Lately, I have been trying to extricate myself from tech brain as much as I can. On twitter, this means muting most VCs and founders and everyone participating in the endless bullshit economy we’ve made for ourselves — I’d mute myself if I could — and instead following the people who choose to embrace complexity and thereby actually build things: systems experts, game designers, chip engineers, hackers, artists.
Turns out most people who actually build things are thoughtful and sincere, and very few of them give a single shit about whatever bad takes are circulating VC twitter that day.
I try to remind myself that instead of reading tweets that make me feel like my synapses are collapsing one by one, I could be learning new programming languages, reading papers on arxiv, debugging systems at work, reading poetry, listening to music, hanging out with my friends and engaging in messy human drama, which resists reduction more than anything else there is.
Schneier's last Crypto-Grams (June, July) are good. In particular, Schneier: The security value of inefficiency, on the security consequences of having leaned our supply chains / healthcare to the bone, and the need for antitrust regulations.
Godot engine: Donation changes. TL;DR: better paid contribution structure, more sponsorships. Godot is becoming the Blender of game engines: a solid free / open-source foundation with steady progress and strong backing ❤. Go(dot) go(dot) go(dot).
snakeware"is a free Linux distro with a Python userspace inspired by the Commodore 64. You are booted directly into a Python interpreter, which you can use to do whatever you want with your computer. [...] Our window manager, snakewm, is based on pygame. We do not use X11; snakewm draws directly to /dev/fb0". 👏. HN.
In the old economy of price signals, you tried to build a product that people would want, and the way you knew it worked is that people would pay you more than it cost. You were adding value to the world, and you could tell because you made money. In the new economy of user growth, you don’t have to worry about making a product that people want because you can just pay them to use it, so you might end up with companies losing money to give people things that they don’t want and driving out the things they do want.
On the Metal: Jonathan Blow, where Bryan Cantrill interviews language & game designer/developer Jonathan Blow (author of Braid & The Witness). This interview is pure gold for anyone technical, listen to it nnnnnow.
I started reading Cory Doctorow's daily blog, Pluralistic. And gaaaaah it's full of greatamazinghopeful things made by lovely humans, but it's also full of close reporting on everything that's terrible about the USA. Not always an easy read. Here's a selection of the last few weeks, mostly about the virus.
Money at this scale is a social fiction. The government can support the economy for as long as it takes. That doesn't plunge a society into "debt". It's not money we "borrow" from China. We are lending it to ourselves.
[fr/qc] Got a word from a friend (merci Berthe) about the "fined while singing happy birthday to a friend from their car" case: this is a good example of La Presse providing hot-but-often-incorrect facts and failing to correct past articles once they got the facts straightened up. My friend says it's not a rare occurence from them, and recommends to take all they write with a grain of salt, or avoid them and read slower-but-more-accurate newspapers.
[Monday @ 5AM](https://www.lapresse.ca/covid-19/202004/06/01-5268157-le-spvm-distribue-des-amendes-salees.php): _"Selon elle, les agents lui ont dit qu’elle recevrait par la poste une amende de 1500 $ d’ici 10 jours et qu’advenant une deuxième infraction, elle risquait de six mois à un an de prison."_
[Monday @ 12, about the same case](https://www.lapresse.ca/covid-19/202004/06/01-5268206-le-spvm-a-emis-67-constats-dinfraction.php): _"un porte-parole du SPVM a indiqué à La Presse que c’est un avertissement, et non un constat d’infraction, qui a été remis en fin de semaine à une femme dont des amis sont venus souligner l’anniversaire en voiture, à Beaconsfield. « La dame a été avertie. Elle n’a pas reçu de constat et n’en recevra pas », nous a-t-on dit."_
Article 1 could kiiiinda be considered okay-ish if corrected through an in-article erratum after article 2. got published, but this didn't happen. Also, reading 1.'s _"selon elle"_ literally, yes the gap disappears (reading it as La Presse _"just reporting what *she* said"_), but c'm'on, this is not journalism then, this is gossip forwarding without the slightest fact-checking.
So: one case (among others if I trust my friend's experience) where La Presse 1. doesn't check facts / fails to adequately signal un-checked facts, and 2. fails to publish in-article erratas after a fact was debunked. Not the best journalism 😕. Keep it in mind.
