this is @sippey’s blog

App Store doesn’t accept “too simple” apps. This is a wild story, especially in the context of all the crappy / scammy apps that are in the App Store.

Why Is This Interesting interview with W. David Marx, especially the bits about how the viral contagion model is the wrong one when thinking about how culture spreads. “Third, the concept of virality suggests that the beginning and end states of a trend are the same. The only reason things can “spread” from elites and the underground is that the media, manufacturers, and other institutions step in to simplify innovations to better fit pre-existing conventions. By the time a normal person is participating in a trend, all the edges have been sanded off.”

Building games and apps entirely through natural language using OpenAI’s code-davinci model. “TL;DR: OpenAI has a new code generating model that’s improved in a number of ways and can handle nearly two times as much text (4,000 tokens.) I built several small games and applications without touching a single line of code. There are limitations, and coding purely by simple text instructions can stretch your imagination, but it’s a huge leap forward and a fun experiment.”

James Harden throwing his birthday cake in the Ocean, and all of the replies. I can’t get enough of this.

The Daily Show: Elon Musk, Visionary FutureMan. Narrated by William Shatner. Don’t doubt your vibe.

NYT: Why Pop’s Biggest Stars Are Staying Put for Long Residencies. “In a rebounding touring market, with concert-starved audiences buying tickets in record numbers — and at higher prices than ever — these bookings are deliberate choices by prominent artists to reduce their time on the road and set up shop in far fewer places than they could on a traditional tour.”

DHH: Let it Slide “Letting things slide is not a sign of neglect. It’s an acceptance of our finite allotment of time, motivation, skill, and knowledge. It’s a recognition that if there are 100,000 things you could do, the difference between getting 8 or 12 things done in a day is not really a 50% increase in productivity, but a rounding error in the grand picture of completion.”

Charles Baudelaire: Be Drunk. “You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk. But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.” (Via Mark Slutsky’s Something Good.)

Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends. Sometimes (OK, a lot of times) Ben Thompson nails it. This one of his nails it. (Also, only 11% of the text is self-quoting!) “There is lots of talk about the $10 billion the company is spending on the Metaverse, but that is R&D; the more important number for this moat is the $30 billion this year in capital expditures, most of which is going to servers for AI. That AI is doing recommendations now, but Meta’s moat will only deepen if Lessin is right about a future where creators can be taken out of the equation entirely, in favor of artificially-generated content.” (Westworld, anyone?)

Eli Merritt: It All Started With Rush Limbaugh. “No single historical event can explain the rise and plunder of Donald Trump over the past seven years. But an unmistakable origin date is 1987 when the Federal Communications Commission repealed the Fairness Doctrine, unleashing the lies and vitriol of Rush Limbaugh upon the airwaves.”

MIT Technology Review: Psychedelics are having a moment and women could be the ones to benefit. “Women are more likely to have PTSD than men, and transgender and gender-­diverse individuals are at a much higher risk of developing PTSD than the general population. Women also experience depression more often, with one in seven women suffering from postpartum depression alone. Studies suggesting good results from just a few doses of MDMA or psilocybin combined with therapy have led the FDA to designate those drugs as breakthrough therapies (a priority status given to promising drugs proposed to fill an unmet need) for PTSD and treatment-­resistant depression, respectively.”

Adam Mastroianni: Why aren’t smart people happier? “We’ve got no problem fawning over people who are good at solving well-defined problems. They get to be called ‘professor’ and ‘doctor.’ We pay them lots of money to teach us stuff. They get to join exclusive clubs like Mensa and the Prometheus Society. … People who are good at solving poorly defined problems don’t get the same kind of kudos. They don’t get any special titles or clubs. There is no test they can take that will spit out a big, honking number that will make everybody respect them.”

NYT: Decoding the Defiance of Henry VIII’s First Wife. Relevant to my interests. “By the end of the afternoon, Braganza thought she had figured it out in her notebook, via a trial-and-error process she compared to ‘early modern Wordle.’ The cipher, she concluded, spelled out HENRICVS REX — Henry the King — and KATHERINE — his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Nothing remarkable there, perhaps. But Braganza argues that the pendant was commissioned not by Henry but by Catherine during the period when he was trying to divorce her and marry Anne Boleyn, as a brazen assertion of her lifelong claim to be his one true wife and queen.”

