Month: April 2023
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Sotetsu Line Tear Jerker
In America, it used to be AT&T that made the nostalgic TV commercials that would bring a tear to your eye. In Japan, a Yokohama train line is pulling on that thread. The Sotetsu line was the train I took to my Japanese grandmother’s house in Wadamachi from its terminus in Yokohama. It was the […]
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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 […]
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White-label AI Bots
I’ve been playing around with a hosted Chat AI offered by Chat Thing that was recently announced on Product Hunt. Seth Godin has indexed 5M words from his blog [Seth’s Blog bot] and Dave Winer uploaded his 30+ years of daily posts from scripting.com [Scripting News bot]. Both bots are instructive and give you a […]
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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.
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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..
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New Yorker
At what point to do you start calling yourself a New Yorker?
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Institutional memory in a box
Every publisher should be thinking about publishing their archives into a GPT-style database to be used as an internal research tool.
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Succession Riffs on Media
Cringy dialog around media from HBO’s Succession
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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 […]