A Funkaoshi Production

Andy Biao goes deep on the rise and fall of Ello.

My favourite newsletter is leaving Substack, because Substack sucks.

The Eras concert was honestly bananas. I’m far from the biggest Taylor Swift fan, but the scope of the show is pretty crazy.

It’s uncanny how well this all works.

All about how terrible the Internet is now that every site you read has been built to be scraped by Google’s bots.

I skipped ahead to the 36 minute mark, and it’s bananas. You “beat” tetris by forcing the game to crash. There is an interview with the fellow on YouTube.

A weirdly engrossing video about viewing the motion information in a video.

Nicolas Cage can sometimes come off as really goofy, but listening to him talk about his roles shows he has a deep love for the craft of acting.

I’ve been thinking about aloneness recently. Well, I’ve been thinking about it my whole life. It’s difficult to remember a time where I didn’t feel alone or apart or “on my own.” And I’ve spent the majority of my adult life — from 17 onward — living mostly alone, going to bed alone, and waking up alone. Left to my own volition to somehow transmute that aloneness into forward momentum, “output,” (“content” ha ha) and positive habits.

This issue of Roden is a couple weeks old now, but I was reminded of it again with the launch of his new book Things Become Other Things.

The preamble to this post is already out of date, but it’s otherwise a good discussion of the tension at the heart of everything happening at OpenAI right now.

Whether or not you agree with the Sutskever/Shear tribe, the board’s charter and responsibility is not to make money. This is not a for-profit corporation with a fiduciary duty to its shareholders; indeed, as I laid out above, OpenAI’s charter specifically states that it is “unconstrained by a need to generate financial return”. From that perspective the board is in fact doing its job, as counterintuitive as that may seem: to the extent the board believes that Altman and his tribe were not “build[ing] general-purpose artificial intelligence that benefits humanity” it is empowered to fire him; they do, and so they did.

There is some so compelling about Mick Foley, Mankind from WWF. I love seeing him in interviews. He’s so different than his WWF persona, so humble and mild mannered.

Both leads from Top Boy are famous UK rappers. Kano is foundational in the creation of UK Grime. This video was done by the person who directed The Long Goodbye and is great.

It’s always amazing watching people playing the elite version of anything. (For example, this video about the greatest game of classic Tetris.)

Paul Ford uploaded his father’s writing to the Internet Archive, and writes a little bit about the process, and death.

It’s been over a decade since we’ve heard from the elusive White Stripes drummer. Could renewed attention over a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nomination coax her back into the spotlight?

A very sad end to one of the true pioneers of blogging. She was only 47 years old.

These people are life’s losers. Not because they have money or because they’re sending kids to private school. Lots of people with money know how to enjoy it. But because, by orienting themselves entirely around acquiring things they feel they should want, they seem to have rendered themselves terminally incapable of enjoying themselves. The most distinctive thing about them is that they seem actually incapable of having fun.

An interesting article on the discourse around ‘rich people problems’.