Bonjour bonsoir, friends. These weeks music is: Flavien Berger, new Thom Yorke, Angel Bat Dawid, Raven, Jesus Horse, and Shh...Diam!

On the news,

• [fr] Environnement :
  • Nitot : Le déni climatique.
  • Nitot : En vrac sur l'environnement, la politique et l'économie.
  • Clim : de l'invention d'un "cinglé" à un problème de santé publique.
• Kottke: Uncompetitive purposefulness and infinity cake, 👍.
• Kottke: The Apollo 11 mission in realtime.
• SMBC: Teaching.
• Pretty great Scott Alexander / Slate Star Codex on knowledge & tradition:
  • Epistemic learned helplessness, on how aiming at broadly & constantly believing arguments is insane, because arguments are easy to make and the time to evaluate them is limited.
  • Book review: The secret of our success and List of passages I highlighted in my copy of “The secret of our success” are helping me reconcile with tradition. They demonstrate why today's standard "demand logical justification for everything" rationalism should give tradition a break, because the value of many traditional practices is impossible to figure out / experiment within the span of a lifetime. The examples from the highlights are fascinating, I'm buying and devouring this book.
  • Asymmetric weapons gone bad offers guidelines to integrate our civilization's rationality with traditions.
  • Addendum to “Enormous nutshell”: competing selectors draws parallels with right vs. left wing.
• Tech:
  • Mozilla announces Track THIS, a cute search engine bomb. If the trend continues, I predict a divorce with Google sweet ad dollarz by end 2019, and they'll find money elsewhere (gosh, they could even ask their users for some?!), and it will be a good thing further aligning Mozilla with users interests. HN blah.
  • Meanwhile, Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side, of course yes. HN, which points to this reCAPTCHA demo I didn't know about, which lets you see your reCAPTCHA score.
    My results: Using Firefox with uBlock and Cookie-Autodelete I get 0.1. Using Chrome, even incognito and with uBlock I get 0.7. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻. Fuck you, Google, this is blatant bullying, technically unjustifiable abuse of your stranglehold over the whole web platform.
  • [fr] Nitot : En vrac sur la technologie.
  • EA: "We don't call them loot boxes", they're "surprise mechanics". 🖕.
  • r/SubSimulatorGPT2is a subreddit where "all posts and comments in this subreddit are generated automatically using fine-tuned versions of the GPT-2 language model from OpenAI". Via SSC.
  • Wired: Microsoft's ebook apocalypse shows the dark side of DRM. HN.