Month: April 2024

“Indian food delivery company Zomato is setting up micro-hubs to pilot last-mile delivery for already delivered food. “Walkers” will pick up the food from designated kiosks, and take it to the exact floor or location. The experiment aims to make deliveries frictionless by eliminating the need to call riders and wait for crowded elevators. A month ago, a Zomato program manager even advertised this fleet of walkers, asking people to fill out a Google form if their company didn’t allow delivery riders to go up to the office floors”

https://mailchi.mp/restofworld/indias-electric-rickshaws-are-leaving-evs-in-the-dust

“There’s the germ of something interesting here – an idea of kitchen-sink rock, writing directly but artfully about the real lives of kids in post-industrial Britain. You can see why it would work – and in a few months we’ll see it working a lot better. But there’s a tension even in early Stereophonics between that idea and the grimly basic musical tools the band have at hand to realise it. The group were like the post-Richey Manics, but for people who didn’t like any of that funny post-punk stuff, or hip-hop, or even glam. Whatever sensitivity Kelly Jones had as a writer didn’t transfer to his singing, a raspy rock bellow as tender as a sandpaper handjob. And it didn’t translate to his band, who sound like they considered meat and potatoes decadent luxuries”

https://popular-number1s.com/2024/04/24/stereophonics-dakota/

“In 2019, Barr explained to an audience at the University of Notre Dame the ideology behind the strong executive and weakened representation. Rejecting the clear words of the Constitution’s framers, Barr said that the U.S. was never meant to be a secular democracy. When the nation’s founders had spoken so extensively about self-government, he said, they had not meant the right to elect representatives of their own choosing. Instead, he said, the founders meant the ability of individuals to “restrain and govern themselves.” And, because people are willful, the only way to achieve self-government is through religion.

Those who believe the United States is a secular country, he said, are destroying the nation. It was imperative, he said, to reject those values and embrace religion as the basis for American government”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-28-2024

“Any diagnosis of the crisis–and any sense of a path forward–needs to address the fact that the smartphone, and a host of software technologies built on it, have birthed what is essentially a parallel, non-union, motion-picture industry consisting of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, Twitter, and their many other social-video rivals, all of which rely on the free or barely compensated labor product of people acting as de facto writers, directors, producers, actors, and crew. Even if they’d never see it this way, YouTubers and TikTokers are effectively competing with Hollywood over the idle hours of consumers everywhere; more to the point, they’re doing what any non-union workforce does in an insufficiently organized industry: driving down labor compensation”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/one-weird-trick-for-fixing-hollywood-6f0

“When distributors go down, they tend to take publishers with them—the publisher’s inventory and cash are all tied up in the distributor. Jack Stoddart’s General Distribution Services filed for bankruptcy in 2002 and claimed or threatened the lives of a whole raft of publishing houses including Key Porter, House of Anansi, ECW, and Douglas & McIntyre. Just two weeks ago, Small Press Distribution, which distributed several hundred US literary presses and magazines, closed its doors. One expert quoted by the New York Times expects that 85 to 90 percent of those presses and magazines may now go under”

https://shush.substack.com/p/andrea-fleck-nisbet-breaks-glass

“Block, block, block. Report and block. Mute and block. You will feel parts of your soul unclench that you didn’t previously understand were balled into tights fist of stress and simmering disaster. I’m involved in dozens, sometimes hundreds of interactions in a given week, and I do it. You should consider this your license to do it as well”

A Never-Ending Block Party

“A radio signal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 ½ hours for a signal to come back to Earth. When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft.

During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software. These include the portions that will start returning science data”

https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/04/22/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth/

“The Apple Way works best when they take an existing product and make it amazing. The best pitch for Apple Watch wasn’t “The Rolex of Tech,” but rather, “A very fancy FitBit.”

It also helps when a product leverages Apple’s existing ecosystem, and the goodwill Apple had earned from customers. The Apple Watch connected to the Health app, received messages from your phone, played your favorite music, etc. Apple has a beautiful moat, I’m sure filled with stunning koi fish.

Humane spent five years developing their product in a vacuum. They lacked a FitBit to prove their concept. They had little evidence people want to ditch their phones. They didn’t know what form factors users would tolerate. They didn’t have normal people telling them battery swaps are dumb”

https://www.sandofsky.com/humane/

“Ultimately the movie seems much less concerned with making a particular political or moral statement (or even exploring the politics or morals of its fictional scenario) than it does with efficiently and energetically moving its truck of adrenaline junkies from one suspenseful action set-piece to the next. It’s like finding a 1967 alternate-history novel published by Del Rey with the tagline “They Crossed a War Zone Between New York and D.C.–to Photograph the President’s Murder!”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/what-is-the-civil-war-in-civil-war

“Having what Elliott calls a “sticky” demo is helpful — a slice of the game that grips players and doesn’t let go. Balatro, which transforms poker hands into an addictive “roguelike” that fans can’t stop playing, is a good example of this phenomenon. The game is difficult to explain but nearly impossible to put down once you’ve tried it.

Elliott said his teams often reach out to small streamers and YouTubers — people who might not have millions of viewers but do have loyal, dedicated audiences that can add up in the aggregate. “If you get enough of those people talking about the game early enough, it does build resonance,” he said.

Elliott, who worked at big game companies such as Acclaim and Electronic Arts before becoming an entrepreneur, said he started Playstack in 2016 “to do everything I’d ever done again, but learn from the mistakes.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-19/how-small-video-game-publisher-playstack-creates-hits-like-balatro