2024 est terminé

B R

B R

— 6 min read
2024 est terminé
Tommy Siegel

What I've done

This year started with finishing the first of four French courses, moving on from Substack [[1]], and wistfully considering alternative futures.

Remains a good idea.

As spring rolled in, we started going out a little more - the highlights being a drag brunch Megillah reading (Purim), the first heatwave coinciding with the eclipse, and a wonderful visit to Seattle.

Over the course of the year I've written more about history and politics than I had the year before - Canada's short lived attempt at independence by force in the 1830s, the protests against genocide this year, the invention of the garbage can by a Frenchman, major city mayors that remarkably don't suck shit, the success of the left in France [[2]], the history of Fierté (Pride) in Quebec, and of course what AI is and how it sucks [[3]].

What I've read

As one might expect from someone who's only job is French [[4]], I've been trying to read the local news [[5]], but as I've improved in my comprehension my reading has expanded to stuff like Quebec Science or Nouveau Projet.

My daily reads haven't varied too considerably from since I have arrived [[6]] - Ars Technica for general technology news, Metafilter as a really good community-driven aggregator, Semafor for global news is a not-awful replacement for the NYT.

And while I'm loathe to admit it, there are two sites that I shamefully continue to visit as I have been unable to find fully adequate replacements:

  1. Twitter is slowly but steadily becoming unusable but Bluesky, while improving rapidly, hasn't completely displaced it.
  2. The other site is Hackernews, which has a decent alternative in the form of Lobste.rs, is still an aggregator that has quite a lot of decent tech/tech-adjacent links and often shockingly ungenerous-to-tech comments for a site run and moderated by a literal VC [[7]]

Here is a grab bag of stuff that I found interesting enough to at least save somewhere.

Readings:

People:

  • Adam Tooze: While I will admit a certain reluctance to endorse any economist, Tooze has an excellent newsletter, supported and participated in the Columbia protests (where he teaches), and I can also recommend his podcast.
  • Foreign Exchanges: Just about every day these folks give a breakdown of major world political events and conflicts, which they supplement with a podcast as well.
  • Molly White: Unfortunately the crypto crash did not end cryptocurrency, and, in fact, the election of Donald Trump portends a greater government role in supporting what may be one of the worst early inventions of the 21st century. Molly White is the best person to read about it.
  • Cory Doctorow: I'm not enamored with a lot of his analysis, but his blog is an excellent source for other good work on the internet on politics and technology.

Tech stuff

  • Funkwhale: Basically a distributed audio platform, you can join a pod and listen/share music with friends or a larger community and it's all federated. If I get enough feedback I'll start one even.
  • FUTO: I routinely consider ideas for building stuff that would shift the internet away from the huge centralizing oligopolies that currently dominate and these folks have already built a few.
  • NomadNet: Off-grid, resilient mesh communication with strong encryption, forward secrecy and extreme privacy - in case you were more in the "actually fuck the existing internet" mood or wanted a communications network for several extreme scenarios, etc.
  • Kosmi: Pretty easy way to watch stuff on Youtube/Tubi/PlutoTV together.
  • Mirotalk: I've probably posted this before but if you want a secure peer-to-peer Zoom replacement this is excellent. It has virtually all the features you might expect, there is nothing to install, and it works seemingly everywhere [[8]].

What I've watched/listened to

Some more links:

[[1]]: Which, in its struggle to maximize profit, has gotten even worse

[[2]]: Not to make a long digression into French politics but this happened in July and President Macron has steadfastly refused to allow the Front Populaire majority to form a government this whole time, instead opting to try to cobble together coalition governments led by esoteric moderate/conservative parties that received basically zero votes. Virtually the only thing the Front Populaire and the hard right led by Marine Le Pen agree on is that this is bullshit and they've toppled like three of these governments in a row

[[3]]: Incidentally if you have a website here is how you can block AI companies from scanning it

[[4]]: Until February

[[5]]: La Presse, Radio Canada, and Le Devoir are the standard centralist liberal stuff you might expect from like NPR, but it's important to be careful in generalizing across the fairly sizable cultural gulf between Quebec and any given part of the United States. One thing I will say is that they are apparently unafraid of running some stories of some substance about the failures of the political parties, particularly the one in power. And they have a reasonable expectation their reporting will be responded to in some fashion - like when the francisation classes were getting shuttered. Which is pretty quaint really, almost like how the US press occasionally worked many decades ago. They are catching up however, the Conservatives in particular seem to feel absolutely no need to engage in that fashion

[[6]]: Apart from no longer reading the NYT, whose denial and apologia for the unrepentant and ongoing genocide of the Palestinians has simply become too much to bear and virtually without exception their opinion page is reactionary trash. Though it can be occasionally funny, like when - all too late for it to ever matter - David Brooks recently admitted that opposition to Donald Trump should have come in the form of a Bernie Sanders-style disruption (100% not linking)

[[7]]: Not the absolute worst VC - that's actually hard to choose - but still

[[8]]: Literally nothing else worked when my partner was visiting China

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