If you want to treat yourself (and that’s all it is — a treat), subscribe to the print edition of New York Magazine and never read the website (so you’re always surprised by the contents of the latest issue).
It’s one of life’s great pleasures, particularly if you love print.
”I also acknowledge that in American public life, women can’t seem to apologize enough for our mistakes,” she said. “While our male counterparts’ past — or recent — mistakes are minimized as youthful indiscretions or ‘poor judgment,’ women aren’t afforded that same forgiveness. Again, the only thing I can do is to say I’m sorry and commit to doing better.”
One of her mayoral rivals, Portland Commissioner Rene Gonzalez, had his license twice suspended more than two decades ago and also received seven speeding tickets between 1998 and 2013, according to court documents first reported by Willamette Week.
While court records show numerous candidates for Portland mayor and City Council have been cited for parking or traffic violations in Oregon, Rubio’s number and repeated flagrant lapses of settling them are unparalleled. Over two decades, she had her licenses suspended six times and courts referred her unpaid parking tickets to a collection agency on at least 100 occasions, records show. Days after The Oregonian/OregonLive first reported on her driving record, Rubio damaged a parked Tesla and then left without leaving a note for the car’s owner.
Portland gonna Portland.
(Be sure to refresh the page at least once.)
Don’t ever hand your phone to the cops
No matter what, teaching people they can add their IDs to their phones means some people will inevitably leave the house without physical ID, and that means creating the opportunity for cops to demand phones — which you should never, ever do.
Don't.
Ever.
This is among one of those many, many privacy stances most people do not understand. "I don't have anything to hide," they say. "Let the cops have my phone — I don't care." Or alternatively, "I don't care if Google tracks me — I don't have anything to hide."
Let's be honest — most people don't understand how a computer works, let alone how databases compiled by thousands of computers put together tracking profiles that know everything about them. They don't know how invasive it all is, how they're handing over their entire lives when they hand over their phones (or consent to tracking).
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s New ‘Message’ on Israel and Palestine
He had known, of course, in an abstract sense, that Palestinians lived under occupation. But he had been told, by journalists he trusted and respected, that Israel was a democracy — “the only democracy in the Middle East.” He had also been told that the conflict was “complicated,” its history tortuous and contested, and, as he writes, “that a body of knowledge akin to computational mathematics was needed to comprehend it.” He was astonished by the plain truth of what he saw: the walls, checkpoints, and guns that everywhere hemmed in the lives of Palestinians; the clear tiers of citizenship between the first-class Jews and the second-class Palestinians; and the undisguised contempt with which the Israeli state treated the subjugated other.
HOW TO SUCCEED IN MRBEAST PRODUCTION (leaked PDF)
There’s a lot of stuff in there about YouTube virality, starting with the Click Thru Rate (CTR) for the all-important video thumbnails:
This is what dictates what we do for videos. “I Spent 50 Hours In My Front Yard” is lame and you wouldn’t click it. But you would hypothetically click “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”. Both are relatively similar in time/effort but the ketchup one is easily 100x more viral. An image of someone sitting in ketchup in a bathtub is exponentially more interesting than someone sitting in their front yard.
The creative process for every video they produce starts with the title and thumbnail. These set the expectations for the viewer, and everything that follows needs to be defined with those in mind. If a viewer feels their expectations are not being matched, they’ll click away - driving down the crucial Average View Duration that informs how much the video is promoted by YouTube’s all-important mystical algorithms.
MrBeast videos have a strictly defined formula, outlined in detail on pages 6-10.
The first minute captures the viewer’s attention and demonstrates that their expectations from the thumbnail will be met. Losing 21 million viewers in the first minute after 60 million initial clicks is considered a reasonably good result! Minutes 1-3, 3-6 and 6-end all have their own clearly defined responsibilities as well.
Ideally, a video will feature something they call the “wow factor”:
An example of the “wow factor” would be our 100 days in the circle video. We offered someone $500,000 if they could live in a circle in a field for 100 days (video) and instead of starting with his house in the circle that he would live in, we bring it in on a crane 30 seconds into the video. Why? Because who the fuck else on Youtube can do that lol.
