Hey frendz. Music, with the Emily Haines-esque raw pop of Kristin Hersh.

Internews:

• Humans have only 12 years to limit devastating climate changes.
• Kottke: Kurt Vonnegut on the role of artists in society.
• 💩😷⚠ Donaldese:
  • Kottke: A brief history of america’s shameful inaction on climate change.

Hola. This week's music is Hampshire & Foat.

On the news,

• Kurzgesagt: Why meat is the best worst thing in the world, et [fr] Élevage industriel : « Nous vivons un divorce total avec la nature » .
• Banksy painting self-destructs after fetching 1.4 M$ at Sotheby’s, 👍👍👍.
• [fr] Atelier10 - Repères 03.
• Re/code: Elites like Bezos think they’re being philanthropic, but they could do so much more. Via jwz.
• RPS: How The Witness fooled us all with a postmodern bait and switch.
• SMBC: Rise of the (confused) machines, funz.

Bonjour bonsoir, and music with deafheaven.

News:

• What would a truly representational US congress look like?, nice viz.
• SMBC: Trees.
• Tech:
  • [fr] Bien dit, via Standblog :

    Les enfants n’apprennent pas l’informatique à l’école, ils apprennent Microsoft (et Google et Facebook), ce qui revient à confier des cours de nutrition à Mac Donald’s ou leurs cours d'histoire, à Robert Faurisson

  • HN: Using Gmail? You will be force logged into Chrome.

Yes! No! Maybe! Hello, friends. Musique, avec un nouveau Grand blanc.

On the news:

• [fr] Standblog : La démission de Nicolas Hulot.

  Au-delà de l’organisation de l’Etat, ce qui cloche, ce qui nous mène dans le mur et que les chefs d’Etat doivent corriger de toute urgence, c’est le modèle économique dominant. Pendant que « la planète est en train de devenir une étuve, que nos ressources naturelles s’épuisent, que la biodiversité fond comme la neige au soleil », Emmanuel Macron, Edouard Philippe comme tous les dirigeants de la planète, pensent croissance, PIB, relance de la consommation…

  Bref, dixit Hulot, « on s’évertue à entretenir voire à réanimer un modèle économique marchand qui est la cause de tous ces désordres ». Et alors que « l’enjeu écologique est un enjeu culturel, sociétal, civilisationnel, on ne s’est pas du tout mis en ordre de marche pour l’aborder comme cela ».

• Kottke: In praise of public libraries.

  Your time at the library comes with absolutely no expectation that you buy anything. Or even that you even transact at all. And there’s certainly no implication that your data or your rights are being surrendered in return for the services you partake in.

  This rare openness and neutrality imbues libraries with a distinct sense of community, of us, of everyone having come together to fund and build and participate in this collective sharing of knowledge and space. All of that seems exceedingly rare in this increasingly commercial, exposed world of ours. In a way it’s quite amazing that the concept continues to persist at all.

• [fr] De bons articles d'Agnès Giard récemment :
  • Pourquoi les mouches de labo sont-elles mâles ?
    et Le sexisme médical peut-il tuer ?
  • Pourquoi dire «Non» : pour exciter le mâle ?
• SSC / Scott Alexander: The omnigenic model as metaphor for life.

Hey ho, long time no see. Music, with the relaxing bleeps of emancipator.

Around the wild wild interwebs,

• Kottke: Offering a more progressive definition of freedom.
• SSC launched an "Adversarial Collaboration Contest", where "two people with opposite views on a controversial issue work together to present a unified summary of the evidence and its implications". 👍 idea.
  • Are islam and liberal democracy compatible?
  • Should childhood vaccination be mandatory?, which prompted me to read about the Amish.
• Around bullshit jobs:
  • David Graeber - On bullshit jobs: a work rant.
  • SSC / Scott Alexander - Bulls**t jobs (part 1 of ∞) (HN)
• [fr] Monsieur Phi - Éthique animale : la probabilité d'une catastrophe (suite).
• “Final Offer”, a sci-fi short about interstellar negotiation, funz.
• [fr] Anne Archet - Senryūs électoraux, Autres senryūs électoraux.
• SMBC: Robot captcha.
• Tech:
  • Intel publishes microcode security patches, no benchmarking or comparison allowed! HN.
  • jwz: Major open source project revokes access to companies that work with ICE. Problematic for e.g. Debian packaging but not wholly unreasonable. Link to GitHub PR.

