I wrote another piece on Eye on The Press about something that has been on my mind lately. Linux Outlaws listeners from way back will remember my stance on Musk back then, when everyone was hyping him…

→ Eye on The Press: On Elon Musk

The US presidential election is less than a year out. High time to call it, I think. Unless a lot of things change in the next year, you don’t have to be a genius to predict this one, I feel:

→ Eye on The Press: Trump is Going to Win Again

“Pencil Sketch Avatar”

Drawn in Rebelle 5

Ah yes. Those are the people leaving Twitter because of all the horrible, horrible “hate speech” on that platform. I guess it’s okay when you do it to someone else, isn’t it?

Just one post of many that nicely demonstrates that a) Bisky isn’t a nicer place populated by nicer people than Twitter was and b) that labelling something as “hate speech” has nothing to do with fighting hate, but that it is simply a propaganda term used to excommunicate opposing viewpoints.

While I don’t agree with the conclusion of this piece — nothing will change, I fear — and some of the more flowery language not withstanding, there’s some very sharp analysis on display here.

Under the direction of our ruling class and the educators who rely on its largesse for their tenure and their grants most recent activism has been confined to the realm of manners, microaggressions, and most of all, an endless litigation of the past. Because nothing can truly be done about it. You can’t free slaves that have been dead for 150 some-odd years, unlike the victims of today’s slave markets, which are far more numerous and also have the benefit of still being savable by virtue of still being alive. But you don’t hear very much about them. To focus on them would create a demand for meaningful action. The kind of action that could upset corporate relationships, manufacturing deals, international geopolitics, the price of labor; in short, profits. Much better to hunt down racism in the human heart, which, like the hunt for sin, can never really be concluded, and like the war on terror, can make its proselytizers a fuck ton of money.

→ It’s Alive! Social Justice Movement Turns On Its Creators, Russell Dobular, Due Dissidence

He pressed the Transcription key. Within twenty seconds all twelve pages of his report, impeccably typed and punctuated, with several grammatical slips corrected, had emerged from the office Telefax. He scanned it rapidly, in case the Electrosecretary had made mistakes. She did this occasionally (all Electrosecs were ‘she’), especially during rush periods when she might be taking dictation from a dozen sources at once. In any event, no wholly sane machine could cope with all the eccentricities of a language like English, and every wise executive checked his final draft before he sent it out. Many were the hilarious disasters that had overtaken those who had left it all to electronics.

— Arthur C. Clarke, A Fall of Moondust (1961)

Leaving aside the obvious cultural sexism of the 1960s, I find it fascinating that Clarke not only anticipates AI here, but also the cloud (“dictation from a dozen sources at once”). And, to top it all off, he also anticipates the inherent problem with all of this: That humans still have to check the output of this magical AI cloud, because no matter how advanced, you trust machines at your own peril.

As I’ve recently played around with coding games for PICO-8 again, I’ve also been playing a lot of games other people made for the platform to learn about programming techniques and tricks other developers have used. While doing this, it has occurred to me, that I might as well start sharing some of the amazing games for this platform on my blog, so that other people can learn about them, too.

As a start, I would like to tell you about probably the most famous PICO-8 game: The hardcore platformer Celeste. The version most people know was built with Microsoft’s XNA, but the original version of the game, now called Celeste Classic, was a PICO-8 game. If you own a copy of PICO-8, you can load the following cart to play the game. Just download the PNG, put it into the carts folder of PICO-8 and run: load celeste.p8.png

If you don’t own a copy of PICO-8, you can play the game online here.