Everything on the Internet is a LIE (except for this)
Technology, double-edged sword, evil intentions etc. There’s an avalanche of manipulated bullshit coming from every direction, I’m afraid, the media is horribly guilty, on a zillion levels, of selling fantasy as fact - but I’m more concerned about people’s willingness to buy into whatever they’re fed, no matter how ridiculous, if it supports what they already believe. Even worse are people who get their information from social media, which is basically an ideological glory hole; you have no clue as to the origin of the information, you just dutifully put it in your mouth and then spread it like syphilis to all your friends. I don’t know if it’s a societal shift, or the failure of schools to inspire more kids to learn & understand, or the disappearance of books, but there’s this whole, weird thing out there where people read a snippet online and feel they’re experts on any subject, and will expound, or criticize, or speak in absolutes when in fact they’re laughably ignorant. The Internet has the power to legitimize the worst kinds of idiocy. If a guy is on a soapbox, screaming gibberish on the corner of Hollywood & Highland, people ignore him; give him a Twitter account and the Los Angeles Times will quote him and dub him a “pundit.” At some point the world has to realize that the Internet isn’t an accurate barometer of anything. Social media has become such a minefield of bullshit & scam artists that I’ve pretty much abandoned it. I’m disappointed in virtually everyone, everywhere.
Preach.
You Don’t Have to be a Try Guy
The point is that you don’t know someone’s character until that character is revealed to you in a way that’s entirely separate from the performed, self-conscious aspects of a person. This, again, is another aspect of human social life that’s made harder in the internet era, given that there is no such thing as an affect-free presentation of the self online. Decency and integrity can only be discovered through the process of actually getting to know someone; they are not superficial virtues but instead deep, in-the-bone qualities that reveal themselves only slowly and with effort.
A decent man does not have to put on an elaborate performance of being sexless and unthreatening towards women, in part because he understands that such a performance is no guarantor of safety at all. Very often, such affects are the very tools of predation. Nor should any of us operate under the impression that because some men are strong in the commission of abuse then the problem is the strength and not the abuse. It would probably be more convenient if good and bad came to us labeled and prepackaged, but they don’t. Sometimes the best men are some of the least ostentatiously feminist men, but only sometimes. You just have to live with someone long enough to find out when nice is only Nice. As Little Red Riding Hood taught us, nice is different than good.
Police Searching for Teslas Near Crimes to Seize Their Camera Footage
Police officers are scanning for Teslas that may have ambiently recorded nearby crimes on their external cameras — and even going as far as to attempt to tow the vehicles away to inspect the footage.
President of the Richmond Police Officers Association Ben Therriault told the Chronicle that officers usually attempt to ask for the owner's consent first, but sometimes resort to towing the vehicles anyway.
We can now watch Grace Hopper’s famed 1982 lecture on YouTube
Hopper was a very popular speaker not just because of her pioneering contributions to computing, but because she was a natural raconteur, telling entertaining and often irreverent war stories from her early days. And she spoke plainly, as evidenced in the 1982 lecture when she drew an analogy between using pairs of oxen to move large logs in the days before large tractors, and pairing computers to get more computer power rather than just getting a bigger computer—“which of course is what common sense would have told us to begin with.” For those who love the history of computers and computation, the full lecture is very much worth the time.
I’ve long heard about Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, often from unexpected people in disparate places.
Before he died, my neighbor, once an employee of American Satellite and IBM, mentioned her name more than once.
What a remarkable person.
How to use iOS’s Live Text feature
...back in 2021, Apple introduced a feature in iOS 15 called Live Text, which makes it possible for iPhone users to grab text, email addresses, phone numbers, and more from images. Live Text works with both handwritten and typed text and supports a variety of languages.
Once you learn to use Live Text, it becomes indispensible. This ranks up toward the top of 'best iPhone features most people don't know about.'
Social media kills political understanding
Perhaps your only concern is, understandably, keeping him out of office. Fine. But to defeat something, you must understand it. And treating this quite plausible political threat as a kind of strange alien which does not so much befriend as contaminate our loved ones, and which can have no other explanation than as a manifestation of our most base intolerance and bigotry, probably isn’t quite “steel-manning” the opposition.
