“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

“Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon” – Understanding AI

“At the moment, we don’t have any real insight into how LLMs accomplish feats like this. Some people argue that examples like this demonstrate that the models are starting to truly understand the meanings of the words in their training set. Others insist that language models are “stochastic parrots” that merely repeat increasingly complex word sequences without truly understanding them.

This debate points to a deep philosophical tension that may be impossible to resolve. Nonetheless, we think it is important to focus on the empirical performance of models like GPT-3. If a language model is able to consistently get the right answer for a particular type of question, and if researchers are confident that they have controlled for confounds (e.g., ensuring that the language model was not exposed to those questions during training), then that is an interesting and important result whether or not it understands language in exactly the same sense that people do”

https://www.understandingai.org/p/large-language-models-explained-with

“Party Switch. Sorry Dad” – Matt Glassman

“But the thing I really loved was watching my dad watch a hockey game. He was a very mild-mannered person, except when it came to sports. And when it came to sports, he was still pretty reserved, except when it came to hockey. Just a lovable lunatic. He could barely sit still in front of the TV, directing the players on the ice second by second, calling for line changes, harassing the referees, all while keeping up a running commentary that rivaled the announcers. It was impossible not to love”

https://mattglassman.substack.com/p/party-switch-sorry-dad