PicoBlog

The writer Glenn Fleishman recently wrote an introduction to Mastodon, the “federated” social network that has become a sort of refuge from the madness of Elon Musk’s Magick Kingdom, which has become justifiably widely shared. There’s a key passage explaining how it works: You can think of Mastodon as a flotilla of boats of vastly different sizes, whereas Twitter is like being on a cruise ship the size of a continent.

One of my favorite parts of having kids is when you can start introducing them to the books and movies you liked as a child. My six-year-old brought home a Babysitters Club book from the school library a few weeks ago and while my first reaction was “wait, you’re six, are you even going to understand this?” my heart also sang with excitement, because how thrilling it is to finally be able to discuss important topics in 80s pop culture—by which I mean Claudia Kishi keeping junk food under her bed—with my kid!

In our last piece, we discussed the difference between managerial capitalism and entrepreneurial capitalism—that in the latter the bigger equity holders in the company also run the company, and in the former the interests are dispersed more widely across more shareholders. In entrepreneurial capitalism, incentives are often better aligned since the people-making decisions are also motivated primarily by equity.  Perhaps I was too dismissive of managerialism though. Managerialism’s drawback is that no one is significantly incentivized to serve the company with its long-term interests in mind because equity is too dispersed.

Summary: New regulations from the Government of India prohibit the use of 12 common dark design patterns. These sneaky practices are unethical applications of established UX knowledge to make interface designs that harm users instead of helping them. “Dark design patterns” are ways of cheating users through a variety of misleading user interfaces — or sometimes simply by making it unnecessarily difficult to accomplish actions that the user wants but that the company wants to prevent, such as canceling a subscription.

I spoke to Marian Seldes almost every day for many years. I could go to her with anything, or simply to talk. She would tell me to get my pad and pen and then say, “Let’s begin.” Unfortunate circumstances necessitate my publishing this particular conversation, but I’m happy to note the support that has shown up for me; the strength of friends and evidence. Things will be said and written, but as a great attorney told me, in a style not at all like Marian’s, but similar in sentiment: “They’re throwing shit up a pole.

In 2023, descendants of the architecture that the ILLIAC IV pioneered, using monolithic integrated circuits, are central to the development of modern AI, which looks like it could change the course of the human race, just as Stanley Kubrick’s monoliths did in ‘2001 : A Space Odyssey’ Too many tubes John von Neumann on Daniel Slotnik’s original idea for a parallel computer Stanley Kubrick’s computer in ‘2001 : A Space Odyssey’, HAL 9000, took its name from ‘decrementing’ ‘IBM’.

Hate The Game The Newsletter By Daryl Fairweather, PhD A newsletter about my writing on economics. Specifically, my forthcoming book, HATE THE GAME: an exploration of the uses of game theory and behavioral economics to win in career and life (University of Chicago Press, Fall 2024.) ncG1vNJzZmirpZfAta3CpGWcp51kjaetyKuunpmknbKzvMed

Daryl SandersNashville-based music journalist Daryl Sanders is one of the foremost authorities on the city’s extensive rock, soul and jazz history. He is the author of "That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound: Dylan, Nashville, and the Making of Blonde on Blonde.” ncG1vNJzZmirpZfAta3CpGWcp51kjaWt0bKjrJmembKzvw%3D%3D

“Chris has this quality in his writing that makes it very easy to imagine I’m sharing a run or a beverage with him. He shares both his triumphs and stumbles with unfiltered authenticity, and I get the sense he enjoys taking on running by his own rules.” ncG1vNJzZmickajHb7%2FUm6qtmZOge6S7zGg%3D