Why has such child’s play become so politically mainstream? The answer perhaps lies in the second reason: social media. Politicians are the nervous hostages of voters, who at present are the nervous hostages of malicious algorithms designed to cultivate self-assurance and righteousness with artistic precision.
The Information: OpenAI shows ‘Strawberry’ to feds, races to launch it
An excerpt from an excerpt:
OpenAI is also using the bigger version of Strawberry to generate data for training Orion, said a person with knowledge of the situation. That kind of AI-generated data is known as “synthetic.” It means that Strawberry could help OpenAI overcome limitations on obtaining enough high-quality data to train new models from real-world data such as text or images pulled from the internet.
Using AI to create data on which to train ever-larger models of AI.
Huh.
Well, now that I know this, yeah, of course this is the next step. The whole of the internet is not nearly large enough (nor does most of it quialify as “high quality data”) to train the ever-larger models.
As the summer stretches on, I’m more in line with Gary Marcus than I’ve ever been. The anxiety I have over artificial general intelligence (AGI) — defined by ChatGPT as “a type of artificial intelligence that has the ability to understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks at a level comparable to or exceeding that of a human being” — is waning, at least temporarily. I don’t see the path for LLMs in their current iteration to become AGI, at least not in-and-of themselves.
But will LLMs be enough to fool many, many people into thinking that they are sentient? Of course. They’ve long passed that threshold. And that’s remarkably dangerous in a populace with little to no understanding of how computers work.
There’s a short-sightedness of the AI optimists that willfully ignores just how incomprehensible this stuff is to non-tech people — the people I engage with every day, often within some form of tech support. Most everyone has no clue what AI or LLMs are, let alone how they work.
Sure, those optimists would say, but most people have no clue how a tractor works, or an alarm system or a steel mill or an elevator, either.
And while that’s true, none of those things are designed to present as human, and therein lies the danger. When computers can present as human beings convincingly enough to fool other human beings — and other computers! — we are in trouble.
We will adapt. Humans adapt. But this doesn’t condone recklessly incorporating AI into our lives in ever-more complext ways without being sure the general population understands how it works.
What (still) keeps me up at night is not the emergence of AGI, it is the disruption that regular ol’ AI will have on our lives. Just look at the release of the ‘Reimagine’ feature on the new Google Pixel 9 phones. John is correct to point out that “this technology becoming ubiquitous feels inevitable,” but does it have to be? I’m not saying that it isn’t inevitable, I’m saying why isn’t there more of a conversation around these things?
Here I am, bemoaning the loss of the old ways in the face of an inevitable future. Sure. But at any juncture, humans have the ability to question the ethical implications of new technology and to not be held prisoner by its "inevitability."
Right?
To use an example the AI industry itself so often uses: nuclear weapons! We’ve seemed to reach consensus as a species that using them is too dangerous…after we tried them out…and used them on other humans twice…and keep them around as deterrent…for the last 80 years. (That's a lot of caveats!) And nukes, unlike AI, were not given to the masses.
While I’m privy to simmering conversations of how AI will change our lives, the nuances of the subject are nowhere near mainstream. And until it is, I’m unsure of how ethical it is to deploy this technology.
And now we’ve arrived at the very obvious: of course we’re going to release this technology upon the masses, consequences be damned. This is the very story of humanity! This is how progress and innovation happen.
Up until now, most people would argue this ‘progress’ has been a net positive. I have my doubts.
But my doubts aside, let’s presume that technological progress has been a net good for us all. Who’s to say there’s not some tipping point, some innovation that frays the fabric of society, that hot-wires our neurology so thoroughly that we can’t help but trigger a collapse? Things can be good…until they aren't. And to assume progress will always tend toward benefit is just as delusional, just as grounded in confirmation bias, as infinite economic growth.
When we won’t be able to agree on the veracity of a photo, of anything printed, of what we saw in a video, what then? When a shared truth can no longer be shared, then what? When we cannot agree on anything, how do we progress as a species?
I'm either a cynic or an optimist — I do not believe any future is inevitable.
Maybe that just makes me delusional.
