“It Seems Like “The Reckoning” Has Become Embarrassing” – Freddie deBoer

“That’s what I think this is all about, this reflexive insistence that 2020 is the distant past, that really it wasn’t that big of a deal – if you acknowledge that there was this big political moment, that you and all your friends believed in it, that you yelled and marched and beat a drum for it, and then that moment failed according to its own outsized demands, well, then maybe you’ve been owned. Maybe you’ve been made to look foolish. Maybe you don’t actually exist at a permanent remove from ordinary human frustration and disappointment. Maybe you can fail, can be hurt, can be gotten to. And we can’t have that. So you look at the excess and failure of a passionate moment, when you allowed yourself to get carried away, and you say oh, well, hey. That was so long ago, and it wasn’t a really big deal”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/it-seems-like-the-reckoning-has-become

“Among the A.I. Doomsayers” – Andrew Marantz (The New Yorker)

“Grace sometimes works from Constellation, a space in downtown Berkeley intended to “build the capacities that the world needs in order to be ready” for A.I. transformation. A related nonprofit apparently spent millions of dollars to buy an old hotel in Berkeley and turn it into another A.I.-alignment event space (and party house, and retreat center), featuring “cozy nooks with firepits, discussion rooms with endless whiteboards,” and “math and science decorations.” Grace now lives alone, but many of her friends still live in group houses, where they share resources, and sometimes polyamorous entanglements. A few of them have voluntarily infected themselves with a genetically engineered bacteria designed to prevent tooth decay”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/18/among-the-ai-doomsayers

“everything in modern culture is about status resentment” – Freddie deBoer

“That is to say, she is suggesting a comparison (traditional publishing houses vs self-publishing) when she has no numbers with which to make the comparison. There’s no big self-publishing merger that produced lots of public data to crunch. Against the hard numbers that make publishing look bad, she can only pitch broad waves to conditions in self-publishing. That’s because we simply don’t have the necessary information. But it is a certainty that self-publishing follows a Pareto distribution as well. There is no doubt that the vast majority of people trying to make it in self-publishing are failing. There is no doubt that the vast majority working on newsletters will not have the success Griffin has had. Success in creative fields is hard to come by no matter what the model. That’s always been true of the arts! There’s no halcyon days when most artists made a living, and every reason to believe that creators of all types face”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/publishing-is-designed-to-make-most

“What just happened” – John Elledge

“As the day went on, assorted commentators dusted off their “whisper it, but Susan Hall could win” takes – not necessarily because they believed them, but simply because they didn’t want to be the one who’d laughed off the possibility if it happened. That evening the BBC political editor herself tweeted that, “No votes have been counted yet… but it is clear tonight that the race is much much closer than some polls had suggested…” How any such thing could be clear when no votes had been counted was an open question. All that was clear was that a lot of people were saying the race was much closer than some polls had suggested.

And the moment we started to see any actual vote numbers, the narrative collapsed”

https://jonn.substack.com/p/what-just-happened

“With creative developers shutting everywhere, the future of games looks bleaker and boring” – Keza MacDonald (Pushing Buttons, Guardian)

“The kind of games and studios that are being “rationalised” out of existence here are exactly the kind that we need in 2024: smaller, creatively interesting games that offer alternatives to the increasingly homogeneous gaming behemoths that have been hoovering up money for more than 10 years. Roll7’s releases are exactly the kinds of games that should form part of an artistically as well as monetarily valuable portfolio for a publisher such as Take-Two.

Grand Theft Auto prints money, and the publisher’s executives take home tens of millions every year. Is it actually true now that such a publisher can’t support smaller games, too – even if they win awards and turn a profit? What is the point of having an “indie” publishing label if you’re simply going to buy good studios and shut them down after barely two years?”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/article/2024/may/08/pushing-buttons-roll7-studio-take-two

“Logitech’s Mouse Software Now Includes ChatGPT Support” – Daring Fireball

“Logitech committed a bunch of sins with this mouse driver. First, it just seems ridiculous to add an AI prompt feature to a mouse driver. Second, no matter what the feature, it’s wrong to add a top-level folder to a user’s home directory — and it’s especially wrong to give such a folder a dumb name like “ai_overlay_tmp”

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/05/06/hackett-logitech-mouse-driver

“Questions of Appetite” – John Elledge

One is that, in contrast to cuisines from many of the world’s other countries, you’re not likely to run into a “British restaurant” anywhere else in the world. The other is that a lot of Americans on social media periodically enjoy taunting the inhabitants of Airstrip One about our terrible, bland food. it doesn’t matter how often anyone points out that tourists are disproportionately likely to end up in tourist traps, that the national dish is curry, or that you can, in most British cities, now find decent food from any one of a dozen major cuisines: no American in history has encountered a single flavour anywhere upon the island of Great Britain, and the entire population of the UK is confidently believed to be so terrified of spices that we all shrivel up, slug like, in the presence of even half a pinch of salt.

https://jonn.substack.com/p/questions-of-appetite

“Golf’s wealth wars” – Ed Smith (New Statesman)

“Having fewer fans who are effectively funding ever more riches also creates a paradox: the game has to work harder to sweat its “stakeholders” (viewers), which in turn adds urgency to the need for stories that “cut through” into the mainstream, hence exacerbating the industrialisation of player access and the factory-line production of quotes and storylines. Yet this media-corporate complex induces weariness and cynicism among the very people it purports to serve: the fans who love the sport in the first place. Sport is addicted to constant refinancing, just to service its self-induced interest payments. And this “necessity” to make people pay more and more may lead them to love sport less and less”

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2024/05/golf-wealth-wars-liv-manchester-city-mcilroy

“The untold story of Kickstarter’s crypto Hail Mary” – Leo Schwartz and Jessica Mathews (Fortune Crypto)

“Even though Kickstarter figured out early on how to make a profit, the company could never seem to take off. The number of projects plateaued in 2016 at around 19,000 per year—with no signs of growth. Dollars raised on the platform, where Kickstarter got its cut, would fluctuate year-to-year and peaked during the pandemic at nearly $814 million”

https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/03/11/kickstarter-blockchain-a16z-crypto-secret-investment-chris-dixon/

“10 years of Super Bowl secrets” – Boondoggle

“The law is Orwellian in the extreme, as its preamble proclaims that “the department of tourist development adopts as its official policy the principle of open records,” and that “A binding contract or agreement entered into or signed by the department that obligates public funds, together with all supporting records and documentation, is a public record and open for public inspection as of the date the contract or agreement is entered into or signed,” before creating a statute doing precisely the opposite”

https://boondoggle.substack.com/p/10-years-of-super-bowl-secrets