Category: Current Events
-
Something Different
Yasumura has been polishing his bit for years back in his native Japan. Now he has taken his act internationally to Britain’s Got Talent, changing his name to Toni Kaku and leaning into his mangled Engrish. Don’t worry. . . he’s wearing . . . PANTS! Izumi dug up a video of him from eight…
-
Underlined or Crossed-out?
Last night’s episode of Succession hung in the balance on the interpretation of a memo left in Logan Roy’s safe and the collective interpretation of a single, wobbly pencil line left by the family patriarch. Just when you think it can’t get any murkier, the clouds roll in. UPDATE: Jesse Armstrong points out the obvious…
-
New York Media Obsession
I’m looking forward to when we can spend more time talking about challenges in front of us than crime and corruption from the past..
-
Succession Riffs on Media
Cringy dialog around media from HBO’s Succession
-
The Challenge Ahead
Generative AI presents a challenge for media companies that can no longer rely on Google for “discovery.” The chat UI commoditizes everything it indexes so every source in its index is reduced to a mere footnote. The article (or media artifact) construct will exist tangentially to chat, but with less importance to the reader experience…
-
Art is by humans, for humans
I thoroughly enjoyed the final cut of Everything is a Remix which, if you’ve seen earlier cuts, has been updated to include a chapter about AI and its impact on Art. The conclusion is uplifting, affirming the triumph of human creativity over the robots. Kirby Ferguson completed this multi-year project, manually curating an impressive number…
-
The learned grammar of humanity
Thank you Noam Chomsky for pointing out the key difference between generative AI and human “intelligence.” The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question.…
-
Ukraine
Today is the anniversary of the war in Ukraine. The Stop Putin page is still up and the Yale School of Management estimates over 1,000 companies have withdrawn from Russia since the conflict started. If you’re looking for someplace to donate, check out the 1K Project. Looking through my archives, here’s a rundown of things…
-
Wet Leg
Nothing to report, just a musical interlude for your enjoyment. Chaise Longue blew up when it was first posted on YouTube. After a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist (they lost to Samara Joy who we saw recently at the Blue Note). “I was staying over at Hester’s house when we wrote it, and when I…