Starbucks and the Curse of the Highly Complicated Coffee Order
Companies have always had to deal with choice and customization versus the complexity that comes with it. In many businesses, including food and grocery, the 80/20 rule applied. You’d get 80 percent of your business from 20 percent of the product line, but it was still worth giving customers more choice to hang on to as many of them as possible. But we know that too much choice can be paralyzing.
Simplification is generally the privilege of privately held companies that do not have to answer to Wall Street’s quarterly earnings demands and, like Patagonia, are free to pursue goals beyond profits, such as sustainability.
These days, there are vanishingly few companies from whom I can make a purchase and know I won't be disappointed, regardless of price/cost: Mack Weldon, REI, Patagonia, Anker, Eve, and Apple. That kind of brand loyalty is hard-earned, rare, and impossible to put a price on.
Though some of these are public, I find my preference tends toward products sold by companies that are privately held, free from Wall Street's infinite-growth-at-all-costs demands. This often comes at a higher price, yes, but the products are of better quality and usually last substantially longer.
Anyone who buys a Pixel 9 — the latest model of Google’s flagship phone, available starting this week — will have access to the easiest, breeziest user interface for top-tier lies, built right into their mobile device. This is all but certain to become the norm, with similar features already available on competing devices and rolling out on others in the near future. When a smartphone “just works,” it’s usually a good thing; here, it’s the entire problem in the first place.
…the default assumption about a photo is about to become that it’s faked, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial to do. We are not prepared for what happens after.
No one on Earth today has ever lived in a world where photographs were not the linchpin of social consensus — for as long as any of us has been here, photographs proved something happened. Consider all the ways in which the assumed veracity of a photograph has, previously, validated the truth of your experiences. The preexisting ding in the fender of your rental car. The leak in your ceiling. The arrival of a package. An actual, non-AI-generated cockroach in your takeout. When wildfires encroach upon your residential neighborhood, how do you communicate to friends and acquaintances the thickness of the smoke outside?
My AI anxiety is high this week, as I’ve been following the release of the Pixel 9. Embarrassingly, I have extended family (that I rarely see) that work not just for Google, but specifically in Pixel marketing.
What the hell are they thinking?
Say what you will about Apple Intelligence, the new set of AI features due to be released on iPhones, iPads and Macs in the fall, but it doesn’t do anything like this by design. In fairness, I’m unsure Apple has the compute power (they want to do much of their AI on-device, whereas Google does theirs in the cloud) to do this kind of thing, but I’m almost certain they wouldn’t want to if they could.
Google is being extraordinarily reckless here. The lack of guardrails around this technology speaks volumes, and their terms of service is typical corporate legalese bullshit that avoids any and all responsibility for how this feature will be used.
Famously, Google’s corporate motto was once “don’t be evil,” but somehow that’s become “don’t blame us.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Is Expected to End His Presidential Campaign
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is expected to end his troubled independent presidential campaign this week, according to three people briefed on his plans, and is in talks to throw his support behind former President Donald J. Trump.
Three of the people briefed on Mr. Kennedy’s plans emphasized that nothing was final, and that the iconoclastic Mr. Kennedy could still change his mind, but said that plans were in the works for him to appear alongside Mr. Trump on Friday. Some people close to Mr. Kennedy were still arguing against an endorsement, according to two of the people.
Biden dropping out of the race changed my personal calculations. Not being a straight-ticket voter, between Trump, Biden, and RFK, my choice was RFK. Trump is deranged, Biden is unfit for four more years, and RFK was the only candidate talking about the role of corporate profit in our politics.
But given his position on corporate control of our politics, that he’s even considering a Trump endorsement at this stage is unconscionable.
And while I’m still a bit unsure about Kamala, I’m way more comfortable with her than I am Trump or RFK. Hell, I don’t have to preface every comment about her with “I don’t agree with everything she says, but…”
But that’s more of a commentary on public sentiment than anything else, and I’ve long been wary of public sentiment.
I’ll work out my thoughts on Kamala another time, though it’s clear that my problems with Kamala aren’t with her at all, but with the Democratic Party. If they hadn’t spent the Trump era reacting to Trump by swinging out wide to appeal to the Nonsense Left (of which, don’t forget, I was a member!), desperate to make Kamala’s centrist, moderate record as a prosecutor seem like a negative, I wouldn’t feel so much whiplash around her nomination.
