Hi geeks, and music with new Esmerine, and Totorro (merci Laurie).
Everything was forever until it was no more by Esmerine (bandcamp.com)
Come to Mexico by Totorro (bandcamp.com)
Charity Majors @ WTFisSRE: It is time to fulfill the promise of Continuous Delivery. Techies, this is a must-see talk that will give you hope and ammo to go push for more CD at $job, and save your sanity. Thx Ian.
Woop. On the music side, PIANO CHAT / Marceau Boré is awesome. Also, new old Tellier.
Ours Molaire by PIANO CHAT (bandcamp.com)
NOUS by PIANO CHAT (bandcamp.com)
Lands by PIANO CHAT (bandcamp.com)
Schoon Donker by Marceau Boré (bandcamp.com)
La Ritournelle EP [New edition] by Sébastien Tellier (bandcamp.com)
Stereogum: Why are musicians expected to be miserable on tour just to break even? and Adam Neely of Sungazer on their tour expenses. Via waxy.
Kevin Kelly: 103 bits of advice.
👋 geeks, and music with Plastikman & Chilly Gonzales.
Consumed In Key by Plastikman & Chilly Gonzales (bandcamp.com)
[fr/qc] Caribou: Qu’est-ce qu’un prix juste ? Merci Berthe.
It’s union time at/around U.S. software bigcorps: Raven software QA, Dragon Age QA, a second Amazon warehouse, Apple Retail.
Bonjour bonsoir frendz, and music with new King Gizzard.
Omnium Gatherum by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard (bandcamp.com)
Kottke: The bagworm caterpillar is quite the animal architect. THIS IS THE MOST AWESOME THING. More photos.
Ottoman leaf calligraphy, via Nelson.
Kottke: The mass delusion of the pandemic being over.
“Just listen to Jaron Lanier talk about social media” is my new go-to answer to why I’m not using them: Who is civilization for? , HOPE 2020 keynote, How the internet failed and how to recreate it. Thx James.
Magnetron the GPT3 AI. Via Nelson.
Vice: Leaked “shill price list” shows wild world of cryptocurrencies promos.
Nerds! Hello, and music, with lovely new Daniel Rossen.
You belong there by Daniel Rossen (bandcamp.com)
Life advice from NYC chess hustlers, via Kottke.
The endgames of bad faith communication. HN.
Michael Hobbes - Anatomy of a moral panic: The “free speech crisis”.
Tom Murphy - Harder Drive: Hard drives we didn’t want or need. 👏👏👏.
SIGBOVIK 2022 proceedings (PDF).
Inigo Quilez: Painting a landscape with math, via waxy.
Eric Goldman: Content moderation remedies.
White House: Executive order on improving USA cybersecurity. Of particular interest, the requirement of an “SBOM” (Software Bill Of Materials) to list dependencies (node modules, go packages, rust crates, etc) and understand / mitigate risks associated to them. Via Schneier.
Wikipedia: Solar cell research, via Nelson.
Horrible edge cases to consider when dealing with music 😄, via Trivium.
jwz: Autonomous murderbot pulled over by SFPD; tries to escape 😄.
Hi geeks. This week’s music is Floating Points.
Grammar by Floating Points (bandcamp.com)
[fr] Monsieur Phi : Oui au scrutin par approbation. EDIT 12 avril complémenté de son Analyse par Théo Delemazure, merci Berthe.
David Broockman & Joshua Kalla: Effects of partisan media on viewers’ beliefs and attitudes: a field experiment with Fox News viewers (link to paper).
SMBC: Punching bags, Game.
Two new mindblowing AIs generating images/art from natural language: DALL·E 2 (paper, thoughts by Sam Altman, reddit with tons of examples, plenty more illustrating twitter bios) and MidJourney. Via waxy.
adn: Why indiedev creativity is stagnant and how to fix it.
Intercept: New Amazon worker chat app would ban words like “Union”, “Restrooms”, “Pay Raise”, “Plantation”, “Grievance”, “Slave labor”, “This is dumb”, “Living wage”, “Diversity”, “Vaccine”, and others. HN.
Comparing what TikTok shows to Russian vs. Ukrainian users. Via waxy.
Atlantic / Hilary J. Allen: Are cryptocurrencies re-creating the 2008 financial crisis?
Woop. Music, with fresh new P’tit Belliveau.
Un homme et son piano by P'tit Belliveau (bandcamp.com)
[fr] Sista : Et si on posait les mêmes questions aux chefs d’entreprise hommes qu’aux femmes ? Via Nouveau projet.
