📡 – 2024-05-17
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I keep accidentally engaging with the AI assistants that are showing up in all the text-input boxes in my life, and it is consistently making each of those moments just slightly more frustrating.
Anyway did you know that in order to get your work Slack opted out of their LLM, your boss has to EMAIL THEM?
I have to do the same thing to unsubscribe from paper marketing spam my cable internet provider sends me (and continues to send me because "the unsubscription process is not immediate and may need to be re-initiated once a year"; bullshit).
Screenshot h/t to Ingrid Burrington, who has a buttondown newsletter where she collects Perfect Sentences. You should subscribe to it.
On to the stuff I liked!
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Press Pause on the Silicon Valley Hype Machine
But some of A.I.’s greatest accomplishments seem inflated. Some of you may remember that the A.I. model ChatGPT-4 aced the uniform bar exam a year ago. Turns out that it scored in the 48th percentile, not the 90th, as claimed by OpenAI, according to a re-examination by the M.I.T. researcher Eric Martínez. Or what about Google’s claim that it used A.I. to discover more than two million new chemical compounds? A re-examination by experimental materials chemists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, found “scant evidence for compounds that fulfill the trifecta of novelty, credibility and utility.”
World in a Box: Cardboard Media and the Geographic Imagination
https://placesjournal.org/article/social-history-of-the-cardboard-box/
Let’s unpack that, shall we? Boxes are media in multiple senses of the word. They’re lithographed surfaces designed to be read, and they’re dimensional containers that mediate between outside and inside worlds. They’re “media of transport and information, shapers of public opinion and consumer desire, and means of targeting attention.” 11 And they’re “logistical media” that “arrange people and property into time and space,” that “coordinate and control the movement of labor, people, and things situated along and within global supply chains.” 12 The cardboard box is a minimalist form with maximalist ambitions, an arboreal apparatus made from one of the world’s most abundant renewable resources, then filled with plastic and moved around by copious quantities of oil. It doesn’t just coordinate and control landscapes; it transforms them. 13
Best printer 2024, best printer for home use, office use, printing labels, printer for school, homework printer you are a printer we are all printers
I am including a box with buttons to buy a Brother laser printer; the buttons kick us back small affiliate fees if you press them and buy a printer. Don’t feel compelled to do it; my only ask is that you make this article go viral by sharing it in faux-outrage that the EIC of The Verge has published an article partially generated by AI, because after the buttons I am going to include a bunch of AI-generated copy from Google’s Gemini in order to pad this thing out.
The Revenge of the Home Page
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/the-revenge-of-the-home-page
Perhaps the platform era caused us to lose track of what a Web site was for. The good ones are places you might turn to several times per day or per week for a select batch of content that pointedly is not everything. Going there regularly is a signal of intention and loyalty: instead of passively waiting for social feeds to serve you what to read, you can seek out reading materials—or videos or audio—from sources you trust. If Twitter was once a sprawling Home Depot of content, going to specific sites is more like shopping from a series of specialized boutiques.
Good Enough
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/good-enough-adler-bell
This way of thinking is severe but not inexplicable. When a loved one is depressed, or worse, they may cease to take pleasure in their passions; we watch with dread as they forego the enlivening activities of life. Likewise, it’s not surprising that a society dependent upon our productive labor would cultivate powerful injunctions against idleness, sloth, and capitulation. (Thus our pervasive social fear of “dropouts” and “freeloaders.”) But giving up, Phillips insists, is not always and only an incremental step toward self-annihilation. Nor is refusing to give up always admirable or life-affirming. Tragic heroes, like Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, he points out, are “our catastrophic examples of the inability to give up.” They suffer precisely for their refusal to change their minds or change course; they are monomaniacs. “I want to suggest that we are, or may be, unduly terrorized,” writes Phillips, “and intimidated by the wish to give up, and that the daunting association of giving up with suicide has stopped us being able to think about the milder, more instructive, more promising givings up.”
When ‘Lol, No’ Is Not Enough: Lawyer Explains Why Bogus Takedown Over ‘Fuck The LAPD’ Shirt Should Result In Paying Legal Fees
As we highlighted in our post, the threat letter was ridiculously vague about what “IP” the LA Police Department Foundation believed it owned. It’s not difficult to figure out why: because nothing in the image above could possibly constitute either trademarks or copyright belonging to the LAPDF. Still, we had a few paragraphs explaining how if they claimed copyright, it would be wrong and another few paragraphs on why they’d be wrong about trademark too.
It turns out that in addition to the “LOL, no” letter, Dunford also sent a more detailed response to someone higher up at IMG, the rights company that sent the original, basically asking why his client, Cola Corporation (makers of fine anti-police wear), shouldn’t seek attorneys’ fees from IMG for their vexatious takedown.
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How this only has ~5k views is beyond me, holy shit
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I plugged the PS5 in for the FIRST TIME since we moved back in NOVEMBER (I know!) to watch a DVD of the Venture Brothers, but then I was confronted with the fact I should probably at least have passing experiences with Balatro, Animal Well, and that Crab Game Everyone was Raving About.
Alas, I have been back to Brogue to relax at the end of the day. It's hard to argue with!
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Never Post did a two part collab with the folks at Slate's Internet Culture Pod ICYMI about "monocultural events": those moments which seem to dominate all conversation across social media. Think: Evergiven, Balloon Boy, Kate Middleton. Part of the work we did with the ICYMI crew was to develop a framework for understanding these events... what characteristics does it seem like they must possess in order to dominate discourse the way they do?
We began working on this before the Kendrick / Drake Beef reached the levels it did, but I'm really happy to say that it meets a lot of the "requirements" we set for something to become this kind of event. The system works!
In the second half of the collab, I chat with dis- and mis-info researcher Joan Donovan about the proximity of casual conspiracy theorizing ("Kate got a BBL") to actual, society-unraveling conspiracy ("the white race is being replaced") and we have a Big Debrief with Rachelle and Candice about How We All Feel participating in these events. It's a ton of fun.
Catch both eps on our feed, their feed, and everywhere you listen to pods.
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That's what I got for you this go! I hope you had a great week and have a great weekend. I got two friends and my parents in town for the weekend, and we are going to go eat sandwiches in the park tomorrow. It's gonna rule.
If you got something to say, say it: respond to this email, and it should head straight to my inbox.