onfocus

Music League makes music social in a way that social media algorithms, ironically, do not. Every league I am in has a group chat that erupts when a new playlist drops, and again when the votes are in. The comments on the songs are often very funny and might be my favorite part of the game.

I've been playing Music League with friends for a while and it has been a great way to hear new music. Lots of conversations about music and sharing memories about music that wouldn't happen otherwise. Highly recommended!

One student I met outside the Low Library after Johnson’s speech, who only identified himself by an initial, K, summed up the dissonance between Johnson’s description of the protesters and the reality of the encampment: “It’s as if there’s some kind of armed insurrection here—there isn’t,” K told me. “There’s maybe, like, 100 students sleeping in tents on a lawn.”

I think it’s good to keep in mind who really has power in these situations. Is it the administration and politicians who can direct militarized police or college kids? Showing up on campus to get some headlines while punching down is awful.

It’s a rogue court, a thoroughly corrupt one, one that is so far gone in its corruption that it feels free even from the practical obligation to clothe its corruption for the sake of appearances.

Hard not to be completely depressed about the state of things. This is the consequence of having a billionaire class and a large number of non-billionaires voting for their chosen sociopath. Please vote for people who care about other living people.

It’s important to be clear here: there is no chance a critical mass of people will ever leave X without a major shock to the system. Musk is not a smart person but on some level he recognises that many of those who have stuck with X through every single depraved shift in its centre of gravity will happily stick with X as it gets significantly more hateful and harmful. But that doesn’t mean you should stay, and prolong its decline.

The best time to leave was 2018, but the 2nd best time is now. It's painful to shut off a regular source of information. It's also very possible. Experimenting and rebuilding how you get info sounds like a lot of work and it is! Sharpening your Internet skills will make you feel young again and you get to stop working for that weirdo.

McKinsey is to the middle class what flesh-eating bacteria is to healthy tissue.

Edward Zitron reads Google's internal emails revealed in a DOJ suit and names names:

These emails are a stark example of the monstrous growth-at-all-costs mindset that dominates the tech ecosystem, and if you take one thing away from this newsletter, I want it to be the name Prabhakar Raghavan, and an understanding that there are people responsible for the current state of technology.

Scathing.

…in the meantime, you have tens of thousands of people who are pregnant or will become pregnant who will either need to drive or fly or get sick in order to receive care and their health will be very much at risk." 

As I always ask, please vote for people who care about other people and want them to be healthy. Please help living people here and now. Abstract ideas will continue to be ok but real living people might not be ok.

"Relative to undocumented immigrants, U.S.-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes," according to a 2020 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It's good to see fact checking like this happening in the media. It's very difficult to correct lies when the media is flooded with bs, but the attempt to correct the record is important.

Google Books is indexing low quality, AI-generated books that will turn up in search results, and could possibly impact Google Ngram viewer, an important tool used by researchers to track language use throughout history.

AI is why we can’t have nice things. Also maybe having a private for profit company organize the world’s information was a terrible idea. They make decisions to maximize their profits, not provide a data heritage for humanity.

So in the story of the loss of ancient Greco-Roman literature, library fires are just a footnote. No single library had a monopoly on the classics anyway. A much bigger role was played by a format shift that affected every book, everywhere: the shift from scroll to codex. That format shift took place in the years 100 to 400 — in antiquity: most of the loss occurred before the dissolution of the western empire.

Interesting history of preserved Greek texts. Expiring formats have always been a problem, I guess? When Word, Powerpoint, and PDFs eventually die we're going to lose a lot of knowledge. It's easier to copy data once it's digital, but it's also easier to erase.

A clearer-eyed view of what has happened in the last two years is that a few companies have amassed enormous amounts of data (mostly taken non-consensually) and the capital to buy the computing resources to train enormous models which, in turn, can be used to output facsimiles of the kinds of interactions represented in the data.

I think a better understanding of how generative AI products are produced would help clear up some of this magical thinking that’s happening.

Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts.

Like nutrition labels on food, we should require companies to provide ‘human labor’ numbers for their products. Centralized social media and generative AI also require a surprising amount of human labor. We should be aware of the human cost so we can make informed choices about which technologies to use.

“It’s been an amazing year for the world’s richest people, with more billionaires around the world than ever before,” said Chase Peterson-Withorn, Forbes’ wealth editor. “A record-breaking 14 centibillionaires [$100bn] have 12-figure fortunes. Even during times of financial uncertainty for many, the super-rich continue to thrive.”

slow clap.