The Economist: Ann Shulgin pioneered the use of psychedelics in therapy. “She started to be called a “pioneer” and people started to write papers on how psychedelics can increase ‘brain connectivity’ and ‘neuroplasticity’. But she would always put it more simply: they allowed you to love yourself.”

Ted Gioia: 10 Observations on Tragedy in a Digital Age. “Despite the hubris on daily display, almost every kind of negative social metric is on the rise—depression, suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, violence, etc. At some level this is connected to the psychic cost of living in a tragic age which refuses to confront tragedy.”

bookbear express: modern malaise. “People have become anti-work because work used to be a source of meaning and prosperity, and now it isn’t. But meaningful work is the one of the only sources of meaning along with family and religion. If we lose it, we only have nihilism.” And “We yearn for radicalism, for inventism. This is why the right is doing better politically than left, because they have the language of nationalism. The left is offering nothing except management and consolation. The left has failed by refusing to produce imaginative politicians who can tell a compelling story of who we are and where we’re going.”

Max Read goes deep on those weird wrong-number texts, in a way that only Max Read does. “This kind of con has proliferated over the last few years in China, where it’s called sha zhu pan, or ‘pig-butchering,’ because the victim is strung along for weeks or months before the actual swindle, like a pig being fattened for slaughter.”

Serena announces her retirement from tennis. “Believe me, I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and a family. I don’t think it’s fair. If I were a guy, I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical labor of expanding our family.”

Michael Jordan’s jersey from his final championship run with the Bulls could fetch $5 million at auction. “The auction follows the successful sale by Sotheby’s of controversial footballer Diego Maradona’s 1986 World Cup match-worn shirt, which sold for $9.3 million in May.”

Is it ‘bama rush season already? The URL slug on this piece about the calendar tick tock of TikTok is amazing. bama-rush-tiktok-hot-girl-summer-christian-girl-fall.

Rands on Elden Ring. I am not a gamer, but I enjoy reading Michael Lopp on pretty much anything, especially things that he loves. “The fundamental lesson in Elden Ring is a reminder: don’t panic. Yes, the hideous crow-like creature is ten times larger than you, it makes horrific noises designed to terrify you, but this creature in this game is a knowable machine. It acts in an almost predictable manner. Your job in this game is to discover the pattern and to use it against this creature. It is a scenario designed to get your heart rate up, but the winning strategy starts with a lesson that is always useful: you are your worst self when you panic.”

Notable People. “Using data from Morgane Laouenan et al., the map is showing birthplaces of the most ‘notable people’ around the world. Data has been processed to show only one person for each unique geographic location with the highest notability rank.” Love this. (Via Waxy.)

Why is this interesting, the Tetris edition. I had no idea that people played Tetris with the “hypertapping” technique. Wild.

Mike Masnick on politicians on both sides of the aisle complaining to Google about bias. “That’s bullshit. It’s a search engine. The entire point is bias. It is literally ranking the search result to try to bring up the most relevant, and that, inherently, means bias. The attacks on free speech are not from Google trying to serve up more relevant search results, but from politicians of both parties sending these competing threat letters to try to pressure Google into modifying search results to get their own preferred search results shown.”

Two part series on the a16z blog about the Ethereum merge. Definitely worth reading in full. Part two includes a human readable description of shadow forks, “the process of copying real Ethereum data to a testnet to simulate a mainnet testing environment.” Danny Ryan: “We should have been doing shadow forks for the past four years. They’re great; they’re really cool. I essentially take a number of nodes that we control — call it like 10, 20, 30 — and they think a fork’s coming, so they’re on mainnet or one of these testnets and then at some fork condition, like block height, they all go, ‘Okay, we’re on the new network.’ And they fork and they then hang out in their own reality, but they have the mainnet-size state.” Wild.

Ken Norton: CEOs and Product Leaders. If you’re a product leader working with a product-oriented CEO (cough), then this is definitely worth reading.

M.G. Siegler on iOS 16. Holy shit, haptic feedback on the keyboard. I’ve wanted this since 2008.

Eric Seufert on the modal presented when you tap to purchase Netflix outside of the Netflix iOS app. “Once again we see the use of heavy-handed, intimidating language in intransigent, disruptive modals designed to suppress consumer use of off-platform services. This is clearly a significant hurdle to open payments and commerce. And the privacy point is absurd.”

