Seven fireplaces
Rick Perlstein had dinner with Marc Andreesen:
All that talk about human potential and morality, and this man afire to reorder life as we know it jokingly welcomes chemical enslavement of those he grew up with, for the sin of not being as clever and ambitious as he.
There is something very, very wrong with us, that our society affords so much power to people like this.
Williams F1 only just stopped using Excel to manage their build
It is not an exaggeration to say that up to and including at least the initial work on the 2024 Williams, its car builds were handled using Microsoft Excel, with a list of around 20,000 individual components and parts.
According to Vowles, the Excel spreadsheet was being migrated to a digital system at the same time the car’s “technology base” was going through its own colossal overhaul.
Mark Pesce thinks Autonomous Agents are the Future
The amount of computational power that will require is staggering.
Pesce quotes Wim Vanderbauwhede:
”As a society we need to start treating computational resources as finite and precious, to be utilised only when necessary, and as effectively as possible.”
Pop culture, according to the right wing, should be frivolous. Because before the internet, it was something sold to girls by corporations run by powerful men. Famous pop stars through the ages, like Frank Sinatra, America’s first Justin Bieber, or The Beatles, the One Direction of their time, would be canonized as Great by Serious Men after history had forgotten they rocketed to success as their generation’s Tumblr Sexymen.
– Ryan Broderick: Taylor Swift vs. the manosphere
Five things I like right now
Listen
Smoove and Turrell is peak Northern Soul. Just the thing for getting into the groove of the new year.
Watch
Are we still in the doldrums post the writers strike? Nothing new is very good. Season 2 of Reacher is pretty good, I guess.
Read
Gosh, the Thursday Murder Club books are good.
Also Ali Abdaal’s Feel Good Productivity was not what I expected, in a good way.
Eat
Biscotti which must be “assertively crunchy”. The recipe in this old Guardian article is very good.
Think
Going to need to plan out the year, somehow.
Turns out cars really are smartphone accessories
Disney+ apps aren’t in Teslas any more because Elon Musk and Disney CEO Bob Iger don’t like each other.
The move comes a month after several major companies, including Disney, Apple, and Sony, pulled advertising from X because the site is becoming a racist, transphobic cesspool whose owner is promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Five things I like right now
Listen
It’s Christmas so get into Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings It’s a Holiday Soul Party.
Watch
I am in the depths of nostalgia for The West Wing. It holds up.
Read
I’ve been reading a bunch of strategy books. Chet Richard’s Certain to Win is a good one.
Eat
Natalie Paull’s book Beatrix Bakes is full of complicated recipes but they are all worth the effort.
Think
Gosh it’s a been a year.
I'm @bjkraal@aus.social on Mastodon