Tag: email_newsletter

“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

“The problem is that everyone is a fool to someone — many someones — along some axis. Perhaps not the axis of cleverness; it could instead be sensitivity, thoughtfulness, precision. It could be etiquette, or kinesthetic grace. The point is: everyone is suffered, all the time, by others. Possibly they don’t realize it, because they are suffered so gladly; so transparently.

How small-minded, then — how foolish — to be the one link in this great chain of forbearance who “does not suffer fools”.

Just … relax, and suffer. It’s the least you can do”

https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/summer-reading/

“The update, which was meant to teach the system how to spot a particular type of cyber-attack that had already been observed in the wild, instead “triggered a logic error that resulted in an operating system crash”.

I’ve been covering this sort of thing for more than a decade now and my guess is the “logic error” will turn out to be one of two things. Either something in one of the most complex systems that humanity has built in its history will have a barely comprehensible fail state and an almost inconceivable combination of bad luck will have led to something catastrophic happening; or someone did something tremendously dumb”

https://www.theguardian.com/global/article/2024/jul/23/why-crowdstrike-style-chaos-is-here-to-stay