Hola, frendz! Good 🎵 this week: discovered the bright & spacious jazzy prog of I Think You're Awesome, the Portishead-esque vibes of Oracle Hysterical, and the rhythmic sax of Roller Trio.

News:

• Kottke: The carrot is not important; chasing it is and I've never had a goal.
• New No’s by Paul Chan, written after US' 2016 election:

  No to racists
  No to fascists
  No to taxes funding racists and fascists

  No mercy for rapists
  No pity for bigots
  No forgiveness for nativists
  No to all those

  No hope without rage
  No rage without teeth
  No separate peace
  No easy feat

  No to bounds by genders
  No to clickbait as culture
  No to news as truths
  No to art as untruths

  No anti-Semitic anything
  No Islamophobic anything
  No progress without others
  No meaning without meaning

  No means no
  No means no
  No means no
  No means no

• Grandmaster Flash hacked his first mixer using parts from Radio Shack.
• How would English sound if it were phonetically consistent?
• SMBC - Reverse Victorianism.
• xkcd #2033 - Repair or replace on our current attitude towards tech fix-ability.
• Tech:
  • Neil Postman - Five things we need to know about technological change (original PDF).

    1. All technological change is a trade-off. For every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage.
    2. The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population. This means that every new technology benefits some and harms others.
    3. Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Every technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards.
    4. Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. The consequences of technological change are always vast, often unpredictable and largely irreversible.
    5. Media tend to become mythic. Cars, planes, TV, movies, newspapers — they have achieved mythic status because they are perceived as gifts of nature, not as artifacts produced in a specific political and historical context.

  • xkcd#2030 - Voting software.
  • Good comment from HN user notatoad about Google AMP:

    AMP's innovation isn't a way to make pages fast. AMP is a way to sell other stakeholders on implementing technologies that make your website fast. All the stuff AMP does is stuff you could do yourself without the extra request to amp.js and the extra work to amp-ify your pages.

    But imagine you've got an advertising department that wants three different ad networks, a couple different managers that want to see stats from a couple different analytics platforms, and and the designer wants to load a font from fontsquirrel and another one from typekit and another one from google web fonts, and as a developer who wants to keep the site fast you have to fight them every single time they want to add something else that slows your site down. Having the same fight every time, with everybody else saying "oh, it's just one request. and this one is really critical" it's hard to keep fighting that fight.

    It's a lot easier to say "i can't do that, it doesn't work in AMP". If you can find a better way to convince large organizations that page load speed is a valuable metric, and more important that whatever other resource they want to load today, I'd love to hear it. But from what i've seen, AMP is the only thing that's had any success in tackling this problem.

  • There's Waldo is a robot that finds Waldo.
  • James Veitch: More adventures in replying to spam, thx bro.
  • Google data collection research, via DF.

    In “Google Data Collection,” Professor Douglas C. Schmidt, Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University, catalogs how much data Google is collecting about consumers and their most personal habits across all of its products and how that data is being tied together. The key findings include:

    • A dormant, stationary Android phone (with the Chrome browser active in the background) communicated location information to Google 340 times during a 24-hour period, or at an average of 14 data communications per hour. In fact, location information constituted 35 percent of all the data samples sent to Google.

    • For comparison’s sake, a similar experiment found that on an iOS device with Safari but not Chrome, Google could not collect any appreciable data unless a user was interacting with the device. Moreover, an idle Android phone running the Chrome browser sends back to Google nearly fifty times as many data requests per hour as an idle iOS phone running Safari.

Bonjour bonsoir, folks. This week's 🎶 is FAUXE.

On the news,

• Kottke: The history and future of the hardware store.
• Tech:
  • Got my dead-trees copy of The Rust Programming Language, it's good!
  • Doc Searls: Engineers vs. re-engineering.
  • Quartz: Everything bad about Facebook is bad for the same reason.

Hola, and music with Consider the Source and Happy Rhodes.

Tidbits for this week:

• Kottke: The weird & wonderful American roadtrip with John Margolies.
• Tech:
  • Nick Heer - The bullshit web. HN.
  • Steve Klabnik: Is wasm the return of Java applets & Flash? HN.

Bien le bonjour. Get some radioheadphones, 2+2=5 is 👍 live.

