Hi there. Music this week with Daniel Herskedal, thx Rufin.

On the news,

• [fr] Jean-Marc Jancovici : À quand la rupture énergétique ?, thx mom.
• Kottke: The robots are coming for our jobs (thank god), quoting this ever-pertinent reflection from Buckminster Fuller:

  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: Hiking interactions, fun.
• Tech:
  • NYT Mag: The secret history of women in coding, via Kottke.
  • Wondermark: Browser tabs.

Hello frendz. This week's music is Little People.

Around the interwebs,

• [fr] Fortnite : Comment gagner des milliards avec un jeu gratuit, excellent résumé des mécanismes neuro/psycho utilisés pour rendre addictif le jeu vidéo Skinner box le plus populaire du moment.
• David Cain: Patience is something you do, not something you are. I like his idea of "micro-patience" as the very doable act of practicing non-resentment during momentary discomfort.
• [fr] Monsieur Phi fait découvrir de la belle SF, avec une Lecture audio de "Greg Egan : En apprenant à être moi". Et entame une dissection.
• 99designs - 100 years of Bauhaus: what today’s famous logos would look like in Bauhaus style; cooooool! Via [fr] Nouveau Projet.
• Tech:
  • Eric Higgins: Technical debt is like Tetris, nice analogy!
  • W3C approves WebAuthn as the web standard for password-free logins, finally! HN.
  • Atlantic: The servant economy, via Kottke.

    It’s not hard to look around the world and see all those zeroes of capital going into dog-walking companies and wonder: Is this really the best and highest use of the Silicon Valley innovation ecosystem? In the 10 years since Uber launched, phones haven’t changed all that much. The world’s most dominant social network became Facebook in 2009, and in 2019, it is still Facebook. Google is still Google, even if it is called Alphabet.

    Politically, the world is night and day, though. In that context, these apps take on a strange pall. The haves and the have-nots might be given new names: the demanding and the on-demand. These apps concretize the wild differences that the global economy currently assigns to the value of different kinds of labor. Some people’s time and effort are worth hundreds of times less than other people’s. The widening gap between the new American aristocracy and everyone else is what drives both the supply and demand of Uber-for-X companies.

    The inequalities of capitalist economies are not exactly news. As my colleague Esther Bloom pointed out, “For centuries, a woman’s social status was clear-cut: either she had a maid or she was one.” Domestic servants—to walk the dog, do the laundry, clean the house, get groceries—were a fixture of life in America well into the 20th century. In the short-lived narrowing of economic fortunes wrapped around the Second World War that created what Americans think of as “the middle class,” servants became far less common, even as dual-income families became more the norm and the hours Americans worked lengthened.

    What the combined efforts of the Uber-for-X companies created is a new form of servant, one distributed through complex markets to thousands of different people. It was Uber, after all, that launched with the idea of becoming “everyone’s private driver,” a chauffeur for all.

    An unkind summary, then, of the past half decade of the consumer internet: Venture capitalists have subsidized the creation of platforms for low-paying work that deliver on-demand servant services to rich people, while subjecting all parties to increased surveillance.

Bonjour bonsoir, folks! Music, with a good'ol'Clues.

And on the news,

• SSC / Scott Alexander - Rule thinkers in, not out, 👍👍👍.
• Kottke: Cheap TVs and exorbitant education, modern America in one chart, wooooow amazing chart.
• About face, on rising fascism in 'merica. Via jwz.
• SSC / Scott Alexander - Wage stagnation: more than you wanted to know.
• Kottke: The life-changing magic of the $15 minimum wage.
• SMBC: Douchey Robot Bosses, on human guilt. And ULTRA-LASERS.
• Tech:
  • Canadians! It's tax season; use SimpleTax, which Isa says is refreshingly simple, pay-what-you-want, and built by a small local team. ❤ Isa.
  • Cooler Screens: Creeping on you in the cold drinks aisle.
  • The Verge - The trauma floor: the secret lives of Facebook moderators in America, to which SSC / Scott Alexander - In mod we trust offers good counterpoints. Also, Guardian - Revealed: Facebook’s global lobbying against data privacy laws.
  • DF reports on Turnaround Time on Facebook’s Spying: 12 Hours and I'm not even surprised.
  • Cooool lessons & sounds: DOOM: Behind the music. Merci Heinz.
  • Finally, a fascinating piece of politics-around-video-games: "Devotion" game is being review-bombed on Steam by Chinese players (pcgamer article), then removed from Steam rps article on removal. Removal is unlinkable from outside Steam, but reads beautifully Orwellian:

