Lots of pixels spent this week on Musk closing on his acquisition of Twitter, and I have nothing interesting to offer on what happens next that isn’t already pretty obvious. I’ll just add - I do want the service to survive, so I’m hoping for the best but getting ready to drop off yet another platform if it seems like time.
Here are some aspects of the whole deal that I’m most curious about:
- Welcome to Hell, Elon: I imagine most of you have seen this brilliant column from Nilay Patel - full of lots of supporting links and data.
- Kakao is Korea’s app for almost everything. Its outage forced a reckoning.: Thinking about Musk’s, “X the everything app” tweet, I really wonder if the US audience wants this app. Super-apps tend to work well in countries with tightly centralized services, often because of government forces encouraging monopolies/duopolies in key services, e.g. payment. We’re kind of the opposite of that as a market. On top of that, Kakao’s outage shows some of the risks of having a single app be so critical to everyday life.
Reads #
- The Fantasy Football Kingpin: There was this debate inside Disney/ESPN about how to approach gambling. As this article shows, they/we were already in the business, just not dealing with the money. (these leagues sound intense…)
- Same Type Of Rotax Engines Used In Iranian Drones Targeted In Bizarre Theft Wave (Updated): A fascinating look at how Iran might be getting engines for their drones. I can’t imagine this scales to the demands of an active shooting war, but the fact that this is even plausible is amazing.
- How I decided that swiping right would be Tinder’s signature move: A simple explanation for a UX that transcended Tinder to become part of our vocabulary.
- ‘I Don’t Think Anyone Should Buy Land in Any Metaverse Right Now’: The headline is a little dramatic, but I loved the answer about what the metaverse land grab was about - advertising. Without additional utility for users, though, what normal user wants to hang out there? The projects focused on that are the ones that will win on the other side of this “winter.”
- A Data & Society report interviewed doorbell camera users and delivery drivers to understand how surveillance is affecting both, for the worse.: I have cameras on my door. Not Rings, but one that stores to a local server (so I can play with AI detection, etc.) and a Nest cam that’s using their cloud services. This creepy use case has crossed my mind a few times, pushing me toward local-only cameras…
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2022/tiktok-popularity/: Speaking of weird algorithmic surveillance, this is a really good overview of TikTok’s product, including interviews with creators.
- @sequoia Gen AI Market Map: Good overview of the notable players in the Generative AI space.
Code & Tools #
- bleeding edge ai: A single list, time sorted, of the latest news in AI. A great one-stop site if you want to keep up with the pace of AI development.
- Playing with Minecraft and command-line SD (running live, using img2img): Fun little experiment turning Minecraft drawings into more realistic drawings.
- tRPC: A Typescript-based typesafe API framework. Looks interesting. Haven’t used it yet.
- Next.js 13: Some fun things on the new feature list, including layouts. Highlighting this release, though, because of Turbopack. One more major step in the dev/build pipeline now written in Rust and much faster for it. Rust is the language I’d pick to learn if you’re looking for something different. It just feels good.
- Tailscale in the browser: Love Tailscale, and love WebAssembly. WebAssembly is underrated.
- Adobe pulling Pantone Colors from Creative Cloud tools: Crappy situation for designers who need Pantone to align colors in physical production (e.g. print, signage, etc). This feels like something that ought to be standardized at this point with the core open sourced. No idea how hard that is, but the Pantone has been around long enough that the core patents have to be expired by now.
- excalidraw-animate: Animate your Excalidraw drawings. Pretty sweet. Got me to try Excalidraw, which I haven’t used before.