O hai, frendz. Music this week with Rev. Lewis and mmph.

In the papers,

• Scott Alexander - Basic income, not basic jobs: against hijacking utopia.
• Funfunfunction: Politeness or clarity? 👍, on communication: adapting your message to the audience, and debunking the Torvaldese conception of politeness as fluff.
• New Republic: Don’t blame phones for narcissism and the self as a “sack of noisy ghosts”. Via [fr] Nouveau Projet.
• Chris M. Forsyth: Subway pictures in Montréal and elsewhere.
• Segmented type, via waxy.
• SMBC on cryptocurrencies and the lord.
• Tech:
  • Jacques Mattheij: GDPR hysteria. HN.
• 💩😷⚠ Donaldese:
  • Kottke: Against political analogies.

👋 ! Music: Joachim Mencel Quintet, Gyan Riley, Just Mustard, Jon Hopkins.

News:

• Scott Alexander / SSC: Varieties of argumentative experience, 👍👍👍.
• [fr] La Presse : Un monde sans information ? Via Nouveau Projet.

  Vous payez déjà beaucoup pour vous informer. L’argent que vous avez économisé sur votre abonnement à La Presse, vous le dépensez, et même davantage, sur la quincaillerie qui vous permet de lire La Presse+.

  Le problème, c’est qu’avant, cet argent servait à payer des journalistes. Aujourd’hui, la même somme sert à enrichir des entreprises de téléphonie mobile et des multinationales technos.

• EV#165 - Zavain Dar: New radical empiricism.

  A young Kepler today likely wouldn’t look into the sky in search for structure, but rather collect the prior month of visual sky data and train a recurrent neural network to predict tomorrow night’s sky. [...]

  The availability of data and machine learning might create new pathways of exploration in a range of domains, where are traditional techniques have become stuck. It's almost as if the availability of data (and better maths with which to manipulate it) allows us to create new dimensions from which to establish vantage points to surveil the problem set.

• I played Fortnite and figured out the universe, on how humans can turn zero-sum situations into nonzero-sum ones. Via Kottke.
• New Yorker: The United States of Japan, via waxy.
• An online collection of high-res scans of M.C. Escher’s prints.
• [fr] Les 400 culs : Il n’y a pas de rêve heureux ?
• The Metro Gun Share Program.
• Tech:
  • oÔ: Google’s AI sounds like a human on the phone — should we be worried? to which Kottke gathers questions around Should our machines sound human?
  • oÔ again: Write emails faster with Smart Compose in Gmail. HN.
  • jwz: TicketBastard wants your biometrics.

O hai! 🎹 🥁 🎶: Steve you are a dick, to my cat-neighbor Steeve with two "e"s, Kikuji, Group Listening, Orquesta Akokán, Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois.

And on the news,

• [fr] Monsieur Phi : La liberté en jeu.
• A mass of copyrighted works is about to enter the US Public Domain.
• [fr] Le devoir : Pourquoi y a-t-il incompréhension entre les critiques de cinéma et les fans ? Via Nouveau Projet.
• On customers Divine Discontent.
• [fr/qc] Hein ? Merci Isa.
• SMBC on mimicry: Rye ← wheat, Plant ← programmer.
• Tech:
  • Linux Journal: Privacy is still personal, excellent reminder. ♥ the parallels between physical privacy (through clothing and shelter) and digital (barely existent) privacy.
  • Amazon & Bezos being shitty pieces of shitful shits:
    • Jeff Bezos sees space as the “only” option to spend his money on.
    • Amazon puts 7,000 jobs on hold because of a tax that would help Seattle's homeless population.
  • WaPo: WhatsApp founder & employees plan to leave after parent Facebook attempts to weaken encryption.
  • Any company using facebook for user ID is foolish.
  • Michael Geist - Canada: world’s worst wireless pricing.
  • xkcd #1988: Containers and #1989: IMHO.

Hey ho; !@#$% awesome sounds from Höga Nord Rekords.

News:

• NYT: Breathing our cities polluted air.
• David Cain: Why the other side won’t listen to reason.
• Magnasanti: the largest and most terrifying SimCity. HN.
• Goood xkcd week: #1984: Misinterpretation, #1985: Meteorologist.
• SMBC: Platypus.

O hai, friends. Dang, no new music this week. Have a sip of Radiohead, then ♥.

Around the interwebs,

• [fr] Monsieur Phi : Dissertation, l'art des réponses longues et intelligentes aux questions brèves et stupides.
• Awesome Kottke links this week:
  • The pigeon photographer: Aerial photographs from the turn of the century.
  • The calmness of airplane pilots.
  • The storytellers who read aloud to Cuban cigar rollers.
• Tech:
  • Kottke: Building a better Kindle (or, why buttons matter). On physical UX.
  • Morning Paper: Processing-In-Memory: mitigating data movement bottlenecks.
  • A flaw-by-flaw guide to Facebook’s new GDPR privacy changes, lulz.
  • RPS on "the ever-contentious matter of videogame crunch".
  • A reminder from jwz:

    "We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."

    – R. Buckminster Fuller, 1970

  • The verge: Ready Player One, a.k.a. the utopian belief that technology would make all voices equal instead of amplifying existing social inequality. Via waxy