Faster Than You Can Watch It · The Catalog · №005
Robotaxis without steering wheels, prove your age to Meta, and splitting the video feed
Welcome back to The Catalog. Here’s what’s worth learning, exploring, or watching this week, so you can start with a shortlist instead of sifting through noise.
CONTENTS
New Arrivals (Robotaxis with Drivers, Nathan Fielder meets Elizabeth Holmes, Meta Settlement IDs, Unlimited AI in the East)
The Feature (The Week Between Episodes)
Observations (Casual Dining, AI Music)
NEW ARRIVALS
01 · Robotaxis without Steering Wheels
Tesla launched a fleet of self-driving Cybercabs in Austin, TX. Cybercabs are a two-seat car with no steering wheel or gas/brake pedals.
You can download Tesla’s Robotaxi mobile app that competes directly with Uber. Crowdsourced trackers watched the autonomous fleet climb to at least 50, and Tesla wants you to register if you want to buy a Cybercab fleet.
No one is talking much about teleoperator mode. At low speeds, there’s someone in the background, a remote driver who takes control from the cloud. So the car with no steering wheel still has a driver, in a room somewhere you’ll never see.
02 · Surprise Elizabeth Holmes Doc with Nathan Fielder
You Can See Everything premiered at the Telluride Film Festival with a surprise screening. It runs 174 minutes, and was cut together partly from prison visits Nathan Fielder made to Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in Bryan, Texas, where she's serving 11 years for fraud. Holmes has said almost nothing in public since her 2022 conviction. Fielder somehow captures her on camera anyway.
Nathan Fielder builds elaborate real-world setups and then lives inside. On Nathan for You he ran actual small businesses into absurd comedic territory, and in the second season of The Rehearsal he spent the entire season on airline safety, building full cockpit replicas to argue that first officers are too intimidated to correct their captains. I've been a fan of his particular breed of comedy for years, and cannot wait to watch this new A24 documentary.
His co-director Lance Oppenheim blurs staged and real footage on purpose, so I doubt this will be a straight interview doc. It will be interesting to see a film made to keep you unsure of which parts are real, the same trick Fielder always plays, while pointed this time at Holmes who did it for a living until a jury stopped her.
03 · Meta Pays $17B and Starts Carding
A Los Angeles court found Meta and YouTube negligent in March over claims that Facebook and Instagram harmed young users. The award was $6 million, with the jury voting 10 to 2 and putting 70% of the responsibility on Meta.
