👋 geeks, this week’s music is an old-made-new notwist.

News

Adam Neely: The Nintendo-fication of jazz. Cooool stuff.

Winners of the Underwater Photographer of the Year 2023, via Kottke.

JK Brickworks: Making an infinite LEGO domino ring, via waxy.

SMBC: Dentistry, Herd.

AI

qntm: Lena / MMAcevedo. READ THIS NOW.

Simon Willison - Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first” (HN).

Tom Scott: I tried using AI; it scared me.

Bruce Schneier: AI and political lobbying.

Tech

CoRec #085: Shipping Apple’s “Graphing Calculator”, amazing story.

Sebastian Ruiz: Design narratives to the strength of the medium.

Speedrunners “God Run”, a.k.a. finishing FromSoftware’s seven Soulsborne games without taking a single hit. Wait, what.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Jim Stephanie Sterling - Hogwarts: A legacy of hate.

New Tech Bingo.

Bonjour bonsoir, and music with more Colin Stetson.

News

Not Just Bikes: Amsterdam’s new “bicycle stables” are awesome.

[fr] Clément Viktorovitch : L’Assemblée Nationale française s’est elle “bordélisée” ?

McSweeney’s - When to turn your heat on: a decision guide.

xkcd: Only Serifs.

AI

Ted Chiang: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web. 👏👏👏, amazing Ted Chiang. Recent AIs (ChatGPT but also DALLE2 & Stable Diffusion) amaze me by the mere compression they achieve. Ted explores this, with a very pertinent reminder of Xerox’s JBIG2 mishap, and asks a million excellent questions. One of the best articles I’ve ever read about ChatGPT.

Peter Welch: AI is not the problem.

Scott Alexander: Mostly skeptical thoughts on the chatbot propaganda apocalypse.

DAN, the cat-and-mouse game played by r/ChatGPT trying to break free from OpenAI’s limitations of ChatGPT.

Tech

Technology Connections: A simple water heater is more clever than it seems.

Yahtzee Croshaw / Extra Punctuation: Comedy in games should be more than just quips.

Hey geeks. Have some Colin Stetson.

News

Scott Alexander: You don’t want a purely biological, apolitical taxonomy of mental disorders.

Kottke notices The minimalist photography awards for 2022.

Asianometry: When silt fills your water reservoir.

Why Canadians can’t bike in the winter (but Finnish people can), thx Uri.

Felix Colgrave: DONKS.

SMBC: Requiem for a blockbuster.

Tech

Drew DeVault: Private platforms should engage in censorship.

Ange Yaghi: What is bloom (Fraunhofer diffraction), and how is it simulated?

Google: MusicLM - Generating music from text.

Connor Oliver’s favourite computer: an old Mac.

Games

Noclip (2021) The story of Thief & Looking Glass studios.

People make games - Working at Valve: “A fearless adventure” or “Lord of the flies”?

jm8 @ Escapist: Game difficulty is more enjoyable when designed qualitatively, not quantitatively.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Wladimir Palant - IPinside: Korea’s mandatory spyware.

jwz: Autonomous murderbots still going great.

Yo, and music with new Atsuko Chiba.

News

That bit at timestamp 32m24s of hbomber - Climate denial: A measured response, where a journalist interviews Patrick Moore about Roundup, is fabulous. Other good episodes of his “A measured response” series: Vaccines and autism, and The war on Christmas. Also, Woke brands and Speedrunning is awesome summed up in Hbomberguy @ XOXO Fest 2019.

xkcd: Runtime, SMBC: Drugs.

Tech

Verge: Getty Images is suing the creators of AI art tool Stable Diffusion for scraping its content.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Verge: “Extremely hardcore” Twitter.

Woop woop, frendz, and music with Joni Void + Maya Kuroki.

AI

[fr] Monsieur Phi : De quoi ChatGPT est-il vraiment capable ? EDIT: suite du 2 février, et Scott Alexander: Janus simulators.

Ars Technica: Microsoft’s new AI can simulate anyone’s voice with 3 seconds of audio.

Lawsuit challenging Stable Diffusion, and HN blah.

AI-created stills for movies that don’t exist: David Cronenberg’s Galaxy of Flesh (1985), Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Tron (1976).

Tech

Bruce Schneier: Decarbonizing PoW cryptocurrencies through taxation.

Asianometry: How semiconductors ruined East Germany.

MIT: We now understand why Roman concrete is so durable, long-lasting, and self-repairing. Via Kottke.

[pdf] Field Guide to NOTAMs, a tastily-presented snark about the irrelevant crap that goes into official pilot notifications. Said differently, “notification overload”, but for airplane pilots instead of your phone. Via Nelson.

