Bonjour bonsoir, and music with new TOO MANY ZOOZ and Linus Åkesson covering clown core.

News

[fr] Science4all : Les limitations du réductionnisme énergétique.

[fr] Arte - Les dangers du sucre.

Kottke: The neo-luddite movement.

Oh the urbanity: Edmonton is the Canadian city to beat on housing reform, The disturbing death disparity on North American roads.

SMBC: Philosophy, Underwear, Play doctor.

xkcd #2907: Schwa (Wikipedia).

Software

[fr] Science Étonnante - L’algorithme de Diffie-Hellman.

Johan Halse: Care. HN.

Gunpei Yokoi’s Lateral thinking with withered technology, via swillison.

Games

Quake Speedruns Explained: The history of Quake world records.

Gen Z gamers are doomed.

BreakTime: Running Breakout inside Google Calendar, via HN.

AI

swillison: The GPT-4 barrier has finally been broken.

The Claude 3 system prompt, explained, via swillison.

You can now train a 70b language model at home, via swillison + HN.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Roku locks devices until users agree to new terms of service.

Hi geeks, and music with fresh new Godspeed songs from their tour:

News

[fr] Monsieur Phi - Dilemme du prisonnier et agents Kantiens.

NYT: The absurd problem of New York City trash, via nelson. Same in Montréal –and many (most?) North America cities–, trash management here is Bad™.

Comics: xkcd #2899: Goodhart’s Law, SMBC: Post.

Software

Prime: TigerBeetle, the fastest and safest financial transactions database 👏👏👏. Also, Tiger Style, their style & design guide which is 👏👏👏 too.

AI

EMO: Emote Portrait Alive - Generating expressive portrait videos with Audio2Video diffusion model under weak conditions, via waxy.

Who am I? Conditional prompt injection attacks with Microsoft Copilot, via Simon Willison.

Hi geeks, and music with new Flavien Berger.

News

[fr] Science4All : Innovation vs. sécurité.

A global review of cars harm to people and the environment, via Kottke.

Samantha Moore: Visible mending.

Things unexpectedly named after people.

SMBC: Demand, Hatero, Help, Yeep.

AI

Simon Willison: The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is video.

Scott Alexander: Sam Altman wants 7 trillion $.

[fr] Monsieur Phi : CrazyGPT.

👋, and music with Yonatan Gat rock-covering Dvořák’s American Quartet.

News

[fr] Sénat - Audition de Jean-Marc Jancovici au sujet de Total Énergies.

[fr] Angelo Mathémélo - Les mathématiques du cœur.

Persistence of vision in black & white noise, via waxy.

Dan Hon: Stickers to manage internet replies, 👏👏👏👏👏.

Superb Owl Sunday VIII.

13 worst bike lanes in the world, via Kottke.

SMBC: Deepfake 2.

Software

“Chronolog”, low-tech crowdsourced time lapses that help monitor the environment, cooooooooool.

Common programming terms (loop, patch, library, bug) derived from physical attributes of early computers, via Kottke.

DF: Apple’s reversal on RCS support stems from China regulation, not EU.

AI

OpenAI Sora.

Yowdy frendz. This week’s music is the Outer Wilds OST.

News

NJB: More highway lanes are (still) a bad thing.

David Policar: They’re made out of meat.

Kottke: Concha García Zaera’s MSPaint paintings.

RobWords: Words we’ve ruined.

xkcd: Relationship advice, Log cabin.

SMBC: Cult, Temperature.

Software

Anil Dash: “Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement.

AI

François Chollet:

People seem to be falling for two rather thoughtless extremes:

1. “LLMs are AGI, they work like the human brain, they can reason, etc.”
2. “LLMs are dumb and useless.”

The reality is that LLMs are not AGI — they're a big curve fit to a very large dataset. They work via memorization and interpolation. But that interpolative curve can be tremendously useful, if you want to automate a known task that’s a match for its training data distribution.

Memorization works, as long as you don’t need to adapt to novelty. You don’t need intelligence to achieve usefulness across a set of known, fixed scenarios.

In fact, that’s the entire story of the field of AI so far: achieve increasing levels of usefulness and automation, while bypassing the problem of creating intelligence.

GOODY-2 😄.

Bonjour bonsoir, geeks, and music with new The Smile.

News

xkcd: Greenhouse effect.

How France’s “Centre National du Cinéma” works, hében, savais pas.

Real Eng - The insane engineering of the space shuttle: Re-entry.

[fr] Clément Viktorovitch - Janvier 2024.

Starlink’s laser system is beaming 42 PB/day (432 Mbps/laser, 9000 lasers total). HN.

