Month: May 2024
“Logitech’s Mouse Software Now Includes ChatGPT Support” – Daring Fireball
“Logitech committed a bunch of sins with this mouse driver. First, it just seems ridiculous to add an AI prompt feature to a mouse driver. Second, no matter what the feature, it’s wrong to add a top-level folder to a user’s home directory — and it’s especially wrong to give such a folder a dumb name like “ai_overlay_tmp”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/05/06/hackett-logitech-mouse-driver
“Cryptonomicon“ – Neal Stephenson (audiobook)
“Questions of Appetite” – John Elledge
One is that, in contrast to cuisines from many of the world’s other countries, you’re not likely to run into a “British restaurant” anywhere else in the world. The other is that a lot of Americans on social media periodically enjoy taunting the inhabitants of Airstrip One about our terrible, bland food. it doesn’t matter how often anyone points out that tourists are disproportionately likely to end up in tourist traps, that the national dish is curry, or that you can, in most British cities, now find decent food from any one of a dozen major cuisines: no American in history has encountered a single flavour anywhere upon the island of Great Britain, and the entire population of the UK is confidently believed to be so terrified of spices that we all shrivel up, slug like, in the presence of even half a pinch of salt.
“Golf’s wealth wars” – Ed Smith (New Statesman)
“Having fewer fans who are effectively funding ever more riches also creates a paradox: the game has to work harder to sweat its “stakeholders” (viewers), which in turn adds urgency to the need for stories that “cut through” into the mainstream, hence exacerbating the industrialisation of player access and the factory-line production of quotes and storylines. Yet this media-corporate complex induces weariness and cynicism among the very people it purports to serve: the fans who love the sport in the first place. Sport is addicted to constant refinancing, just to service its self-induced interest payments. And this “necessity” to make people pay more and more may lead them to love sport less and less”
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2024/05/golf-wealth-wars-liv-manchester-city-mcilroy
“The untold story of Kickstarter’s crypto Hail Mary” – Leo Schwartz and Jessica Mathews (Fortune Crypto)
“Even though Kickstarter figured out early on how to make a profit, the company could never seem to take off. The number of projects plateaued in 2016 at around 19,000 per year—with no signs of growth. Dollars raised on the platform, where Kickstarter got its cut, would fluctuate year-to-year and peaked during the pandemic at nearly $814 million”
“10 years of Super Bowl secrets” – Boondoggle
“The law is Orwellian in the extreme, as its preamble proclaims that “the department of tourist development adopts as its official policy the principle of open records,” and that “A binding contract or agreement entered into or signed by the department that obligates public funds, together with all supporting records and documentation, is a public record and open for public inspection as of the date the contract or agreement is entered into or signed,” before creating a statute doing precisely the opposite”
https://boondoggle.substack.com/p/10-years-of-super-bowl-secrets