Drew Austin: A Rainbow in Curved Air. “At the height of their prowess, pre-internet cultural elitists tapped into veins of esoteric knowledge via subcultural infrastructure that the mainstream could not or would not access, and then imprinted that knowledge upon themselves thoroughly enough that they could reliably transmit it to others. In this milieu, where good taste itself was always being formalized and even centralized (and thus not always open to interpretation), you distinguished yourself from the masses not by deciding what was good, but by having better access to the sources of taste and then merging them into your own identity, thereby becoming a beacon for others to follow.”

Michael Lopp has been blogging for 20 years. “I don’t expect to stop publishing here because I never stop writing.”

Alison Willmore: Is Jane Austen Just a Vibe Now? “Austen isn’t sacred. There’s no inherent virtue in being as faithful to her books as possible, and trying to do that still requires a degree of guesswork about artistic intent as well as leaving things out for the sake of running time. But Persuasion so lacks interest in the spirit of its source material that you’re left wondering why it bothers with it at all. Austen is reduced to just a vibe — to bonnets, walks in the countryside, sessions of piano playing in the parlor, a vague sense of a stuffy British accent.”

Ev Williams: New Decade, New Ideas. “Outside of lots of time with friends and family, I plan to spend the next few months (or years) learning as much as I can about things I don’t know a lot about. I also plan to start a new holding company/research lab to facilitate this learning, to be helpful to Medium and other companies I believe in, and to keep doing what I’ve always found most interesting — opening doors to the adjacent possible.” I couldn’t be happier for this guy.

Vulture interviews The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White. “Something I talked to Joanna and Chris about is, what’s Carmy’s life outside of the kitchen? I don’t think it’s there. That is so heartbreaking. What a lonely place to be in, when you can really only feel like yourself when you’re in your place of work — and now that he’s in this place of work where nothing is working the way he thinks it should be, where is the space for him? That’s why it’s so easy to get angry.”

The Bear Episode 7 Became A One-Shot Episode Shortly Before Filming. This was probably the single best episode of television I’ve seen since The Wire. Lead actor Jeremy Allen White, on shooting this as a single shot: “I think in our case, it really lends itself to the story and where the characters are at because the tension is building so quickly we don’t give the audience a break from it. There’s no reprieve — it’s consistent.”

Matt Webb: I imagine cave paintings as ancient virtual reality. “The image of shamans twisted at the rocky cave-wall interface, travelling in the realm beyond the membrane, reminds me of nothing so much as, well, me, hunched over my smartphone, unnaturally contorted to jab with my thumbs, an overwhelming feeling of being elsewhere, the screen a veil and on the other side a world that I can visit but can never stay in, my eyes blind to the physical room and others here.”

The Uber whistleblower. This little snippet of a text message sent by Travis about then VP Joe Biden is just pure gold. “At the intercontinental waiting for Biden…who is late. I’ve had my people let him know that every minute late he is, is one less minute he will have with me.”

Phoebe Bridgers, I Know the End at Glastonbury. Chills.

Ana Marie Cox in the Times. “The party needs to scare voters and show that they, too, are scared: scared of the voters themselves. Democratic politicians watched Republicans roll back abortion rights for decades — and when Roe fell, they had no plan. Now, they need to demonstrate that they are willing to put themselves at the mercy of those they failed — making specific promises and letting the voters know that if they fail again, it will be more than a fund-raising opportunity. It will be a reckoning.”

Wisconsin no longer allows ballot drop boxes. “Bradley wrote that absentee ballots must be delivered in person at a clerk’s office and cannot be returned by someone else. The ruling did not address whether someone must physically put their own absentee ballot in the mailbox if voting by mail.” JFC.

Simon Willison: Using GPT-3 to explain how code works. “GPT-3 doesn’t actually know anything about anything at all. It’s a huge pattern generator. You can’t trust anything it says, because all it does is group words together into convincing looking shapes based on text that it’s seen before. Once again, I’m reminded that tools like GPT-3 should be classified in the “bicycles for the mind” category. You still have to know how to peddle!”

Karl Bode at Techdirt on Ben Smith’s interview of Tucker Carlson. “Platforming, debunking, or even debating fascist propagandists is a lose-lose scenario. You can’t defeat it with ‘gotcha’ questions, because fascists have zero compulsion about lying, and no incentive to meet you in honest dialogue. Their goal is simple: to platform fascist ideology, to expose that ideology to as broad as audience as possible, and to frame fascism itself as a valid policy that’s up for debate.”

