Hi friend, just shut up already and listen to new GY!BE:
"NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD", by Godspeed You! Black Emperor (bandcamp.com)
[fr] Arte - Dégats du sucre sur l’organisme.
Astral Codex Ten: In defense of “I’m sorry you feel that way”, and comments.
11 foot 8, the “can opener” bridge.
Google’s new “Reimagine” feature on new Pixel 9 phones makes it trivial to create deepfakes, quite the ease-of-use jump indeed. Via DF.
Hola, and music with Feist and Caput Medusae.
Feist - Tiny Desk concert (youtube-nocookie.com)
You can’t negotiate with zombies, by Caput Medusae (bandcamp.com)
Oh the urbanity: I went to an anti-bike-lane meeting, here’s what I learned.
SMBC: Tao of Waldo, Paradox, App, Life, Nostradamus.
Hi frendz, and music with Spoon.
Spoon - Don’t make me a target (youtube-nocookie.com)
AlphaPhoenix: Dragonflies hunt by predicting the future.
Not just bikes: North-American fire depts. are getting people killed.
SMBC: Sharing, xkcd #2972: Helium Synthesis.
Carson Gross (CEO of HTMX) @ Big Sky Dev Con 2024: A theory of open-source marketing.
Andrew Moore @ Tech Over Tea #231: Firefox & Privacy Preserving Ads.
Ryan Sipes @ GUADEC 2024: Thunderbird’s death and rebirth.
Simon Willison @ PyCon 2024: Imitation Intelligence and text.
Jim Stephanie Sterling - No more room in hell: How tech & games are rotting.
Leonard French: Inside Elon Musk’s trashy advertising lawsuit (X Corp v. GARM et al)
Hola geeks, and music with FYEAR (merci Berthe).
FYEAR, by FYEAR (bandcamp.com)
[fr] Homo Fabulus - 140 biologistes en colère contre la couverture médiatique scientifiquement inepte d’un livre. Tribune.
xkcd #2932: Driving public service announcement.
Brick Technology: Destroying Lego towers, via waxy.
The PBF: Turn that frown, SMBC: Turing Test.
Kilian Valkhof @ JSConf 2024 - Don’t use JS for that: Moving features to CSS & HTML.
jblow: Why does software almost always do the opposite? There’s a bajillion things to say to confirm / complement / nuance / reject this, but at any rate: good observation and good meme. Thx Heinz.
Nicholas Carlini: How I use “AI”, a reasonable take. Via simonw & HN.
Ross Scott: Europeans can stop games being destroyed. Campaign, EU petition.
Woop woop. This week’s music is Lilacs & Champagne.
Fantasy World, by Lilacs & Champagne (bandcamp.com)
Lilacs & Champagne, by Lilacs & Champagne (bandcamp.com)
Cat Graffam: “Corporate Memphis” & why everything looks the same.
The Onion: News Happening Faster Than Man Can Generate Uninformed Opinions.
SMBC: Bad economic news, Humans uniqueness, I remember the raiders.
The bizarre secrets I found investigating corrupt Winamp skins, via waxy.
CrowdStrike:
LambHoot: Death Stranding and desire paths.
Adam Millard: How “good design” ruins games.
404 Media: Google is now the only search engine that can surface results from Reddit, making one of the web’s most valuable repositories of user generated content exclusive to the internet’s already dominant search engine.
O hai, weirdos, and music with Marika Hackman.
Big Sigh, by Marika Hackman (bandcamp.com)
Photos of New York City’s subway in 1970-1980, via nelson.
Cat Graffam: Using MS Paint to remake the Windows XP wallpaper.
SMBC: Toxic, Infidelity, Immortal, Bad bad girl.
Drew DeVault: So you want to compete with, or replace, open source.
Asianometry: The big data center water problem.
Molly White: Follow the crypto, “a new project to track cryptocurrency industry spending to influence 2024 elections in the United States”. Announcement, source code.
Hi friends, and music with Thom Yorke.
Thom Yorke - Confidenza original soundtrack (youtube-nocookie.com)
[fr] Clément Viktorovitch : Pour une nouvelle constitution.
Asianometry: China’s sinking land problem.
Not Just Bikes: The secret to Japan’s great cities: good zoning, street design, traffic & parking restrictions, kei cars.
Pixel Mirror, “a faceted crystal that turns everything viewed through it into pixel art”. Via waxy.
