A depressing but probably accurate analysis.

A fascinating account of one family, split into two branches, and a very clear highlight of how much many elements of race/racism are a social construct. Some sad and difficult stuff in here, and some cause for hope, too.

A perfect set of little touches makes this a must read.

Keiron is absolutely bang on here. It can be summarised as "get buy in", but the flip side is "if you want to play a reluctant-hero character who has to be convinved to do things, make sure it's very, very easy to convince them".

The writing has been on this particular wall for over a decade, and smaller indie artists have known it for a long time. What interests me is that Jimmy Iovine is now saying it.

This article resonated very, very strongly with me, and particularly this quote:

“The reason that tech generally — and coders in particular — see LLMs differently than everyone else is that in the creative disciplines, LLMs take away the most soulful human parts of the work and leave the drudgery to you,” Dash says. “And in coding, LLMs take away the drudgery and leave the human, soulful parts to you.”

I've listened to "Cross Road Blues" a number of times over the years. This really is an impressive new digitisation of a very clean and well preserved original.

And the letter he has written to the community of Apple users seems really very genuine and plausible, and I find myself wondering how many CEOs can really say the same sorts of things about their job. Obviously, being the CEO of Apple is a pretty one-of-a-kind thing, but still: how many of them feel a sense of outright joy that they get to do the job the do? As opposed to some of ghastly, competative grindset mentality or even just a weight-of-responsibility thing?

Perfect summary. Especially the "Party" one.

The World Bank abandon free market doctrine in favour of sensibly targeted government intervention. In further news, down is up, and dogs are now cats and vice versa. I jest, but this is both interesting and kinda-good-news.

I suspect I'm not alone in watching more Youtube that broadcast TV. But I do still get odd looks when I say I do that. I am relieved to find that merely makes me more mainstream than the person looking at me funny.

An AI research company is letting an AI run a shop. And it's hired staff. It's a fascinating research experiment, if, at the current level of the tech, more or less doomed to be no more than a weird curio.

Absolutely wild true-crime story from New Orleans. Fascinating read.