    Due to technical issues that cause unexpected crashes and among other reasons, we are pulling Devotion off from steam store to have another complete QA check. At the same time we'd like to take this opportunity to ease the heightened pressure in our community resulted from our previous Art Material Incident, our team would also review our game material once again making sure no other unintended materials was inserted in. Hopefully this would help all audience to focus on the game itself again upon its return.

    Developer statements: 1, 2 (and 3: removal above, but un-linkable). So, if a couple of game textures vaguely ridiculing a president and taking a stance in a social debate equals "the internets on fire, your publishers dumping you, an explosion of negative reviews, hate messages littering your game page, talks of Steam being potentially banned from the country", I say 👏 pretty amazing yield, Red Candle, you touched a nerve. There's lots to unpack here and most of it is in Chinese, which I cannot read. Hoping for more coverage soon, in the meantime here's a summary from a forum user, edited by me for grammar:

    This incident may give the Chinese government a perfect excuse to block Steam in China, or to force Steam to pull off all Red Candles Game from the store. Summary:

    • At first, the game becomes extremely popular in the gaming channels in Chinese community. Streamers stream the game, millions of viewers watch the game playthrough. Game also receives universal praise from the media, it even becomes a trending topic in Chinese social media. The public gives extremely positive feedback.
    • Then, users from Taiwan PTT and gaming forums post inflammatory screenshots and mock that the game successfully fooled Chinese mainlanders into supporting a game to "mock PRC people and KMT supporters" (who tend to unify with China). It attracts more attention and people dig deeper into the game. Anger transfers to outrage when people discover on the founder / lead designer's social media that he supports Taiwan independence and writes political posts.
    • Except for the photos of Xi, the developers also placed other elements condemning the RPC and mainlander Chinese. Text and images from the game imply that cult in the game is 陆心会 (mainland heart association), which means the association of people are in favor of PRC. The cult leader's name is 陆恭铭/陆公民 ，which means "PRC citizens" in Chinese. The Cult Festival in the game is October 1st to 7th, which is the Nation Festival of PRC. The list goes on. As more hidden messages are discovered, mainlanders start feeling irritated and cheated on.

¡Hola! Music: SLUGish Ensemble is going places that are fun and bright, No Party For Cao Dong is pretty cool Taiwanese grunge (via the DEVOTION還願 trailer), and Dos Santos makes me like hispanohablante musica again.

On the news,

• bon appétit - My restaurant was the greatest show of excess you’d ever seen, and it almost killed me, on alcoholism among restaurant staff. Thx Isa.
• Kottke: We’re all lonely together.
• SMBC: A brief history of life online.
• Tech:
  • SSC / Scott Alexander on surprising recent AIs: Do neural nets dream of electric hobbits? and its follow-up, GPT-2 as step toward General Intelligence, and a tongue-in-cheek-o-conclusion Meaningful. Mildly related, This person does not exist.
  • DF: More apps caught sending highly personal information to Facebook.

Hello, world. This week in my 🔊, Tim Hecker.

Newsworthy:

• [fr] Les fêtes de divorce : une coutume féminine célébrée dans le sud marocain, via Nouveau Projet.
• SMBC: Logic gates 😄.
• Tech:
  • Reminder: Kottke - The history of women in coding.
  • Mozilla, Reporters Without Borders, Greenpeace & others post an Open letter: Facebook, do your part against disinformation. I ❤ Mozilla and I want to believe, but "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it". EDIT oooh, Facebook actually moved a toe.
  • Sahil Lavingia - Reflecting on my failure to build a billion-dollar company is a refreshing read of a startup founder (of Gumroad, payment tool) turning away from the VC-fueled constant growth mindset.
  • Streetsblog: All the bad things about Uber and Lyft in one simple list, via Kottke.