In Scope of Work, Spencer Wright rides along with New York Times photographer Christopher Payne, on his visits to the MTA’s repair shops.
The factories he visits are complicated, complex, kludgy. Factories take knowledge away from craftspeople and turn it into bureaucracy and institutional anxiety. Factories pollute our waterways. Factories take razor-sharp lathe swarf and try to convince us it’s jewelry; factories enlist workers to help someone else fulfill their dreams. But then Christopher Payne comes in, and he crawls around for a few months, and he finds parts of the factory that we can be purely and unabashedly proud of. I don’t think that Payne’s work is asking questions at all; he’s just taking something messy, and pointing a spotlight on the honorable parts.
Virginia Heffernan interviews congressman Hakeem Jeffries about January 6th, 2021.
Heffernan: So what moments stick out to you from that day?
Jeffries: The moment that probably crystallized that we were entering into a very different space was when a Nancy Pelosi, who was on the rostrum as the speaker, was suddenly and expeditiously removed and the sergeant at arms or someone from the sergeant at arms, the staff interrupted the debate and then says that the mob has breached the Capitol. They’re on the second floor. There are a few steps away from the House chamber. Be prepared to hit the ground and secure the gas masks that are underneath your seats. I’ll never forget those words because I never thought that I would hear them. And I didn’t even know that there were gas masks underneath each seat in the House of Representatives.
Emphasis mine.
Four years on, the framing of January 6th that resonates with me is from Jason Kottke: “this was not an attack on the Capitol Building. This was an attack on Congress, the United States Government, and elected members of our government. It was a coup attempt.
Nick Cave, in today’s Red Hand Files, answers the question “Where is the hope? What is hope?”
So, what is hope, and what is hope for? Hope is an emotional temper that emboldens the heart to be active, it is a condition, a mood, an aura of being. It is a feat of the imagination, both courageous and ingenious, a vitality that inspires us to take innovative action to defend the world. Hope is essential to our survival and our flourishing.
We achieve this vitality of spirit by rejecting the relentless promotion of despair and opening our eyes to the beauty of things, however imperiled, degraded, or difficult to love the world may appear to be. We try to view the world not as it is packaged, presented and sold to us but as we imagine it could be. We do not look away from the world, we look directly at it and allow the spirit of hope – the necessary driver of change – to inspire us to action.
Bartosz Ciechanowski’s latest epic Moon explainer / simulator / playground makes it abundantly clear to me that I never could have done physics.
Elizabeth Spiers on the rage at the U.S. healthcare system, and the understandable desire to hold someone – anyone – accountable.
When you’re stuck in the pediatric oncology ward watching your child die because insurance thinks the doctor’s recommended treatment plan is too experimental, or when you’re watching someone you love experience unremitting pain that no one will treat or pay for, or you simply find yourself buried in mountains of paperwork and bills when you’re too sick to navigate it, who do you blame? Who can be held accountable? Everyone intuitively understands that there are individual people responsible for this state of affairs and no real mechanisms to prevent them from causing harm.
Om Malik’s post on the passing of tabla master Zakir Hussain is some wonderful blogging.
No matter how much you know, you can never stop learning and evolving. What a great lesson for everyone, including those who deem themselves experts. You are almost always the student, always part of the process, and part of the collective that leads to a better place…
If you’re looking for a way in to Hussain’s work, start with this Tiny Desk performance with Bela Fleck and Edgar Meyer from 2010. Mindblowing joy.
Ev Williams on the launch of Mozi:
A lot has changed for me in the last couple years. I made a lot of new friendships and rebuilt old ones. I did a lot of growth and healing work. I now have a robust network of friends from coast to coast. Not because of an app, but because I prioritized relationships and invested the time.
I don’t think technology is the answer to our most human needs. But it would be silly not to use the tools at our fingertips to serve those needs. I love seeing when I will be in the same place as people I care about via Mozi.
If we’re in each others’ address books, I’ll see you on Mozi. ;)
Ben Thompson’s long piece on Intel is a fantasic read, starting with the history of CISC v. RISC computing, moving on to the rise of mobile and why Intel lost that battle, through the company’s current management and board struggles and ends with a call for the US government to save Intel in a Manhattan project to develop AGI.
If the U.S. is serious about AGI, then the true Manhattan Project — doing something that will be very expensive and not necessarily economically rational — is filling in the middle of the sandwich. Saving Intel, in other words.
Start with the fact that we know that leading AI model companies are interested in dedicated chips; OpenAI is reportedly working on its own chip with Broadcom, after flirting with the idea of building its own fabs. The latter isn’t viable for a software company in a world where TSMC exists, but it is for the U.S. government if it’s serious about domestic capabilities continuing to exist. The same story applies to Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta.
To that end, the U.S. government could fund an independent Intel foundry — spin out the product group along with the clueless board to Broadcom or Qualcomm or private equity — and provide price support for model builders to design and buy their chips there.