The highest resolution photo of the sun ever taken.
jwz / DNA Lounge: Musicians are begging fans to mask up at concerts.
ONF: Dans l’ombre du “Star Wars Kid”.
Tom Scott: The Thames barrier must never fail. Here’s why it doesn’t.
Amazon workers vote to unionize Staten Island warehouse (the first Amazon union in the U.S.). With descriptions of Amazon’s union-busting tactics. Via waxy.
Ars: Google’s next US antitrust issue: Google Maps.
Axie Infinity’s “Ronin” network suffers $625M exploit. BEAUTIFUL.
Bonjour bonsoir nerds, and music with Skinless Lizard + Cold Storage.
Death Went Smiling by Skinless Lizard (bandcamp.com)
Slipstream - the music from WipE'out'' by CoLD SToRAGE (bandcamp.com)
Slate: Russians are downloading Wikipedia before it gets banned.
Kottke: A collection of unusual geological landforms.
Scott Alexander: Debating “therapy: good or bad?” again. Reddit.
WipEout PSX + Windows source code! HN.
Hi geeks, and music with Ben Lukas Boysen, and Sectioned (thx Sam).
Clarion by Ben Lukas Boysen (bandcamp.com)
Annihilated by Sectioned (bandcamp.com)
[fr] Médiapart - Oligarques russes, plongée dans le système Poutine. La semaine dernière j’étais agacé par l’insistance des médias occidentaux à utiliser de façon isolée ce mot “oligarque”, singularisant les accaparateurs de pouvoir russes, et soustrayant les nôtres du même regard critique. Il y a toutefois des particularités au système russe, que creuse cette entrevue.
Then, back on the topic of western oligarchy and benefiting from the russian system: Kottke: Putin’s oligarchs and the London laundromat, and New Yorker: Turning the focus on America’s oligarchs.
Scott Alexander: Ukraine thoughts.
[fr] Osons causer - Gaz russe : comment Poutine a piégé l’Europe.
Kottke: Ukrainian stamp design contest.
Schwarzy’s “Message to the russian people” is interesting propaganda.
Kottke: Winners of the 2021 World Nature Photography Awards, Winners of the 2022 Sony World Photography Awards.
[fr/qc] L’architecture vernaculaire Québécoise.
[fr] Blast cause avec Philippe Poutou.
Kottke: Mimi Choi’s surrealist makeup.
SMBC: Refresh, Scythe, Evolutionist.
Kottke: RCA’s “SelectaVision”, the weird and doomed early 80s video record player, plus part 4 and part 5.
Noclip Documentary - Black Mesa: 16 years to remake Half-Life.
Ars: Is Elden Ring “hard”? , which led me to discover Kaizo Mario World.
Timezone fun! Also, BuzzFeed: Everyone was surprised the senate unanimously passed permanent DST, especially the senators.
Rohan Kumar: An inventory of search engines with their own indexes.
Atlantic: Lessons from 19 years in the (Second Life) metaverse.
Light mode, dark mode, and gen-z mode.
Jenny Nicholson: The gender bias inside GPT-3.
[fr] Nitot : En vrac sur les NFTs, cryptomonnaies, et blockchains.
SPAs were a mistake. Are, not were. HN.
Hi frendz. No new music this week; have my (so far) favorite Godspeed.
Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress by Godspeed You! Black Emperor (bandcamp.com)
OKAY, MAINSTREAM OCCIDENTAL MEDIA, YOU DON’T LIKE RUSSIAN “OLIGARCHS”. ME NEITHER. Now, will you apply the definition of oligarchy to our own occidental societies and remember to report on our own homegrown oligarchs, to name them as such, to investigate their hoarding of power in anti-democratic and socially-destructive ways, their manipulation of media, and their fiscal evasion, pretty please? Fffffuck I want to kick the radio/screen every time I hear this thought-gagball of a propaganda word our journalists carefully save for rich russian assholes while avoiding applying it to rich occidental assholes, zealotly virtue-signalling the occident and avoiding introspection. As if our “exploitative rich dudes with power and far-reaching hands, but born in sweet’Merica / Europe” were not oligarchs. Q: “Uuuh, maybe our oligarchs pay the media too, and it’s difficult to bite the hand that feeds you?” A: Yeah yeah.
[fr] Médiapart fait du bon travail de terrain et d’entrevues 👏.
Nadine White / The Independent: The racial bias in western media’s Ukraine coverage is shameful. Ou en français : Viktorovitch : pour Zemmour et Bardella, tous les réfugiés ne se valent pas.