SMBC: Singed, Wolf, Unspeakable, Prayer.

Software

Tonsky: In loving memory of square checkbox.

jwz: Hypertext emerges from his well to shame the tech industry.

Shitty tech ℹ️

[pdf] Mozilla: How Microsoft compromises browser choice. HN.

Slate: How Quora died.

Hola, and music with Giardini di Mirò.

News

Real Eng: The questionable engineering of the Boeing 737 Max, via HN.

Compound pejoratives on Reddit, from buttface to wankpuffin, via nelson.

SMBC: Flesh, Consciousness, War.

PBF: Standards.

Software

Second Wind: 13 times people leaked military documents on War Thunder forums.

Jblow: Game devs are drowning in complicated proprietary systems, and Primeagen reacts.

Games

RPS: Piracy & games preservation.

Pong wars, via waxy.

AI

0xide & friends: Open-source LLMs with Simon Willison, stellar interview.

Google Research: Lumière, a text-to-video and image-to-video diffusion model for video generation.

Wired: Most top news sites block AI bots. Right-wing media welcomes them.

404 Media: YouTube deletes 1000 videos of celebrity AI scam ads.

Jakob Nielsen - The articulation barrier: Prompt-driven AI UX hurts usability, via Simon Willison & HN.

jwz: “Driverless” cars always have a driver.

Shitty tech ℹ️

The Verge: Apple’s new browser rules are “as painful as possible” for Firefox, says Mozilla. HN1, HN2. Also, DF: Apple’s Plans for the DMA in the European Union

👋 frendz, and music with Peter Broderick.

News

[fr] Science Étonnante - LENIA, une nouvelle forme de vie algorithmique.

RobWords: Why E̱nglish shoul̆d start ūsing accėnt màrks, thx Isa.

Rackarkatten.

SMBC: After, Farming life, Am.

Software

Prime: Carson Gross, creator of HTMX, talks HTMX 👏👏👏.

Andy Baio: The quiet death of Ello’s big dreams.

Prime: Are developers ok? and I fixed git.

Games

Ross Scott - Dead game news: The Crew neatly complements A wholly subscription-driven games industry would be “savage”, says Larian CEO.

Under The Mayo: The problem with remaking Silent Hill 2 – Modern audiences and censorship.

NeverKnowsBest: Lies, hate and the story of Emil Pagliarulo. A dissection of exponential spiralling hatefarming & defamation on youtube / reddit / twitter. Reminiscent of Hbomberguy’s video about plagiarism, but focused on { personal attacks, spitballing, entitlement, power tripping } instead of simple plagiarism. A reminder that angry liars can be dangerous when they have a platform.

Woop woop. Bonjour bonsoir, en musique avec encore Vincent Peirani.

News

[fr/qc] Télé Québec - Récolter l’hiver.

[fr] Osons causer - Sécurité des centrales nucléaires françaises.

[fr] Le Réveilleur - Le charbon et ses impacts.

[fr] Clément Viktorovitch - Le “réarmement” : inflexion politique ou concept marketing ?

Zeynep Tufekci: The truth about airplane safety.

Dan Olson: About that Idris Elba gold documentary.

SMBC: Lion, Meaning, Ideology.

Software

Andy Wingo: Missing the point of webassembly.

matklad: Write less.

Niklaus Wirth: A plea for lean software (1995), via DF.

AI

Meta admits use of pirated book dataset “Books3” to train AI.

OpenAI’s answer to the New York Times lawsuit.

Amazon product listing spam.

jwz - Bill Gates’ 1996 “Electronics gives us a way of classifying things” optimism.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Unity’s Open-Source Double Standard: the ban of VLC, via HN.

👋 friends, have some Daniel Lanois.

News

[fr] Osons causer - Critique de la position de JB Fressoz sur la transition énergétique.

[fr] Léonora Miano @ Médiapart - Racisme en France.

How coop “S Group” became Finland’s dominant retailer, via Kottke.

Julia Doubleday: COVID reinfections are not to be taken lightly, as they lead to increasingly-probable Long COVID, via jwz.

Scott Alexander: Singing the blues.

Oh the urbanity: Reasons for the success of Montréal’s St-Denis REV bike lane.

“1000 matchsticks” stop motion animation.

Ed People: “Can you teach me your favorite dance move?”, via waxy.

SMBC: Afterlife, Lightness, Unity, New year, Quote.

Software

American Dialect: 2023 Word of the Year is “enshittification”, via waxy.

How “Standard Ebooks” serves millions of requests per month with a 2GB VPS; or, a paean to the classic web 👏.

matklad: Of rats and ratchets, Git things.