…
This is all pretty fuzzy, to be clear. What does exist, however, is a need — domestically sourced and controlled AI, which must include chips — and a company, in Intel, that is best placed to meet that need, even as it needs a rescue. Intel lost its reason to exist, even as the U.S. needs it to exist more than ever; AI is the potential integration point to solve both problems at the same time.
Emphasis mine.
Sally Rooney, in conversation with Merve Emre in The Paris Review.
I’m hesitant to get into my own psychology, but I’m aware that for me, writing novels is a way of preventing or being in denial about the passing of time. The years I spent on this book passed, and I can never have them back, but I do have the book. It’s like I’ve stored that time in a jar, like it can never quite get away from me, because it’s in there. There is a sense of pouring life into the novels and feeling like I get to live the lives of my characters. It does give me a doorway out of the world where time passes, as it does for all of us, into a world where I get to control the passing of time.
Via Kottke, emphasis mine.
Robin Sloan’s 2024 gift guide. In praise of freshness. In praise of intention. In praise of lineage. In praise of candor. In praise of invention. In praise of quality. In praise of danger. In praise of wonder. In praise of strangeness. In praise of propaganda. In praise of whompitude. In praise of utility. In praise of lightness. In praise of repair. In praise of warmth. In praise of doing it yourself.
Steven Johnson turns his latest book into an interactive detective game, as a way to illustrate what’s possible when LLM context windows get bigger:
What you’ve just experienced is an interactive adventure based on the text of my latest history book, The Infernal Machine. At its core, the game relies on three elements: the original text from my book; a large language model (in this case, Gemini Pro 1.5); and a 400-word prompt that I wrote giving the model instructions on how to host the game, based on the facts contained in the book itself. You could take any comparable narrative text—fiction or nonfiction—and create an equally sophisticated game in a matter of minutes, just by slightly altering the wording of the prompt.
…
The fact that a machine now has the ability to transform linear narratives into immersive adventures has significant implications for both education and entertainment. I’ve generated a similar game just with the Wikipedia entry for the Cuban Missile Crisis. (You play as JFK trying to avoid nuclear war.)
Margaret Kilgallen: “My hand will always be imperfect, because it’s human.”
Glorious.
Sparker, To love is to be inconvenienced.
I worry sometimes that we forget we are supposed to be inconvenienced by one another; that’s what it means to live in a functioning society. We’re meant to take turns bearing the burden so that others show up for us when we need it — and that means that we have to show up, even when we don’t feel like it.
Maybe especially when we don’t feel like it. … Living in A Society means bumping up against other people who are different from you and learning how to get along well enough. It’s messy. It’s inconvenient. It means we’ve got to give each other a lot of grace when our ideas for how to achieve a common goal don’t totally align. It means we have to look within ourselves and ask if we are putting our own comfort above someone else’s right to live.
Email’s been here for years. But the reason Substack wants you to call your creative work by their brand name is because they control your audience and distribution, and they want to own your content and voice, too. You may not think you care about that today, but you will when you see what they want to do with it.
This is me posting to a thing that is 100% absolutely not my Substack.
Oliver Burkeman, author of the self-help productivity philosophy book Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals, in his newsletter today:
I don’t need these people’s psychodramas in my head anymore. The closest thing to a political point I want to make is that I’ve dedicated far too much brain-space, in recent years, to marinating in the psyches of the angry, cynical and damaged men currently ascendant in our politics – which is basically what you’re doing when you spend time on Twitter, idly surf online media, or consume most TV news. I’m not talking about people in general here. We’ve lots of work ahead to try to understand how large swathes of the population – people like us, in so many ways, who love their kids, and so on – could embrace viewpoints we find so bewilderingly abhorrent. And we’re going to have to be willing to accept the possibility that some of the failings might be, at least partly, on us. But these tasks won’t be aided in any way by remaining addicted to the feuds and fragile egos of the demagogues at the top, or their hangers-on in the commentariat, and the shocking things they say for attention and money. We can’t ignore the deep societal problems that have fueled their rise. But we absolutely can choose to excise from our lives all their distracting psychodramas, their whiny podium speeches, social media bloviating and related bullshit (which includes, by the way, the output of many of those building media empires by railing against them, too).
Emphasis his. Also mine.
Craig Mod votes from Japan.
I slammed my ballot down and shoved it into an EMS international airmail envelope and gleefully paid thirty freggin’ bucks or so to get that sucker to my utterly blue state knowing damn well that that vote won’t tip the scales in any meaningful way. And yet. And yet — AND. YET. — I wanna be on that ledger. Goddamn, you bet I want to be on that ledger. What else is there but the ledger in a moment like this? Pull the lever, cast your tiny pebble into it all and hope things add up. De minimis? Hell no. At the very least, you’ll be present on the cosmic scale, a little number at the end of a bigger number — one that wouldn’t have been quite as big without you. That’s not nothing, and when your grandkids asked what you did right now — in this mythic time of madness and infinite resources all seemingly used in the wrong ways, facing the wrong directions, directed at the wrong people — you can at least say you were present, doing the smallest of things you could in whatever way you could. Tick.
