if you have a newsletter with 1000 subscribers that pay $5/mo, Substack will cost you $500/mo, Patreon $400/mo, Ghost $19/mo, Beehiiv $39/mo, Ko-fi $6/mo, Buttondown $29/mo.
is fighting for attention is Journalism’s biggest threat?
The destruction of patience is one of the most dramatic cultural shifts we’ll probably experience of our lifetimes.
A nation of uncritical drifters can change only the form of tyranny.
https://mattdpearce.substack.com/p/journalisms-fight-for-survival-in
Why are we letting algorithms rewrite the rules of art, work, and life?
For Marx, the poet of economics, when a person’s innate value is replaced with exchange value, it is as if we’ve been reduced to “a mere jelly.”
Artmaking—the cultural industries—occupies the middle of an uneasy Venn diagram.
Only twenty years ago, there was no public, complete data on book sales.
THE INTERNET is designed to stop us from ever switching it off.
Influencers get attention by exposing parts of their life that have nothing to do with the production of culture.
We are not giving away our value, as a puritanical grandparent might scold; we are giving away our facility to value.
If you are reading this, it’s a commodity now, fluctuating and fungible, like so much digital dust.
Building LLMs is probably not a good business
Airlines though, turned out to be an unavoidably rubbish business.
Fizzy-drinks – very favourable industry structure.
So is the position of LLM makers any good? I’m afraid it’s not good news.
Really though, LLM makers have only one true supplier: NVIDIA.
It’s worth saying that even companies that raise huge sums of money sometimes turn out to have no viable business.
Software companies are really good businesses.
The problem is that not all technology companies are software companies.
how to make social, social again?
After a lifetime working at mattering, I realized I had under-invested in what really mattered: Relationships.
Social networks became “social media”.
what would an actually social network look like?
Clearly, it would need to be private. Non-performative.
https://ev.medium.com/making-social-social-again-0126fa5c6ce8
To Build Community Requires
Because of induced demand, this Sisyphean struggle against congestion is an expensive boondoggle
this could be written about Barrie’s own Allandale and the 400: ‘but it’s really a divider—because it isolates Allendale.’
The iron law of congestion is an endless cycle in which congestion leads to highway expansion, which invites more peak-hour trips, which brings back traffic, and so on.
Because of induced demand, this Sisyphean struggle against congestion is an expensive boondoggle. Worse, the added miles of highway lanes act as an accelerant for climate change.
With so many forces pushing for roadway expansions, opposing them requires political bravery.
https://slate.com/business/2024/08/construction-traffic-cars-driving-transportation-highway.html
Lessons from Andy Grove
What you’re seeing today is a very, very rapid evolution of an industry where the milieu is better understood by people who grew up in the same time frame as the industry. A lot of the years that many of us have spent in business before this time are of only limited relevance.
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/interviews/a1449/learned-andy-grove-0500
friend with kids and aging parents, this app could really come in handy!
‘Flush Toilet Finder is the quickest, simplest way of finding a public bathroom or restroom.’