Streamer Mikkaa simultaneously beats 2 Elden Rings with a controller and a dance mat.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Good reminder by Nick: “Smart” home devices are security & privacy trash. IT’S ALSO RIDICULOUSLY FRAGILE AND MOSTLY-USELESS OBSCENE FIRST-WORLD TECHNO-GADGETO-BABBLE BULLSHIT, GODDAMNIT. MORE TECH ≠ BETTER, ever dared thinking about it?

Bonjour bonsoir, and music with Genghis Tron, merci Sam.

News

Maciej Cegłowski: Why not [humans on] Mars, 👏👏👏.

[fr] INA - « Qui aurait pu prédire la crise climatique ? », merci Berthe.

Winners of the 2022 BigPicture natural world photo competition, and 2022 Close-up photographer of the year. Both via Kottke.

SMBC: Art, Yer mom, Imagination.

Tech

The strangest computer manual ever written.

LambHoot: The Big Fat Greek reason I haven’t played Hades, Violence in VR video games, Caught in a Dongo Adventure.

Jean-Michel Jarre’s “Oxygene pt. 4” in 19kb of JS code, via waxy.

Limmy’s show: Top secret came up while discussing the LastPass breach, thx James.

Shitty tech ℹ️

The expanding “Dark Forest” and generative AI, via waxy.

Apple fined 8.5 million $ for illegally collecting iPhone data for ads.

Feliz año nuevo, nerdz, and music with Janel Leppin, merci Juju.

News

Tom7 - PAC-TOM: Running every street in Pittsburgh.

SMBC: Oops, JPEG, Real life.

Tech

[fr] Jérôme Denis & David Pontille : La maintenance ou l’art invisible de faire durer les choses.

Ferd: A bridge over a river never crossed, and the idea of Falsework, “a temporary structure used to support a permanent structure while it is not self-supporting” 👍.

Wladimir Palant: South Korea’s online security dead end.

Kottke: Super Mario Bros was designed on graph paper.

The Needling: Portland startup to mine artisanal Bitcoin using only slide rules and graph paper 😄, via jwz.

jwz: Floppy disc assembly line.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Josh Strife Hayes: Abusive game monetization strategies.

🎄, geeks, and music with Black Ox Orkestar.

News

[fr] Homo Fabulus - Climat : comment faire pour que les gens se bougent (une fois qu’ils ont été bien informés).

[fr] Stupid Economics : L’impossible transformation de l’Éducation Nationale.

[fr] Osons causer - Nucléaire : un atout pour l’indépendance de la France ?

Oh the urbanity: Airbnb decimates housing affordability (but it doesn’t have to)

Photos of GY!BE playing at a Mexican restaurant in Manchester UK, November 1998, via r/gybe.

Paul Fairie: The 2022 headline of the year nominees.

SMBC: Artificial Incompetence, Ceremony.

Tech

Bryan Cantrill: The container revolution: Reflections after the first decade (2016), Zebras all the way down (2017), Hardware/software co-design: The coming golden age (2021)

Asianometry: The dawn and dusk of Sun Microsystems.

Technology Connections: The optical audio of sound-on-film.

Danny Spencer: Can Doom run it? An adding machine in Doom. HN, which links to a similar thing in Quake.

NYT: The “Luddite” club, a group of NYC teens opting out of smartphones and social media, via waxy.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Hyperloop as a “Gadgetbahn”: Futuristic transportation that looks cool but is unnecessarily complicated and is definitely not built for real people.

Woop. Music, with Benjamin Clementine, Washing machine techno, and The hardcore coffee machine (merci Rufin 😄).

News

SMBC: Bad code, Addicted, Tangled.

Tech

Scott Alexander: Perhaps it is a bad thing that the world’s leading AI companies cannot control their AIs. Reddit blah.

Bryan Cantrill @ GOTO 2017 - Debugging under fire: Keep your head when systems have lost their mind.

Genders.wtf, a collection of absurd-but-real gender form fields. Via waxy.

Found this gem on a Hipster News thread, from @antihero + @lrvick:

• Linux is like driving a car with your hands in the engine.
• Windows is like driving a car that is actually a city bus full of hostile randos that take a lot of effort to constantly remove.
• MacOS is like driving a car by yelling at the driver from the kids seat in the back.

... In the end, learning how an engine works to maintain one myself is not so bad.

[Shameless self-plug] By the way, if you haven’t read it yet, my linux nerd toolbox is full of good things.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Vox: Fortnite maker Epic Games has to pay 520 million $ for tricking kids and violating their privacy (HN). Good commenting by Muta, who links to Dark Pattern Games.