Around the interwebs,

• SSC / Scott Alexander on navigating our differences:
  • Fundamental value differences are not that fundamental.
  • The whole city is center.
• The hotel bathroom puzzle, or a great illustration of the XY problem.
• Kurt Vonnegut: Ladies & Gentlemen of A.D. 2088, via kottke.

  The sort of leaders we need now are not those who promise ultimate victory over nature through perseverance in living as we do right now, but those with the courage and intelligence to present to the world what appears to be nature's stern but reasonable surrender terms:

  1. Reduce and stabilize your population.
  2. Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.
  3. Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.
  4. Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you're at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.
  5. Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.
  6. Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean, and stupid.
  7. And so on. Or else.

• Kottke: How to ask a favor.
• [fr] Grain de philo : Voulons-nous mourir ? et FAQ de la mort !
• David Cain: There is no right decision.
• r/PhotoshopBattle: French president Macron celebrating victory, thx Louis.
• SMBC: The Best.
• Tech:
  • DF: Kara Swisher interviews Mark Zuckerberg.

    Zuckerberg is so wrong here. It is not hard at all to “impugn the intent” of Holocaust or Sandy Hook deniers. They’re fucking Nazis. The idea that these people are wrong but are making honest mistakes in good faith is nonsense. Facebook’s stance on this is genuinely detrimental to society. They’re offering a powerful platform that reaches the entire world to lunatics who, in the pre-internet age, were relegated to handing out mimeographs while spouting through a megaphone on a street corner.

  • Bloomberg: A global guide to state-sponsored trolling, via jwz.

    In Venezuela, prospective trolls sign up for Twitter and Instagram accounts at government-sanctioned kiosks in town squares and are rewarded for their participation with access to scarce food coupons, according to Venezuelan researcher Marianne Diaz of the group @DerechosDigitales. A self-described former troll in India says he was given a half-dozen Facebook accounts and eight cell phones after he joined a 300-person team that worked to intimidate opponents of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. And in Ecuador, contracting documents detail government payments to a public relations company that set up and ran a troll farm used to harass political opponents. [...]

    In response to revolutions and social movements launched on Twitter and Facebook, national governments initially censored content, blocked access to social media and used surveillance technology to monitor their citizens. But it turned out to be far more effective to simply inundate the platforms with a torrent of disinformation and anonymized threats -- what the researchers dubbed a strategy of "information abundance" made possible by the rapid spread of social media. [...]

    Turkey is a prime example, according to Camille Francois, who directed the Jigsaw project as a principal researcher at Google. Since the 2013 protests at Istanbul's Gezi Park, President Recep Erdogan's government has used a combination of online and offline repression to turn social media "into a near dead zone for genuine social protest in Turkey," Francois said. "Five years later, there is very little organically organized activity."

  • xkcd #2021 - Software Development. NOT TRUE, WE DON'T "load 500 of them into the cannon we made and shoot them at the wall", WE LET AMAZON DO IT.
• 💩😷⚠ Donaldese:
  • Old Steve Jobs on the constructive-destructive axis:

    In return for speaking at the retreat, Jobs got Murdoch to hear him out on Fox News, which he believed was destructive, harmful to the nation, and a blot on Murdoch’s reputation. “You’re blowing it with Fox News”, Jobs told him over dinner. “The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you’ve cast your lot with the destructive people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society. You can be better, and this is going to be your legacy if you’re not careful”. Jobs said he thought Murdoch did not really like how far Fox had gone. “Rupert’s a builder, not a tearer-downer”, he said. “I’ve had some meetings with James, and I think he agrees with me. I can just tell.”

Bonjour, frendz. This week's 🎵 is a fresh new Birds in row.

News:

• [fr] Fanny Britt - L’ode à un vieux couple.
• Kottke reminds us about Buckminster Fuller in March 30, 1970 edition of New York Magazine:

  We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

• Kottke: Manually pixelated food.
• Tech:
  • Funfunfunction - Why care how your tools work? Good bits on motivation and tolerance to change.
  • jwz - Facebook's not-at-all-dystopian facial recognition patent application for brick-and-mortar surveillance.
  • Michael Geist - The state of canadian wireless in one chart: no one has carriers that generate more revenue with less usage (pdf report). WJW:

    Canada is a global outlier (or leader if you are a telecom executive). Simply put, no one has carriers that generate more revenue with less usage per SIM than Canada.

