Tag: email_newsletter

“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

“Most modern clients look much different. Some wait to receive the most elementary instruction at base camp from Nepali guides, practising with their crampons and ascenders and ice axes. These clients don’t have months at their disposal to trek to a mountain and acclimatize to the altitude. They have weeks, at most. But they have money, and they have ambition. Flying to base camp, breathing bottled oxygen, and clipping into lines from bottom to top works for them. As well as a holdover from earlier times—being accompanied by their personal Sherpa.

For alpinists still trying to climb independently, the scene can be shocking: air traffic jams, equipment drops, tents full of oxygen cylinders—and the equivalent of introductory climbing classes taking place at the foot of the mountain”

https://thewalrus.ca/mass-market-mountaineering/

“Morrisseau clearly cared. He and Vadas flew to Toronto, where the suit had been filed, to rally support from like-minded gallerists and settle the debate once and for all. But by then, the artist was in his mid-seventies and frail and was using a wheelchair; he’d suffered a stroke ten years earlier and had also had double knee surgery. While in Toronto, he was taken to Toronto General Hospital, where, on December 4, 2007, he died. He never got a chance to tell a judge he hadn’t painted those pieces. Years later, the fight over the fakes still rages”

https://thewalrus.ca/norval-morrisseau/

“Frustration among electric car buyers is helping to fuel a combustion boom. And it’s not just at Caritas that the shift to electric cars has stalled. The German federal government’s central modernization project is in danger of failing. Not only is the German populace not playing along, but manufacturers haven’t come up with attractive products and the political framework conditions still haven’t been optimized. Electric car purchases remain the domain of those with healthier salaries”

https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/volkswagen-und-co-deutschlands-autobauer-in-der-existenzkrise-ist-es-das-ende-der-autonation-a-a8e67021-cf57-4931-98c1-fde3f2714fef

“Elden Ring is a horrible game if you’re trying to complete it as fast as possible with extremely limited time – most games are. It’s a wonderful game if you’re focused on the adventure you’re having in the moment. I spent about 40 minutes in a small smouldering church, trying to beat a red phantom warrior with a gigantic cleaver who could kill me in two hits, just to see if I could. When I got her – after two successful parries and a flurry of desperate sword swipes – I was beside myself. That was a moment I would have missed entirely if I’d been fixated on getting through the game”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/article/2024/jul/02/pushing-buttons-elden-ring-making-time

“As a reader, I can get over this. I have done so many times — easily, eagerly. Prydain, Krynn, whatever The Wheel of Time’s world is called … I’m game. I’ll admit, I appreciate it when writers knit their creations into the skein of reality — I’m thinking of Philip Pullman, his matrix of worlds — but if a nonsensical premise opens the door to something fun and interesting, well, great.

It turns out my charity does not extend to myself. As a writer, I cannot, in fact, get over it. This was a surprising discovery, and a vexing one, because I have long coveted the pleasures and possibilities of the fantasy mode.

Many times I sat and schemed, sketched and dreamed, and every time I hit the same wall. The same question. Where the f —  is this supposed to be?”

https://www.robinsloan.com/moonbound/where-the-f/

“The Verge reports increased scrutiny from Microsoft’s highest bosses on the Xbox division, after the $7bn Activision merger, causing it to “prioritise high-impact titles”. Worrying words for all the formerly independent studios that Xbox has bought in recent years, such as Double Fine (Psychonauts, pictured) and Ninja Theory (Hellblade). As Kotaku put it in its report on a town-hall meeting held at the company: after buying up studios, Xbox leadership says it doesn’t have the resources to run them”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/article/2024/may/15/pushing-buttons-big-studio-cuts-indie-developers-animal-well-retro-games