Bien le bonjour. Get some radioheadphones, 2+2=5 is 👍 live.

Around the interwebs,

• SSC / Scott Alexander on navigating our differences:
  • Fundamental value differences are not that fundamental.
  • The whole city is center.
• The hotel bathroom puzzle, or a great illustration of the XY problem.
• Kurt Vonnegut: Ladies & Gentlemen of A.D. 2088, via kottke.

  The sort of leaders we need now are not those who promise ultimate victory over nature through perseverance in living as we do right now, but those with the courage and intelligence to present to the world what appears to be nature's stern but reasonable surrender terms:

  1. Reduce and stabilize your population.
  2. Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.
  3. Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.
  4. Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you're at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.
  5. Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.
  6. Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean, and stupid.
  7. And so on. Or else.

• Kottke: How to ask a favor.
• [fr] Grain de philo : Voulons-nous mourir ? et FAQ de la mort !
• David Cain: There is no right decision.
• r/PhotoshopBattle: French president Macron celebrating victory, thx Louis.
• SMBC: The Best.
• Tech:
  • DF: Kara Swisher interviews Mark Zuckerberg.

    Zuckerberg is so wrong here. It is not hard at all to “impugn the intent” of Holocaust or Sandy Hook deniers. They’re fucking Nazis. The idea that these people are wrong but are making honest mistakes in good faith is nonsense. Facebook’s stance on this is genuinely detrimental to society. They’re offering a powerful platform that reaches the entire world to lunatics who, in the pre-internet age, were relegated to handing out mimeographs while spouting through a megaphone on a street corner.

  • Bloomberg: A global guide to state-sponsored trolling, via jwz.

    In Venezuela, prospective trolls sign up for Twitter and Instagram accounts at government-sanctioned kiosks in town squares and are rewarded for their participation with access to scarce food coupons, according to Venezuelan researcher Marianne Diaz of the group @DerechosDigitales. A self-described former troll in India says he was given a half-dozen Facebook accounts and eight cell phones after he joined a 300-person team that worked to intimidate opponents of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. And in Ecuador, contracting documents detail government payments to a public relations company that set up and ran a troll farm used to harass political opponents. [...]

    In response to revolutions and social movements launched on Twitter and Facebook, national governments initially censored content, blocked access to social media and used surveillance technology to monitor their citizens. But it turned out to be far more effective to simply inundate the platforms with a torrent of disinformation and anonymized threats -- what the researchers dubbed a strategy of "information abundance" made possible by the rapid spread of social media. [...]

    Turkey is a prime example, according to Camille Francois, who directed the Jigsaw project as a principal researcher at Google. Since the 2013 protests at Istanbul's Gezi Park, President Recep Erdogan's government has used a combination of online and offline repression to turn social media "into a near dead zone for genuine social protest in Turkey," Francois said. "Five years later, there is very little organically organized activity."

  • xkcd #2021 - Software Development. NOT TRUE, WE DON'T "load 500 of them into the cannon we made and shoot them at the wall", WE LET AMAZON DO IT.
• 💩😷⚠ Donaldese:
  • Old Steve Jobs on the constructive-destructive axis:

    In return for speaking at the retreat, Jobs got Murdoch to hear him out on Fox News, which he believed was destructive, harmful to the nation, and a blot on Murdoch’s reputation. “You’re blowing it with Fox News”, Jobs told him over dinner. “The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you’ve cast your lot with the destructive people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society. You can be better, and this is going to be your legacy if you’re not careful”. Jobs said he thought Murdoch did not really like how far Fox had gone. “Rupert’s a builder, not a tearer-downer”, he said. “I’ve had some meetings with James, and I think he agrees with me. I can just tell.”

Bonjour, frendz. This week's 🎵 is a fresh new Birds in row.

News:

• [fr] Fanny Britt - L’ode à un vieux couple.
• Kottke reminds us about Buckminster Fuller in March 30, 1970 edition of New York Magazine:

  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.

• Kottke: Manually pixelated food.
• Tech:
  • Funfunfunction - Why care how your tools work? Good bits on motivation and tolerance to change.
  • jwz - Facebook's not-at-all-dystopian facial recognition patent application for brick-and-mortar surveillance.
  • Michael Geist - The state of canadian wireless in one chart: no one has carriers that generate more revenue with less usage (pdf report). WJW:

    Canada is a global outlier (or leader if you are a telecom executive). Simply put, no one has carriers that generate more revenue with less usage per SIM than Canada.

    It is difficult to overstate how much the lack of wireless competitiveness is holding back the Canadian market. With the CRTC refusing to take act and carriers continuing to increase fees (particularly on overage fees that generate more than a billion in revenue per year), it falls to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains to recognize that longstanding failed Canadian wireless policies must change.

