👋 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).

Hey geeks, time for newsnewsnews.

News

McSweeney’s: Son, You’re Old Enough to Know the Truth, There is No Such Thing as the “Invisible Hand of the Market”.

Vox: Why large delivery vans still rule in urban U.S., while e-bikes took over Europe cities deliveries, via Kottke. As usual: lack of regulation.

Games

Matt’s Ramblings - Speedrun science: Beating Quake with code.

Escapist: The making of EVE Online.

Force Gaming: “Live Service” games suck.

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.

Hola friends, and music with Clown Core.

News

[fr] Clément Viktorovitch : L’appel à la bienveillance, une forme de violence.

SMBC: Productivity tips.

Tech

OpenGL vs. Direct3D - Servan Keondjian & Casey Muratori. 👏 historical perspective on API design.

AI

Perplexity: interactive LLM visualization, neat. Via Nelson.

Shitty tech ℹ️

StarLink.

Yo, here are some news news news, listening to Rone.

News

[fr] Science Étonnante - Techniques pour mieux apprendre et étudier.

Kottke: In America, the cheese is dead.

SMBC: Introducing the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves-Weinersmith voting mechanism, AI consciousness threshold, Stress.

Tech

CoRecursive #091: The science of learning to code.

EXPI by p01, 1kb JS demo that won this year’s Assembly.

Games

Quake Speedruns Explained: E2M3 and the hardest trick in Quake.

Jim Stephanie Sterling: No sex please, we’re straight.

AI

Drew DeVault: AI crap.

Bonjour bonsoir, geeks. Music, with more GIRAFFES? GIRAFFES! and new Islands.

News

Man announces he will quit drinking by 2050. Via Nelson.

[fr] Linguisticae - Quoicoubeh : retour sur une panique générationnelle.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Web scraping for me, but not for thee.

Hey geeks, and music with Hashimoto.

News

Huge cars harm society.

Here's what world-class Scrabble looks like.

SMBC: Rammed, Temple, Co-op.

Tech

Tech over Tea #174: Fedora Linux with the project leader, Matthew Miller. Didn’t know Matthew; lots of balanced takes on many Linux topics.

Gary Bernhardt: The Unix chainsaw.

Julia Evans: Some tactics for writing in public.

Casey Muratori: Efficient DDA circle outlines. Cool, and learned about Digital differential analysis.

KRAZAM: AI boyfriend.

Games

Yahtzee Croshaw: Random documents and audio logs.

The infamous EVE Online bank heist.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Karawynn Long: The coming enshittification of US public libraries, via Nelson, who sums it up: “Maker of beloved library apps Overdrive / Libby was bought by private equity firm KKR in 2020, now turning the screws of rent-seeking”. Context: see Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” playbook & examples.

Holaaa, and music with Léonie Pernet.

News

Berkeley Earth: June 2023 earth temperature update.

Lex Fridman speaks to Palestinians in the West Bank.

Oh the urbanity: Elevated trains are good, actually, on the fiasco of Montréal’s abandoned “REM de l’Est”.

Not Just Bikes: Designing urban places that don't suck.

SMBC: Transporter.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Ars Technica: Google’s nightmare “Web Integrity API” wants a DRM gatekeeper for the web.

Bonjour bonsoir, frendz, and music with Emin Gök.

News

Derek Sivers: The past is not true.

Time lapse of ants invading a flatbed document scanner.

[fr] Jamy / Épicurieux - Utilité écosystémique des insectes et moustiques.

[fr] Philoxime : L’éthique de la voiture électrique.

David Cain: Is it time for Plan A?

Tech

Tom Humberstone: I’m a Luddite (and so can you!)

Why I hate frameworks, or “Modern software development summarized”, or “Factory Factory Factory”. HN.

no-more-secrets, “a command-line tool that recreates the famous data decryption effect seen in the 1992 movie Sneakers”. HN.

Games

Quake Speedruns Explained: The end of E1M5.

Hey geeks, and music with PJ Harvey:

News

Nautilus: A third of North America’s birds have vanished.

“Brossez vous les dents sous la douche”.

Real Engineering: The questionable engineering of Oceangate.

SMBC: Copyright.

Tech

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

Legal Lullabies, a 50 minutes-long reading out loud of the Instagram Terms of Use. Via waxy. If this makes you giggle, see also Robert Sikoryak’s “Terms and Conditions”.

The Linux Experiment: Prospectives about the crumbling ad-based internet.

AI

Schneier: The AI dividend.

There I ruined it, AI-generated mashups of classic singers singing modern songs. Via Nelson.