Anil Dash: “VC qanon” and the radicalization of the tech tycoons.

Asianometry: The rise of Unix and the seeds of its fall, A Chronicle of the Unix wars.

Games

Jonathan Blow and Tiago Loureiro: The future of software development in video games.

Paku Paku, a.k.a. 1D-Pacman.

AI

antirez: LLMs and Programming in the first days of 2024.

Simon Sillison: Stuff we figured out about AI in 2023, It’s OK to call it Artificial Intelligence.

Bonjour bonsoir nerds, feliz año nuevo tout ça tout ça, et musique avec Rajna Swaminathan.

News

[fr/qc] L’Histoire nous le dira - Accent québécois : origine et mode d’emploi.

Not just bikes: Montreal’s urban infrastructure is good by North America standards, but a far cry from leading European cities.

Jennifer Jenkins - Mickey, Disney, and the Public Domain: a 95-year love triangle.

Vox: The world slaughters 18 billion animals a year, and then wastes 25%.

“China Export” mark.

SMBC: Normal.

Software

NBC: Woman using dating app to find January 6 fascists, get them to talk, and send the info to the FBI, via jwz.

Drew DeVault: Why Prusa is floundering, and how you can avoid their fate.

Games

Thief: The Black Parade is my Game Of The Year 2023.

RPS: China’s upcoming regulation on online games addictive / exploitative monetization.

AI

Simon Willison - Embeddings: What they are and why they matter.

Facebook is being overrun with stolen, AI-generated images that people think are real.

Jussi Pakkanen - AI silliness: getting to a “no”.

NYTimes sues OpenAI and Microsoft over A.I. use of copyrighted work

Prompt-Brush is “a non-AI generative model: if you suggest an image prompt, Pablo Delcan will make you a drawing with black ink and send it to you”. Via Kottke.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Mike Masnick: Substack turns on its “nazis welcome!” sign.

The Hyperloop was always a scam.

jwz: Remember when Mozilla made a web browser? Also, HN blah.

jwz: Migrating away from 1Password.

Hi geeks, and music with old Vincent Peirani.

News

[fr] Angelo Mathémélo - Le théorème du singe savant.

[fr] Stupid Economics - 2050 : Conséquences de la fin de “l’abondance”.

[fr] C’est une autre histoire - Sabotage.

Cory Doctorow: It all started with a mouse.

[fr] Osons comprendre - Profs : le grand déclassement.

The insane engineering of the Space Shuttle.

SMBC: Behold, I.e., Down, Soulmate.

AI

Kitboga: Using ChatGPT to scam scammers.

Simon Willison: The AI trust crisis.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Zuckerbunker.

Engadget: 23andMe frantically changed its terms of service to prevent hacked customers from suing.

Robert Reich: How Amazon is ripping you off.

Hola, and music with Zeal and Ardor.

News

[fr] Angelo Mathémélo : Vous êtes éclatés en probabilités (et moi aussi), Les fonctions “monstres” de Weierstrass.

AlphaPhoenix: Watch electricity hit a fork in the road at half a billion frames per second.

[fr] Philoxime - COP28 : Faut-il dealer avec les pétroliers ?

hbomberguy: Plagiarism and You(Tube).

SMBC: Remember, Generivore, Family, Loosen.

Tech

Kitboga: Sending Facebook scammers the wrong gift cards.

Brother printers have gotten to where they are now, by not innovating (HN).

Games

Thief: The Black Parade is amazing.

AI

Schneier: AI and Trust.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Jeff Atwood: I fight for the users.

Muta: Sony sincerely fists you “because of changes in licensing agreements”.

EFF: EU’s eIDAS 2.0 article 45 will roll back web security by 12 years (HN).

23andMe confirms hackers stole ancestry data on 6.9 million users.

Bonjour bonsoir, nerdz. Have some DJ Shadow.

News

Bobby Fingers: Jeff Bezos rowing boat, 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏.

LambHoot: The dead game in Hedbanz. Cool story around kids remixing a found board game lacking a rulebook, into a non-competitive social game reminiscent of Cards Against Humanity.

A perfectly designed Climate Report cover.

[fr] L’Histoire nous le dira #227 - La saga de l’avortement au Québec : Chantale Daigle.

Winners of the Landscape Photo Awards 2023, via Kottke.

SMBC: Discrete.

Tech

Linus Akesson: C64 Vivaldi summer presto (“The storm”)

Heyyy, raise a glass to feudal Big Tech bending a micrometre to EU regulation! No Bing, no Edge, no upselling: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon (HN), RCS support is coming to iPhones (HN).

Games

Quake Speedruns Explained: 19 years to beat Quake’s E1M6 record.