  • iOS bug reveals how Apple censors the Taiwanese flag on Chinese iPhones.
  • Thomas Dullien on complexity emerging from our overpowered-then-specialized general-purpose computers, and the resulting security challenges (slides), via Schneier. Liked this quote in particular:

    How does one design an electric motor? Would you attach a bathtub to it, simply because one was available? Would a bouquet of flowers help? A heap of rocks? No, you would use just those elements necessary to its purpose and make it no larger than needed — and you would incorporate safety factors. Function controls design.

    – Prof. Bernardo de la Paz in "The moon is a harsh Mistress", Robert A. Heinlein

  • Are free societies at a disadvantage in national cybersecurity?

    Dan Geer often said that "the price of freedom is the probability of crime." We are willing to pay this price because it isn't that high. As technology makes individual and small-group actors more powerful, this price will get higher. Will there be a point in the future where free and open societies will no longer be able to survive? I honestly don't know.

• 💩😷⚠ Donaldese:
  • New Yorker: Man Wins “Why Trump Shouldn’t Go to Prison” Essay Contest, funz.

HelloooooOoooo. Music: Eastern Standard.

On the news,

• SSC / Scott Alexander on Piketty's Capital in the twenty-first century: book review, highlights, comments highlights.
• SSC / Scott Alexander - Dissolving the Fermi paradox (paper: arxiv, pdf).
• [fr] IRIS - Bullshit jobs, brown-out et revenu minimum. Deuxième partie.
• Good SMBCs: Coupling, Knock knock.
• jwz - Ben avli(S), awesome.
• Tech:
  • Cory Doctorow - Zuck’s empire of oily rags. HN.

    It’s as though Mark Zuckerberg woke up one morning and realized that the oily rags he’d been accumulating in his garage could be refined for an extremely low-grade, low-value crude oil. No one would pay very much for this oil, but there were a lot of oily rags, and provided no one asked him to pay for the inevitable horrific fires that would result from filling the world’s garages with oily rags, he could turn a tidy profit.

    A decade later, everything is on fire and we’re trying to tell Zuck and his friends that they’re going to need to pay for the damage and install the kinds of fire-suppression gear that anyone storing oily rags should have invested in from the beginning, and the commercial surveillance industry is absolutely unwilling to contemplate anything of the sort.

    That’s because dossiers on billions of people hold the power to wreak almost unimaginable harm, and yet, each dossier brings in just a few dollars a year. For commercial surveillance to be cost effective, it has to socialize all the risks associated with mass surveillance and privatize all the gains.

    There’s an old-fashioned word for this: corruption. In corrupt systems, a few bad actors cost everyone else billions in order to bring in millions – the savings a factory can realize from dumping pollution in the water supply are much smaller than the costs we all bear from being poisoned by effluent. But the costs are widely diffused while the gains are tightly concentrated, so the beneficiaries of corruption can always outspend their victims to stay clear.

    Facebook doesn’t have a mind-control problem, it has a corruption problem. Cambridge Analytica didn’t convince decent people to become racists; they convinced racists to become voters.

  • Wired - Marketing firm Exactis leaked a personal info database with 340 million records. HN.

Hey ho! Music, with SEIROM.

And little news this week, frendz. Oh well.

• Justin Peters: A digtial artist who merges reality with his imagination, via kottke.
• Tech:
  • jwz: Today in Uber autonomous murderbot news.
  • jwz: STARTTLS Everywhere, on email centralization because Gmail.

Music: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and The Armed, thx Sam.

News:

• xkcd - Customer Rewards, on our personal data.
• [fr] Les 400 culs : Femme et melon, à peine les connaît-on.
• Tech:
  • [fr] Hausse des tarifs de Google Maps : « On a plus que jamais besoin d’alternatives libres »

    Ces nouveaux tarifs posent question, car ils paraissent disproportionnés par rapport aux coûts réels. Par ailleurs, si Google a fourni gratuitement pendant des années à des milliers de clients un service qui avait un coût aussi élevé, il a clairement pratiqué du dumping pour empêcher d’autres acteurs d’émerger. Avec succès. Des initiatives ont vu le jour, notamment grâce aux données d’Openstreetmap, comme Mapbox aux Etats-Unis. Mais globalement, l’écosystème a été paralysé.

  • Schneier: Censorship in the age of large cloud providers:

    In 1993, John Gilmore famously said that "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." That was technically true when he said it but only because the routing structure of the Internet was so distributed. As centralization increases, the Internet loses that robustness, and censorship by governments and companies becomes easier.

  • And more Schneier: Data protection laws are shining a needed light on a secretive industry.
  • The Inner-platform effect is "the tendency of software architects to create a system so customizable as to become a replica, and often a poor replica, of the software development platform they are using". Via Leah Neukirchen.
• Donaldese:
  • Kottke / New Yorker: The language of the Trump administration is the language of domestic violence.