🔗 One weird trick for fixing Hollywood - by Max Read:

Maybe more than any other sphere of human activity, “wasting time” has been utterly disrupted by smartphones and the app ecosystems built on top of them. Businesses that used to specialize in helping people kill time have come under existential threat1 thanks to group chats, Candy Crush, Tower Defense, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, etc. It’s much cheaper and more convenient to scroll listlessly on one’s phone for two hours on the couch than it is to buy a ticket and sit in a theater.

I remember this! Going to some random movie in the theater because there was nothing better to do!

I have a weird theory that maybe some old TV series and movies should languish in obscurity and not be released on blu-ray/4K or streaming services because they were objectively crummy, even if I remember them fondly through the lens of nostalgia because of the point in my life when I first happened to see them.

🔗 Premature Evaluation: Taylor Swift The Tortured Poets Department

On her new album, Taylor Swift would like us to know that this was an act. She wants us to know that she’s a big weirdo, a crazy-passionate self-saboteur who has come to resent the gilded prison of overwhelming fame. She’s worked so hard and done so much, and as a result, millions of people feel entitled to tut-tut her life choices. That’s the message that I’m taking from The Tortured Poets Department, anyway. That’s a pretty interesting message, but it would be more interesting if it came attached to some bangers.

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🔗 The Man Who Killed Google Search:

In April 2011, the Guardian ran an interview with Raghavan that called him “Yahoo’s secret weapon,” describing his plan to make “rigorous scientific research and practice… to inform Yahoo’s business from email to advertising,” and how under then-CEO Carol Bartz, “the focus has shifted to the direct development of new products.” It speaks of Raghavan’s “scientific approach” and his “steady, process-based logic to innovation that is very different to the common perception that ideas and development are more about luck and spontaneity,” a sentence I am only sharing with you because I need you to see how stupid it is, and how specious the tech press’ accolades used to be. This entire article is ridiculous, so utterly vacuous that I’m actually astonished. What about Raghavan’s career made this feel right? How has nobody connected these dots before and said something? Am I insane?

On a side note, it was only as I was getting ready to post this quote that I noticed the title of Ed’s post says “The man…” but in the URL it is “the-men…”

Since the URL is usually set when a post is first drafted, it makes me wonder if Ed only focused in on Raghavan as the villain of the piece as he was writing it.

Or maybe it was just a typo ¯_(ツ)_/¯

My favorite diorama

🔗 Clap Or AI Gets It - Aftermath

Like the threat behind crypto’s “have fun staying poor” slogan, AI needs the rest of us to believe in its unstoppable ascendancy because that belief is basically all it has. AI products aren’t about whether anyone wants or needs AI products. They’re about how people could want or need those products, eventually, if everyone stays the course and also keeps pumping money into AI companies.