“Once, in a feat I found particularly astonishing, he had the A.I. build him a Snake game, like the one on old Nokia phones. But then, after a brief exchange with GPT-4, he got it to modify the game so that when you lost it would show you how far you strayed from the most…
“The end of anonymity on Chinese social media” – Caiwei Chen (restofworld)
“other major Chinese social media platforms including WeChat, Douyin, Zhihu, Xiaohongshu, and Kuaishou, announced that they now required popular users’ legal names to be made visible to the public. Weibo stated in a public post that the new rule would first apply to all users with over 1 million followers, then to those with over…
“The worst thing about writing a book is that one day you’ll be done” – Marcin Wichary
“All of them are connected by the subject matter (of course), but also by the particular shade of orange, the uppercase Gorton typeface, and the all-around certain Marcin-ness of it all: the strange curiosity, the obsessiveness, the visual storytelling, a touch too much vulgarity at times, maybe, and at other times a misguided fondness for…
“Warhammer Records: Brian May, bungled tours, and 40,000 hard rock anthems” – Callum Bains (Polygon)
“Warhammer’s gothic ultraviolence was clearly gelling with the studded leather getups of Britain’s burgeoning metal scene. And with Games Workshop embracing what Jones describes as an “entrepreneur spirit” where “anything was possible,” the idea of following up these musical dalliances with a full-blown record label seemed less like pivot than a natural next step. “We…
“I Hereby Swear to Hate Henry Symeonis, Whoever That Is.” – Lowering The Bar
“for more than 500 years, anyone who wanted a Master of Arts degree from Oxford had to take an oath promising they would never “agree to the reconciliation of Henry Symeonis” (this was in Latin, so quod numquam consencient in reconciliationem Henrici Symeonis). The requirement was added to the university statutes in 1264, and wasn’t…
“Zombie news: the strange resurrection of the local paper” – Will Dunn (New Statesman)
“It was not a real newspaper but a zombie – a piece of promotional material created for the local Conservative MP, Robert Largan, by a company in nearby Manchester. As such, it was just the latest example of how the local newspaper industry, which has been all but destroyed, is now being replaced. Freed from…
“The Cooperative That Could” – Ryan Cooper (The American Prospect)
“S Group poses a more fundamental challenge. Here we have a hyper-efficient retail operation, run with cutting-edge management and logistics, dominating half the grocery market of a wealthy country, without minting a single billionaire in the process. It is not just competitive with capitalist businesses; it is more successful. It’s enough to make the ghost…
“The Rookie” – Andrew Rice (The Intelligencer)
“When Cohen bought the Mets, he inherited the lease on a giant piece of land: the parking lot next to Citi Field. Almost from the moment he took over, he has been building support for a plan to turn the long-neglected area into an entertainment megaplex. Its anchor would be a casino, one of three…
“January 3, 2023” – Letters from an American
“Three Republican judges, two appointed by Trump, ruled that hospital emergency rooms don’t have to perform life-saving abortions in states that have passed antiabortion laws. After the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion, Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services…
“Thoughts on ‘Now and Then’” – Andrew Hickey
“To be clear, I think McCartney performing major surgery on Lennon’s song makes the result a more authentic Beatles record, rather than less. Lennon and McCartney’s collaboration was often in the form of editing each other’s work, and sometimes extensively rewriting it (as when McCartney turned Lennon’s sad acoustic dirge about being unloved and uncared…