Author: Self

“Two days before the first of its centenary events, the New York Times reported that Simon & Schuster—this great American company, this remarkable piece of cultural history, this repository of some of the world’s most popular books as well as its finest literature, including sixty-one Pulitzer prizewinners and eighteen National Book Award winners—had been sized up as AI fodder.

The large language models that drive new artificial intelligence services such as ChatGPT are trained on mountains of text. The higher the mountains, the better the training. Trouble is, there’s a shortage of readily available text not covered by copyright. According to the Times, Facebook owner Meta, which is competing with Google, OpenAI, and a lot of other firms to develop large language models, last year seriously considered buying S&S not because it admired its business or its books, but simply to feed its AI machine”

https://shush.substack.com/p/crashing-the-s-and-s-party

“In the UK, British Sugar dominates around two-thirds of all the country’s sugar production. Operating within a highly regulated and controlled market, pricing structures leave little room for profit margins, emphasizing the importance of operational efficiencies. At some point those processes were so streamlined there was no room to squeeze profits.

Then someone suggested that all the hot air from the sugar making process be collected and pumped into a neighboring greenhouse.

And that’s how in 02006, British Sugar’s flagship beet factory in West Norfolk became the country’s tomato capital!”

https://optional.is/newsletter/02024Q2/

“Till 2012, India accounted for only 2% of the world’s mobile data traffic. Then came the dramatic fall in prices, triggered by the launch of Mukesh Ambani’s Jio 4G mobile network. With a tantalizing offer of 4GB free data per day, along with cheap handsets, Ambani ensured that Indians were consuming 1 billion GB of data every month within six months of Jio’s launch, compared to 200 million GB earlier. Today, Indians use more data than the U.S. and China combined. And India accounts for more than 21% of the world’s mobile data traffic”

https://restofworld.org/2024/narendra-modi-youtube-influencer/

“it’s not so much a question of needing to be a professor to know the answer – you needed to be a professor to know that it was the right answer, to be sufficiently confident to maintain it in a situation where the stakes were unimaginably high, and to be sure that objections from admirals whose experience and intuition went the other way were wrong”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/jesuitical-economics

“Regulators and prosecutors will continue their slow game of whack-a-mole while more people are taken for all they’re worth by thieves who use the same old playbooks. As Bankman-Fried becomes a more and more distant memory, the industry will try to convince people that it’s cleaned itself up since its chaotic Wild West days. Without intervention, it may succeed, and the cycle will begin anew.

But I will be here, shining a light on it to the best of my abilities.”

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-54/

“China ships over $100 billion worth of goods to Africa, of which countries like South Africa, Congo, and Zambia account for the biggest portion. In 2022, online retail in South Africa crossed 50 billion rand ($2.6 billion), fueling the popularity of drop-shipping. But there are concerns about Chinese counterfeits — which currently account for up to 10% of the South African economy, according to the Consumer Goods Council — and growing worries over Chinese brands making South Africa their dumping ground”

https://restofworld.org/2024/dropshipping-south-africa/

“It is always stressful because there are endless last-minute, last changes. Like: Did you remember todo that thing I never told you about until just now? Which means shuffling things around to accommodate for changes.

None are impossible, just unexpected, untimely and under-appreciated”

https://optional.is/required/2024/04/05/week-684-686/

In my head, I still hear you. When things go well, you gently mock the swelling of my ego. When things go wrong, I feel how you would have held my hand. I flirt, and hear your comments on my choices. I smile at the joy you’d have taken from a news story, remember how you always had the inside track, imagine what you’d say about some drama among our friends.

I almost grab a newspaper so we can do the crossword. For half a second I wonder what you might need from the shops. On the edge of sleep, the world where you’re still here feels so close I can almost smell your perfume. 

And several times a day, when I know no one will hear, I say your name. I’ve no idea why.

https://jonn.substack.com/p/295-days-gone