I work in tech. I think a lot of cool stuff is being built and a lot of good work is being done. But tech is a mature industry, and most of what is interesting these days has to do with bringing the things we learned from 2000-2015 about how to use software into places that have not yet modernized. We’re at the tail end of what’s interesting and good and novel. Software technology has very little left to change in a major way. And the entire ethos of a16z and the like has utterly failed to produce breakthroughs in computer hardware, biological sciences, energy, environment or any other major sector. The last decade of innovation has been entirely about reducing friction in commerce. That’s it. And it’s not that profitable and will end up with a very small number of winners.

You’ve heard this refrain before – giving money to homeless people is not the best way to help them because it might be squandered, or spent on harmful habits. But a new Canadian study makes a powerful case to the contrary.

97 travailleurs Kényans cosignent une lettre ouverte demandant au président des États-Unis, Joe Biden, de mettre fin « aux conditions de travail qui s'apparentent à de l'esclavage moderne » dans l'industrie du numérique.

But isn’t “weird” just making fun of people? Well … yes. And that’s good. It’s good to mock and make fun of people who are bad or want to do bad things. It’s also necessary politically. One of the challenges of the Trump era is that Trumpism is very threatening and dangerous. It aims to upend and destroy the foundations of our civic democracy. But in cataloguing these threats and pumping up outrage over every Trumpian transgression we can also build up the image of their power like inflating a vast flaccid balloon, a sort of collective psyching yourself out. Good thrusting mockery cuts right through that. Yes, they’re dangerous. But they’re also insecure, stunted degenerates. They’re weird. Normal people don’t want to be around them. They think this kind of talk is normal because it’s common parlance in the far-right podcast subculture they live in. That’s really the JD Vance story right there. In his world, raging at miserable cat ladies trying to rule our lives doesn’t seem strange.

Imposer aux gens qui s'expriment sur le web d'utiliser leur véritable identité ne résout aucun problème et en introduit de nouveaux, comme le montre l'exemple de la Corée du Sud : moins de 1% de diminution des commentaires malveillants, réduction de la liberté d'expression et de la sphère privée, augmentation massive des tentatives de piratage des sites qui doivent désormais stocker les données personnelles des gens, coûts importants pour les sites, application à deux vitesses de la loi, etc.

Violent video games are much more likely to be trotted out as an excuse, however, in certain situations. For a forthcoming study, Dr. Ivory and his colleagues studied 6,814 news accounts of mass shootings. They found that in coverage of mass school shootings specifically, video games were more than eight times as likely to be brought up when the shooter is white than when the shooter is black.

“We should think about when we are more comfortable looking for something else to blame,” he said, adding, “I haven’t heard any senators talk about video games when an immigrant commits a crime.”