SMBC: Like that.
Jacob Kaplan-Moss: All I need to know about engineering leadership I learned from “Leave No Trace”. Also, Just use PostgreSQL for everything.
Booting Linux off of Google Drive, via Brodie.
xkcd #2958 - Remote cod execution.
Simon Willison: Jevons paradox applied to AI + software engineering.
Simon Willison: Quoting Jim Covello, Goldman Sachs.
Maggie Appleton @ Local-First Conf: Home-cooked software and “barefoot programmers” (YouTube video).
Time: Inside the health crisis of a Texas bitcoin town, via jwz.
Bonjour bonsoir, geeks, and music with new Islands.
What Occurs, by Islands (bandcamp.com)
[fr] Clément Viktorovitch : Marine Le Pen achève la destruction du langage entamée par Macron.
Asianometry: How America saved its failing freight trains.
SMBC: Latte, Pro wrestling, Camouflage, Cortex.
Serving a billion web requests with boring code, via lobsters.
Marco Rogers: The frontend treadmill.
Programmers are also human: Next-door 10x software engineer 😄.
Ludic Mataroa: I will fucking piledrive you if you mention AI again, and extremely entertaining Primeagen Reacts.
jwz: Wherein the techbros want to sell your security cameras back to you, again.
Hi nerds, and music with Oiseaux-Tempête.
AL-'AN ! الآن (And your night is your shadow — a fairy-tale piece of land to make our dreams), by Oiseaux-Tempête (bandcamp.com)
[fr] Clément Viktorovitch - Reconnaître le fascisme quand il frappe à votre porte.
Not just bikes: I rode the craziest trains in Japan.
SMBC: Beauty Standards.
jwz: “Great news, everybody! Google has approved the crowdsourced updated XScreenSaver Privacy Policy. I assume that this means they find it 100% factual and endorse it entirely”. 😄, peak jwz.
Charity Majors: Generative AI is not going to build your engineering team for you, 👏👏👏.
FromSoft Word, “the Dark Souls of word processors: one typo, and it’s game over”. 😄, via waxy.
Quake Speedruns Explained - Co-op Quake: The movie.
Jim Stephanie Sterling - Embracer’s legacy: 44 axed studios, 80 axed games, 4532 axed jobs.
Bonjour bonsoir, avec OrelSan.
OrelSan - L’odeur de l’essence (youtube-nocookie.com)
[fr] Alain Damasio : Le cyberpunk a été trahi.
Programmers are also human: Interview with Esolang Academic 2024.
Glyph: A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle:
Each of these cycles has been larger and lasted longer than the last, and I want to be clear: each cycle has produced genuinely useful technology. It’s just that each follows the progress of a sigmoid curve that everyone mistakes for an exponential one.
There is an initial burst of rapid improvement, followed by gradual improvement, followed by a plateau. Initial promises imply or even state outright “if we pour more {compute, RAM, training data, money} into this, we’ll get improvements forever!” The reality is always that these strategies inevitably have a limit, usually one that does not take too long to find.
Noclip documentary - Wipeout 2097: The making of an iconic PlayStation soundtrack.
Hola, et musique avec Seb Martel, Matthieu Chedid, Mathieu Boogaerts.
Face Cachée, by Seb Martel, Matthieu Chedid, Mathieu Boogaerts (bandcamp.com)
Oh the urbanity: The COVID transit apocalypse, Not just bikes: Visiting Shinjuku, the world’s busiest train station.
SMBC: Execute, Dear Jesus.
How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop, via waxy.
Brodie Robertson: “OpenOffice doesn’t print on Tuesdays”.
Douglas Adams on reactions to technology, by age of opinion giver.
Nerds! Have a pretty take on Aphex Twin’s Avril 14th.
Aphex Twin – Avril 14th (piano cover by Josh Cohen) (youtube-nocookie.com)
SMBC: Mathematics.
The batsh*t software Aphex Twin used.
DHH: Open source is neither a community nor a democracy.
“I thought AI Overviews would be disastrous but I never imagined they would be this funny”.
Statement from Scarlett Johansson on OpenAI using her “Her” voice without consent. HN.
Jim Stephanie Sterling: The one where Microsoft admits game studios are fucked.
Hey geeks, and music with Atrium Carceri, merci Sam.
Forgotten Gods, by Atrium Carceri (bandcamp.com)
Bobby Fingers: Fabio and the Goose 👏👏👏.
