Documenting Life

“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 efficient route. It took the bot about ten seconds to achieve this. It was a task that, frankly, I was not sure I could do myself.

In chess, which for decades now has been dominated by A.I., a player’s only hope is pairing up with a bot. Such half-human, half-A.I. teams, known as centaurs, might still be able to beat the best humans and the best A.I. engines working alone. Programming has not yet gone the way of chess. But the centaurs have arrived. GPT-4 on its own is, for the moment, a worse programmer than I am. Ben is much worse. But Ben plus GPT-4 is a dangerous thing”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/a-coder-considers-the-waning-days-of-the-craft

“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 hadn’t got a clue about making a record, or what that involved,” says Jones. “We just thought, Well, how difficult can it be?”

https://www.polygon.com/23954679/warhammer-records-oral-history-brian-may-john-blanche-metal-af

“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 of Ronald Reagan cry.

https://prospect.org/world/2023-10-11-cooperative-that-could-s-group-finland/

“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 that the state government is preparing to license in the New York City region. The $8 billion project, called Metropolitan Park, faces opposition from some environmental groups in the area and competition from most of New York City’s big real-estate developers, who are all battling for the limited supply of licenses. But if he builds it, the gamblers will come, creating revenues far exceeding anything the Mets might ever generate”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/steve-cohen-mets-citi-field-queens-casino-bid.html

“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 for as a child into “Yellow Submarine”) and what both men missed in their solo work was the ability of the other to find the core good idea among their bad ones and to polish it up for them and turn it into something workable. Both released plenty of fatuous solo work that could have been turned into classics with just a little bit of help from the other (as well as both releasing plenty of actual classics in their solo work)”

https://www.patreon.com/posts/thoughts-on-now-92258652