Shiny things 18/ I give Quantitative Aesthetics 6.5 out of 10
Trying a new format
Idea: Quantitative Aesthetics - this essay is a must read.
Data analysis, done with care, can yield insights of great depth […] But as an instrument used to justify consumer preference within a landscape of complex values, a Quantitative Aesthetic often just becomes a way to deal with the problem of not wanting to spend much time thinking—the opposite of deep thought.
I only have a joke as a counter argument to this essay — the Anthropocene reviewed is a great book.
Book: The Great Reclamation is an imaginative, magical story set in Singapore — I found it beautiful and human and so very Singaporean (as best I can understand that).
Podcast: Infinite Loops: Numerai, the “open source hedge fund” , and how lo-fi LLM embedded in low cost devices might forever rebalance how we capture and access knowledge and wisdom.
Other shiny bits
Senegalese farmers are using Whatsapp voice notes feature to open up the world. Though “illiteracy” is low in China, WeChat’s huge early adoption was largely driven by their voice feature, which continues to be crazy popular (typing hanzi is still slower / harder than alphabet-based languages)
the hunt for the next twitter: a series from The Verge (via metafilter). I am also on mastodon & threads, posting links to this newsletter, and waiting for a Bluesky invite code.