Paweł Jońca: Russian bear steps on Ukrainian lego.
Casey Newton: The internet is a force multiplier for Ukraine.
[fr] Nitot : Que dit le nouveau rapport du GIEC sur l'adaptation ?
MIT: The staggering ecological impacts of computation and “the cloud”.
Derek Sivers: Write plain text files (HN). Fuck yes.
No-Frauds Club: Following the fun - A conversation with Raigan Burns (designer of games N and N++). Excellent game design chat.
Alexander Pruss: Game Boy Fiver (Wordle clone) - How to compress 12972 five-letter words to 17871 bytes. Via Leah Neukirchen.
Toward an ethics and etiquette for electronic mail (1985).
Epic Games buys Bandcamp. Pitchfork, HN.
Ars: Cybercriminal-o-cryptobros who breached Nvidia threaten with more IP leak if Nvidia doesn’t stop stimying cryptomining (HN).
Nick Heer: Meta (Facebook) launders its reputation through small businesses:
All Apple did to push Meta’s buttons is that it now requires explicit consent for tracking. If Meta’s business model cannot handle a simple question of permissions, that is a pretty crappy business model. It should have been better prepared for a day when lawmakers started asking questions.
But it was not. Meta’s best move has been to use the plight of small businesses, lured by its short-term promises, to excuse its unethical practices. Shame.
👋 nerds, and music with Floating Points and Lala Lala.
Promises by Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra (bandcamp.com)
I want the door to open by Lala Lala (bandcamp.com)
[fr] Salomé Zourabichvili (présidente de la République de Géorgie) @ France Inter : Poutine est en train de provoquer ce qu’il voulait éviter”. Merci Berthe.
RealLifeLore (Joseph Pisenti): Why Russia is invading Ukraine.
Au sujet de du prétexte de Poutine de “dénazifier” l’Ukraine,
Wikipedia: War in Donbas & casualties, 2014 Donbas status referendums.
Data Center Dynamics: How Russia took over the internet in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
Monsieur Phi - Justice et héritage.
John Green: How to make potatoes while dread presses in from every direction.
Sporks: Win32 is the stable Linux userland ABI. HN.
RPS: The jolly co-operation of localising Dark Souls.
RPS: Making games accessible isn't the same as making them easy.
Troy Hunt: How everything we’re told about website identity assurance is wrong.
David Rosenthal @ Stanford EE380: Can we mitigate cryptocurrencies’ externalities? (text). Also from him, Daniel Rosenthal: Making sure “Number Go Up”.
DF: Facebook’s stolen privacy ecosystem:
I often turn to the analogy of Facebook’s profiting from exploiting users’ privacy —and complaining about Apple now giving users control being bad for business— to that of a pawnshop complaining about the police cracking down on a burglary spree that the pawnshop had profited from. There are small businesses that are built on Facebook, which depend upon Facebook’s surveillance-based ad targeting.
But arguing that it’s wrong, in any way, for Apple (and perhaps, soon Google) to give users the control to close these tracking loopholes because it’s going to hurt these small businesses built atop Facebook’s targeted ad capabilities is like arguing about the plight of small business that depend upon cheap goods purchased from the hypothetical pawnshop that’s been buying those goods from burglars. The whole thing has [...] been illegitimate, even if the small businesses did nothing wrong themselves.
Hi geeks, and music with new Big Thief and Zeal & Ardor.
Dragon new warm mountain i believe in you by Big Thief (bandcamp.com)
Zeal & Ardor by Zeal and Ardor (bandcamp.com)
Kreative Kontrol #667: Efrim Manuel Menuck, thx Berthe.
[fr] Changements climatiques : Deux bons Thinkerview avec Aurore Stéphant, et Jean-Marc Jancovici + Laurent Morel. Aussi, [fr] Nitot : Notre rapport toxique à l'automobile. Also, SMBC: Omission.
Lu Pan: Don't point out something wrong immediately. HN.
Plague: Measles makes your immune system forget its protections against past illness, et [fr] Médiapart - Covid long.
Radionews: “OK Computer but everything is my voice”, and NPR: Greenwood pretended to play the keyboard when he joined Radiohead.
With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.
