The best eulogy for the worst car in existence.
Visually, the Cybertruck asked and answered pressing questions. Questions like: What if a hammerhead shark were also a microwave? What if the abstract concept of “toxic masculinity” took on a physical form? Can a car be so powerfully off-putting that it makes your wife divorce you? Can a person communicate, solely through their chosen mode of transit, where they were on January 6, 2021?
Andrew Hawkins at The Verge really knocked this one out of the park. All articles about billionaires and their past-times should be written to this level of scrutiny and criticality.
TIL that not only was there a massively impressive engineering project that safely decommissioned Chernobyl in 2019, but last year, Russia severely damaged it to the point of catastrophic loss. Lost in the headlines and tragic as hell.
Nilay at The Verge did a whole podcast/post deriding Alex Heath's recent Mark Zuckerberg interview, inserting himself with the questions he would have asked. At first I thought this would be cringe (reaction videos are not my thing) but Nilay's questions are so sharp and so good that he, intentionally or not, makes Heath look completely inept. Fantastic.
Incredibly good writing about niche subcultures is truly one of my favourite things.
Some juicy drama around who actually gets credit for it, since OpenAI may have (read: probably did) used other mathematicians' very recent work on the same problem to inform their solution. Either way, a very exciting, confusing, and difficult time for the math community.
This Barry Can’t Swim track has been rattling around in my head as some of the most beautiful poetry I’ve heard or read this year.
Good piece on how the grid works and why data centers are running massive turbines instead of just plugging into what's available (hint: it's not nearly enough).
The follow-on to the previous link, which is worth reading in any way you can.
Pretty wild insider sourcing here. The mood outside of America is clearly Big.
and looking down at his hands during ads
The idea that this administration is accepting of legal immigration has always been bullshit. They are racists to the core.
Unfortunately, the ticket you are buying in SPCX isn't for Mars. It's the itemized receipt for Elon's mistakes back here on earth. At $1.75 trillion, it is the most exquisitely engineered, stainless-steel bag in human history.
Absolute banger of a piece:
We’ve locked ourselves in the stupidest possible version of Plato’s cave, where what looks like the spontaneous consensus of the hive mind is often just shadows on the wall, put there by marketers, political operatives, foreign-influence campaigns, or anyone else with a few hundred bucks and something to sell.
My own usage of for-profit social media has plummeted in the recent years, in large part due to the gross feeling of always having my attention being sold. This article on clipping, which you may have heard about, really pin-points the source of this malaise. It's hard to see how much longer sites like YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook (Instagram, Threads, et al.) can remain viable in these kinds of network conditions – to say nothing of the effects this has on the global (but especially anglophone) world order.
“Who are you buying all these flowers for?”
because sad things
can't be explained.
A really great and in-depth look at the data around American happiness (or lack there-of) in the post-pandemic world – with a perhaps surprising extension to many anglophone nations.
The Vergecast: The beginning and end of the iPad
I really appreciate the way Nilay has pulled apart the macro and micro concerns about the newest iPad commercial. This clip in particular:
In a month, Apple is going to announce AI features across its operating systems – huge sweeping AI features from the reports we've read. [...] They want to add generative AI capabilities to the products directly. And I think what they just learned is even a hint of breaking creative stuff is bad for them. [...] It's just an ad, it's a very expensive ad, but it's not born out of a love of those things because if you truly loved those things, you would not smash them. Maybe it's just a metaphor, maybe it's silly, maybe it's just a misfire. But a month from now they're gonna launch a bunch of AI features that are trained on a bunch of creative work and they're gonna have to answer a bunch of questions about whether or not they paid for that training data and whether artists are gonna compensated for it. And when you type into GarageBand "Make me a beat in the style of... whoever" – that person gets money. And like, are you ready for this? Because the reaction to this ad suggests that you are not.
A great little quiz, with an important post-script.