Category: links_read

“Steve Ells Is Still Trying to Solve Lunch” – Elizabeth G. Dunne (Grub Street)

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“Ells is not the only restaurateur looking for ways to trim labor through automation. Sweetgreen is testing a bowl-composing robotic assembly line in two stores. White Castle is rolling out a robotic arm called Flippy 2 to work its fry stations. Chipotle has been testing a chip-frying bot, an automated guacamole-maker, and a roboticized make-line that can assemble certain digital orders”

https://www.grubstreet.com/article/steve-ells-kernel-restaurant-chipotle-founder.html

“Who killed Google Reader?” – David Pierce (Verge)

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“At its peak, Reader had just north of 30 million users, many of them using it every day. That’s a big number — by almost any scale other than Google’s. Google scale projects are about hundreds of millions and billions of users, and executives always seemed to regard Reader as a rounding error. Internally, lots of workers used and loved it, but the company’s leadership began to wonder whether Reader was ever going to hit Google scale. Almost nothing ever hits Google scale, which is why Google kills almost everything”

https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-rss-social

“On notes, outlines, and somehow cobbling a script together…” – Development Hell

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“If you can make notes and create outlines and then stick to those things and create a good script out of them, then that’s great. Good for you. I can’t do it. And the reason I know I can’t do it is that it has taken me writing this piece up to this point for me to actually understand what my problem is: I have to figure out where I’m going by starting the journey. No amount of packing lists and reading of maps is going to help. Until I’m on the road, I have no idea what’s going to happen”

https://developmenthell.substack.com/p/on-notes-outlines-and-somehow-cobbling

“Public intellectuals have short shelf lives – but why?” – Scholar’s Stage (2020)

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“Thus most humans develop their most important and original ideas between their late twenties and early forties. With the teens and twenties spent gaining the intellectual tools and foundational knowledge needed to take on big problems, the sweet spot for original intellectual work is a person’s 30s:  these are the years in which they have already gained the training necessary to make a real contribution to their chosen field but have not lost enough of their fluid intelligence to slow down creative work. By a person’s mid 40s this period is more or less over with. The brain does not shut down creativity altogether once you hit 45, but originality slows down. By then the central ideas and models you use to understand the world are more or less decided. Only rarely will a person who has reached this age add something new to their intellectual toolkit”

https://scholars-stage.org/public-intellectuals-have-short-shelf-lives-but-why/

“A Trilli – AI, Green Energy, Uber, and Reading” – A Scammer Darkly

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“It allows Uber to control drivers by forcing them to take lower-paying rides to hit ‘utilization’ metrics or face consequences. Like the advertising auctions we talk about around here sometimes, creating opaque markets where the company in charge sets prices on both the buy and sell side means Uber can pay itself more with no repercussions – riders may grumble about fare increases, but they’re unaware that money isn’t ending up in the driver’s pocket”

https://newsletter.scammerdarkly.com/archive/a-trilli-ai-green-energy-uber-and-reading/

“It’s Apple’s Vision Pro, The Rest of Us Just Live Here” – Matt Stoller (Big)

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“Scientific and engineering development isn’t a function of corporate size and power, but the collective knowledge of our society and how we organize it. The internet is a massive scale network, the biggest in human history, and no one owns it. By contrast, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have control over immense swaths of our knowledge base, but there is no reason for that except a political choice to allow a regulatory scheme that concentrates power”

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-apples-vision-pro-the-rest-of

“Issue 51 – It’s quiet… too quiet” – Citation Needed

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“Fairshake superPAC (funded by Coinbase, Andreessen Horowitz, and others [I47]) has just spent around $2 million of the $80 million in its war chest on attack ads against California Senate candidate, Democrat Katie Porter. The ad attacks Porter for receiving three contributions of $500, $2,000, and $2,900 from individuals who are executives at a pharmaceutical company, oil company, and bank (respectively), and claim she has received more than $100,000 in such contributions from “Big Pharma, Big Oil, and the Big Bank executives”. The irony of Big Crypto spending 20x this amount on an attack ad is, apparently, lost on them”

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-51/

“Bluesky opens up to the world – but can anything really replace Twitter?” – Alex Hern (TechScape, Guardian)

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“Threads is massive, but its user base is lurkers and influencers. Like being in the audience of a Marvel movie, you may consume some professionally produced content, but you’re certainly not going to form any lasting memories. For the past year, Bluesky has been pure posters, locked in a room with each other, deprived of much of the dopamine that they need to maintain their frenetic energy. And Mastodon is a community of commenters and reply guys, decentralised to the point that it’s possible to have a nice chat, but difficult to discern a conversation arising from within”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/13/bluesky-twitter-jack-dorsey-social-network