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Sunday, 11. February 12024
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Beneath the Rubble: Documenting Devastation and Loss in Mariupol.

A new report, digital multimedia feature, and 22-minute video analyze the civilian suffering and damage to thousands of buildings, including several hundred high-rise apartments, hospitals, educational facilities, and electricity and water infrastructure in Mariupol following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI.

Humans who want to engage in informal, unoptimised, personal interactions have to hide in closed spaces like invite-only Slack channels, Discord groups, email newsletters, small-scale blogs, and digital gardens. Or make themselves illegible and algorithmically incoherent in public venues.
(…)
How would you prove you're not a language model generating predictive text? What special human tricks can you do that a language model can't?

The sinusoidal tetris – A tetris game with a twist.

No geometrical figures will fall from the sky. Instead, you control a sinusoid, defined by: f(x)=Asin(ωx+φ)f(x)=A*sin(\omega x + \varphi)

As heard at Al Zaytouna.

The story behind Fairuz’s song “Kanou Ya Habibi” and the Soviet army “Polyushka Polye”.

coffeestains.

This package provides an essential feature to LaTeX that has been missing for too long. It adds a coffee stain to your documents. A lot of time can be saved by printing stains directly on the page rather than adding it manually.

All you never wanted to know about JSON.

Judicious JSON.

JSON is a simple technology but has a lot of underlying topics to think about. This guide can help uncover those topics.

Jujutsu (jj) is a new version control system from a software developer at Google.

Jujutsu is two things:

  1. It is a new front-end to Git.
  2. It is a new design for distributed version control.

Making a PDF that’s larger than Germany.

We’re gonna need a bigger printer.

Source: alexwlchan.net

Software Is Beating The World (via densediscovery.com).

Whatever Andreessen and his ilk are, they are not “optimists.” These are not people fighting to make the world better, or smaller, or more connected. Their war is one where software poisons and monetizes every corner of society, with the costs flowing back to rich and powerful people that can, in turn, add even more tolls to your everyday life. Their influence has turned the tech industry away from making software that deepens the human experience; that empowers us and enriches us through streamlining annoyances, forges connections and makes our lives fundamentally better.

Those that fight for the growth-at-all-costs cause are anti-innovation, anti-labor and anti-creativity. They see ChatGPT and Midjourney as ample replacements for writers and artists because they fundamentally lack any creative energy, existing as joyless vessels hoarding more capital and attention in the hopes it makes them forget that they’ve fundamentally created nothing.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that some venture capitalists worship a machine that can create soulless facsimiles of other people’s ideas. It’s how they built billion-dollar empires without ever having any ideas of their own.

This week I played Canadian Fruit Salad, a card game that resembles Black Lady and similar games with names like Slippery Anne, Hearts, Schwarze Katze, schleichende Johanna or Emma treiben.