This is why I’m so uneasy about the Democrats: there’s a profound lack of reckoning with their own decisions. For years, I’ve heard how Hillary wasn’t elected because Americans hate women, but almost nothing about how she A) insulted half the electorate, B) refused to travel to certain key swing states, C) carried a profound sense of entitlement that her time had come, and D) was the obvious corporate candidate. (Though Trump turned out to be one, too, as they almost all do.) Rather than reckon with some of their own irrational decisions on covid, George Floyd, even Trump himself, most Democrats exclaim how stupid, hateful, and ignorant Trump voters must be to present any criticism of the Left at all.
Believe me, that’s a very tempting, addictive narrative. But it’s too easy. There’s zero introspection involved, and that is always dangerous.
The panic of the Trump era gripped us all — Right, Left, and everyone else — in different ways, but the Democratic Party suffered acutely. Any criticism of the party line and suddenly you were tantamount to a fascist.
And while I believe that the Left’s heart is in the right place, we cannot abandon logic and reason when we get scared. As a country, we’ve made this mistake too many times — Iraq and Afghanistan come to mind.
It’s the reticence of the Democrats to grapple with their own fear that I find unsettling. That fear motivated them to insist that Joe Biden was fit for another term.
“He’s wearing clothes!” they’d shout of their emperor, furious if you said otherwise.
That same fear has motivated them to turn on a dime to Kamala. Her narrative changed from ‘ineffectual’ to ‘savior’ overnight.
Let’s be honest: she’s neither of these things. But the way the Democrats have treated her in the last month has me deeply unsettled by the sentiments and excitations of the party.
The Republicans have scared me for a while now, but the Democrats, in their inability to introspect, are dutifully following along behind.
Never forget… that this exists.
Google threatened tech influencers unless they ‘preferred’ the Pixel
The agreement tells participants they’re “expected to feature the Google Pixel device in place of any competitor mobile devices.” It also notes that “if it appears other brands are being preferred over the Pixel, we will need to cease the relationship between the brand and the creator.” The link to the form appears to have since been shut down.
“Google Pixel: Please don’t put us next to an iPhone.”
Currently reading: What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill 📚
…imagine if Nazism had not grown in popularity. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, eugenics was widely supported among intellectuals in liberal countries like the United States, Britain, and Sweden. If Nazism had not created such a strong opposition between eugenics and liberal ideas, then, horrifically, perhaps forced sterilisation and forced abortions would be widespread practices today. Or note that most cultures historically have been extremely patriarchal. If Roman attitudes towards gender had persisted in Western Europe, then perhaps the feminist movement could never have gotten off the ground.
I’m not claiming that we know the truth of any of these counterfactuals; it’s impossible to know anything like this for certain. But given the theoretical reasons to expect multiple moral equilibria and the plausible examples of moral contingency that we can see today, we should not be confident that these very different moral worldviews couldn’t have become widespread or even globally dominant. Certainly, the expected contingency of moral norms is high enough that the value of ensuring that the world is on the right track, morally, is enormously high. But if we take value changes seriously, which values should we promote, and how?
Huh.
Strangely, I find the premise of this book to be at odds with my Taoist…faith. (Can something be called a “faith” if the only faith it professes is a faith in doubt? I’m not sure it can.)
There’s a real sense of needing to control in this book.
Here in lies my central struggle with this book and the people I see as relentlessly, defensively optimistic: they insist that my belief that our species is heading toward a catastrophic collapse (by which I mean a tremendous amount of suffering in humans and many, many other species) is the very thing that will cause the collapse.
And let’s be honest: they might have a point. If no one dreamed of a world without it, perhaps there would still be slavery.
(Zeno’s paradoxes are present in this moment, are they not?)
Yet my counter-argument is just as effective: those that would argue a collapse is not inevitable are willfully ignorant of human nature and the laws of physics and biology. Undergirding their belief is a subconscious assumption that humans are somehow better than, different from, or exceptions to the rule.
