this is sippey’s blog

Ben Thompson: Narratives. Two bits from this. First…

When it comes to the good of humanity, I think the biggest learning from Twitter is that putting together people who disagree with each other is actually a terrible idea; yes, it is why Twitter will never be replicated, but also why it has likely been a net negative for society. The digital town square is the Internet broadly; Twitter is more akin to a digital cage match, perhaps best monetized on a pay-per-view basis.”

Note that @benthompson and @notechben are still active as of this afternoon. Despite that “whichever way the wind blows” opening section about Twitter, it’s worth reading through the self-quoting all the way to the end, for this…

In the end, the best way of knowing is starting by consciously not-knowing. Narratives are tempting but too often they are wrong, a diversion, or based on theory without any tether to reality. Narratives that are right, on the other hand, follow from products, which means that if you want to control the narrative in the long run, you have to build the product first, whether that be a software product, a publication, or a company.

Yep.

Sort of related, I finally read that “savior complex” piece of…content. The kicker is a wild ride…

Crypto is money that can audit itself, no accountant or bookkeeper needed, and thus a financial system with the blockchain built in can, in theory, cut out most of the financial middlemen, to the advantage of all. Of course, that’s the pitch of every crypto company out there. The FTX competitive advantage? Ethical behavior. SBF is a Peter Singer–inspired utilitarian in a sea of Robert Nozick–inspired libertarians. He’s an ethical maximalist in an industry that’s overwhelmingly populated with ethical minimalists. I’m a Nozick man myself, but I know who I’d rather trust my money with: SBF, hands-down. And if he does end up saving the world as a side effect of being my banker, all the better.

SleepBaseball.com. “Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio is a full-length fake baseball game. There is no yelling, no loud commercials, no weird volume spikes.” Haven’t tried this. Available wherever you get your podcasts, which means you can listen to it at 2x speed and fall asleep twice as fast.

A secretive spaceplane just returned to earth after 2.5 years in orbit. I’m sorry, what? A secretive spaceplane?

Brent Simmons: After Twitter. “Everything you might build that had to do with communication, reading and writing and otherwise, was compared to Twitter or somehow in relation to Twitter, even when unasked for, and Twitter was the enormous factor in that equation.” Can relate.

Sunday link dump. Blockquotes FTW.

JoAnna Novak with a masterful essay in The Paris Review, connecting Taylor Swift’s 10 minute All Too Well with poet Joe Brainard’s memoir I Remember.

Brainard’s writing is akin to the visual art he made: friendly and image-drenched and nonchalantly funny, kind of telescopic in a diaristic way that’s relentlessly present in its anaphora, and also sometimes sort of sexy. I find myself thinking about Joe Brainard whenever I listen to “All Too Well.” Swift sings the word remember eighteen times. And then there’s the third verse, which begins by conjuring her ex-lover in a childhood photograph, a seemingly ordinary boy with glasses.

Rosencrans Baldwin: Los Angeles after it rains. Turning hydrangea into an adjective is such a flex.

Los Angeles is different after it rains. It’s windy and brightly blue, it’s hydrangean. The next morning, the buildings glow, as if by getting wet, with all the dirt washed off, they’ve become more porous and able to absorb light. Basketball courts and tennis courts are puddled until about lunch.

Mike Hale’s review of the new season of The Crown in the Times, which gets to the core of the challenge in telling the Charles & Diana story. “History is, in general, the enemy of good storytelling.”

Morgan resorts to the same shallow, sentimental notions of love gone sour and family inflexibility that were the stuff of public mythmaking. The idea of practical calculation is floated but rejected with regard to both Diana and her rival, Camilla Parker Bowles (Olivia Williams), presumably because the Princess Di story has to be a love story. But even as Morgan is telling us that’s what it is, it doesn’t feel like that’s what it is. The type of story that would really make sense of Charles and Diana would very likely have to be a wilder, harsher, more corrosive story than “The Crown” can afford to be. Such a telling would probably trigger the supposed guardians of historical accuracy to an even greater extent than Morgan’s fictionalizations already do. History is, in general, the enemy of good storytelling, and Morgan can’t be blamed for putting words in people’s mouths; his characters are his, not ours, and many of the show’s best moments are those characters’ stirring, wholly invented lectures on one another’s bad behavior.

Tom Breihan at Stereogum on “Crazy in Love”. I love his ongoing series The Number Ones, where he’s reviewing every Billboard #1 hit from 1958 to the present. I don’t read all of them, but I definitely read this one.

