¡Feliz año nuevo!, folks 🎉. Have some Loraine James.

News

[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.

• Sélection {épidémies, virus, vaccins, quarantaines} : Émeute anti-vaccins à Montréal en 1885, L'histoire des quarantaines, Port du masque et épidémies, Grippe espagnole au Québec, Peste de Londres en 1665.
• En vrac : Origines et histoire du racisme, Depuis quand est-on poli, Crise du verglas au Québec de 1998, Sexualité des prêtres.

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.

SMBC: Science, Wizardry.

xkcd #2560 - Confounding Variables.

Tech

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).

a normal person explains cryptocurrency 😄.

Bonjour bonsoir, and music with Magdalena Bay & aya.

News

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.

SMBC - Hey man.

Tech

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.

unicode is fun.

👋, humans. Have some ocnotes, thx James.

News

jwz: Vaccination and base rate fallacy.

SMBC: Feral economist.

Yankee Candle’s stages of abstraction, via waxy.

Tech

Another 👌 optimization lecture by Casey Muratori (of Handmade Hero) extracted from his “refterm” project aiming at building a performant terminal emulator: 1. Philosophies of optimization, 2. Slow code isolation, 3. Minimal buffer processing, 4. Glyph hash table, 5. Parsing with SIMD.

Hellooo frendz. Have some old new Nils Frahm.

News

Kottke: Arctic snow goggles, How bikes work.

[fr] 10 points sur la taxation mondiale des multinationales.

Tech

Casey Muratori: Where does bad code come from? and Q&A. TL;DR: development drifting away from the real low-level work to be done, through { 1. cargo culting of software “best practices” out of touch with hard reality, 2. wasteful tooling, too many layers & dependencies }. I would add 3. removal of constraints by steady hardware progress hiding & enabling software sloppiness.

Brown; color is weird. Which made me discover Technology Connections, a collection of amazing and fun technical deep dives into tech we use in our daily lives.

SMBC: Dystopia.

Shitty tech

The Markup: Amazon Brand Detector, a browser extension that reveals more-or-less distinguishable Amazon products while you shop.

👋. Have some The Armed, thx OJ.

News

• [fr] arte / Noëlla Bugni-Dubois & Francis Dupuis-Déri : Hommes pro-féministes.
• Fraser Valley Current: A drained lake, a re-routed river, and the rain: the deep roots of the BC flood crisis.
• [fr] Anne Archet - La longue tirade chiante de la woke pas drôle.
• Guardian: The bikelash paradox.

Tech

• Nicholas Fraser: Flatpak is not the future. HN.

Bonjour bonsoir geeks, et joyeux OrelSan. Faisait longtemps que j’avais ressenti une telle justesse dans un texte d'artiste témoignant des maux d’une société.

News

• [fr] Iels en parlent : Viktorovitch fait le tour, Marie-Hélène Drivaut (directrice éditoriale des éditions Le Robert) rappelle les bases, À l’air libre creuse avec deux profs, Meurice fait parler la France.
• [fr] Clément Viktorovitch : la rhétorique d’Orelsan 👏👏👏.
• Kottke: Is humpbacks behavior altruistic / compassionate?
• SMBC: Zed.

Tech

• Yahtzee Croshaw / Extra Punctuation: The ghost train ride. Excellent observations on AAA games; also see The “Open World” game is dead from two weeks ago if you haven’t seen it.

Shitty tech

• Reuters: Amazon lobbyists kill U.S. privacy protections. HN.
• [fr] Nitot : En vrac du lundi.

Bonjour, Heinz. Bonjour, les restes du monde. Have some new Delta Sleep.

News

• [fr/qc] Michèle Lalonde - Speak white et version de Falardeau & Poulin.

Shitty tech

• Casey Muratori: Made By Us 😄😄😄👏👏👏😄😄😄.
• jwz: Guilty of walking without lowjack.

Woop woop. Have some Ought.

News

• Nitot - En vrac climat.
• Markus Eder - The ultimate ski run.

Tech

• Yahtzee Croshaw: The “Open World” game is dead.
• DF / Vice: Bots that steal your 2FA codes.
• Clive Thompson: The metaverse is already here — it’s Minecraft.

Hi nerds, and music with Grohl drumming along recording of Teen Spirit.

News

• [fr] Arnaud Hoedt et Jérôme Piron @ TEDxRennes - La faute de l'orthographe, merci Morgane. Wow, savais pas que la difformité de l'orthographe française est intentionnelle, et pas seulement un mille-feuilles historico-linguistique. Aussi, Académie Française - L’orthographe : Histoire d’une longue querelle, et Libé - Notre orthographe si compliquée ? « C’est un choix politique », et Le Point - Orthographe : pour la fin d'un tabou français, qui confirment.
• Le Tour de Pants with Ali Selim, via Kottke.
• Astro Anarchy: Grand mosaic of the Milky Way is grand-er. HN.
• Kottke: Epidemiologists analyzing health risks in Bond movies 😄.