    It is difficult to overstate how much the lack of wireless competitiveness is holding back the Canadian market. With the CRTC refusing to take act and carriers continuing to increase fees (particularly on overage fees that generate more than a billion in revenue per year), it falls to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains to recognize that longstanding failed Canadian wireless policies must change.

  • iOS bug reveals how Apple censors the Taiwanese flag on Chinese iPhones.
  • Thomas Dullien on complexity emerging from our overpowered-then-specialized general-purpose computers, and the resulting security challenges (slides), via Schneier. Liked this quote in particular:

    How does one design an electric motor? Would you attach a bathtub to it, simply because one was available? Would a bouquet of flowers help? A heap of rocks? No, you would use just those elements necessary to its purpose and make it no larger than needed — and you would incorporate safety factors. Function controls design.

    – Prof. Bernardo de la Paz in "The moon is a harsh Mistress", Robert A. Heinlein

  • Are free societies at a disadvantage in national cybersecurity?

    Dan Geer often said that "the price of freedom is the probability of crime." We are willing to pay this price because it isn't that high. As technology makes individual and small-group actors more powerful, this price will get higher. Will there be a point in the future where free and open societies will no longer be able to survive? I honestly don't know.

• 💩😷⚠ Donaldese:
  • New Yorker: Man Wins “Why Trump Shouldn’t Go to Prison” Essay Contest, funz.

HelloooooOoooo. Music: Eastern Standard.

On the news,

• SSC / Scott Alexander on Piketty's Capital in the twenty-first century: book review, highlights, comments highlights.
• SSC / Scott Alexander - Dissolving the Fermi paradox (paper: arxiv, pdf).
• [fr] IRIS - Bullshit jobs, brown-out et revenu minimum. Deuxième partie.
• Good SMBCs: Coupling, Knock knock.
• jwz - Ben avli(S), awesome.
• Tech:
  • Cory Doctorow - Zuck’s empire of oily rags. HN.

    It’s as though Mark Zuckerberg woke up one morning and realized that the oily rags he’d been accumulating in his garage could be refined for an extremely low-grade, low-value crude oil. No one would pay very much for this oil, but there were a lot of oily rags, and provided no one asked him to pay for the inevitable horrific fires that would result from filling the world’s garages with oily rags, he could turn a tidy profit.

    A decade later, everything is on fire and we’re trying to tell Zuck and his friends that they’re going to need to pay for the damage and install the kinds of fire-suppression gear that anyone storing oily rags should have invested in from the beginning, and the commercial surveillance industry is absolutely unwilling to contemplate anything of the sort.

    That’s because dossiers on billions of people hold the power to wreak almost unimaginable harm, and yet, each dossier brings in just a few dollars a year. For commercial surveillance to be cost effective, it has to socialize all the risks associated with mass surveillance and privatize all the gains.

    There’s an old-fashioned word for this: corruption. In corrupt systems, a few bad actors cost everyone else billions in order to bring in millions – the savings a factory can realize from dumping pollution in the water supply are much smaller than the costs we all bear from being poisoned by effluent. But the costs are widely diffused while the gains are tightly concentrated, so the beneficiaries of corruption can always outspend their victims to stay clear.

    Facebook doesn’t have a mind-control problem, it has a corruption problem. Cambridge Analytica didn’t convince decent people to become racists; they convinced racists to become voters.

  • Wired - Marketing firm Exactis leaked a personal info database with 340 million records. HN.

Hey ho! Music, with SEIROM.

And little news this week, frendz. Oh well.

• Justin Peters: A digtial artist who merges reality with his imagination, via kottke.
• Tech:
  • jwz: Today in Uber autonomous murderbot news.
  • jwz: STARTTLS Everywhere, on email centralization because Gmail.

Music: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and The Armed, thx Sam.

News:

• xkcd - Customer Rewards, on our personal data.
• [fr] Les 400 culs : Femme et melon, à peine les connaît-on.
• Tech:
  • [fr] Hausse des tarifs de Google Maps : « On a plus que jamais besoin d’alternatives libres »

    Ces nouveaux tarifs posent question, car ils paraissent disproportionnés par rapport aux coûts réels. Par ailleurs, si Google a fourni gratuitement pendant des années à des milliers de clients un service qui avait un coût aussi élevé, il a clairement pratiqué du dumping pour empêcher d’autres acteurs d’émerger. Avec succès. Des initiatives ont vu le jour, notamment grâce aux données d’Openstreetmap, comme Mapbox aux Etats-Unis. Mais globalement, l’écosystème a été paralysé.