“Crazy In Love” didn’t suddenly surge into existence; it came out of the same pop-industry process that’s produced virtually every other song that’s appeared in this column. But “Crazy In Love” is the kind of dizzy alchemy that can only happen when everyone involved in that process is operating at peak capacity, when they work together to make something that positively levitates.

Rachel Handler: Bed Habits. Long sleep diary, trying to find some clarity about blue screens. The lede is the best part:

Here is an incomplete list of things I need in order to fall asleep at night: a room that sustains 70 degrees without the help of air-conditioning; complete darkness and total voidlike silence save for a shockingly loud white-noise machine placed directly next to my head; five pillows (one under my head, one under my chin, one between my knees, one directly on top of my face, one sitting on top of my chest); a completed to-do list; a clean apartment; a clean conscience; the knowledge that everyone I love is never going to die; assurance from a Russian official with total security clearance that they aren’t going to incite nuclear war; universal health care; and a fan.

Dan Pfeiffer: Why Extremism Trumped Inflation in ‘22. I loved this bit about why Democrats were so surprised about the midterm results:

We have political PTSD scars from a shocking loss in 2016 and an almost as shocking near loss in 2020. Despite losing often, Republicans pound their chests and prance around. Despite winning the popular vote in every election but one since 1988, Democrats mope around doing an Eeyore impression.

The Generalist: The Casino and the Genie. Mario Gabriele comes to terms with FTX and SBF.

Historically, I’ve seen crypto as a debaucherous hackathon. Sure, some off-color activities might take place here and there – some light gambling, for example – but it is fundamentally a sector defined by what it is building. Over the past year, I’ve learned that not only is this wrong, it’s perfectly wrong. Crypto is not a hackathon with a little betting; it’s a casino where spontaneous entrepreneurship occasionally breaks out. The emphasis I’d assumed should be inverted, flipped on its head.

Matt Webb: The Minecraft generation meets property law and AI-synthesised landscapes. Voxels, voxels, voxels:

I know there are 3D edit tools that allow precision, but I feel like fine control is maladaptive in this situation. You want to be able to make something gorgeous, and easily, and have full creative expression. That’s what voxels provide, plus the application of AI which - thanks to the prompt - has all the almost-infinite variety of latent space.

For obvious reasons, Substack Chat is interesting.

Today we are launching Chat, a new space for writers and creators to host conversations with their subscribers. Chat is a community space reimagined specifically for writers and creators— it’s like having your own private social network where you make the rules. Writers set the topic and the tone for every discussion, and can turn the feature on or off at any time.

This FTX story is just fucking bonkers. Jessica Lessin’s coverage is spot on. “I would like to know whether Sequoia, SoftBank, Ribbit Capital and all the others who poured money into FTX knew about Alameda’s FTT holdings or even wanted to ask. You would think some of the smartest private tech investors in the world would have been looking into the issue. Even a modicum of diligence could have uncovered that huge potential liability. I wonder whether they also asked questions about FTX’s solvency, because yesterday Bankman-Fried said the exchange could cover the billions in redemptions that Binance’s move triggered. Today, it couldn’t.”

Matt Levine on FTX is a good read. “Is FTX worth tens of billions of dollars, if it can get through this week of heavy withdrawals and negative press? Maybe! Will Binance buying it allow it to get through this week of heavy withdrawals and negative press and return to profitability? Probably! Is Binance paying FTX tens of billions of dollars for its equity? I would be very, very, very surprised!”

Ed Zitron: The Death of a Statesman. “To really hammer it home: this is an incredibly bad situation, because this industry desperately needed Sam Bankman-Fried to keep being the respectable gentleman of the cryptocurrency world. Having SBF attend events with Bloomberg and say smart things about the economy was useful, because it suggested that there were executives in this industry that could both legally visit America and not commit massive amounts of fraud.”

Sean Garrett interviews Ashley Simon for Mixing Board. Sean’s an old colleague from Twitter; Ashley’s a more recent colleague from Medium, both are fantastic humans. And I loved this conversation. “I don’t know very many people, and I’m putting myself first here, that actually know how to live with failure and feel okay about it. Personally, I always still feel like something is wrong with me, or that I haven’t worked hard enough, smart enough, or whatever the case may be.”

Simon Willison: Mastodon is just blogs. That’s cool and all, but “get that kid a Mastodon!” is even worse than “get that kid a blog!”

Gordon Brander on “Thinking Together” and how we’ve hit an information scaling threshold “The cost of forking realities has dropped below the Coasean floor, and there’s little incentive to merge realities. We fractally fragment understandings, then algorithmically amplify the confusion to maximize engagement. The most effective coordination mechanisms left seem to be memes and conspiracy theories.”