Tech

• adn: NFTs, status and creativity. Meanwhile, Developers write open letter asking Valve to reverse Steam's NFT ban. Am very unsure of what to think of these things; in one hand it smells a lot like vaporous tech bullshit, in the other hand okay it may be an actual path to more decentralization. But can such a decentralization ever happen? With so much potential $, NFT “pioneers” and early operators will for sure inject their proprietary flavor to capture and walled-garden-ize it anyway. Feels like E.E.E. step 1. Embrace: “hey, $thing_standard is pretty cool, we’re on the path to $thing decentralization & interoperability!”, then comes step 2. Extend $thing_standard with proprietary “extensions” to “compensate for standards deficiencies”, then step 3. Extinguish and silently migrate users of $thing_standard to proprietary implementation.
• Financial Times’ 404 is full of economist dork jokes 😄. Via kottke.

Garbage tech

Lots of non-fun tech this week. Reminder: my “editorial policy” for this blog –especially the Tech section– is to share interesting / inspiring / fun stuff and cut sharing of angering news to the minimum. Big Tech manure happens continually, you probably already get exposed to it, and I see meager value in hammering turds. It splotches on our collective brainz, eclipsing the good stuff happening elsewhere.

But occasionally, a supremely shitty thing happens that I find worthwhile to share: as a reminder to stop blindly trusting Big Tech, and to stop using their products / services. Also, if you work at one of these socially-noxious places beyond repair, please rock the boat, be it by shouting internally, or by leaving.

• Google 💩: [PDF, 3MB] Google digital ads antitrust litigation (Sep 2021), with a few highlights by @fasterthanlime and comments by DF.
• Faceboook 💩: WaPo: Key takeaways from the Fb Papers, The Atlantic: ‘History will not judge us kindly’, Casey Newton: How Fb decides which countries need protection, The Verge: Fb’s lost generation, NYT: Inside the big Fb leak, other Fb Papers stories. All via waxy.
  • Meanwhile, disconnection.

Hola, and music with Salomé Leclerc.

News news news:

• Listening In: How Radiohead wrote the perfect Bond theme, via Kottke.
• [fr/qc] La Presse : Vieillir à son domicile au Danemark.

Tech:

• r/gamedev: Linux gamers are free quality QA. 6% sales, but 38% of bug reports, often high-quality, and overwhelmingly not linux-specific. HN.

Hi geeks, and music with Sutekh, thx James.

On the news,

• [fr] Monsieur Phi - Au nom du père.
• Safe cycling showdown - Good vs. bad city design, comparing Amsterdam to Calgary. Thx Adel.
• The Guardian on stopping fetishising overwork.
• Kottke: Fuzzy moths taking flight in super slow motion.
• SMBC: The main reason to make yeast bread.

In tech,

• Excellent introduction to optimization and low-level CPU stuff by Casey Muratori: Simple code, high performance, Follow-up #1: A simplified CPU diagram, Follow-up #2: Analysis with Godbolt Compiler Explorer and UICA . Via r/Programming.
• Handmade podcast #14: Examining CS education, with Demetri Spanos. Great interview with nuanced takes from Spanos. And reminded me about the parable of the Blind men and an elephant.
• Drew DeVault: Software developers have stopped caring about reliability.
• vlogbrothers has many things to say about Facebook.
• jwz: How much more terrifying could the murderbots be? Waymo.
• Ars: Robert Willis, hacker who built a pro-Trump fake news empire, unmasks himself, thx Heinz.

👋. The weekly music is Hakuna Kulala / Scotch Rolex.

On the news,

• [fr/qc] Radio Canada : Peut-on se passer de certains pesticides dans nos champs ? Via Nouveau Projet.
• Tech:
  • Eidos-Montréal and Eidos-Sherbrooke shifting to the 4-day work week (HN, r/gamedev).
  • Body-breaking working conditions at Amazon warehouses and unionization. Via Nouveau Projet.
  • [fr] L’occasionel rappel de quitter Fb : Nitot - Facebook, le cauchemar.

Bonjour bonsoir, and music with King Woman.

On the news,

• Charlie Warzel: What do we do with all this rage?
• Anil Dash: Cooperative overlap. Curious. Had never heard this presented as a communication style, had always seen it as rude.
• Kottke: Continuous sidewalks.
• [fr/qc] Radio Canada - Quand l’enseignement de l’histoire sert un dessein colonial.
• [fr/qc] IRIS : Crise de gangs et armes à feu, données douteuses.
• Tech:
  • Drew Devault - Developers: Let distros do their job.
  • DF: The tragedy of Safari 15 for Mac’s ‘Tabs’. Or Firefox’s fucking similarly bad “Proton” tabs redesign.
  • Fully Justified Metroid (direct link to the guide).

