Drowning in the Streams 📧
Back from the road – briefly (back on the road tomorrow). One thing top of mind right now is just how far behind I am on what would seem to be some really good television shows. For all the talk that we're now past "peak TV", the pace of releases has seemed relentless to me the past few months. Perhaps it's just because as the parent of an infant, I struggle to stay awake long enough in the moments where I could plow through some of this content, but I mean, I had to create a new list in my to do app to keep track of things I eventually want to watch, lest I forget.
Currently on there (in no particular order): The Gentleman, Monsieur Spade, Feud: Capote and the Swans, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Sugar, Tokyo Vice (season 2), A Gentleman in Moscow (not to be confused with The Gentleman), 3 Body Problem, Manhunt, Ripley – and that's just newer shows. I've yet to get to Silo, Severance (!), White House Plumbers, The Old Man, and a handful of other "old" shows. And that's because I'm currently in the midst of watching Shogun, The New Look, X-Men '97, Masters of the Air, The Stairwell, Foundation, and Monarch.
And The Acolyte plus the new season of House of Dragon will be upon us soon.
I'm the type of person who is usually reading about a half dozen books at once, but this TV show context switching is bonkers. Throw in movies and it's even worse. The best of times and all that...
Briefly...
The ‘Beastification of YouTube’ May Be Over – Mimicking video style is sort of the point of TikTok, but it has long swept over YouTube as well. The latest version was insanely fast cuts, flashes, and loud sound effects in the style of MrBeast. With his rise, a massive amount of videos copied the tactics. Which felt like it was pushing us closer to the futures envisioned by Idiocracy meets Wall-E. Thankfully, it seems there's now a movement against such video styles...
The Problem of AI Ethics, and Laws About AI – Benedict Evans points out something fairly obvious, but that also doesn't seem to get talked about enough: AI is not just one piece of technology used for a specific purpose, it's a wide-range of technologies used in myriad ways. Good luck trying to shove it into buckets from where to set rules and laws. This is not the car industry, there's something new being put out there into the world almost daily. The first step in trying to figure out how to have some level of control over such tech is to admit this reality.
Watching People Watch a Game. With 100,000 Friends. – The worlds of Twitch and English football/soccer commentary broadcasts are colliding. "Watchalongs" are a fascinating trend, which is also the offshoot of director commentary, post-show recaps, and podcasts where people just sort of catch up with friends. While the "Manningcast" is kind of professionalizing this for the NFL, this can obviously go far more granular with all sorts of content and games.
My Missives...
M.G. Siegler
What on Earth is Apple Doing with content for the Vision Pro (besides very little)?
M.G. Siegler
Why on Earth hasn't Apple jumped back into colorful MacBooks?
M.G. Siegler
Gmail at 20
Quoteable...
"The words just tasted good."
-- Louis Gossett Jr. on his role of Emil Foley, the Marine drill instructor from hell, in An Officer and a Gentleman, for which he won an Oscar. Gossett Jr. passed away last week at age 87. Sadly (to me) his obit has zero mentions of Iron Eagle.
Some Thoughts On...
🔪 Jon Stewart sticking the knife into Apple
⁉️ Yahoo buying the dead AI newsreader Artifact
👻 Apple soft launching 'Spatial Personas' for VisionPro
💊 A fifth Matrix movie being greenlit
🤖 Apple's next big thing is now robots?
🕹️ Hollywood's shift from comics to videogames...
Quickly...
- While Jon Stewart is generally great, no one is perfect – a good reminder not to take him too seriously, all the time.
- Are AI chatbots the new spreadsheets?
- John Gruber pulls together some quotes from two of the key EU commissioners about the DMA and they're pretty looney tunes. They're also pretty pompous. "And a market of 450 million customers is simply unthinkable for anyone not to be there." Is it? We might yet see!
- John Anderson has been doing Sportscenter for 25 years (!), but now his watch has ended...
- Amazon let weird AI-generated book covers take over the Kindle lockscreen. Yuck. Related: what is Amazon doing with Kindle? Anything?
- Seemingly lost in all the AI hype, Microsoft (with the help of Quantinuum) has potentially made a large breakthrough in quantum computing – are we entering the "stable era" for the tech?
- Speaking of big technological breakthroughs, Forbes seemingly figured out a new and scammy way to shove more shitty ads into their user experience
- Trian's attempt to shakeup Disney failed quite miserably, but it's interesting that they even had a shot because of how disperse the shareholder base is thanks to so many small and individual stockholders
- Speaking of Disney, their forthcoming stand-alone ESPN streaming service will also, apparently, be available through Disney+ as a part of a bundle. As is Hulu. But not Hulu Plus Live TV, which also has ESPN. But that's different from ESPN+. And the other sports streaming service which ESPN will be a part of...
- An interesting interview with DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, as most interviews with him tend to be...
- The Tropicana, one of the OG Las Vegas hotels – I hear it was quite comfortable – is no more. In a few years, it will be a baseball park, home to the Las Vegas A's – assuming they keep that name. They probably should, if only because Aces is already spoken for.
- Anyway, it beats the A's of Nowhere, which is what they'll apparently be starting next year while playing in Sacramento, waiting on the Vegas park to be built. It's all a bit silly.
- Paramount and Skydance are going exclusive... in their M&A talks. This seems awfully messy though with an all-cash $26B offer from Apollo on the table...
- The Economist recently got a new, custom typeface, one with three different types of capital 'Qs', did you notice?
- Matter, the app in which I read nearly everything (and am an investor in, and use it to save all the links you see here), dives deep into how they think about and have improved their parsing engine for reading web-based content, which often looks like the aforementioned Forbes stuff on the web...
- One other feature of Matter I can't live without: read-aloud functionality. And it sounds like The New York Times is about to roll out it out as a feature, natively, to basically all of their content...
- Microsoft rips Teams out of Office as regulation ramps around the world...
- At the same time, Apple is trying to coerce podcasts to use their subscription offering, seems like maybe now is not a good time for this, Apple?
- Amazon seems to be hedging their AI startup bets even more so than Microsoft with their own team building "Olympus" – certainly a better name than Rufus.
- Speaking of, I can't tell if the rumored OpenAI/Microsoft "Stargate" supercomputer project is a sign of deeper collaboration or a mask over growing dysfunction between the two sides. Regardless, a big hedge against NVIDIA.
- Regardless of the above, there was clearly some dysfunction within Microsoft post-Panos Panay around their Windows and Surface split and subsequent reunification, presumably ahead of the massive "Windows AI" push under newly
acquiredhired "CEO" Mustafa Suleyman. Speaking of, we nearly had a CEO reporting to a CEO reporting to the CEO. Time to update that Microsoft org chart with the guns...
- The expanding extreme dichotomy of Elon Musk – insanely inspirational rockets to space, satellite internet for the world, and brain breakthroughs for the impaired to the ever-growing xhitshow that is Xhitter
One More Thing... (Grunge Edition)
A lot of the AI tools and services launching everyday are clearly overhyped. But some things almost feel underhyped. Suno, which allows you to type in some words to make a song about anything is in the latter camp. There are a few such tools, but the output here is really good. Here's a song I "wrote" (by typing about 5 words) about MG cars in the style of grunge.
Not your style? How about a pop song about Spyglass? I think Taylor Swift is safe, but this is just pure fun. And you could imagine all sorts of uses for this – my wife created a song for our daughter for her half birthday. She loved it.