Tag: email_newsletter

“In retrospect, the Nintendo DS prepared the world for the iPhone, and for the explosion in touchscreen smartphone gaming that would eventually kill off the whole idea of a handheld games console. We don’t need them any more, now that we have one device that fits in our pockets and can do everything from giving us directions and taking photos to playing games. The DS was a half step between the Game Boy and the smartphone – a device that played games but could also do other things”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/nov/12/pushing-buttons-nintendo-ds-at-20-smartphone-gaming

“Anger and frustration in town have been boiling ever since: one person threatened to burn the school down with everyone inside it. A kind of madness has washed over the town, with people who otherwise led quiet lives being brought to the edge. One person told me they’d endure physical violence, even take a bullet if necessary, in order for the RCMP to lay charges against Didulo or her followers”

https://thewalrus.ca/queen-of-canada/

“In recent years, ideas once considered beyond the pale have made inroads into legitimate institutions and among Canadians. We’ve seen credentialled medical professionals play footsie with anti-vaccine activists wielding sciencey vocabularies, accomplished lawyers push dubious and convenient interpretations of the law, elected officials entertain baseless claims about governmental conspiracy, Convoyites swear themselves in as so-called peace officers with imagined arresting powers, and livestreamers LARP as tenacious, evidence-based journalists”

https://thewalrus.ca/conspiracy-theories-canada/

“I have a couple of books out under my name, and this was a very different experience. We got marketing support, which is an unfamiliar feeling for me. Her media team put together appearances on Good Morning America and the Today show, that kind of stuff. So that was cool in one sense and I guess dispiriting in another because it’s, like, how do beginner writers ever get that sort of coverage?”

https://www.vulture.com/article/celebrity-novels-ghostwriting.html

“Can AI be used to make cars drive themselves?” is an interesting question. But whether we should allow self-driving cars on the road, under what conditions, embedded in what systems—or indeed, whether we should deprioritize the car altogether—are the more important questions, and they are ones that an AI system cannot answer for us”

https://thewalrus.ca/ai-hype/

“If there’s one thing crypto fans won’t give up on, it’s trying to create their own countries, sovereign communities, seasteads, and other things of that nature. One such community is the rather uncreatively named libertarian paradise that will be “Liberland” — at least if they can convince the Croatian government to stop arresting its supposed “citizens” every time they try to visit the roughly 1700-acrem patch of floodlands next to the Danube that Liberlanders claim is a sovereign state. (Croatia apparently disagrees)”

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-68/

“There is in fact a lot in here that will remind you of other things. In some senses it’s a container for everything Coppola has seen and thought about his entire life”

https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/p/i-survived-megalopolis-and-all-i-got-was-this-weird-time-disease

“The past decade has ushered in cataclysmic shifts that have upended the fashion industry and changed the way we shop. E-commerce made designer fashion globally accessible, while fast fashion grew into a billion-dollar business, much of which is built on designer dupes at a fraction of the price. Social media disrupted traditional advertising’s influence and reach. Fashion influencers speak directly to consumers and suck up the robust advertising budgets that once funded the pages of Vogue or GQ. This paradigm shift leaves mass market brands like Roots in a tricky spot. If they go too fashion, they risk alienating loyal customers. If they play it too safe, they risk irrelevance”

https://thewalrus.ca/roots-sexy/

“It is my hypothesis that, back in the 2000s, everybody’s activation energy was a bit lower. More of us were bloggers, back then. Linking felt more natural, somehow. Now, in the 2020s, the algorithms do most of that work.

You must lower your activation energy again.

When a thoughtful reader shares a link, it’s not intrusive. It’s not annoying. You have to imagine the integral: all the readers, all the links. If the World Wide Web has any hope at all — and it might not — this is it”

https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/golden-door/#energy

“The Online Safety Act is a curious piece of legislation: an attempt to corral the worst impulses of the internet, written by a government that was simultaneously trying to position itself as the pro-free-speech side of a burgeoning culture war, and enforced by a regulator that emphatically did not want to end up casting rulings on individual social media posts.

What came out of it could be described as an elegant threading of the needle, or an ungainly botch job, depending on whom you ask. The Online Safety Act doesn’t, on its own, make anything on the web illegal. Instead, it imposes requirements on social media firms to have specific codes of conduct, and to enforce them consistently”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/13/why-elon-musks-fun-week-of-stirring-up-unrest-shows-the-limits-of-our-online-safety-laws