youzicha

Late-analog-era TVs and cameras were built around jungle chips, most of an analog TV on one integrated circuit.

Anthy cosplay with an India-style dress.

"in Old English blac (sometimes spelled blæc) meant 'bright, shining white' and blæc (sometimes spelled blac) meant 'black'."

Achive 50% gender ratio with one weird trick!

Cool figurine of Bort from Houseki no Kuni.

Steve Bannon, OR Why Do We Build the Wall? (45 minutes). A leftist youtuber take on Steve Bannon and Evola and far-right youtubers, which maybe doesn't sound very promising, but the acting is really good!

Relatedly, Anaïs Mitchell's concept album Hadestown (2010) is really good, highly recommended.

Rob Pike's notes from a 1984 trip to Xerox PARC .

Smalltalk files are awkward, but you can just (essentially) map the information into your address space and hold it there, whereupon it becomes remarkably easy to use. These subsystems are all like isolated controlled environments, little heated glass domes connected by long, cold crawlways, waiting out the long antarctic winter. And each dome is a model Earth.

Gwern experiments with neural networks trained on a single anime character. Infinite Asukas! Weird glitchy Asukas!

Bread Clip Neue. A typeface based on iconic bread clips.

Stefan Rusu's Instagram, concrete architecture from the former East Bloc.

Utopia Lost: The Case for Radical Technological Optimism. This essay is pretty okay, and the call to action is interesting: to try to claim the term "radical leftism" for something centered on Star Trek rather than on street-fighting in Weimar. That's kindof interesting, right? Star Trek feels familiar and comforting and basically the least radical thing ever, it's as American as apple pie. (And also feels like a celebration of America's "soft empire", which isn't very leftist.) And yet according to basic Marxist theory, abolishing wage labor ought to completely up-end society, so something doesn't add up. Maybe it's an unintentionally good methaphor for the UBI that the author calls for, which I could imagine would somehow leave all social structures basically intact, with some extra zeroes added to college tuition and rent. I really approve the of using the burning Montreal Biosphere as a political metaphor, this photo is criminally underused.

Some good discussion at Hacker News about A Soul of a New Machine, including a link to this essay by Tom West's daughter.

brin_bellway: I fail the Turing test, but at least the bots have accepted me as one of their own.

A dog with a mouth in its ear!

A quite funny thread snarking about Neil Gaiman's "MasterClass". (For clarity, it's not literally connected with Phoenix University, MasterClass is an unrelated company.)

Two experiments show that obstruents are associated with tsun-type maids whereas sonarants are associated with moe-type maids.

The Communal Mind. A funny take on what it feels like to be on Twitter etc.

I wrote about the decade when all the NATO countries freaked out about their air bases being bombed and tried to build VTOL fighters, but apparently West Germany had an even simpler solution.

日本語は基本的にフラットなんで…

How to ride your bike to LaGuardia Airport. The headline seems unremarkable, but it kindof buries the lede, which is that it is deliberately not possible to bike to JFK or Newark airports, to the extent that they have guards in place to stop you.

Big Rock Candy Mountain, Communism, and Libertarianism as the daydreams of hobos, college students, and office workers.

Using a botnet to automatically make it appear that someone is being ratioed on twitter.

"Teacher tells me to love my country, and to love our domestic brand Huawei!"