No species that consumes resources and breeds as we do is immune from collapse, and we consume far more resources than any other species. Even with a declining birth rate in several countries, the consumption of resources in those same countries has been increasing.
And while in the last three decades there’s grown a global awareness of climate change and its effects, has there been meaningful change? From a purely utilitarian point-of-view, have all things gotten better over the last three decades? What about the last century or two?
What do I mean by “have things gotten better”? Consider all the deforested land in the Amazon, the nearly-dead Great Lakes, the hundreds of millions of animals in industrial feedlots and slaughterhouses.
Is there now in this present moment less suffering — and not just human suffering — than there was, say, at the start of the Industrial Revolution? Or is there more?
Sure, globally, there are record low levels of poverty and violence, but I’d argue that this comes at the cost of the environment. The Industrial Revolution and cheap energy have benefitted us humans greatly, but what about the world as a whole? All species, all living things? It’s pure anthropocentrism to argue that the last two hundred years have been good for the planet.
This is my point: when I say that a collapse is inevitable, it’s because it’s already happening. If you learn how and where to look, you can’t not see it. Devastated ecosystems, mass species die-offs, warming oceans. And for what? So humans of the last two hundred years or so can have convenience, longer lives, fun toys? Is that a worthwhile tradeoff?
Let’s be honest: for nearly every person you know, that answer is ‘yes.’
That is why I believe collapse is inevitable.
If I’ve learned anything from Taoism, it’s that an unwillingness to accept things as they are always leads to more entropy, more suffering. The insistence that “it will get better” is a delusion. A comfy delusion, but a delusion nonetheless.
Unwilling to see things as they are, these people lock us into the very collapse they insist won’t happen.
The trouble, or so I’ve been told, is that like so many of the homeless she refuses help when offered, and both the policy and the culture of institutionalized do-gooding prevent the people who might save her life from doing anything about it. To force help on dying people must not be considered. And for the current generation of said do-gooders, that’s the end of the story. Nothing to be done. For reasons that I find impossible to understand, just utterly senseless, many progressives have decided that forcing help on the homeless and the sick is a worse outcome than simply letting them die. And letting them die is exactly what we’re doing.
At some point you have to admit that your preference for altruistic neglect is still just a preference for neglect.
My culture cannot handle nuance.
Several decades ago, about the time I was born, there was a push to empty and close “institutions,” known otherwise as “asylums.” Abuse, neglect, and a lack of accountability were rampant in these places, and shuttering them and changing our understanding and expectations of healthcare for the disabled or mentally unwell was an unequivocal good.
But what did we replace that system with?
For those with money and time, assisted living facilities or home care is an option. But what about everyone else?
With mental institutions banished to the dustbin of history, they were never replaced with a viable, more humane alternative.
The taps have run dry in Jerusalem’s largest Palestinian neighborhood
Located within Jerusalem’s northeastern municipal boundary but severed from the rest of the city by the separation wall, Kufr ‘Aqab’s residents have grown accustomed to the systematic neglect they face from the Israeli authorities. But the current crisis is the worst it’s ever been. During the few hours that the water does flow, residents try to do everything they can with it: take showers, do laundry, and clean the house. The rest of the time, they are forced to buy water from private suppliers and store it in containers on the roofs of their apartment blocks.
While I was living in Palestine, this was all too common. Israel controls Palestine’s water and would regularly destroy the rainwater catchment cisterns we would construct or repair on the rooftops of Palestinian homes and refugee camps.
Us internationals (i.e. those of us with expendable income) would resort to paying for private water delivery for the community, out-of-pocket.
This is a human rights abuse and Israel does it knowingly and systematically.
Federal Appeals Court Finds Geofence Warrants Are “Categorically” Unconstitutional
…the court found that even though investigators seek warrants for geofence location data, these searches are inherently unconstitutional. As the court noted, geofence warrants require a provider, almost always Google, to search “the entirety” of its reserve of location data “while law enforcement officials have no idea who they are looking for, or whether the search will even turn up a result.” Therefore, “the quintessential problem with these warrants is that they never include a specific user to be identified, only a temporal and geographic location where any given user may turn up post-search. That is constitutionally insufficient.”