Casey Newton interviews Molly White, author of Web 3 is going great. 👏:
I don't see a future for web3, and I am quite critical of it. But I do acknowledge that despite the very negative things I've highlighted about it, there are some positives. It's drawing attention to a lot of things that I am delighted to see highlighted: community-driven projects, community organizing, and open source software, to name a few. It's also drawing a lot of people in to get involved with tech, often from new backgrounds (artists, for example), and that's great. I am hoping that even if web3 turns out to be a disaster, and I do think it will, some of those people stick around, and keep going with open source software and community-driven projects without all of the blockchain bullshit. That could be very powerful.
As far as specific projects, if anything good comes out of web3, I expect it will emerge despite the technologies rather than as a result of them. There are all kinds of people trying to solve very real problems, but they are putting all their eggs in the one basket: a type of datastore that's often very expensive and inefficient, and which introduces complexities around decentralization, immutability, and privacy that many projects will find impossible to overcome.
Anil Dash: That broken tech/content culture cycle.
DF: On Spotify’s ambitions to dominate podcasting, and Spotify is acquiring two major podcast surveillance “ad tech” platforms. Well summed up by Gruber:
Spotify is trying to do to podcasting what Facebook did to “having your own website”.
Music: La colonie de vacances, Burial + Four Tet, Rone.
La colonie de vacances (bandcamp.com)
Nova/Moth by Burial + Four Tet (bandcamp.com)
Ghosts by Rone (bandcamp.com)
jwz on Long COVID and the importance of vaccination: Wherein nobody’s boosted, and nobody believes that Long COVID exists. And links to:
[fr] Hartmut Rosa : Aliénés, à la fois libres et perdus, via Atelier 10.
Scott Alexander: Heuristics that almost always work. HN.
[fr] Héritage : Stupid Economics, Le Monde, Usul, Monsieur Phi.
Michael Hobbes: “Cancel culture” is a moral panic, via Kottke. If needed, Sociology Tutor: Moral panics.
Cheese caves and food surpluses: Why the U.S. government currently stores 1.4 billion lbs of cheese.
Monty Python: French taunting, thx Gordu.
SMBC: Model behavior, Reviews.
Martin Paul Eve: Warez - the infrastructure and aesthetics of piracy.
Drew DeVault: Framing accessibility in broader terms.
Woop dee woop, people. This week on the music side: new old Cerberus Shoal, Imarhan, Skinless Lizard, La colonie de vacances.
Chaiming the Knobblessone by Cerberus Shoal (bandcamp.com)
Aboogi by Imarhan (bandcamp.com)
Alpaca by Skinless Lizard (bandcamp.com)
ECHT by La Colonie de Vacances (bandcamp.com)
[fr] Monsieur Phi - Socrate : la dernière interview 😄👌👏.
[fr] Gaël Giraud - 12 mesures pour 2022.
xkcd #2576: Control Group, #2577: Sea Chase 😄, which made me discover the Dymaxion map.
A brief compendium of modernist homes for movie villains with flawless taste, via Atelier 10.
[fr] L'esprit de l'escalier.
Kottke: Wordle sold to NYT, and that’s a good thing.
Yehudit Mam: The real value of NFTs, highlighting stories of artists who have found a new market. Okay, that exists. Via Nelson.
Jblow: The most frustrating thing in your life.
Aubrey Hirsch on harassment and existing as a woman online.
Yahtzee Croshaw / Extra Punctuation: What the hell happened to mobile gaming?
Robin Berjon on “Topics”, Google’s proposal replacement for 3rd-party cookies and abandoned FLoC.
Do not let Spotify convince you that Joe Rogan is a moderation problem (it’s an editorial choice). Via waxy.
Atlantic: The (NFT) internet is just investment banking now.
Hi geeks, and music with Hania Rani and Russian choir (1, 2), merci Isa.
Alone I set out on the road - Выхожу один я на дорогу (youtube-nocookie.com)
Where are you flying, cuckoo? - Куда летишь, кукушечка (youtube-nocookie.com)
Live from Studio S2 by Hania Rani (bandcamp.com)
Scott Alexander: Bounded distrust.
Nature Photographer of Year 2021.
Alex Falcone: “I have nothing to hide (and that’s a shame because I love hiding stuff)” 😄.
Yanis Varoufakis on crypto / NFTs and techno-feudalism. An excellent complement to last week’s Dan Olson: The problem with NFTs, which yes you should totally spend 2 hours watching —or download to your phone and listen to! There's little to see—.
Nvidia: face-vid2vid, “One-shot free-view neural talking-head synthesis for video conferencing”.
👋 and happy week, people. On the music side, Arooj Aftab.
Vulture Prince by Arooj Aftab (bandcamp.com)
[fr] Dirty Biology #83 - Faut-il laisser brûler ces forêts ?