In this mythic time of madness…tick. Tick. Tick.
Rosencrans Baldwin sits on a Los Angeles street corner, practicing sixty minutes of focus aerobics. Traffic, planes, stoplights, graffiti, people walking by clutching things.
So many folks also openly clutch their phones. At least seventy-five percent of the women during the hour, and maybe a quarter of the men. Question: do you also find it silly to call our smartphones “phones” or “cell phones,” when that’s hardly their use anymore?
Maybe we need to invent a word for slot machine/anxiety-induction device. Or just call them drugs.
I’ll go with drugs.
Ben Thompson dissects Netflix’s earnings reports in today’s update, and I absolutely loved this chart, plotting revenue against content cash flow.
For many years Netflix’s investment in content growth tracked its revenue growth; as you can see on this chart, though, the key switchover happened around 2018, when Netflix’s content costs stabilized at around $4 billion per quarter. And, guess what happens when you keep costs steady but revenue continues to grow? You get expanding margins, and you start to look a bit more like a tech company.
Thompson goes on to compare and contrast Netflix’s “pay up front for content” model with YouTube (and Spotify’s) model, where content costs are directly connected to revenue.
YouTube has much more theoretical upside for creators: a hit video can generate millions of dollars on its own. That payout, though, is much less certain; that means the smartest approach is contant production, both to increase the chances of a breakout and also to build up a presence in users’ algorithms that delivers a baseline amount of viewing. That can make for compelling content, to be sure, but Netflix is right that its not really suited for more highly produced high cost offerings.
You can, if you squint, see the classic Internet barbell concept here: on one hand you have a large platform [Netflix] that, thanks to its large user base, can provide funding with a fixed upside to creators; on the other you have a large platform [YouTube] that, thanks to its astronomically large userbase, can provide huge variance in outcomes. One wonders how much room there is in the long run for something in the middle, i.e. the old Hollywood model, where creators could make ambitious projects with a lot of funding and still get a share of the upside. On one hand the companies stuck in the middle need these models, because they need to produce content at a somewhat lower cost; on the other hand, if they keep giving away upside they may never grow big enough to overcome the distribution advantages Netflix has by getting to scale first.
Ezra Klein makes the argument that what is wrong with Donald Trump is his complete lack of inhibition. It’s a long essay, and I encourage you to listen instead of read, because the audio clips interspersed are reliably jaw-dropping. Klein’s conclusion – that this disinhibition is incredibly dangerous because he’s planning on removing all the checks on his power – is spot on, and terrifying.
This bit really hit; emphasis mine.
Over the years, I have interviewed I don’t know how many politicians. Talking to them is different from talking to anyone else. It’s why I don’t just fill this show with them. Politicians are inhibited. Before anything comes out of their mouth, they are running their response through this internal piece of software. Some of them are really good at it. Pete Buttigieg, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama — the software is so fast and efficient as to be almost seamless.
The politicians we sense to be inauthentic — it’s often that the software is slower and buggier. You can see the seams. You can watch the calculations happening in real time. But what that software is doing is inhibiting. It is running their words through a filter of what they shouldn’t say, given who they are and what they are doing and the weight their words carry. If your words move markets and launch missiles, you choose them carefully.
But there is something undeniably electric to watch someone unchained from the bundle of inhibitions the rest of us carry around. Watching someone just say it. There is something aspirational about it. What if I was without fear, without doubt? And if I can’t be without fear, if I can’t be without doubt, what if I could at least be led by somebody who was? Protected by somebody who was? Fought for by somebody who was?
It is Trump’s absence of inhibition that makes him a great entertainer. It is Trump’s absence of inhibition that makes him feel, to so many, like not a politician — the fact that he was already the U.S. president notwithstanding. It is why the people who want to be like him — the mini-Trumps, the Ron DeSantises and Blake Masterses and Ted Cruzes — can’t pull it off. What makes Trump Trump isn’t his views on immigration, though they are part of it. It’s the manic charisma born of his disinhibition.
Even if it’s real it’s fake, courtesy of Charlie Warzel.
The images of Trump’s McDonald’s stunt—in which he jiggled the fryer and handed burgers out of a window yesterday—are uncanny. There’s Trump, face contorted in the appearance of deep concentration, tilting a fry basket to the heavens; Trump hanging two-thirds of the way out a drive-through window, waving like a beleaguered Norman Rockwell character; Trump, mouth agape, appearing to yell into the middle distance of a fast-food parking lot. The shadows of the McDonald’s kitchen, the interplay between the sheen of the stainless steel and the cast of the nugget-warming lights, give the very real photos a distinct Midjourney aesthetic. … In his own way, Trump has shown us all the limits of artificial intelligence. Computers, at least for now, cannot quite capture the crushing surreality and maddening absurdity of modern electoral politics.