Dave Troy: Elon and Jack are not “competitors.” They’re collaborating. The absolute hottest of takes, in the form of a FAQ. “Q: So this is why Musk seemingly ‘overpaid’ for Twitter? He and his backers want to use it as a tool of information warfare, to kill off the dollar and help usher in Putin’s ‘multipolar world?’”

Screenplays.io is amazing. Here’s Better Call Saul, Season 6 Episode 7. “Lalo peels off the waders, revealing his usual clothes underneath. He wipes his hands with a towel, then slips on a pair of FLIP-FLOPS (even though we may glimpse his LOAFERS, along with a coat and a bag of other clothes, inside the trunk).” I need to start reading more screenplays, if only for the all caps props. (Via Recommendo, which is gonna have to move off Revue!)

Robin Sloan’s reflections on his Spring ‘83 protocol. “The opportunity before us, as investigators and experimenters in the 2020s, isn’t to make Twitter or Tumblr or Instagram again, just ‘in a better way’ this time. Repeating myself from above: a decentralized or federated timeline is still a timeline, and for me, the timeline is the problem.”

Joshua Barone profiles Steve Reich on his 86th birthday. “Reich’s sound is by now central to the history of American classical music — and modern art more generally.”

Jesse Grosjean’s Bike outliner introduces some nice affordances for rich text editing. Small details, well executed. The cursor tail is a really clever solution to a challenging UX problem.

Westworld is over. Some violent delights, a not so violent end.

Meanwhile, I had no idea that Christopher Nolan and Lisa Joy were executive producers on the Amazon production of William Gibson’s The Peripheral. I’m two episodes in so far and it’s working for me; I loved the book. This quote from Nolan in the Times nails the experience of reading Gibson’s prose: “Gibson basically just takes you and he drowns you. He just holds you all the way under in the deep end, and it’s that moment where you’re trying to adapt to a new atmosphere and you either do or you don’t.”

The Adobe and Pantone Color Apocalypse: Frequently Asked Questions. Excellent FAQ about how colors can’t be copyrighted, but Pantone’s swatch book can, what happened in Adobe products, and, of course, an answer to this F’d A’d Q: “What if I wanted to make my own Pantone swatch libraries and distribute them? With blackjack and hookers?” (Answer: “You’d be playing with fire, that’s for sure.”)

Matt Haughey uses Google Collab and Stable Diffusion to generate a bunch of wild profile pics of himself. I like the feather head one.

ArtNet on the opening sequence for Season 2 of HBO’s The White Lotus. I liked the 90 second intro more than the rest of the episode? But I’ll keep watching, obviously. Meanwhile, The Vow Season 2 is just as boring as Season 1…but I’ll keep watching, obviously.

Choire Sicha: “It’s an exciting moment for text delivery methods that are not tweets. Perhaps I will make all my mistakes in this ‘email’ venue going forward? The Twitter situation is evolving quickly.”

WaPo: Why daylight saving time is worse for your body than standard time. Really lovely animation that illustrates what would happen if we went to daylight savings time permanently. “Living chronically out of sync with our internal clock puts us at an increased risk for sleep loss, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, mood disorders and even certain types of cancer.”

Julie Powell, of Julie and Julia fame, dies of a heart attack at 49. I read and loved her blog at Salon in the olden days; the movie was delightful (esp. the cameo from Amanda Hesser). “Blogging made it possible for Ms. Powell to reach readers on a relatively new platform and in a new kind of direct language.”

Halide’s Sebastiaan de With on the iPhone 14 Pro camera. Of a piece with Julie Powell, I love obsessively in-depth reviews like this, even if I care about or understand maybe 10% of it. “Above all, I found a soul in the images from this new, 48-megapixel RAW mode that just made me elated. This is huge — and that’s not just the file size I am talking about. This camera can make beautiful photos, period, full stop. Photos that aren’t good for an iPhone. Photos that are great.”

Nicheless.blog. “Nicheless is a micro-blogging platform for raw, unfiltered thoughts. It’s like long form Twitter, minus the status games.” I don’t know if this will be “the thing” but I like that it’s “a thing” and that there are more and more of these small purpose-fit social things out there, pushing things either backwards or forwards in time.

Simon Owens: Twitter has never understood the Creator Economy. A friend texted me earlier this week and asked if we had ever thought about sharing ad revenue with creators when I was there. Owens’ piece isn’t a bad explanation…even though sentences like “they’d just need to set aside a fixed percentage of their monthly revenue and then distribute it based on the level of engagement generated by their users” make my blood boil. Pro tip: never use the word “just” when writing about things like this.