Friends Per Second #34: How The Escapist died and Second Wind was born.

Valve: Half-Life 25^th anniversary documentary.

Shitty tech ℹ️

[fr/qc] Le Devoir : L’IA en santé, entre conflits d’intérêt et millions de dollars perdus.

Hey nerds. The weekly music is Kae Tempest.

News

Finalists of the 2023 “Comedy wildlife photography awards”, via Kottke.

SMBC: Bah, Remember, Bottleneck.

Tech

1x Engineer, thx Liza.

The Grug Brained Developer. HN.

Games

Pop culture detective: Searching for humanity in Fortnite’s battle royale.

Shitty tech ℹ️

jwz: All my apes are blind.

Woop woop, friends, and music with new old Radiohead.

News

Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks out against Israel’s segregationist apartheid regime after West Bank visit, and A dangerous conflation, “an open letter from Jewish writers who wish to disavow the widespread narrative that any criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic”. Via Kottke.

SMBC: Norms, Smile.

Tech

Kitboga: I trapped 200 scammers in an impossible maze. HN.

Games

eurothug4000: How Elden Ring balances darkness with beauty.

Hey geeks. The weekly 🎼 is Jeremy Dutcher.

News

Robert Reich @ UC Berkeley: Wealth & poverty, “a deep look at why inequalities of income and wealth have widened significantly since the late 1970s in the United States, and why this poses dangerous risks to society”, 👏. US-centric, but not US-specific.

Barbara Ehrenreich - Bright-sided: How “Positive Thinking” undermines America, thx James.

Separating fact from fiction on social media in times of conflict.

Oh the urbanity: 25 recent awesome urban transformations in Montréal.

McSweeney’s: So, You’ve Decided to Start Listening to Radiohead in Your Mid-Thirties.

SMBC: Esteem, Autocomplete.

Tech

[fr] JB Kempf de VideoLAN / VLC cause sur Underscore_ : HDMI, vidéo, codecs, dav1d.

Jacob Bartlett - Through the Ages: Apple CPU architecture.

A cone-ven of witches casting spells onto self-driving cars.

Nerds! Bonjour, and music with Peter Broderick & Ensemble 0.

News

Drew DeVault: Going off-script.

The winners of the 2023 small world photomicrography competition.

[fr] Romain Gary à “En toutes lettres” en 1970, sur l’éclatement des médias et les bulles médiatiques.

SMBC: Social, Existential Batman, Forever, Equation, Sauce, Illusion, Sleep.

CBC (April 2011) Use of the word “terrorist” and similar BBC policy, via Reddit hell thread commenting on Fox hell post.

McSweeney’s: Sure, Trump Is an Authoritarian Grifter, but at Least He’s Three Years Younger Than Biden.

Tech

Tom7 - The glEnd of Zelda(): Automatic 3Dification of NES games and Uppestcase and Lowestcase Letters [advances in derp learning].

Technology Connections: Old pinball machines.

We have used too many levels of abstractions and now the future looks bleak, via HN.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Ed Zitron: Everything looks like a nail, and Dave Karpf: Why can’t our tech billionaires learn anything new?, and [pdf] Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”, redacted by Ben Grosser 👏👏👏, via jwz. If you must, here’s the original turd.

Every member of “Bandcamp United” union bargaining team was laid off (HN) and So, you want to make a Bandcamp..., via jwz.

jwz: Wherein Twitter delenda est 😄.

Bonjour bonsoir, en musique avec Gonzo.

News

[fr] Science Étonnante : Modélisation et explication de l’effet de serre.

An intuitive approach for understanding electricity.

xkcd #2838: Dubious islands of North America, and the waterways that separate them, #2839: Language acquisition.

Cyriak: HONK.

Tech

Cory Doctorow reviews Brian Merchant’s “Blood in the Machine”, 👏 read on what the Luddites movement was and wasn’t.

Casey Muratori: Conway’s law and complexity.

[fr] Épicurieux - Fiabilité des supports de sauvegarde : disque dur, SSD, bandes.

Julia Evans: Making hard things easy.

Woop woop. This week’s 🎵 is new Grails.

News

Stunning high-resolution Lidar images of rivers & deltas, and photos of storms and clouds from a 767 pilot.

Oh The Urbanity: What happened when Rotterdam banned housing investors.

SMBC: Inspired by nature, Your powers.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Drew DeVault: The forbidden topics.

The tyranny of the marginal user: Why consumer software gets worse, not better, over time (HN).

Google Ads team begging for worse search results, so that Ads team can hit their goals (direct link to US gov. PDF).

Dan Olson: This is financial advice (HN).