A Funkaoshi Production

I had forgotten how great he was being behind that desk.

These Toronto Life scam stories are always so bananas, and this story is no exception. These women really torpedoed their lives.

The design and typography of this article on the NY Times is fantastic.

A lovely post from Kottke on the 19th anniversary of running his blog as a full time job. One of the greats.

This conflict is being so thoroughly documented by the civilians and journalists on the ground, but the impact of those videos seems to be a lot of indifference. (At least at the level of political action.) A more chilling and creepy form of documentation is also being undertaken by the IDF soldiers themselves, posting their actions on TikTok and other forms of social media. Also lots of examples of people saying the loud part quiet, so to speak. (Samira has been doing a good job covering that aspect of the current conflict, over on her Instagram account.)

Fathima and her friend Sujith Xavier look at the parallels between the conflict underway in Gaza right now, and the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka. (Hamas and the LTTE being on the other side of the conflict seems like another parallel. They both give / gave easy cover for the atrocity that follows.)

Craig Mod writes about running his Special Projects membership program for the last five years. I became a member myself this past year. My original reason for becoming a member felt very transactional: I wanted to get one of his books, and it seemed like I may as well also support him while doing so. Having been a member this past year, that feels like the entirely wrong way to approach what he’s doing. It’s honestly not really that great a “deal” if you just want to buy some books or prints. You kind of have to want more for it to make any sense. Almost a year on, I do feel like i’m contributing a very small part to helping make something good.

I love these deep dives into competitive NES Tetris. This video is great.

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.