Elisa Gonzalez at The Paris Review on Marilyn Monroe’s poetry. “Marilyn often spent long periods in front of the mirror, just looking at herself. This wasn’t only the rapture of narcissism. She studied and honed her movements and faces, learning to feel how she looked in the eyes of others. Especially given that Marilyn never sought publication, reading her work makes me think less of overhearing a conversation than of watching someone else’s shifting reflection. These dashed-off, insular poems embody an oft-submerged but ever-present feature of lyric poetry: a dialogue within the self, overheard by the self.”

Olivia Snow, in Wired: Are You Ready to Be Surveilled Like a Sex Worker? “Some precautions I’ve taken for my own safety as a sex worker include withholding my birthday, age, ethnic background, hometown, current city, former cities, commute, alma maters, graduation years, time zone, weather, current employers, past employers, even my favorite color. When I post photos, I photoshop out my face and tattoos, and I never reveal my natural hair. If I post a screenshot, I crop out any time stamps.”

John Gruber: How to Temporarily Disable Face ID or Touch ID, and Require a Passcode to Unlock Your iPhone or iPad. “Just press and hold the buttons on both sides. Remember that. Try it now. Don’t just memorize it, internalize it, so that you’ll be able to do it without much thought while under duress, like if you’re confronted by a police officer. Remember to do this every time you’re separated from your phone, like when going through the magnetometer at any security checkpoint, especially airports. As soon as you see a metal detector ahead of you, you should think, ‘Hard-lock my iPhone’.”

Jia Tolentino: We’re Not Going Back to the Time Before Roe. We’re Going Somewhere Worse. “Pregnancy is more than thirty times more dangerous than abortion. One study estimates that a nationwide ban would lead to a twenty-one-per-cent rise in pregnancy-related deaths. Some of the women who will die from abortion bans are pregnant right now. Their deaths will come not from back-alley procedures but from a silent denial of care: interventions delayed, desires disregarded. They will die of infections, of preëclampsia, of hemorrhage, as they are forced to submit their bodies to pregnancies that they never wanted to carry, and it will not be hard for the anti-abortion movement to accept these deaths as a tragic, even noble, consequence of womanhood itself.”

Steven Johnson: Natural Magic. “When Charles Babbage encountered an automaton of a ballerina as a child in the early 1800s, the ‘irresistible eyes’ of the mechanism convinced him that there was something lifelike in the machine. Those robotic facial expressions would seem laughable to a modern viewer, but animatronics has made a great deal of progress since then. There may well be a comparable threshold in simulated emotion—via robotics or digital animation, or even the text chat of an AI like LaMDA—that makes it near impossible for humans not to form emotional bonds with a simulated being.”

Vulture’s interview with Bill Hader about the end of Barry, season three. “The very first shot of the entire series is not funny. It’s a dead body and that was very much on purpose. You’re just trying to do what’s honest for the characters and the story. When we got to those last two episodes, it felt like we were forcing things to be funny. It undercut what you wanted the characters to go through. When you’re doing a show about a murderer and dealing with domestic violence and trauma and PTSD and conversion therapy of a gay man, you can’t really be that funny at times. If you’re going to portray it honestly, the comedy comes from other moments, like in life.”

ArtNet: Surrounded by Visitors, the FBI Seized 25 Works Purportedly by Basquiat From a Florida Museum in a Mid-Day Raid. “The exhibition, titled ‘Heroes and Monsters’, was due to close June 30 before traveling to Italy. ‘A show like this, with supposedly unknown, unseen works by Basquiat would be a tremendous financial gain for any museum,’ Levin said. ‘The fact that there wasn’t one U.S. institution that had inquired and arranged to travel this show prior to the F.B.I. investigation speaks silent volumes.’”

Fred Wilson: Staying Positive. “Yes, it is our collective fault for getting out over our skis during the good times and not seeing tougher times ahead. Yes, we could have and should have been more conservative with our growth plans and hiring. Yes, it is our fault for putting our companies in the position where they have to let go of so many people. But it is also the case that the number one thing in times like this is staying in the game so you can play another round.” Reminder that we’re playing an infinite game.

James Carse: Finite and Infinite Games. “Infinite players look forward, not to a victory in which the past will achieve a timeless meaning, but toward ongoing play in which the past will require constant reinterpretation. Infinite players do not oppose the actions of others, but initiate actions of their own in such a way that others will respond by initiating their own.” (Ahhh, I love Readwise.)