There are 9 posts from July 2022.
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.
thread of stones
Saving this here, because a machine will autodelete it in about 14 days time.
I had the wildest telemedicine experience today and I just had to share. (Over share? I don’t really share much on this app. Whatever. Here goes.) 🧵
I had a minor kidney stone incident in March, and then another, more serious one, in May. Kidney stones suck. Do not recommend. Stay hydrated, kids.
After the May incident I had surgery - shockwave lithotripsy - to blast a stone. Coolest name for a procedure, but really not fun. Also? It didn’t work! Stone is still in there, like a little ticking time bomb. 😬
Got referred to a doc at UCSF for a second opinion on what to do next. First appointment was today, over Zoom. Wasn’t sure what to expect! (I mean, 23 years into this global pandemic I’m obviously still learning how Zoom works.)
Logged on 5 minutes before the appointment. Waited. Meeting started on time, got put into a Zoom meeting. And there was the doc, along with a team of like 7 other people. (!!)
Two scheduling people, someone dealing with medical records, two other doctors, and then probably some med students along for the ride.
It was a crazily efficient call. Doc had looked at my images and my chart ahead of time, asked great questions, let me ask questions, told me what his recommendation was, helped get the ball rolling on next steps. Along the way called on his colleagues for ideas and help.
I’ve had in person doc visits where they walk in with a team, and it’s really nerve wracking. Who are all these people? Are they judging me? Are they all going to ask questions? Are they just here to stick needles in me? (I hate needles.)
But this first visit today on Zoom didn’t feel that way at all. It felt like I was showing up and there was instantly a team there to support and help. They were on it and it felt great. Like “Hey, we’ve got you. Don’t worry.”
It’s just one little reminder that even though things have changed with this whole everything, there are moments you can engineer to take advantage of new ways of doing things to make the experience feel better for people.
Now, if only they could blast this remaining stone remotely over Zoom, that’d be cool. Alas. (The end.)
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.”
DALL•E rolls out pricing
Super interesting pricing model from OpenAI for DALL•E. Each image request is costs one credit; you get 50 free credits your first month, and 15 free credits every month after that. Buying 115 credits costs $15, and can be shared across an organization. Also, this:
Starting today, users get full usage rights to commercialize the images they create with DALL·E, including the right to reprint, sell, and merchandise. This includes images they generated during the research preview.
I think we’re going to see a lot of competition in this space, and a bunch of creativity around different types of asset generation with different constraints on the input training set, different pricing models, different target audiences, etc. Weird times ahead. Also, it might be time to check out the DALL•E 2 prompt book, an 85 page guide on how to craft useful prompts for the big image making machine in the sky.
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.”
those office feelings
I love working from home, but I also love all the friends I’ve made working in offices over the years. In other words I love not commuting, but I miss…humans. A lot. This piece from Emma Goldman in the New York Times, “The Magic of Your First Work Friends,” is hitting me hard today…
There’s an electricity to forming that first close friend at work. It’s the thrill of staying too late at drinks to keep giggling. It’s the delight of darting to someone’s desk and dragging her to the bathroom to gossip. It’s the tenderness of showing up to work on a rough morning and realizing a co-worker will know instantly that something is wrong.
I wrote a thing back in 2015, titled TFW, office edition that I’m still really proud of, despite its dated reference to email threads. It’s essentially a love letter to my first work friends. Here’s a graf related to the one above…
That feeling when you’re running late on a Friday morning, having had maybe a few too many the night before with your work crew, and it took you longer than usual to find parking and the elevator’s late and you’re hustling to your desk because you’re worried the CEO is going to look at you askance and wonder where the hell you’ve been and you get there and she’s not in yet.
Good times.
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.”