Meanwhile, everything’s fine at Twitter.

Hi geeks, and music with new Zeal and Ardor.

News

[fr] Homo Fabulus - Quel concept scientifique mérite d’être mieux connu ? 200 intellectuell·e·s répondent.

Tech

Scott Alexander: Why I’m less than infinitely hostile to cryptocurrency. Good points that make me reconsider my admitted own infinite hostility to it. One point that Scott doesn’t mention, though, is the ecological disaster that Proof-Of-Work coins imply, but one might hope this will improve (or be fully solved with PoS?!). This is one particular axis of the problem, for which “In 2010, it was probably 100x worse than the regular financial system; now it’s maybe only 10x worse. Might there come a day when it’s no worse at all, or even better?” HN blah.

CNBC: Apple will use “Made in America” chips built at Arizona 3nm TSMC fab + TSMC to up Arizona investment to $40 billion with 2^nd chip plant (HN). To put it in perspective, Asianometry: Is America stealing TSMC?

“I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are”, good way to frame the question in our days of surveillance internet! Thx Heinz.

Asianometry: AI’s hardware problem.

Making the blue robot: Some faces behind the Godot engine. Good software and good people. Via r/Godot.

Evan Martin: Chrome, 10 years later.

👋 and music with Wacław Zimpel & Hans Kulk.

News

[fr] Monsieur Phi - 1984, réalité et “fake news”.

The Guardian: 20 climate photographs that changed the world, via Kottke.

Journal of allergy & clinical immunology: Gut epithelial barrier damage caused by dishwasher detergents and rinse aids (PDF), via HN.

Cape lappet caterpillars respond to human voice & noise, thx James.

Tech

Building a Virtual Machine inside ChatGPT, 🤯.

Bryan Cantrill (2011) Fork yeah! The rise and development of Illumos, what a great talk, for {1. A supremely entertaining rant about Oracle and Larry “Lawnmower” Ellison @ 33:02, 2. A reminder of what a good license can guard against @ 41:22 }.

Drew DeVault it taking a break from blogging and lists blog posts he’s most proud of. Several excellent reads there.

CloudFlare: The DNSSEC root signing ceremony, via Nelson.

Yahtzee Croshaw / Extra Punctuation: Do games have to be fun?

SMBC: Private information.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Muta: Tencent-made style transfer AI has issues with diversity. Nothing new, but a fun reading at 13:06 of the batshit-crazy Terms of Service.

Hi geeks, and music with Vanessa Wagner.

News

SMBC: Intrinsic.

Tech

Fantasy “Jodorowsky Tron” AI visualisations by Johnny Darrell, whoaaa. Via Nelson.

Corridor Crew on the future of 3D scanning for video “Neural Radiance Fields” (NeRF), neural networks that can generate complex 3D scenes from 2D photos. Via waxy.

Give a couple $$$ to Thunderbird!

Frost @ The Escapist: Better games fail better.

LGR - The Cybiko experience: a handheld Computer for year 2000 teens.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Fb CICERO: An AI agent that negotiates, persuades, and cooperates with people. Via waxy, whose comment I’ll echo: “building extremely persuasive AIs that are more effective negotiators than humans, what could go wrong”.

Bonjour bonsoir, and music with Moor Mother.

News

[fr] Jancovici : Audition à l'assemblée nationale française, 2 nov. 2022.

[fr] Philoxime - COP 27 : pertes & préjudices.

vlogbrothers: How much does humanity weigh?

Floor796, “an ever-expanding animation scene showing the life of the 796^th floor of the huge space station”. Via waxy.

SMBC: Clowning 😄.

Tech

xkcd - #2699: Messaging feature comparison, #2701: Change in slope.

GMTK - Why do God of War’s characters keep spoiling puzzles?

Kevin Zurawel @ Strange Loop 2021: Game development in 8 bits.

twittoor, “cartoons about life at Twitter”.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Amazon exec gets ripped to shreds by Labour MPs over working conditions in select committee hearing, thx Jo.

Hey geeks, and music with Swans.

News

SMBC: Twin.

The PBF: A fit of the vapours.

Tech

Drew DeVault: In praise of Plan 9.

Pinafore’s (a Mastodon client) interesting “wellness settings”, “designed to reduce the addictive or anxiety-inducing aspects of social media”. Via Nelson.

Frost / Escapist: Why I don't play good games.

Technology Connections: Censoring bad words with 1980s tech.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Kind of a follow-up to last week’s mention of Valve’s gambling problem, Mutahar: Why Roblox is not safe for children.