  • Schneier: Censorship in the age of large cloud providers:

    In 1993, John Gilmore famously said that "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." That was technically true when he said it but only because the routing structure of the Internet was so distributed. As centralization increases, the Internet loses that robustness, and censorship by governments and companies becomes easier.

  • And more Schneier: Data protection laws are shining a needed light on a secretive industry.
  • The Inner-platform effect is "the tendency of software architects to create a system so customizable as to become a replica, and often a poor replica, of the software development platform they are using". Via Leah Neukirchen.
• Donaldese:
  • Kottke / New Yorker: The language of the Trump administration is the language of domestic violence.

Hi frendz! This weeks music is Celestial Trax.

News!

• Evonomics: Capital’s share of income is way higher than you think. About half of US household income is derived from wealth, and 60% of that wealth is inherited.

  Pretty hard to square this reality with the widely held view of prosperous, hard-working makers vs indolent do-nothing takers. Who's who?

• Kottke: Willpower, wealth, and the marshmallow test.

  The new study finds limited support for the idea that being able to delay gratification leads to better outcomes. Instead, it suggests that the capacity to hold out for a second marshmallow is shaped in large part by a child’s social and economic background — and, in turn, that that background, not the ability to delay gratification, is what’s behind kids’ long-term success.

  The failed replication of the marshmallow test does more than just debunk the earlier notion; it suggests other possible explanations for why poorer kids would be less motivated to wait for that second marshmallow. For them, daily life holds fewer guarantees: There might be food in the pantry today, but there might not be tomorrow, so there is a risk that comes with waiting. And even if their parents promise to buy more of a certain food, sometimes that promise gets broken out of financial necessity.

• [fr/qc] Le Devoir : Magasiner quand on est noir au Canada, une illustration du racisme au quotidien.
• Kottke: Super freaky recently declassified NSA security posters.
• SMBC: Robot frustrated at humans.
• jakelikesonions: Life is full of peaks and valleys.
• Tech:
  • AMPstinction. HN.
  • Marianne Bellotti: The land before binary. HN.

Hi there. Music, with CARROM.

News news news:

• Funfunfunction: Interpret generously, on debate / rhetoric vs. discussion / understanding. 👍👍👍.
• Aeon: You don’t have a right to believe whatever you want to, via kottke.
• [fr] Le Monde - Vidéosurveillance : paradigme du technosolutionnisme.
• [fr/qc] Deux liens Nouveau Projet sur la pollution et les transports :
  • Ventes record de VUS/essence : Il faut cesser d’investir dans le problème.
  • L’Estonie, premier pays aux transports gratuits ?
• Kottke: Amazing 1980s tech company logos, Brutalist cuckoo clocks.
• 五月病, via waxy.
• SMBC: State of the union, AMERICA.
• Tech:
  • GDPR leading to EU being served smaller tracking truckloads, leading to old-new epiphanies that tracking truckloads slows down sites. Via DF.
    • The Verge: 32s → 5s load time, 61 → 2 JS files, 2MB → 1 MB.
    • USA Today: 45s → 3s load time, 124 → 0 JS files, 5.2MB → 0.5MB, 500 → 34 HTTP requests.
  • LinuxJournal - Kyle Rankin: Why you should do it yourself.
  • Reverse emulating the NES, via waxy.
  • Bloomberg: Microsoft to acquire GitHub, oÔ. HN.

Guuuten tag, everyone. Music, with Arabstazy / Aya Metwalli.

On the news this week:

• [fr] Monsieur Phi - Conférence sur la super-intelligence.
• Guardian: Why we should bulldoze the business school.
• SMBC: Why? "Politics is like marriage - the goal is to win".
• Tech:
  • Morning paper - Algorithmic glass ceiling in social networks: the effects of social recommendations on network diversity.
  • Nabil Hassein: Computing and climate change.
  • jwz: Uber as Landfill Capitalism.
  • ACLU: Amazon teams up with law enforcement to deploy dangerous new face recognition technology.
  • WaPo: FBI repeatedly overstated encryption threat figures to congress, public
• 💩😷⚠ Donaldese:
  • AP: EPA bars AP and CNN from summit on contaminants.

