This Friday link dump includes new tools, old stories, and a pretty good critique of AI. I’ve been thinking about how to mix the new and old a lot lately — something we might think of as keeping one eye on the past while another on the future. It’s how artisans think. Maybe that’s why the links for this week are such a strange mix.
— Flowboard is a tool that makes working with Arduino easier. If you’ve ever taught students how to use Arduino, you’ve probably noticed that the feedback loop between code -> testing code is pretty rough. This closes the gap. Pretty neat!
— Here’s something I didn’t know: NBC News was sued in 1993 and lost a Supreme Court case for attaching explosives to GM cars and then blowing them up to exaggerate a problem that GM vehicles had. Not like you needed explosives to give GM a bad reputation.
— I’ve always loved Dwarf Fortress. This post on Game Developer dives into the re-design process of it in preparation for its Steam launch (out now!).
— Seurat’s work was informed by Greek and Egyptian influences. This quote is great: “The lack of narrative means we really should look to the artist’s obsession with form.”
— Fun Tony Hawk lampoon.
— Chomsky writes an incredible critique of AI and, while not addressing it directly, alludes to a lot of things that most of the major religions already discuss — there’s something more to being human, and it’s hard to put your thumb on what that is.
— We were once approached by the guy who owned ColecoVision to help develop games for some new transformation of the brand he was working on. Nothing ended up ever happening. They were in a free fall. The recent Atari news feels like that.
— Great resource to help you get kickstarted with creative writing, the creative process, and out of the box ideas.
— Great podcast episode on leadership.
— Sad to see this go. Subscribing to newspapers and magazines on Amazon also made it easier to cancel those subscriptions — something that these outlets hate. Hopefully someone else picks up on this and creates a service that enables that.