GLITCHET

This is a FASCINATING little game on how trust works in the context of game theory, why enemies in the trenches of World War I made nice at certain times, and why playing nice is the way to go (with other people who will also play nice with you). A great quote: "'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,' may not just be a moral truth, but also a mathematical truth. However..." there's still a lot of distrust in the world. How'd that happen? I'm not going to keep explaining! Just play the game!

MSPaint seems like one of those untouchable things. It's been around since I can remember using a computer (yes, I'm young, I know) and was always a core part of the Windows experience. In fact, I felt betrayed by the new, much-more-usable UI of the new Paint application shipped with later versions of Windows. What are you doing, making this easier to use?! I KNOW this horrible UX! But alas, MSPaint is on its way out, slain by Microsoft.

Click through and check out this COOL short video of an AR experience on a phone watching a guy dance through a sketch-world portal, that person stepping THROUGH the portal and then being IN the world, and then turning around and seeing the OLD world back through the portal with people dancing and stuff. Very cool. It definitely helps you "get" the possibilities.

Here's a blast into the past--in fact, 21 years into the past (time didn't even exist back then!) with an article from 1996 about the incredible feat of putting a 120-ton space shuttle into, um, space, via massive amounts of software and the amount of complexity involved. A fascinating look into the world of programming when the mission is critical and death is the consequence for failure.

Following the thread from the last newsletter about making more convincing ways to fool humans into thinking photos are real, here's an article on how we can use algorithms and coding to figure out whether or not an image has been computer generated or not. Essentially, we are getting the computer to go "I can tell from the pixels and also from having seen many a neural network in my day" and bust the image. Interestingly, one day this technology might even exist as a browser extension that can be installed and then used automatically on all of the images you see on the internet. (Shit, it'd be nice if that existed now.) There you go, free startup idea. If you make a ton of money from it, subscribe to my Patreon. Thanks!

To be specific, this is a surveillance measure in Xinjiang, which is home to "much of its Muslim minority population", not a person-by-person ethnic surveillance targeting. But... really, now. It's pretty awful. They're instructing citizens to install a "surviellance app" and are actually conducting spot checks to make sure they have it, too. It detects "terrorist and illegal religious videos, images, e-books, and electronic documents" on users' phones and orders them to delete them. Delete the app or don't install it and suffer 10 days of detainment.

I'll be honest. I don't really care about Ethereum or Bitcoin or anything like that, even though I have some of it. For me, it's purely speculative and as an average user, I just want to see if I make any sort of increase over the next 10 years. I don't care about the upcoming split or the hackery and loss of money beyond the schadenfreude, but boy do I love a good counterhacking story. Actually, it's kind of weird. This "white hat" group "rescued" funds from 500 vulnerable wallets by using the same vulnerability as the hackers, and then returned them. It's like if Robin Hood broke into your house, stole your shit, then some other robbers tried to steal your shit but couldn't, and then Robin Hood came back with your stuff and a new safe for it. I think I would have mixed feelings about that, personally. Inside, the technical and story details of how that all happened.