Inklings #032 📧

The stock market is currently back up a bit after a bad Black Thursday yesterday. But it's clear this is going to be a turbulent time as everyone tries to figure out what the political shake-up will mean for the AI (and more specifically, data center) trade. To quote the Jurassic Park prophet Ray Arnold, "Hold on to your butts."

I Note...

📰 So Long, Salon – If I'm being honest, it had been a good long while since I can recall reading Salon, still, this feels like the end of an important era in publishing on the web. And this part from the NYT eulogy surprised me, "It was financially backed by Apple, Adobe and the now-defunct bookstore chain Borders." Uh, what?! As it turns out, in 1995, Richard Gingras, an Apple executive working on eWorld (who would later become Salon's CEO), used about $75k in leftover Apple marketing budget to seed fund Salon – he actually wrote about it earlier this year. Also, it launched as salon1999.com. Why? Salon.com was taken by a hair salon operator in Texas. Amazingly, they bought the domain right before they IPO'd (lol) in... 1999. [NYT]

🪟 Where is Windows 12? – No one seems to know, and I'm just not sure how many people actually care at this point, but kudos to Tom Warren for at least trying to find out. Instead, he found out that 'Windows 11 version 27H2' – a very Microsoftian name – is going to be a big update focused on, amongst other things, "replacing the default wallpaper". What will they think of next? Probably not 'Copilot+ PCs' featuring Windows crammed with AI stuff and "malware-like ads". I guess AI local stuff? If ever there was a time (and excuse) to completely rethink an OS from the ground up (and Microsoft doesn't have the luxury of having a mobile OS to try to jump ship to)... [Verge]

🚮 CyberDumpTruck – I'm shocked, SHOCKED, that Tesla is winding down production of the vehicle that looked like a literal dumpster on wheels. While some people seemed to appreciate the unique look on the road, the reality was that 12 year old boys don't buy many cars. It always sort of seemed like a joke that actually shipped, or something designed by the team behind Star Fox – given the constraints of Super Nintendo 3D graphics in 1993. The fact that it seemed to work about as well as it looked, with endless safety recalls, didn't help. Elon Musk once said the goal was to produce between 250,000 - 500,000 a year – so far this year, estimates have sales closer to 10,000. And a lot of those may be to SpaceX or Elon's other companies. So now it's on to 'Cybercab', which looks better, but still not great. And if that doesn't work, it might be fair to start wondering how long Tesla is actually going to continue making cars (versus focusing on robots as a part of SpaceX). [FT 🔒]

🤵‍♂️ Bond Betting – Bonds, not as in stocks and bonds, but as in Bond, James Bond. Hollywood is the latest industry to crack down on prediction markets as there's clearly a lot of insider action happening on things ranging from release dates to casting announcements. The latter, of course, has been in the press a lot lately due to the race to wear that famous tuxedo. While the guessing game has been going on for months – years, even – now that we're in the home-stretch, big bets increasingly look suspicious. So much so that at least one site blocked new action after a surge of money came in around Callum Turner this week – to the point where he (re)surpassed the most recent frontrunner, Jack Lowden. Of course, there was a Sun report last night (which many are suspicious of for obvious tabloid-y reasons) which said Josh O'Connor would be the next Bond. Interestingly, it has long been illegal to bet on actual box office results due to the Onion Futures Act of 1958 – which outlawed two things: motion picture box office receipts and yes, onion futures contracts. No, this is not an Onion article. [THR]

Thoughts On...

I Quote...

"No more Star Wars. We tried to do one more. But they were like, 'No, he’s dead.'"

– Adam Driver, on the state of his would-have-been Ben Solo movie with Steven Soderbergh. While this sounds like a door slam, there's also clearly an opening – just listen to the way Driver speaks about the project, which he says he devoted a couple years to – if Disney is interested. Notably, while Alan Bergman is still there, Bob Iger is no longer CEO, and those were apparently the two that shut it down. And while Kathleen Kennedy was said to be open to the idea, Dave Filoni now has her job, so it's really up to him and new CEO Josh D'Amaro.

And we already know they want more Star Wars again after the (necessary) pause in the franchise. So it's a question of if they think this story would be a distraction from the main timeline. It may boil down to how well next year's Starfighter does.

And maybe Heat 2 (and Batman II?). Which Driver also confirmed to Rich Eisen as the worst-kept secret in Hollywood: that he's playing the main antagonist (not the younger Neil McCauley as was first rumored – that will be Stephen Graham, with Christian Bale as the younger – and maybe older? – Vincent Hanna, and Leonardo DiCaprio as the older Chris Shiherlis) in the film. If they can get shooting after Michael Mann accidentally shot himself in the foot (fine, leg – he's fine). "It's a missile," Driver says of the Heat 2 script. Have I mentioned Heat is my favorite film?

I Wrote...

Birthday Bots

On turning 45 in the Age of AI…

SpyglassM.G. Siegler

The Reviewers Are Crazy; the iPhone Duo Is Fantastic

Some thoughts on the iPhone Duo…

SpyglassM.G. Siegler

Asides...

• With the stock market in free-fall post-election, many are skeptical that Anthropic can hit a $1.5T valuation in the public markets (itself already down from a rumored $2T target). And there's growing skepticism (as seen the prediction markets) about the company going out at all given the turbulence... [WSJ 🔒]
  • Also bad optically (if not operationally) for that IPO, high-profile talent leaving right beforehand – to go to their biggest (and hated) rival, no less. [BI]
  • So much for that "rough" first half of the year (though OpenAI now seemingly also having a hell of a time raising capital right now). [WSJ 🔒]
  • Finally: most of the points in this backstory on Dario Amodei are fairly well known, but this paints a nice, succinct picture around what likely makes him tick the way he does. And a lot of it is seemingly what he reads: Kurzweil -> Yudkowsky -> Alexander -> Cowen -> Etc... [NYT]
• Meta goes beyond just voice with new Muse video calls – no your agent can't see you, but you can see "them" react to your vocal back and forth, which can be quite humorous... [TechCrunch]
• T-Mobile owner Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges sounds both too dismissive and yet somewhat realistic about SpaceX's plans to compete in the cellular industry. Still, it's better than the AT&T CEO. "Welcome to the party." [Verge]
• Microsoft is increasingly turning their backs on the neoclouds they once bolstered. Shocking, I know. [Bloomberg 🔒]
• Meta is increasingly turning their backs on the fruit nicknames they once bolstered. Shocking, I know. [BI]
• An upcoming big Bluetooth speed boost seems like good news for our future of increasingly connected AI devices. [Verge]
• Sort of strange to think of it this way, but jet turbines really are just power turbines used for a very specific purpose, so repurposing them to power data centers to circumvent power plant regulation isn't as wild as it sounds... [NYT]
• La Bola Negra is both the widest theatrical release Netflix has done to date at 465 theaters and the longest-in-theaters it has committed to at 47 days (which, if my math is correct, is even more than 45!) before it hits streaming. The times they are a-changin' (as predicted). [THR]

I Spy...

With their fun Search easter egg for the Zelda: Ocarina of Time (re)release on the Switch 2, Google also inadvertently highlights just how simple and nice the 1998 version of the search engine was compared to the chaotic and cluttered 2026 variety. Is it really any wonder why AI is eating Search?