SMBC: Let us together recognize the impermanence inherent in all things.
Asianometry: The birth, boom and bust of the Hard Disk Drive.
Programming mantras are proverbs, not “laws”, via lobste.rs.
Prime: HaskLUL, Strong opinions.
Microsoft’s carbon emissions spike 29% as AI gobbles up resources. HN.
A plea for sober AI, via Simon Willison.
Paul Ford: Generative AI is totally shameless. I want to be it.
GPT-4o, HN and Prime Reacts. About that demo, BBC (2022) Why your voice assistant might be sexist.
GMTK: The 100 games that taught me game design. Dope list, scarily close to my own list of the best video games 😄.
Non-euclidean Doom: what happens to a game when Pi is not 3.14159. HN.
Bonjour bonsoir, and music with Tony Njoku.
Last Bloom, by Tony Njoku (bandcamp.com)
Gareth Fearn: Liberalism without accountability, via Kottke.
[fr] Clément Viktorovitch décortique la lecture pétée que Rachida Dati fait de l’affaire Meurice.
Coding Horror: Your favorite programming quote, via Simon Willison.
“Slop” is the new name for unwanted AI-generated content.
Nerrrel: Recompilation, an incredible new way to keep N64 games alive.
Skill up: The Activision-ing of Xbox, Writing on games: The games industry is broken, MVG: Xbox has lost its way.
Jack Dorsey, Bluesky, decentralised social networks and the very common crowd, via jwz: Blockchain Rasputin over here is mad that moderation exists.
Bonjour bonsoir frendz, and music with new St. Vincent + dl Salo.
All born screaming, by St. Vincent (bandcamp.com)
Extreme Evolution: Drive to Divinity OST, by dl Salo (bandcamp.com)
Not just bikes: What is the “correct” speed limit? and Vox: The reckless policies that helped fill North American streets with ridiculously large cars.
[fr/qc] Le Devoir - Imposer les gains en capital ?
[fr] Clément Viktorovitch - Sciences Po, Palestine : les sophismes du gouvernement français.
[fr] Linguisticae - Lecture chez les jeunes.
Tomorrow Corporation tech demo 👏👏👏, thx James. A striking reminder of what’s possible for a dev team in control of its “tech stack”, and of how much control we sacrifice when we layer frameworks upon dependencies upon toolkits that look like free lunch, but come at a hefty { weight / performance, flexibility, maintenance } cost.
On that topic, Interview with Senior JS Dev 2024 and Prime Reacts.
Jeremy Howard: SB-1047 will stifle open-source AI and decrease safety. HN.
Prime: Copilot Workspace, Adam Neely: AI is doomed to fail the musical Turing Test. At this point I have officially no idea whether negative stances on AI are realistic or “doomer” takes. AI: global disruption by next year|decade, or confined to limited marginal improvement? Flip a coin for me.
Washed Out: The Hardest Part, “the first official commissioned music video collaboration between a music artist and filmmaker made with OpenAI’s Sora video model”.
Hi geeks, and music with classy new Thom Yorke + new old CocoRosie.
Thom Yorke – Knife edge (youtube-nocookie.com)
Elevator Angels, by CocoRosie and Gael Rakotondrabe (bandcamp.com)
Feathers are one of evolution’s cleverest inventions, via Kottke.
Technology connections - Simmerstats: The genius old tech that controls your stovetop.
McSweeney’s: A message from the chancellor on the recent student protest.
Why you need a “WTF Notebook”, via Kottke.
NeoPragma: Random musings on the Agile Manifesto.
The Verge on internet undersea cables.
Drew DeVault: Copyleft licenses are not “restrictive”.
JS naked day, thx Grâg.
Prime reacts: The plight of Cobol mainframe programmers 👏👏👏.
Christmas shopping online in 1996, via waxy.
Molly White: AI isn't useless. But is it worth it?
Daniel Lemire: Large language models (e.g. ChatGPT) as research assistants.
Cold Take: Stop killing games (website).
Ed Zitron: The man who killed Google Search.
Tracker Beeper, 2022 software having your computer makes noise every time it sends data to a surveillance company. Via Nelson.
Bonjour bonsoir frendz, and music with Jim Guthrie.
Below OST, by Jim Guthrie (bandcamp.com)
Lola Dupre, via waxy.
SMBC: So much of school is pointless, Nice people with ideas about pedagogy.
