Author: Self

“Named after the sound of a revving motorbike, these bololô protests have become a common tactic for delivery drivers in Brazil. Often, they’re used as a response to physical threats or racist attacks on the workers. Because drivers have little recourse for nasty customers on the apps that employ them, the bololô has become both a last resort and a rallying cry, drawing together drivers in a noisy show of solidarity”

https://restofworld.org/2023/bololo-delivery-workers-fireworks-horns-protest/

“I do feel for the fans of all the teams that got fucked up gear, because I too suffer from a mutated version of that gene, but it is a load-bearing metaphor for the financialization and commoditization of pro sports by its ghoulish billionaire owners (of which Rubin is one!) that the only team merch you can buy – because a clout-chasing gremlin bought up all the rights – is chintzy dogshit that may actually have your bitter rival’s team on it to boot”

https://newsletter.scammerdarkly.com/archive/irregulars/

“Among the new releases on Audible are books read by Edward Herrmann, who you might know from his work in Warren Beatty’s Reds or Oliver Stone’s Nixon or Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator or The Gilmore Girls. Herrmann has been dead for ten years. His family gave tapes of his voice to DeepZen, a London-based AI startup. DeepZen is working with a variety of voices to master the full range of human intonation. The results are impressive.

The Wall Street Journal wrote about Edward Herrmann’s books and the intersection of AI and audiobooks. It presented a sample of a DeepZen audio voice and a real voice reading the same text and asked readers to guess which was which. I listen to a ton of audiobooks and consider myself quite sensitive to voices: I guessed wrong”

https://shush.substack.com/p/book-publishings-sonic-boom

“I mention this because people like to grumble about book reviews being cronyism and favoritism and untrustworthy. That isn’t how they work in my experience. Indeed, book reviews are one of the rare publishing spaces largely free of that. Which is one reason it’s sad that book review sections keep dwindling. Blurbs are often connections, publicity is paid for, and buzz tends to be a bit of both, but professional book reviews aren’t either”

https://countercraft.substack.com/p/on-reviewing-books

“Today, recognizing America is in a monopoly crisis has become conventional wisdom, so much so that this judge, an 82 year-old Ronald Reagan appointee, openly talked about the effects of this concentration problem in a merger opinion blocking a deal between two relatively small airlines. And no one batted an eye. That is a stunning intellectual turnaround from an era where consolidation was considered a way to foster efficiency and better corporate behavior”

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-block-the-jetblue

“I believe that those most excited about generative AI “letting them write” or “letting them create art” are those who do not understand that what we can create is, much like an artist, limited by the person itself. We are not all capable of doing anything we want, and through experimenting with our own limitations we discover our talents, sometimes through sheer force of will, and even then, sometimes we can put hundreds of hours into something without being as good as somebody who barely tried”

https://wheresyoured.at/p/empty-laughter