“The second thing I realized is that it might not be such a bad thing to have to apply a Turing test to everything I read, particularly in the more commercialized marketing-driven corners of the internet where AI text is most often deployed. The questions it made me ask were the sorts of questions I…
Month: February 2024
“Fury Driven Development” – Ludicity
“The only thing required to be a grifter, inadvertently or not, is to have your presentation skills outstrip your technical skill” https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/fury-driven-development/
“The Age Gappers They say they’re happy. Why is it so hard to believe them?” – Lila Shapiro (The Cut)
“As Gloria Steinem once put it, “If feminism means anything, it means taking responsibility for ourselves. It is not ‘women as victims’ but women refusing to be victims.” The revelations of Me Too undercut that logic, showing that powerful men, protected by the institutions they dominated, could harm even the most capable and intelligent women….
“Japan’s SmartNews was growing fast in the U.S. What went wrong?” – Andrew Deck (RestOfWorld)
“SmartNews also instituted an annual company road trip as part of this project. Employees, often accompanied by Suzuki himself, would drive through political swing states across the American Rust Belt and the South to interview SmartNews users, local voters, and politicians. The company’s most recent road trip in the fall of 2022 brought members of…
“The Collapse of Hollywood” – Development Hell
“Everyone is trying to sell this thing you’ve created to the next person in line, that’s how the industry works. At its core, it’s a sales business. Not creative. Try to get that into your head. This is not a creative industry, you didn’t read Save The Cat from cover to cover because you wanted…
“Microsoft is about to share a new ‘vision for the future of Xbox’ – here’s what that could mean” – Keith Stuart (Pushing Buttons, Guardian)
“Microsoft has effectively backed itself into a corner from which no escape route is totally desirable. In many ways, the smart thing would be to combine the business models of Sega, which abandoned console development after the failure of Dreamcast and became a third-party games publisher, and Valve, which stopped being a developer and became…
“Congressional Republicans to Defund the Antitrust Division?” – Big
“So how do political opponents take on a popular agenda? Well, instead of taking it on directly, you do it by being super-boring. Just cut the budget of the entity you don’t like. And indeed, since the turn against antitrust in the 1980s, Congress has been cutting the funding of the Antitrust Division, such that…
‘ “Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement’ – Anil Dash
“But for creators, and for the world, that inefficiency was often wonderful. The inefficiency of old media formats resulted in less surveillance of the purchasing and behavioral habits of individuals, and larger surpluses that sustained a healthier, more vibrant media ecosystem that could even afford to invest in important stories or content despite the fact…
“Chain Gang – Prison Labor, Boeing, 23andMe, and Taking Ls” – A Scammer Darkly
“The phrase ‘women locked up in restitution centers to pay off court expenses and forced to work at fast food restaurants’ chills to the bone. It is so shocking, so cynical and twisted, and somehow not the least bit surprising” https://newsletter.scammerdarkly.com/archive/chain-gang-prison-labor-boeing-23andme-and-taking/
“Kevin Durant and the Wake of a Failed Superteam” – Howard Beck (The Ringer)
“There were maybe 150 people in the building that night, counting me. And it was weird as hell. As I wrote then, for Sports Illustrated: “The greatest player ever to pull on a Nets jersey made his Brooklyn debut Tuesday night, and the excitement was … not palpable.” It turns out, that profoundly strange introduction…