Kottke: Tree root system drawings.
xkcd #2569: Hypothesis Generation.
Rolling Stone: U.K. government plans publicity campaign to build public sentiment against end-to-end encryption, also covered by EFF. Via DF & Reddit.
Dan Olson: The problem with NFTs. 👏👏👏.
Bitcoin energy consumption index, via TechRepublic. “Planet-incinerating” indeed.
jwz: U.S. IRS login makes you take a selfie for this security company you've never heard of.
Hi frendz. Lots of gud newly-discovered music this week: Colin Fisher, Willie Dunn, Labelle.
Reflections of the Invisible World by Colin Fisher (bandcamp.com)
Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies: The Willie Dunn Anthology (bandcamp.com)
Éclat by Labelle (bandcamp.com)
Berlin’s urban transformation is wunderbar: an SF transplant’s view.
Kottke: Fashion for hostile architecture.
Robert Wills - Light years ahead: The 1969 Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), thx Heinz. I like the 6 design principles he extracts:
- Use a high-level language
- Divide into jobs
- Restart on failure
- Checkpoint good state
- Hardware monitors the software
- Send telemetry
Yahtzee Croshaw – Extra Punctuation: Bad games are better than bland games.
Steam - Mon Bazou, a.k.a. Need For Speed: Côte Nord, featuring un simulateur de coupe de bois, de cabane à sucre, et de culture de cannabis.
Vice: Google’s union-busting “Project Vivian” campaign.
Wired: Google’s alleged scheme to corner the online ad market.
Hi geeks. The weekly grooves are L'Éclair, merci Sam.
Sauropoda by L'Eclair (bandcamp.com)
[fr] André Grimaldi & Serge Slama @ Mediapart - Irresponsabilité des non-vaccinés.
[fr] La climatologue Valérie Masson-Delmotte commente le film “Don’t look up”.
[fr] Nitot - En vrac début 2022 climat & tech.
Real Engineering - Engineering the James Webb telescope and Smarter Every Day 262 - How does the James Webb Space Telescope work?.
Lots of crypto / “web3” blah this week. A selection, ordered from least to most ranty:
Also, The Verge: Signal’s plausibly incoming integration of easy crypto payments will attract criminals and could offer an excuse for regulators to eliminate end-to-end encrypted chat. Via nelson.
Linus Akesson: Monti On The 'Bin and Qwertuoso.
¡Feliz año nuevo!, folks 🎉. Have some Loraine James.
Reflection by Loraine James (bandcamp.com)
[fr] L'Histoire nous le dira est la chaîne vidéo d’un docteur en histoire québécois qui amène une perspective historique bienvenue à plein de choses. Un Monsieur Phi de l’histoire, efficace et digeste. Merci Heinz.
Atlantic & David Henkin: The weird unit of time that is the 7-day week.
Kottke: The photos of the year for 2021.
Oldie but goodie, thx James: Onion - Yamaha CEO Pleased With Current Production Of Jet Skis, Alto Saxophones, Snowmobiles, Power Generators, Scooters, Golf Carts.
xkcd #2560 - Confounding Variables.
Jaron Lanier (2010) What is a person? Thx James.
Benno Rice (LCA 2020) What UNIX cost us. Felt like an average tech rant for the first half, but keep at it, it’s worth its time for the last half that widens to broader socio-cultural questions still related to the initial point. Merci Heinz.
Jonathan Blow: OOP is shuffling papers on your desk.
adn: Status addicts and Anti-mimetic tactics for living a counter-cultural life (HN).
Bonjour bonsoir, and music with Magdalena Bay & aya.
Mercurial World by Magdalena Bay (bandcamp.com)
im hole by aya (bandcamp.com)
2021 as viewed by Associated Press’ photos.
Scott Alexander: The phrase “No Evidence” is a red flag for bad science communication, and Addendum.
[fr] Thinkerview - Clément Viktorovitch et Étienne Klein, 👏👏👏.
[fr] Le très très savoureux journal de campagne de Pierre-Emmanuel Barré est d’utilité publique. Merci Berthe.
Intercept: Your debt is someone else’s asset.
Project Zero: A deep dive into an NSO zero-click iMessage exploit and related xkcd #2556: Turing complete.
CHUNGUS 2, a 1Hz Minecraft CPU — capable of running Tetris, Snake, and more in real-time with MCHPRS, a server that speeds up redstone computation by up to 180x. Via waxy.
[fr] Nitot : En vrac de Noël.
@brohrer: War stories please. What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on? Merci Heinz.