#42: Old code controlling your money and interactive data

💩 Cool shit

The Weeklypedia - I just signed up to this. It’s a weekly newsletter summarizing the most edited Wikipedia pages. A different way to track what’s trending or changing in the world.

Think Like a Bot - Look at different images and guess what labels the image-recognition algorithm gave them. A fun way to learn what AI “sees”. I found this harder than I expected.

You.com - A new search engine! Positioned as an anti-Google, it’s privacy-focussed, and is meant to give you a summary of the web, rather than the one single answer. I like the philosophy but haven’t used it enough to pass judgement.

Saturday Afternoon Ikea Trip Simulator - A hilarious text adventure game depicting the Ikea experience.

Temporal Anomalies in Popular Time Travel Movies - I love time travel movies, and there’s so much I love about this site, from its analysis of time travel issues in some of my fav movies to its non-fussed design.

The Meataverse 🥩 - What the title says. I especially appreciate the welcoming voice when you launch the site.

Which future do we want? - Since COP26 it feels like the urge for action around climate change is (finally) happening. This site is an interactive projection model showing Earth if COP26 succeeds and if it fails.

Explore Livecams - Live feeds of animals around the world.

💎 Word gems

The Code That Controls Your Money (Wealthsimple Magazine / Clive Thompson)

This is a nice antithesis to the shiny web3/blockchain/NFT train we keep reading about, and instead looks at ‘old tech’ that stays because it works so well. The article focuses on COBOL, a programming language from the 60s that has come to power almost all global financial institutions. Part of COBOL’s lasting success has been that it was built-for-purpose, and with decades of debugging has become incredibly reliable. But, along with fewer people today learning COBOL, those benefits make it harder to innovate, more expensive to change, and risky to replace.

This idea — that older code can not only be good, but in crucial ways superior to newer code — is at odds with a lot of Silicon Valley myth-making. Venture capital-backed startups usually tout the shiny and novel. Founders do not prance around boasting about how old their codebase is. Quite the opposite: They brag about their code being cutting-edge, pounded out in all-night sessions by bleary-eyed genius 21-year-olds. But as nearly every programmer will tell you, the newer and more recently written the software, the more likely it is to be a hot mess of bugs.

Meet the Obsessive Role-Players Who Live Inside the World of Grand Theft Auto (Narratively / Meghan Gunn)

Last week I was skeptical of everything becoming a metaverse and was quick to say “If Minecraft is a video game, is GTA Online one too?”. Ironically, I stumbled across this article about a group of people playing a hacked version of GTA that transforms it into a role playing game instead of a shooter. You could look at this as either a quirky subculture in the vein of Second Life, or a glimpse of a Ready Player One version of the future. I’m still not sure where I stand, but it seemed worth sharing.

The events are so realistic, so true to form, one might forget that they’re fictional, especially when the real human streamers’ faces appear in the corner of the video game. The players inhabit their characters so completely because they have to. Breaking character is grounds for suspension. While anyone over 18 with a microphone can apply to play a character on NoPixel, the application process is strict, and entry is exclusive. Once accepted, characters go through specialized training for their roles, run by other role players. The Personnel and Training Division, to take one example, is the administration that recruits, hires and trains aspiring police officers on radio codes and proper conduct. Players can only attend “the Academy” after in-character interviews. When NoPixel launched, a meme circulated on Reddit proclaiming: “It’s harder to become a cop on NoPixel than in the U.S. Change my mind.”

The Most Detailed Map of Cancer-Causing Industrial Air Pollution in the U.S. (ProPublica / Al Shaw, Lylla Younes)

An analysis showing how much toxic air pollution industrial facilities emit. This is a terrific piece of investigative and data-driven journalism, with some excellent interactive maps.

In all, ProPublica identified more than a thousand hot spots of cancer-causing air. They are not equally distributed across the country. A quarter of the 20 hot spots with the highest levels of excess risk are in Texas, and almost all of them are in Southern states known for having weaker environmental regulations. Census tracts where the majority of residents are people of color experience about 40% more cancer-causing industrial air pollution on average than tracts where the residents are mostly white. In predominantly Black census tracts, the estimated cancer risk from toxic air pollution is more than double that of majority-white tracts.

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