Elezea // The B-Sides

Yes the AI content creation stuff is complicated, but I hope we can at least all agree that creating fake authors and content for them is bananas.

The AI authors' writing often sounds like it was written by an alien; one Ortiz article, for instance, warns that volleyball “can be a little tricky to get into, especially without an actual ball to practice with.”

Well TIL the word “kenopsia” and I love it.

A concoction from the Greek “kenosis” (emptiness) and “opsia” (seeing), kenopsia refers to the “eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that was once bustling with activity but is now abandoned and empty”—a deserted movie set, a club the morning after a party, locked down cities, Chernobyl.

This isn’t surprising, but it’s still jarring to see that “X and Misinformation Super-spreaders Share Ad Money from False Claims About the Israel-Hamas War”:

NewsGuard identified ads for 86 major advertisers — including top brands, educational institutions, governments, and nonprofits — on viral posts seen by a cumulative 92 million X users advancing false or egregiously misleading claims about the Israel-Hamas war.

My experience with Diablo IV videos confirms this take:

Is YouTube feeling boring recently? Well, maybe it’s, as The Game Theorists’ MatPat recently argued, because everyone figured out how to be the MrBeast of their own niche. YouTube has historically been good at de-emphasizing trends like this when they get annoying. The question is will they algorithmically intervene in this case, which would also affect MrBeast’s traffic.

Good timeline of the OpenAI thing. Here’s a bit about the structure I didn’t know:

This so-called “capped profit” is unlikely to be a “cap” for practical purposes. It could be tempting to think that OpenAI’s approach of capping profit at 100x of the investment amount is noble or selfless. However, in practice, there’s little meaningful difference between capping profits at this level and having no cap.

This is a 😍 variant of the new Black Pumas album (which is also a very good album).

This is a bleak take, but I have to admit that I am also concerned.

I believe we have some personal agency. I also believe that a 12-year-old’s mind is no match for a giant corporation using the most advanced AI to manipulate her behavior. Gen Z were the first generation to have our vulnerabilities and insecurities fed into a machine that magnified and refracted them back at us before we had any sense of who we were.

“I change by not changing at all…”

Holy smokes, the new 45rpm vinyl reissue of Vs. completely blew me away. Bass and soundstage for dayyyys. Get it, vinyl nerds.

Here’s something I really don’t understand but it’s real and it happens all the time so let’s open the can of worms why don’t we.

I love The National dearly, but thought their new surprise album “Laugh Track” was just ok. And then the vinyl showed up today and I am completely smitten with the whole thing, every single song.

I don’t want to be That Guy about vinyl, but really. There’s something here.

Dang, this is good stuff. “Hacking is forever.”

This has been out of print for many many years and going for $700+ on eBay and Discogs. So happy to finally have a good (and cheap) repress of my favorite DMB album. They get a lot of flack, but this really is a wonderful set of songs.

When should you hire a Product Manager? Probably earlier than you think:

No founder told me they regretted bringing on a PM, but some companies, including Notion, shared that they regretted waiting so long.

It’s a bit one-sided, but “Spotify Is Eating the Entire Music Business” really resonated with me.

In lieu of royalties, working artists are left with touring and merch sales, and they have to treat streaming — the primary way people are actually consuming their work — as a sort of promotional tool for off-platform ticket and T-shirt sales.

Also I ❤️ Bandcamp and I’m sad about its demise.

I forgot about the PayPal attack ad that didn’t age that well…

Until PayPal’s fatal FY-21 earnings report, no one was truly paying attention to Apple Pay’s meteoric rise. But as the active user base at PayPal started flatlining, Apple Pay continued to see explosive growth in its user base. Since 2016, Apple Pay has grown its active users at a 48% rate. In comparison, PayPal has seen users grow at only 14% since 2016.

Everything about the new U2 show sounds amazing. So sad I don’t have tickets.

Zoo TV had predated reality TV, fake news, social media—all these things. Bono had heard about this new venue in Vegas with nearly 20,000 seats, custom sound and an incredible screen that was akin to the whole audience having a VR experience. In the post-Covid era, it was appealing not to have to travel every night

Very good summary of The OpenAI Keynote by Ben Thompson. This bit stood out to me:

The fact of the matter is that a lot of people use ChatGPT for information despite the fact it has a well-documented flaw when it comes to the truth; that flaw is acceptable, because to the customer ease-of-use is worth the loss of accuracy.

I’ve been following Craig’s work for over a decade and know what to expect, yet his reflections on “Aloneness” took my breath away.

The real shitter is that if you’ve inured yourself to living in this state of aloneness, it can be difficult to break the habits that have led to it. Aloneness as default becomes comforting, and habits built around aloneness feel palliative because they’re known, and we tend to repeat familiar actions, even if they hurt us.

Great essay by AHP on how friendship changes over time—including a period she calls “The Friendship Dip”:

Right now, the way our society is organized, we have a prolonged stretch of adulthood that is not conducive to forging or sustaining friendship or community. In many cases, I’d say it’s actually hostile to it.

Every new house in Portland uses this font for the house number, and now I can’t get this article out of my head. “The gentrification font: how a sleek typeface became a neighborhood omen”:

As Neutraface house numbers have become too commonplace to ignore, some now associate them (along with gray paint jobs) with neighborhoods overtaken by construction and renovations.

Feels like spam is about to get a lot harder to detect… “Inside the Underground World of Black Market AI Chatbots”:

We’ve got folks who are building LLMs that are designed to write more convincing phishing email scams or allowing them to code new types of malware because they’re trained off the code from previously available malware.

For my fellow Northerners… “How to light the dark months” has some excellent advice—not just the normal stuff we’ve all read a thousand times.

Lighting winter is an art and a daily practice, an act of survival and a gesture of love. Here are 10 ideas for fighting the gloom in the dark half of the year.

Well Christmas came early for me. New 45rpm reissue. Glossy tip-on jacket. Sounds absolutely bonkers good. I’ve heard many many versions of this album and this one is noticeably better than anything before it.

Keeping it thematic this afternoon…

The prompt injection examples in this post are fun, but this remains a big issue:

The fundamental problem here is this: Large Language Models are gullible. […] This is a hard problem to solve, because we need them to stay gullible. They’re useful because they follow our instructions. Trying to differentiate between ‘good’ instructions and ‘bad’ instructions is a very hard—currently intractable—problem.