I’m in Mexico City with some friends this weekend, and get to see an incredibly large percentage of my subscribers in person.
This video of a Cloudflare account executive getting fired in what is either a RIF or an absolutely abysmal performance management conversation. I was stunned by how this woman holds her own in the conversation and reveals the utter bullshit that the HR manager and the VP of sales were spewing. The Cloudflare account executive gets fired regardless, but apparently she’s getting a flood of job offers as a testament to how she conducted herself. On one hand — she didn’t sell a single deal for three months. On the other — she did an incredible job defending herself, she’s clearly got sales chops. What do you think?
These AI song covers are actually artistic and interesting. We love the way that artists reinterpret songs — why not give the rest of us the power to remix voices as well? This “Biggie in Paris” video is unbelievable!
As is Kanye’s “Hey There Delilah” — this one is uncanny.
The MoMa in NYC has a piece on Refik Anadol’s AI art, with a discussion of what the potential for AI art could mean for the MoMa and its collection. What I found interesting about the piece was how familiar this whole debate seemed to the curators — they described it as similar to much of the arguments modern art has always wrestled with around machine production, technique, and what technology’s abilities mean for human performance. I didn’t see the analogy between Jackson Pollock’s mark making (that wasn’t directly the result of human performance) and an AI drawing an artwork until this piece.
A piece in ArtForum about AI’s ability to expand imagination (warning: content is explicit and contains nudity, in an artistic way, but, y’know, be warned.)
I’m in Mexico City this week and have been reading a variety of guides that recommend places to go and things to eat. The consistent message across every article or even friend recommendation is that it’s a “vibey” city, and that some coffee shops have the “vibeyyyy” designation and some do not. The vibes have nothing to do with the quality of the coffee, for what it’s worth — a particularly hilarious review of a cafe was “walked by, seems vibey!” I’ve increasingly thought that our culture is shifting towards vibes over the actual content and message, and I found an article about Jack Antonoff, king of Vibes, touching on that same cultural phenomenon.
Made these cookies with my friend Marissa. They were so delicious!
This piece by a writer on how it feels to be a curator whose skills are no longer needed, or a writer whose book was “stolen” for AI training data was a new perspective for me, and I think they describe the feeling very acutely and poetically.
We discussed our continued desire to discover things that matter to us—music, food, art, books—from exploration in the world or an actual human’s curatorial choices, not an algorithm’s mechanized pattern-finding à la Netflix or Spotify. At some point, I cited (I thought) something musician Kazu Makino said in an interview, that “taste and style are an earned individuality.”
The most important word in that sentence for me, I said, the word more and more lacking in our leaden contemporary life for me, was earned.
I shared Slate Star Codex’s take on philanthropy and capitalism last week and have remained interested in the problem. Here’s another take on philanthropy’s modern problems from Anne Helen Peterson (I really love her substack!)
I didn’t realize that Douyin has anti-addiction measures for kids (that are of course not present on TikTok.) As all of the amazing media and tools get better, how do you think about personally creating limits for your children on what they can and should use? Will you be laissez faire about it? Do you believe in “cultural antibodies?”