How America saved its failing freight trains.

SMBC: Latte, Pro wrestling, Camouflage, Cortex.

xkcd #2955: Pole vault.

Software

Serving a billion web requests with boring code, via lobsters.

Marco Rogers: The frontend treadmill.

Programmers are also human: Next-door 10x software engineer 😄.

AI

Ludic Mataroa: I will fucking piledrive you if you mention AI again, and extremely entertaining Primeagen Reacts.

Shitty tech ℹ️

jwz: Wherein the techbros want to sell your security cameras back to you, again.

Hi nerds, and music with Oiseaux-Tempête.

News

[fr] Clément Viktorovitch - Reconnaître le fascisme quand il frappe à votre porte.

Not just bikes: I rode the craziest trains in Japan.

SMBC: Beauty Standards.

Software

jwz: “Great news, everybody! Google has approved the crowdsourced updated XScreenSaver Privacy Policy. I assume that this means they find it 100% factual and endorse it entirely”. 😄, peak jwz.

AI

Charity Majors: Generative AI is not going to build your engineering team for you, 👏👏👏.

Games

FromSoft Word, “the Dark Souls of word processors: one typo, and it’s game over”. 😄, via waxy.

Quake Speedruns Explained - Co-op Quake: The movie.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Jim Stephanie Sterling - Embracer’s legacy: 44 axed studios, 80 axed games, 4532 axed jobs.

Bonjour bonsoir, avec OrelSan.

News

[fr] Alain Damasio : Le cyberpunk a été trahi.

Software

Programmers are also human: Interview with Esolang Academic 2024.

AI

Spreadsheet is all you need.

Glyph: A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle:

Each of these cycles has been larger and lasted longer than the last, and I want to be clear: each cycle has produced genuinely useful technology. It’s just that each follows the progress of a sigmoid curve that everyone mistakes for an exponential one.

There is an initial burst of rapid improvement, followed by gradual improvement, followed by a plateau. Initial promises imply or even state outright “if we pour more {compute, RAM, training data, money} into this, we’ll get improvements forever!” The reality is always that these strategies inevitably have a limit, usually one that does not take too long to find.

Games

Noclip documentary - Wipeout 2097: The making of an iconic PlayStation soundtrack.

Shitty tech ℹ️

jwz: Death from the Skies, Musk Edition.