“One weird trick to fix Hollywood” – Read Max

“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

“Andrea Fleck-Nisbet breaks glass, pulls alarm” – SHuSH

“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

“A Never-Ending Block Party” – Jason Scott

“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

“NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth” – NASA

“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/

“Oh the Humanity – Why You Can’t Build Apple with Venture Capital” – Benjamin Sandofsky

“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/

“What is the civil war in ‘Civil War’ about?” – Read Max

“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

“How One Small Video Game Publisher Creates Big Hits” – Jason Schreier (Game On, Bloomberg)

“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

“the cybernetic history of the crisis” – Dan Davis (back of mind)

“A real intelligence function, though, is explicitly concentrated on those parts of the environment that aren’t yet relevant to what it’s doing. This capability was weak in the central banks; they were not looking for things which might have upset their policymaking framework. The information was there, but it hadn’t been organised into the decision-making process and didn’t shape the view at the management or operational levels. It remained as ‘other data’ or was attenuated away by simply ignoring it; the ‘information processing system of last resort’”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-cybernetic-history-of-the-crisis

“Macron Attempts to Save a City Rocked by Drug Violence” – Britta Sandberg (das Spiegel)

“It’s almost as if an entire generation suddenly realized that France actually has a large city directly on the seaside, a place with pristine rocky coves and restaurants on the water serving grilled fish. The result has been a 5 percent increase in real estate prices, with the popular 13th Arrondissement seeing a 15 percent boost. Many of the newcomers are modern nomads: people with jobs in Paris who work from home in Marseille and can board a TGV to be in the capital in three hours”

https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/the-marseille-experiment-macron-attempts-to-save-a-city-overtaken-by-drug-violence-a-bade2006-b7d7-433c-abf1-f053d56680aa

“Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI” – Erik Hoel

“All around the nation there are toddlers plunked down in front of iPads being subjected to synthetic runoff, deprived of human contact even in the media they consume. There’s no other word but dystopian. Might not actual human-generated cultural content normally contain cognitive micro-nutrients (like cohesive plots and sentences, detailed complexity, reasons for transitions, an overall gestalt, etc) that the human mind actually needs? We’re conducting this experiment live. For the first time in history developing brains are being fed choppy low-grade and cheaply-produced synthetic data created en masse by generative AI, instead of being fed with real human culture. No one knows the effects, and no one appears to care”

https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/here-lies-the-internet-murdered-by