Hi folks. This week's music is: N NAO, Blithe Field, Jerry Quickley, all via joni void's bandcamp recommendations.

On the news,

• Vox: “Reality” is constructed by your brain. A cool bunch of optical illusions and neuroscience factoids I didn't know about.
• Kottke: Law professor skillfully handles a Black Lives Matter complaint from her students.
• [fr] Jean-François Hotte - Yémen, famine et nationalisme de marde.
• Tech:
  • Drew DeVault: General-purpose OS, special-purpose OS, and now: vendor-purpose OS. HN.
  • Gwern: GPT-3. HN.
  • Kottke: Pokémon grandpa’s incredible phone array.

Hi geeks. This week's music is: excellent new joni void, Toe and Lapalux.

On the news,

• [fr/qc] Philippe Langlois / Iris : La disparition de l’argent comptant.
• Wow, Jason Kottke was on a streak of interesting links this week:
  • The 1850s map that made modern epidemiology.
  • How American racism influenced Adolf Hitler.
  • Teacher tells off Neil Armstrong for faking the moon landing.
  • The Atlantic slave trade in two minutes.
  • Vietnam, population 95 million, has recorded 0 deaths from Covid-19.
  • John Cleese on extremism.
• McSweeney's: Just because they’ve turned against humanity doesn’t mean we should defund the Terminator program.
• Tech:
  • Intercept: Facebook pitches new Slack-like enterprise chat app allowing employers to censor words “like unionize”.

Hi weirdos! This week, on the music side: a fresh take on Philip Glass by Bruce Brubaker & Max Cooper, lovely new Gyan Riley, and Inventions.

On the news,

• [fr/qc] IRIS - Projet de loi 61 : contourner des règles plutôt que de relancer.
• Kimberly Jones: “The game is fixed” against Black people in America.
• NYT: how to feed crowds in a protest or pandemic? The Sikhs know.
• [fr/qc] Caribou : La certification bio souffle ses 20 bougies.
• Tech:
  • Doc Searls: People vs. adtech.
  • Mattias Geniar / cron.weekly: On master/slave terminology.

Hi frendz, and music, with new Carrom.

News:

• Scott Alexander: Creationism, unchallenged.
• [fr] Mediapart / Usul - Faut-il éradiquer les écoles de commerce ?
• Wikipedia: Sortition. HN.
• Wikipedia: Procedure Words, via HN. Fun stories behind a few of them 🙂.
• Police brutality in the USA and elsewhere:
  • [fr/qc] JF Hotte : La police et l'état doivent changer.
  • Kottke: Jane Elliott's "A class divided", a lesson in discrimination.
  • Kottke: Research on how to stop police violence.
  • BBC on the success rate of violent vs. non-violent protests.
  • Kottke: Are they police? Or an army?
  • jwz: One riot-gear load can buy 55 front-line care workers full personal protection equipment.
  • Kottke: Increasingly rightwing police unions have made policing more dangerous in America.
  • US police brutality supercuts by Jordan Uhl & Greg Doucette: 1, 2, 3.
• Tech:
  • jwz: Everyone at Facebook is qwhite complicit.
  • snakeware "is a free Linux distro with a Python userspace inspired by the Commodore 64. You are booted directly into a Python interpreter, which you can use to do whatever you want with your computer. [...] Our window manager, snakewm, is based on pygame. We do not use X11; snakewm draws directly to /dev/fb0". 👏. HN.
  • Peter Welch: The problem with Bill Gates.
  • DF: Zoom, still shitting the bed on security / encryption.

Bonjour bonsoir. Music, with old new Radiohead from the Basement.

News:

• Knight Rider for 8 cellos, ❤.
• Coronavirus:
  • [fr/qc] Radio-Canada : Comment les petits producteurs maraîchers s'adaptent à la pandémie.
  • Kottke: Mongolia is the country with the best Covid-19 response. Also, NPR: Some countries brought new cases down to nearly zero. How?
  • Kottke: Water gun baptisms.
• Tech:
  • jwz: Today in landfill-capitalismy news: truckloads of Uber "JUMP" bikes are being destroyed during a nationwide shortage.
  • The Verge: Facebook ignored its own research showing algorithms divided users.
  • DF: Zuckerberg cravenly goes all-in on Trump, 🍿. EDIT June 1: Zuck faces employee blowback over ruling on Trump comments (HN), good.
  • Bloomberg: The unicorns fell into a ditch, via DF.

    In the old economy of price signals, you tried to build a product that people would want, and the way you knew it worked is that people would pay you more than it cost. You were adding value to the world, and you could tell because you made money. In the new economy of user growth, you don’t have to worry about making a product that people want because you can just pay them to use it, so you might end up with companies losing money to give people things that they don’t want and driving out the things they do want.

  • Which makes Gruber rightfully link again to Matt Stoller: WeWork and counterfeit capitalism.