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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.”