👋! Music, with Planning for burial and Horse jumper of love, thx OJ.

News

[fr] Homo Fabulus : Peut-on être de gauche et aimer la biologie du comportement humain ? (psycho évo #8)

vlogbrothers: My secret obsession.

Tech

John Romero @ Strange Loop 2022: The early days of id Software: programming principles or John Romero - DOOM’s development: A year of madness, they’re the same talk.

Jack Rusher @ Strange Loop 2022: Stop writing dead programs, thx Heinz.

Mike Masnick / Techdirt: Hey Elon, let me help you speedrun the content moderation learning curve.

Shitty tech ℹ️

People Make Games: Valve’s gambling problem. Wow. Had the impression that Valve was less shitty than Epic/Fortnite about gambling (probably due to a positive prior I have about Valve because of the objectively good / ecosystem-healthy work they’re doing with Linux/Proton), and oh boy was I wrong. The whole thing absolutely stinks.

Andy Baio - Invasive Diffusion: How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model. Also, AI-generated art sparks furious backlash from Japan’s anime community.

Hi geeks, and music with uSSSy.

News

[fr] Clément Viktorovitch - L'humour, Va-t-on vraiment vers la “sobriété énergétique” ?

vlogbrothers: Instantly debateable.

Tech

Marian Petre @ Strange Loop 2022: Expert software developers’ approach to error, thx James.

Woop woop, frendz, and music with new Birds in Row.

News

Futurology: Montreal’s 6.9 billion $ new railway network, the REM.

vlogbrothers: Vague questions that lead to the formation of simple opinions, that are likely to conflict with the opinions of others, are more likely to create conflict and to go viral. Also, often, the answers to those questions are invalid, because the questions themselves are wrong.

Asianometry: Soviet nuclear icebreakers.

SMBC: New cold war, Loot drop.

Sugar gliders.

Tech

Linus Akesson: The Commodordion is “an 8-bit accordion primarily made of C64s, floppy disks, and gaffer tape”.

Drew DeVault: In praise of ffmpeg.

matklad: Writing good troubleshooting wiki articles.

Yahtzee / Extra Punctuation: Monkey Island and the complicated art of puzzles.

r/gamedev: Funniest line of code you wrote while making a game?

Shitty tech ℹ️

ProPublica: Rent going up? One company’s algorithm could be why. via jwz.

GitHub Copilot investigation.

Most Windows OEM laptops are full of mal/bloatware that non-computerists are ill-equipped to disengage. HN.

Bonjour bonsoir, geeks, and music with Talk Talk.

News

vlogbrothers: COMMIT TO THE BIT.

[fr] Osons causer : Faut-il manger les riches pour sauver le climat ? À regarder en entier.

Atlantic / Xochitl Gonzalez: The sound of gentrification is silence.

Tech

Technology Connections: How to make a point-and-shoot camera in 1961; !@#$% amazing design & engineering creativity.

Text-to-video AI news, via waxy: Phenaki, DreamFusion, Facebook Make-A-Video, Google Imagen.

GMTK: How game designers solved a couple problems, Should designers listen to negative feedback?

adn: Self-expression vs. vesselization.

A good read by the New Yorker on the humans behind NTP.

Ars Technica: Ethereum completes “the Merge” to Proof-of-Stake, which ends mining and cuts energy use by 99.95%.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Ross Scott “Dead Game News”:

• Atlus sues fans for preserving their game
• Stadia is shutting down

Andy Baio - AI data laundering: How academic and nonprofit researchers shield tech companies from accountability.

👋, human. Music, with JAWHAR.

News

[fr] Monsieur Phi - Nous sommes spécistes. Justifions-le.

[fr] Gaël Giraud - L’économie à venir.

[fr] Usul - Violences sexistes : la gauche doit faire mieux.

John vlogbrothers Green - Against nihilism.

Kottke: Microscopic photo of vinyl record grooves.

SMBC: Candy.

Tech

The new iPhone 14 is much easier to repair (HN) and that’s excellent news.

Shitty tech ℹ️

Sébastien Wilmet: GAFAM to MAGMA.

Well hello, friends. Music, with Monolithe Noir.

News

[fr/qc] Trucs santé avec Monsieur Mousteille, merci James.

SMBC: Pipe & beard.

Tech

Matt McMuscles: What happened? is an excellent series of gamedev post-mortems digging into the “why?” of particularly tormented game development lifecycles, often using anonymous dev testimonies. A lot of good cautionary tales, not limited to game dev, and actually not limited to development; these are good project management warnings. Chosen bits: XIII, Cyperpunk 2077.

The last person standing in the floppy disk business.