Bonjour bonsoir, and music with Fishbach.

News

Story of the US electric tramway in the 1920s (continued).

Stunning JWST image of a grand-design spiral galaxy.

[fr] Passé sauvage - Qui a inventé le voile obligatoire ?

SMBC: Meditation, Peace, History, Ambition.

Tech

[fr] Nitot : Non, la nouvelle Apple Watch n’est pas neutre en carbone.

Scott Alexander - Book review: Elon Musk, and comments. Also, Elon Musk moving servers.

Cory Doctorow: Greenwashing set Canada on fire, thx James.

Aardvark'd: The Fog Creek documentary, 18 years later.

AI

Ars Technica: Funky AI-generated spiraling medieval village captivates social media, whoa.

An acronym to describe the bundle of ideologies behind the AI dreams and nightmares pushed by AI gurus: TESECREAL. Via Nelson.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Unity’s enshittification is now at full capacity. RPS 1, RPS 2, RPS 3, GoL 1, GoL 2, GoL 3, GoL 4, GoL 5, GoL 6, Muta, Jimquisition and Casey Muratori, Skill Up (video). Learned via cmuratori’s notes that (emphasis mine):

In Unity’s case, paying attention to their quarterly investor materials tells you many things that aren’t as common knowledge as they should be. As a small example, most developers think Unity is primarily in the business of selling game engines.

They’re not! Less than half of Unity’s revenue comes from game engines. Over half comes from advertising. Their bottom line is more affected by the advertising market than it is by how many developers buy their engine.

EDIT Sep. 22: Unity: An open letter to our community (HN, Muta 2), with a partial reversal and slightly less-weasely excuses than before. Fuck them anyways, they will retry bullshit like this, it’s just a matter of time given the garbage direction they’ve been taking (see above quote). Move to community-built-and-supported engines!

EDIT Sep. 23: And they keep gaslighting! Now they pretend the removal of their ToS on GitHub was done because “views were so low” and are “genuinely disappointed at how our removal of the ToS has been framed across the internet”. This, friends, is 100% pure undiluted bullshit corporate gaslighting. Have a “genuine” fuck you, assholes. Devs still not exactly thrilled and still waving fuckbye to Unity, see e.g. BallisticNG abandoning their Switch port or Godot funding jumping from 25k€/month to 50k€/month.

Reddit activity plummeted after the protests.