P.O.S.S.E.
“Andreessen’s unwillingness to recognize that DOGE promises to be fundamentally different in its goals and structure relative to prior government reform commissions reiterates a recurring theme in his interview: I stayed normal as I became a billionaire; its the rest of the world that became radicalized”
https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/doge-dangerous-oligarchs-grab-everything
“The katsu curry craze is a specifically British phenomenon; it isn’t derived from a larger international trend. American supermarket shelves are not laden with katsu curry products. Burger King never sold their Katsu Range in Canada or Australia, and McDonald’s didn’t release their katsu curry nuggets anywhere else either. The trend is also a recent one – the ubiquity of katsu curry feels sudden and unprecedented. Unlike chicken tikka masala, it does not derive from a major wave of immigration to the country; unlike burgers, it is not inspired by a country that wields global cultural hegemony. But while the trend seems to have come out of nowhere, perhaps it should come as no surprise. After all, katsu curry is British food. Or, at least, it was”
https://www.vittlesmagazine.com/p/the-katsuification-of-britain
“The fourth and most important reason blurb dependency is surprising is that the limited data available indicate they’re ineffective. The audience-research firm Codex Group tested variations of book covers, some with blurbs, some without, in surveys of several thousand readers. A very small number of participants found blurbs meaningful, and only when the person doing the blurbing mattered to them, and the blurb itself contributed to their understanding of the book. When it came to purchasing decisions, 2.5 percent of participants admitted to discovering a book through the recommendation of a favourite author, and 1 percent bought the book as a result”
https://shush.substack.com/p/judging-a-book-by-its-back-cover
“At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Finance today, Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, billionaire Scott Bessent, said that extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts was “the single most important economic issue of the day.” But he said he did not support raising the federal minimum wage, which has been $7.25 since 2009 although 30 states and dozens of cities have raised the minimum wage in their jurisdictions”
“With some rare exceptions, I have found reading the classics as an adult to be thrilling and artistically inspiring. The classics are not some scam by Ivory Tower elites. Yes, we should expand the classics to include great works from across the world and by authors of all different backgrounds. But these books really are great. More than just great, the classics are always far weirder, hornier, and funnier than their reputations. Proust’s Swann’s Way is a riot. Melville’s Moby-Dick is beautifully bizarre. I recently revisited Morrison and Marquez and was reminded of just how full their works are of energy, mystery, and the fullness of life”
https://countercraft.substack.com/p/recommendation-the-odyssey-read-by
“The net result is that a huge number of our leaders are essentially stealing money, but they can’t withdraw the money directly, so they have to spend the organization’s capital on expensive nonsense to purchase status then convert that status into a better salary somewhere else at a really, really bad exchange rate”
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/brainwash-an-executive-today/
“In 1984, Co Rentmeester photographed Michael Jordan leaping midair toward the basket with a ball in his left hand. His legs are nearly in a split as he flies toward the net. It’s a familiar image for most of us — not because we’ve seen Rentmeester’s original photograph but because Nike used a similar silhouette of the athlete as the logo for Air Jordan products. The silhouette in the logo is not from Rentmeester’s image but from a separate, later photo that Nike created where Jordan is again leaping toward the basket. His legs are outstretched but perfectly straight and at more of an angle, and his right arm points down sharply. Behind him is the Chicago skyline at dusk. Rentmeester sued Nike in 2015.
[…] Nike prevailed over Rentmeester in the case, with a court finding that the images weren’t substantially similar — the photographer didn’t own Jordan’s pose, and only creative choices like the angle of the photographs and camera shutter speed could be protected”
“First, a practical argument: writing a formulaic book may be easy but making money off it is hard. Slop is still a numbers game. There are countless writers trying to hop on the latest trend, whatever it is. Editors I know tell me their inboxes are flooded with Romantasy pitches from authors who have never written in the genre before. This is true in every commercially successful trend, fiction and non-fiction. Remember when bookstores were overflowing with adult coloring books, Tumbler-to-book deals, and “fratire” bro books? The vast, vast majority of authors chasing trends will fail. Their books won’t be published or if published they won’t sell. Succeeding in the slop game is a matter of luck and timing, impossible for an author to control”
“concerning characters that could actually exist doing things that could actually happen in a world that’s recognizably ours; matching the mundanity of the described world with a mundanity of style and voice; expressed without any experimentation, formal intricacy, or metatheatrics; relaying all information in sentences that never fool, trick, deceive, engage in play, engage in double entendre, engage in deliberate obscurity, or otherwise strain the reader’s attention at all; are based on the assumption that the only path to transcendence is through steady and responsible accumulation, not the transformative moment; and which generally operate according to Jonathan Franzen’s commandment that for literature to survive, readers must never be challenged in any way they don’t wish to be challenged”
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/what-the-book-section-likes
“We’ve created a cybernetic teddy bear; something that helps to sustain an illusion of conversation that people can use in order to facilitate the well-known psychological fact that putting your thoughts into words and trying to explain them to someone else is a good way to think and have ideas. (That this would be a big use case ought to have been obvious to anyone who knew the history of ELIZA).
I genuinely don’t know how revolutionary this might be, even if this is all there is to it. A machine that doesn’t get bored listening to you could be an incredible boost to a lot of people. It’s actually quite hopeful in my view; although it is nowhere near as science fictional and glam as “AGI”, this could be a very relevant use case”
https://backofmind.substack.com/p/building-a-better-teddy-bear