[fr] Pourquoi la Suisse est pétée de thunes, merci Berthe.
A curious device from 1985 called the “Etak Navigator”, whoaaaa. HN.
Asianometry: The birth of SQL and the relational database, The rise of Oracle, SQL and the relational database.
doom-htop: “the classic DOOM game over htop, the text-based process viewer” 😄. HN.
Majeed Kazemitabaar & Zustin Z. Henley: Learning to code with and without AI, interesting results. Direct links to PDF papers: Studying the effect of AI code generators on supporting novice learners in introductory programming and How novices use LLM-based code generators to solve CS1 coding tasks in a self-paced learning environment.
NeverKnowsBest: The past and present of the “Gamergate” culture wars around video games.
Holaaa. This week’s music is Adrianne Lenker, thx Berthe.
Bright Future by Adrianne Lenker (bandcamp.com)
[fr] Alain Damasio : Un monde repensé par la Silicon Valley.
The case for a maintenance mindset, thx James.
Oh the urbanity: Solving Vancouver’s housing crisis.
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (authors of A City on Mars and SMBC): The lie of colonizing Mars.
Adam Neely: The bizzare ban on musical tempo of Chechnya (and also former UK and USA).
Kottke: The best photos and videos of the 2024 solar eclipse, High-diving penguin chicks.
[fr] La statistique expliquée à mon chat : Monsieur le président, avez-vous vraiment gagné cette élection, merci Adrien.
SMBC: Art school.
MattKC: I backported .NET to Windows 95.
[fr] Kombo : Les incroyables speedruns SA/SO de Hitman et Super Mario Kaizo +++ : Trials of Fire, merci Sylvain.
Modern Vintage Gamer: Why the limitations of the N64 and PS1 mattered.
Bonjour bonsoir, geeks, and music with Buvette.
Tales of the countryside by Buvette (bandcamp.com)
500 mile email, “a curated list of absurd software bug stories”.
LLMs are like a trained circus bear that can make you porridge in your kitchen. It’s a miracle that it’s able to do it at all, but watch out because no matter how well they can act like a human on some tasks, they’re still a wild animal. They might ransack your kitchen, and they could kill you, accidentally or intentionally! — Alex Komoroske, via Simon Willison.
Stop Killing Games, via Ross Scott: The largest campaign ever to stop publishers destroying games.
LambHoot: The game where you argue with AI… as a vampire.
Amazon ditches “Just Walk Out” checkouts at its grocery stores, which was powered by 1000 people working in India reviewing transactions.
Microsoft opens a “high priority” bug in ffmpeg impacting MS Teams, attempting to leech the free labour of the maintainers. HN.
👋, and music with the WipEout soundtrack.
wipE'out'' - The Zero Gravity Soundtrack by CoLD SToRAGE (bandcamp.com)
[fr] Clément Viktorovitch en entreveue chez Blast : Le journalisme neutre n’existe pas.
Kottke: Gou Miyagi skates very mellow, Tyshawn Jones skates fast, Fabio Wibmer bikes fast, Ryan Williams’ mindbreaking BMX Free Willy.
That was quite the eventful security week:
Casey Muratori: The Apple M-series GoFetch attack (exploit site).
Backdoor in xz/liblzma leads to ssh server compromise (HN). Timeline. It’s RCE, not auth bypass (2) (HN). xz/liblzma: Bash obfuscation explained (HN). Xz vuln: A microcosm of open-source projects interactions. xzbot: notes, honeypot, and exploit demo for the xz backdoor (HN). Prime Reacts: Jonathan Blow predicts xz years ago. Also, You are all on the hobbyists maintainers’ turf now and I am not a supplier, via Brodie Robertson. Jussi Pakkanen: Aesthetics matter. Low Level Learning: Revealing the features of the XZ backdoor. Initial detailed analysis & HN. Deep dive into the xz backdoor - Columbia Engineering, Advanced Systems Programming guest lecture (HN). 404media: Bullying in open source software is a massive security vulnerability.
Dom Marti: Internet users preferences about advertising, personalization, and privacy, varies wildly.
Real Engineering: The engineering of the Gameboy.
Prime Reacts: DHH - Be less precious.
NYC’s AI chatbot tells businesses to break the law. Tasty skewer of factual errors presented as facts by a chatbot supposed to be authoritative. Via waxy.
Oh hey, Google Search is experimenting with pushing AI results first.