O hai, frendz. Music this week with Rev. Lewis and mmph.

In the papers,

• Scott Alexander - Basic income, not basic jobs: against hijacking utopia, on UBI. Comments highlights followup.
• Funfunfunction: Politeness or clarity? 👍, on communication: adapting your message to the audience, and debunking the Torvaldese conception of politeness as fluff.
• New Republic: Don’t blame phones for narcissism and the self as a “sack of noisy ghosts”. Via [fr] Nouveau Projet.
• Chris M. Forsyth: Subway pictures in Montréal and elsewhere.
• Segmented type, via waxy.
• SMBC on cryptocurrencies and the lord.
• Tech:
  • Jacques Mattheij: GDPR hysteria and GDPR hysteria part II, nuts and bolts, actionable advice. HN.
• 💩😷⚠ Donaldese:
  • Kottke: Against political analogies.

👋 ! Music: Joachim Mencel Quintet, Gyan Riley, Just Mustard, Jon Hopkins.

News:

• Scott Alexander / SSC: Varieties of argumentative experience, 👍👍👍.
• [fr] La Presse : Un monde sans information ? Via Nouveau Projet.

  Vous payez déjà beaucoup pour vous informer. L’argent que vous avez économisé sur votre abonnement à La Presse, vous le dépensez, et même davantage, sur la quincaillerie qui vous permet de lire La Presse+.

  Le problème, c’est qu’avant, cet argent servait à payer des journalistes. Aujourd’hui, la même somme sert à enrichir des entreprises de téléphonie mobile et des multinationales technos.

• EV#165 - Zavain Dar: New radical empiricism.

  A young Kepler today likely wouldn’t look into the sky in search for structure, but rather collect the prior month of visual sky data and train a recurrent neural network to predict tomorrow night’s sky. [...]

  The availability of data and machine learning might create new pathways of exploration in a range of domains, where are traditional techniques have become stuck. It's almost as if the availability of data (and better maths with which to manipulate it) allows us to create new dimensions from which to establish vantage points to surveil the problem set.

• I played Fortnite and figured out the universe, on how humans can turn zero-sum situations into nonzero-sum ones. Via Kottke.
• New Yorker: The United States of Japan, via waxy.
• An online collection of high-res scans of M.C. Escher’s prints.
• [fr] Les 400 culs : Il n’y a pas de rêve heureux ?
• The Metro Gun Share Program.
• Tech:
  • oÔ: Google’s AI sounds like a human on the phone — should we be worried? to which Kottke gathers questions around Should our machines sound human?
  • oÔ again: Write emails faster with Smart Compose in Gmail. HN.
  • jwz: TicketBastard wants your biometrics.

O hai! 🎹 🥁 🎶: Steve you are a dick, to my cat-neighbor Steeve with two "e"s, Kikuji, Group Listening, Orquesta Akokán, Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois.

And on the news,

• [fr] Monsieur Phi : La liberté en jeu.
• A mass of copyrighted works is about to enter the US Public Domain.
• [fr] Le devoir : Pourquoi y a-t-il incompréhension entre les critiques de cinéma et les fans ? Via Nouveau Projet.
• On customers Divine Discontent.
• [fr/qc] Hein ? Merci Isa.
• SMBC on mimicry: Rye ← wheat, Plant ← programmer.
• Tech:
  • Linux Journal: Privacy is still personal, excellent reminder. ♥ the parallels between physical privacy (through clothing and shelter) and digital (barely existent) privacy.
  • Amazon & Bezos being shitty pieces of shitful shits:
    • Jeff Bezos sees space as the “only” option to spend his money on.
    • Amazon puts 7,000 jobs on hold because of a tax that would help Seattle's homeless population.
  • WaPo: WhatsApp founder & employees plan to leave after parent Facebook attempts to weaken encryption.
  • Any company using facebook for user ID is foolish.
  • Michael Geist - Canada: world’s worst wireless pricing.
  • xkcd #1988: Containers and #1989: IMHO.

Hey ho; !@#$% awesome sounds from Höga Nord Rekords.

News:

• NYT: Breathing our cities polluted air.
• David Cain: Why the other side won’t listen to reason.
• Magnasanti: the largest and most terrifying SimCity. HN.
• Goood xkcd week: #1984: Misinterpretation, #1985: Meteorologist.
• SMBC: Platypus.