Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1551
New Taylor, new ChatGPT, and a trip to the mall.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? Greetings from the playground. Jane was on the fence but here we are. It is already too hot to sit in the sun. Best to get the playground time in early. Gonna be a scorcher.
Happy Taylor Swift new album announcement day to all who celebrate. I was asleep. I do not listen to podcasts, especially football (?? Is that right?) podcasts. Was real behind the curve on this one. Didnt learn about this new album until 8:30 EST this morning. My Swiftie cred is crumbling. I also do not like the title. I would say I like the cover but it is just occurring to me that there is no cover yet. That the padlock on the cover just means it's secret still. Alas.
Like the color of the vinyl though.
Olivia was supposed to announce something today or tomorrow. I doubt it was gonna be OR3, though. I wonder if she postponed.
And a new version of…
Hrm sorry just got interrupted, the playground mom of Jane’s friends was very chatty this morning. Her dad watches Tim Poole on Youtube it is so utterly depressing. Tell her Trump would never dare cut his Social Security. Really thinks he’s in the in-crowd, that guy.
And a new version of ChatGPT came out. Feels like it cost more and does less? People very sad about their chat buddies dying. But some people tell me the “agentic” stuff is better and it is better at coding. Definitely not a giant leap, though. I wonder how much it cost to train this thing. Haven’t I red it was $100MM+ per training run? And this thing needed a lot of training runs? It’s like an inverse version of Moore’s Law: each new iteration of a GPT is a smaller leap than the last at an exponentially higher price.
Though I suppose actually it could just be OpenAI, and the next Claude or Gemini or whatever will be amazing and a giant leap. Mmm hmmm.
Or I suppose this is a one-time hit because Zuck hired everyone away and they whiffed it due to personnel issues. Though given Zuck just hired some Republican toadie to Delores Umbridge his AI team, some of them will probably quit before too long. Be hilarious if he blows a few billion and gets absolutely nothing for it.
If you are as anti-AI as I am, you welcome the ever-spiraling AI talent war. Blow the cash, slow the models, bob’s your uncle.
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Listening to Ozzy Osbourne’s covers album, Under Cover this morning. My god I love the puns that are used to title most cover albums. Martin Gore’s was the best, of course, with Counterfeit. But Ozzy’s lucky to get Under Cover. Though I bet there are like at least ten Under Cover cover albums out there. Anyway his rendition of the Beatles’ “In My Life” was surprisingly tender. Most of these songs I do not know. Though we do have “Woman,” “Sympathy for the Devil,” and “All the Young Dudes” coming up. I am looking forward.
So I went to a mall yesterday. A big mall. Emma thought it would be fun to eat at the food court, and once I definitively ascertained this was not an elaborate ruse for her to eat at a Chick Fil A, I decided yeah let’s do it, this will be fun. Jussi came too. And Jane, of course.
It was a very good food court but I would like to go on record saying that this Thai chain that is in mall food courts is garbage and has no actual Thai food and it is really depressing. They have one at the big posh mall near us too. I spent way too long trying to decide where to eat, was about to eat at the Indian place, but some girl cut me in line and took the last samosa so that took the wind out of my sails. In the end I went to some burger place that was highlighting their turkey burger, so I figured it might be good. It was not.
That burger chain has no reason to exist. I do not see the point. If you are going to dedicate your life to a burger chain at this point, it has to have a purpose. Twenty years ago all burger chains sucked and so you could make Shake Shack and Epic Burger and that one with all the fries in the bag. But now you need a reason. And reader, this place did not have it.
The mall had one of those Fix-your-cracked-phone stores, though. And my iPhone 16Pro has been cracked since the day I got it, the day it came out, because for one day I used it without a case and immediately cracked it. They said they could fix my phone in 40 minutes so I did it.
And we all wandered the mall for forty minutes. I tried to accompany Jussi and Emma to clothing stores but there is only so much clothing you can look at when all your clothes are bought from Bandcamp or some shit.
The mall was crowded. Packed, almost. Mostly teenagers. So many teenagers. Lotta tanlines on those girl teenagers: bikinis all summer, tube tops at the mall, no sunscreen this country is hurling toward another skin care epidemic, my god, why don’t people use sunscreen (this is aside from the recent absurd MAGA assault on sunscreen I am pretty sure). Lotta ruffly shorts. Lotta broccoli hair on the dudes. One girl in full Harujuku baby doll dress that was pretty sweet. Not much dyed hair. Zero punks or goths. Very sad.
I saw exactly one adult couple, maybe four kids under fifteen. We went at like 7PM on a summer weekday so of course it was fewer families and zero elderly mall walkers. There was one other dude my age, alone, muttering to himself. He did not have earpods in. I don’t know what was up with him, though I was walking by myself muttering too, so I guess that’s what dudes our age do at malls.
There was literally nowhere I wanted to shop. Well, the LEGO store was okay. But, I mean. Malls. They no longer have any movie stores or record stores or furniture stores or electronics stores or book stores, anything I would have historically gone to at a mall. And they never really had, say, hardware stores. And this mall did not have an arcade or a theater or anything. So what is a person like me supposed to do at a mall? I mean obviously they just don’t expect us to go at all.
There were four brands, maybe five, in the mall that were pitched to me as a VC in NYC in the oughts. I remember all of their pitches, I remember all of them told me they were going to be online only. But here they are in the mall. Is that good or bad, I do not know. Reader, I passed on Untuckit and Warby Parker. Though I do not regret it.
There were several brands in the mall that existed as mall stores when I was a kid: Nordstrom, PacSun, Spencer’s Gifts (!!!), Macy’s, Land’s End, Express. Gotta give them props.
And then there was an Apple Store. I am pissed at Apple right now, but I went in anyway and god, so depressing. Just a black mirror store. Everyone staring at differently shaped black rectangles.
When I was getting my phone fixed, I thought he was repairing the cracked back with a logo-free generic back panel. I was so excited at the prospect of having an unbranded phone. But, alas, it was just a round sticker covering up the Apple logo and in the end, there was a logo. SAD.
Jane had fun, though. She got a My Melody plushie and… umm… I think that’s it? She REALLY wanted a pink case for her iPhone and she was really milking it and whining and hamming it up and being really cute and it was so mortifying in front of the Indian repairmen and I felt like such a capitalist tool being there at all but she did not get that iPhone case, I did not cave. Of course, she HAS the iPhone, so, you know, I am mostly a failure as a parent.
Industrial playlist for you today, good people. Jump up and start doing the Man Ray stomp. Yee Haw.
Okay I am running very late so gonna go do some work work work. Have a lovely day.
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.