there are 4 posts from October 2022
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.”
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.