“Fueled by an obsession with the architecture of his own fame, Donaldson’s process now seems him engineer videos that, while potentially entertaining to humans, do not get uploaded unless they clear a bar set by the YouTube algorithm. In a different context, this calculated approach to videos might raise questions about the value and meaning…
“Tim Burke’s Indictment Is A Political Choice Disguised As A Legal Act” – Jay Willis (Defector)
“The government contends that Burke broke the law by using “compromised credentials”—credentials the streaming service did not issue to him, and that Fox News would not have wanted him to have. This is roughly analogous to saying that he used keys that weren’t his to unlock a door he wasn’t supposed to open. Burke argues…
“Loblaw Has Become an Everything Company” – David Moscrop
“These days, corporate empires have rebranded as “everything companies,” and everything companies tend to proselytize about the efficiencies they achieve. By operating pharmacies, health clinics, and financial services, among many other businesses, a retailer can better accommodate consumers as a one-stop shop. There’s an intuitive logic here. The more Loblaw can harmonize and cross-subsidize across…
“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…
“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…
“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…
“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…
“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…
“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…