It’s been years since I put together a zine. So for the month of October — spooky szn — I’m putting together a list of my 31 perfect horror movies. Every day I’ll post a new film, along with some words about that film. So at the end of October, I’ll have enough to gather together into a printed zine. We’re three days into October, so there are three films up there now, starting with some big, obvious ones, but hopefully there’s some good ones on there that’ll annoy people enough, they’ll start creating their own lists too.
You can also follow the rss feed, if that’s the kind of thing you like to do.
the AI bubble is driven by monopolists who’ve conquered their markets and have no more growth potential, who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow by moving into some other sector, e.g. “pivot to video,” crypto, blockchain, NFTs, AI, and now “super-intelligence.” Further: the topline growth that AI companies are selling comes from replacing most workers with AI, and re-tasking the surviving workers as AI babysitters (“humans in the loop”), which won’t work. Finally: AI cannot do your job, but an AI salesman can 100% convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can’t do your job, and when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging “foundation models” will be shut off and we’ll lose the AI that can’t do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or “discouraged” and out of the labor market, and no one will do your job. AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations
Someone on Slack asked when we thought the bubble was going to burst and I said “probably in the next year, but that would have been my answer in 2024, and in 2023…”
At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by by people who do not love us but want our money.
I remind you, again, that Wallace said this back in 1996. He had no experience with the internet or social media. But his sense of their future impact is uncanny.
Rakhim hits on something here I’ve been thinking about for a while. LLMs are primarily successful today because Google abused their power as an advertising company and did almost nothing to improve search for almost two decades. LLMs are what search should have been before we allowed SEO to pollute the internet.
Just putting some common apps from e.g. Mavericks and the first macOS (Tahoe) side by side shows the tremendous progress the company had made. From toys to tools. From superficial style to functional beauty.
I’m not saying Tahoe is likely to drive me off MacOS entirely, but the radius of the RoundedRect is actually bonkers.
Usually the prices of consoles starts going down as manufacturing and supply chains settle. This is the first console generation I’ve seen where every single console has had a mid-generation price increase. Grim.
TIL “email apnea”, a condition where you stop breathing or start taking shallow breaths when working at a computer, which puts us into a natural fight-or-flight state. Explains a lot!
Yesterday was the annual Apple iPhone event. Go watch it! Go look at how slick it is. The camera swoops across America and drops us at various Apple locations that are so gorgeous as to appear entirely computer-rendered. At one point, I was thinking “did they open an Apple store on Myst Island?” Stunning. And when it’s time to demonstrate the features of the new products, there’s a seamless transition to a flawless presentation of, first, the product explosion where we see all the parts as they fit in the hardware, and then to a meticulously stage-managed pre-recorded micro-advertisement of the feature being used in absolutely perfect conditions.
At 37'22 of the YouTube version of the event, they introduce the “Center Stage front camera”, which is supposed to expand the field of view of the phone’s selfie camera when it detects more than one person in the shot. Between all the breathless adjectives (I was “advanced”-d and “innovative”-d out within 10 minutes of this event) and the pre-recorded ad of a model and all her gorgeous, photogenic friends hanging out in perfect lighting, I didn’t give much thought to this feature. It’s no doubt a beautiful presentation but it’s so beautiful, I’m left wondering how much of this is real and how much is fixed in post-production? Even with those gorgeous people in that gorgeous location, how many takes did they require to get that shot? And also, I’ve been burned too many times by Apple products and features not working as they show in these pre-recorded videos (I’m in Europe where Apple features work especially bad, if we get them at all), so I didn’t pay much attention to this feature.
This morning, I saw a TikTok from The Verge where they got hands-on with the new iPhone 17 Pro. In this TikTok, the presenter was demonstrating the new camera features, including the center stage front camera switching its field of view to accomodate people in the background. And the presenter doing this inside a crowded, noisy area. Real-world usage. You can hear the excitement in the presenter’s voice. Compare this to the breathless but flat affect of the narrator in the official Apple event video. This is what sold me on that feature. It made sense to me now. It made sense why I’d want it and it I understood how it behaves in less-than-ideal surroundings. It felt human and I got it.
Now, maybe this is all just part of Apple’s strategy. Just like I get the feeling they’re okay with Mark Gurman leaking all of the information of what is about to be announced at these vents ahead of time and they’ve factored this into their marketing, I wonder if their plan is to just do the snazzy videos and then let other outlets do the “real world” stuff.
But one thing I noticed is that since they’ve moved to pre-recorded videos during Covid, I haven’t come out of a single one feeling really excited about the new stuff they’ve announced. I thought this might just be the sign of a maturing product line where new iterations no longer mean a slew of whizz-bang features to get you fired up. But the difference between the Verge video and the too-polished Apple video really showed me that it’s not the lack of features, it’s the way Apple is presenting them to us.
Many people have the quisling impulse to insist that Apple had to kiss Trump’s ass. “They’ll be stuck with really high tariffs!" “They might lose government contracts!" This is foolishness, of cause, because all of this will still happen. The only thing that’s different is that Apple will have to navigate those headwinds while everyone in the world already knows that they’re led by a CEO who has already bent the knee, and by a board that collectively has no spine. There’s no point in having fuck-you money in the bank if you never say “fuck you”!
Watching the obsequiousness of tech leaders in the 2025 has been disheartening and Anil Dash nails it here.
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