Ho ho ho, friends. Music, with a 👍 new Cabaret Contemporain.

News:

• Ted Chiang: Silicon Valley is turning into its own worst fear, READ THIS NOW. Ted Chiang at his best: connecting things clearly and concisely.
  • Related, also on corporations as the closest we have to adversarial AI: Charlie Stross - Dude, you broke the future! (HN)

Rest of the news:

• On 'merica (and its cultural neighbors):
  • umair haque: What do you call a world that can’t learn from itself?, "Why don’t Americans understand how poor their lives are?" Via kottke.
  • Huffpost - Michael Hobbes: Why millennials are facing the scariest financial future of any generation since the Great Depression, brutal article on the erosion of job security & social safety net in the US. Via waxy.
• The oatmeal - How to be perfectly unhappy.
• David Cain: Go deeper, not wider and Max Lukominskyi: Why learning is a new procrastination, 👍.
• [fr] Willy Miermans : Trois vérités qui dérangent pour ceux qui veulent résoudre le problème d'embouteillages.
• TED / Drew Berry: Animations of unseeable biology (DNA replication & chromosomes), thx Guéna.
• Atlantic: The most 2017 photos ever, via kottke.
• Kottke: Playing video games as meditation.
• Polygon's 50 best games of 2017
• [fr] Korben : Bitcoin est-il une monnaie écolo ?
• Tech:
  • Wired: The other tech bubble. "Silicon Valley techies still think they're the good guys. They're not".
  • Citylab: The extreme Amazon bidder just got real, oÔ.

    Chula Vista is offering free land; Fresno is ceding community control; and New Jersey is offering $7 billion in incentives. Here’s what else we know about the 30 publicly available Amazon HQ2 bids.

• 💩😷⚠ Donaldese:
  • Slate: A flight of sycophancy, "A line-by-line breakdown of Mike Pence’s master class in toadyism"
  • WaPo: It’s ‘very gold’: The presidential coin undergoes a Trumpian makeover.