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.