Nilay Patel: Welcome to hell, Elon:

The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience. It’s what YouTube makes, it’s what Instagram makes, it’s what TikTok makes. They all try to incentivize good stuff, disincentivize bad stuff, and delete the really bad stuff. Do you know why YouTube videos are all eight to 10 minutes long? Because that’s how long a video has to be to qualify for a second ad slot in the middle. That’s content moderation, baby — YouTube wants a certain kind of video, and it created incentives to get it. That’s the business you’re in now. The longer you fight it or pretend that you can sell something else, the more Twitter will drag you into the deepest possible muck of defending indefensible speech. And if you turn on a dime and accept that growth requires aggressive content moderation and pushing back against government speech regulations around the country and world, well, we’ll see how your fans react to that.

Anyhow, welcome to hell. This was your idea.

Gordon Brander: Imagine a Notebook: “What if this notebook is enchanted? Inhabited by little AI spirits who think with you? They find related thoughts, and help you forge new connections. They collide unrelated thoughts, and help you see new relationships. They provoke creative breakthroughs with generative AI prompts. They go out exploring, bringing back new ideas you might be interested in. Every time you add a page to this magic notebook, it gets a little bit smarter.” Yes please.

The Eclectic Light Company’s explainer on passwords and passkeys is a short, fantastic primer on how WebAuthn works.

Charles Gaines: The American Manifest, Moving Chains, “a monumental 110-foot long kinetic sculpture that evokes the hull of a ship, built from steel and Sapele, a tree native to West Africa commonly referred to as African Mahogany. Inside of the sculpture, nine chains run overhead: rotating on a maritime sprocket system, eight of the chains represent the pace of the currents in New York Harbor, while a ninth central chain moves more quickly, mimicking the pace of a ship in transit.”

Matt Webb: Let me recruit AI teammates into Figma. “Perhaps app features should be ownable and tradable. A pocketful of feature flags. In short: instead of having thousands of features, mostly unused, undiscovered in a thousand menus, you would see a colleague using a feature in a multiplayer app (like an editing feature in a doc, or co-presenter in Zoom), and then… they could just give it to you. (Or you could buy it.)”

Semantle, which I wish I had never heard of.

David Remnick remembers Peter Schjeldahl. “He took his work seriously—despite the cascades of self-deprecation, there were times when I think he knew how good he was—but he was never self-serious. He once won a grant to write a memoir. He used the money to buy a tractor.”

Schjeldahl: The Art of Dying:

One drunken night, a superb painter let me take a brush to a canvas that she said she was abandoning. I tried to continue a simple black stroke that she had started. The contrast between the controlled pressure of her touch and my flaccid smear shocked me, physically. It was like shaking hands with a small person who flips you across a room.

And…

I like to say that contemporary art consists of all art works, five thousand years or five minutes old, that physically exist in the present. We look at them with contemporary eyes, the only kinds of eyes that there ever are.

And…

Life doesn’t go on. It goes nowhere except away. Death goes on. Going on is what death does for a living. The secret to surviving in the universe is to be dead.

Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, 100 Art Writings 1988-2018 from Schjeldahl is an incredible collection of criticism. Charles Finch, in his review of the book in the Times, said “Schjeldahl seems to find in art the unmediated experiences of living — humor, anger, sadness, perplexity, beauty, sex.” Yes. That. And Finch quotes this from the book’s essay on Picasso…

People make the mistake of supposing that genius is complicated. It is the opposite. We regular folks are complicated — tied in knots of ambivalence and befogged with uncertainties. Genius has the economy of a machine with a minimum of moving parts. Everything about Picasso came to bear when he drew a line.

Matt Levine: The Crypto Story. A must read multi-thousand word almost-daily newsletter isn’t enough? The guy needs to write 40,000 words on crypto? From his newsletter: “If you are a crypto expert you will probably hate this because I skipped over or slighted your favorite things. If you are a crypto hater you will probably hate this because, you know, it’s 40,000 words about crypto.”

Updates to the App Store Rules. 3.1.1 feels like cutting off experimentation and creativity before things even get started: “Apps may allow users to view their own NFTs, provided that NFT ownership does not unlock features or functionality within the app.” And 3.1.3(g) feels like a massive overreach: “Digital purchases for content that is experienced or consumed in an app, including buying advertisements to display in the same app (such as sales of ‘boosts’ for posts in a social media app) must use in-app purchase.”

Andrew Hill: The Best Business Books of 2022. Hill is the Financial Times’ senior business writer, and he shortlists this year’s crop for the always interesting Five Books. Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy sounds amazing.

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.