Hi, and music with Sufjan, Gaspar Claus, SUUNS.

On the news,

• Émilie Nicolas - Why the English election debate tripped the Québec campaign. Un bon résumé nuancé, en anglais et destiné au RoC, mais intéressant pour les Québécois comme moi ayant peu suivi le débat.
• [fr] Ricochet - GIEC & décroissance.
• Kottke: Steven Taylor - The psychology of pandemics.
• Kottke: Michael Pollan - Caffeine helped create the modern world.
• Scott Alexander: Whither Tartaria? (Comments)
• Tech:
  • The Verge: File Not Found. With the shift to online apps, educators report students are increasingly confused by the idea of a local filesystem with nested files and folders. Via waxy.

Hola. The weekly 🎶 is new Low and P'tit Belliveau.

On the news,

• [fr] Science Étonnante - Krachs boursiers & tremblements de terre.
• [fr] Monsieur Phi - Liberté d'expression, retour sur “l'affaire Tipeee”.
• Scott Alexander - Too good to check: A play in three acts.
• xkcd: Vaccine Research.
• US horseshit: Atlantic: The deviousness of Texas’s new abortion law, The Cut: The newest abortion ban is next-level cruelty.
• Víctor Enrich’s “City Portraits” + Photoshopped Architecture, via Kottke.
• Tech:
  • Citizen Lab: Bahraini gov. hacks activists with NSO Group zero-click iPhone exploits has tech details about these “zero-click” exploits.
  • Lenophie: “I cannot stress enough how unintentionally funny the teaser webpage for The Matrix 4 is”.
  • jwz: How QR codes are made.

Hi frendz. This week's music is Ada Rook.

On the news,

• McSweeney’s: Oh My Fucking God, Get the Fucking Vaccine Already, You Fucking Fucks.
• Comics! PBF: Happy Place, PBF: Battleship, SMBC: Software.
• Tech:
  • Playdate Pulp: Zero to video game in 60 Seconds. HN.

Hi geeks, and music with Calexico.

News news news:

• [fr] Science Étonnante - Comment écrire les nombres ayant une infinité de décimales ?
• Black Media Breakdown #12: Bo Burnham's Inside and “White Liberal Performative Art”
• 100 artists build a seamless 3D Rube-Goldberg machine from a single prompt. Via waxy.
• Tech:
  • Googlespeak™ – How Google limits thought about antitrust. HN.

Hola. This week's music is Boysen & Heyne, and Arvo Pärt.

On the news side, a bunch of cool / cute / fun links:

• Kottke: Animated Embroidery, Potato photographer of year 2021.
• jwz: We've moved a few books around.
• SMBC: Running 😄, Financial news given by surly teenagers.

👋, and music with new Erased Tapes and LINGUA IGNOTA.

On the news,

• [fr] Monsieur Phi - Les vaccins nous feront-ils changer d'R ?
• Jens von Bergmann - Exponential growth: public health vs. scientists.
• The Guardian - The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine?
• xkcd: Average Familiarity.
• Lovely creations, via waxy:
  • Tomohiro Okazaki - Matches: study & stop motion.
  • Andrea Love: Summer grill.
• Tech:
  • L. M. Sacasas: Questions concerning technology. Reminiscent of Neil Postman: Five things we need to know about technological change.

Hi frendz, and music with Skinless Lizard and Jakuzi.

On the news,

• Scott Alexander: Adumbrations of aducanumab and Highlights from the comments.
• The Atlantic: Why targets of deliberate deception (e.g. anti-vaccine) often hesitate to admit they’ve been deceived.
• Kottke: The pink salt ponds of Camargue, France.
• Kottke - The walking dead: Pedestrian fatalities on the rise, jwz: SUVs.
• SMBC: Bringing charitable internet to real life.
• Tech:
  • DF: Apple’s new ‘Child Safety’ initiatives, and the slippery slope, Apple publishes FAQ for their new ‘Child Safety’ features, TechCrunch - Interview with Apple Privacy head Erik Neuenschwander about new CSAM detection. Also, Drew DeVault: Police to begin regular, warrant-free searches of homes for child abuse material. Also, Schneier: Apple adds a backdoor to iMessage and iCloud storage.
  • Pro tip: always close your font sizing HTML tags. Via Kottke.
  • Everest Pipkin: Beauty & solace in the abandoned worlds of Roblox.