Nostalgia can be a mind fuck. Democracy, journalism, personal computing, they all feel like games with rules we all understood. No longer. Yes, the house always wins. Especially when everything feels like a war, when we’re not sure if it is either beginning of ending. When all bets are off if feels more like sticking your head in the mouth of a tiger than a roll of the dice. Yet we play on. Time for a little Sunday Morning Reading.
Kicking off is an excellent piece from JA Westenberg called Everything’s Casino. From Iran to the Dutch tulip crisis, with a dash of Dostoevsky. The section on When The Future Stopped Arriving is aces.
Follow that up Jon Ganz’s Command-Shift-War. Snake eyes.
Spend some time with this terrific series from Quinn Norton on Emptywheel that began a little over a year ago with A Normal Person’s Explainer On What Generative AI Is And Does. It concludes with an epilogue that is titled Small Models, Gently Loved, and subtitled An AI Speculative Fiction. It won’t spoil the rest of the series, so I’d suggest starting with that fictional epilogue, but also checking out Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.
John Gruber and Manton Reece both linked to this piece by Les Orchard called Grief And The AI Spit. I’m glad they did. You will be too.
Orchard’s piece above kicks off talking about how making computers do things is fun. Which is a nice companion to Sam Henri Gold’s reaction to Apple releasing the MacBook Neo called This Is Not The Computer For You. There’s nostalgia there, certainly. But I think it’s deeper than that. I’m betting Apple’s stake in the next game is solid.
Speaking of gambling, McKay Coppins was staked by his bosses at The Atlantic to a year long escapade to dive into the rise of gambling. His piece Sucker, tells the tale of his year as a degenerative gambler.
There’s an excellent series worth your attention from various writers on The Verge titled AI vs. The Pentagon: Killer Robots, Mass Surveillance, and The Red Lines. We sure are betting the farm on this, aren’t we?
If not advertising, then now what? That’s the question Hamilton Nolan poses in Patrons of Journalism.
In a piece on democracy dating back a few years, David Todd McCarty sticks his and our heads in the mouth of the tiger in Dreaming of Tigers. The house and the tiger always win.
(Image from Eyestetix Studio on Unsplash.)
If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.
Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3 