There are 7 posts from August 2022.
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.”
outside lands 2022, ranked
Saw 28 artists in three days. Bonkers weekend. Here’s my ranked list of performances.
- Green Day
- Disclosure
- Local Natives
- 100 Gecs
- Purple Disco Machine
- Cassandra Jenkins
- Dayglow
- Del Water Gap
- Sam Fender
- Sampa the Great
- Mitski
- Franc Moody
- Jack Harlow
- Jelani Aryeh
- SZA
- Lil Uzi Vert
- Petey
- Weezer
- Inner Wave
- Benny Sings
- Duckwrth
- Unusual Demont
- Larry June
- Post Malone
- Wet Leg
- Michelle
- Role Model
- The Beths
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.