Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Toronto Will @torontowill.bsky.social · 28m

Oh great, a word paste extruded from the internet on how to talk to women, surely it’s a fount of good advice.

Toronto Will @torontowill.bsky.social · 38m

Also, when Apple split out their password manager into a separate app (free and crossplatform), there was a lot of rumbling that 1P was totally toast. I was not one of them (I still use it) but I don’t know what’s changed. It’s a competitive market with alternatives that are cheap or free.

1

Toronto Will @torontowill.bsky.social · 20h

Inertia is a bitch. You can start out trying to save the world and just caught in the wave of Everything Else. A fate that has befallen pretty much the entire environmental movement (even though the threat they’re tackling actually exists).

1

Toronto Will @torontowill.bsky.social · 21h

Stay out of the way, the Canadians have this in hand.

Reposted by Toronto Will

The Pleasure Vice Principle (he/him/his) @hannibaltabu.bsky.social · 1d

I saw the dot coms crash from a front row seat. AI is running out of money way faster.

The evangelism is insecurity from people who made the wrong bet. I’ve seen it before. futurism.com/future-socie...

AI Data Centers Are an Even Bigger Disaster Than Previously Thought

An investment manager realized he made a crucial mistake — and that his grim prediction about AI investments may not have been cynical enough.

futurism.com

29 580 1.4K

Toronto Will @torontowill.bsky.social · 1d

I’ve grown disdainful of laptops just as a concept. They have their place in specific contexts (like the classroom), but I hope to never buy one again. Small screens, touchpads (yuk), awkward keyboards, underpowered for the price. Fix these things and pay a fortune or it’s not portable anymore.

1

Toronto Will @torontowill.bsky.social · 1d

But in a Ponzi the guy holding the money fakes a profit, to induce more investment. Sam is openly just shovelling cash straight into the furnace, and for some inexplicable reason the investors are tripping over each other to get closer to the flames. A “moth“ scheme, maybe?

Toronto Will @torontowill.bsky.social · 1d

Kiting a trillion dollar cheque and crossing your fingers the money shows up in your bank account before it’s cashed, what could go wrong.

Toronto Will @torontowill.bsky.social · 1d

The easiest answer is that the money drives them insane (eg with the “all your ideas are brilliant” sycophancy of everyone around them, grovelling for a share of their wealth). But I posit that the insanity is a significant contributing factor to how they got rich in the first place. Could be both.

2

Toronto Will @torontowill.bsky.social · 1d

I was thinking the same thing, your corrective statement of truth cannot be sourced to the same damn article you’re complaining is defamatory.

Toronto Will @torontowill.bsky.social · 1d

He really is. If you (or anyone else seeing this) haven't read his book, you absolutely should, it's incredibly well written. I wondered if maybe Paul had a heavy helping hand from an editor or even a ghost writer, but this Substack removes all doubt: Paul really is that good of a writer.

2

Toronto Will @torontowill.bsky.social · 1d

Great piece.

Sometimes studios try to manufacture blockbuster hype into existence, through sheer force of advertising spend. The hook of a star actor used to be enough (e.g. Independence Day). Now, it's too much of a gamble without familiar IP. "Tron" has name recognition, it's not a "John Carter"

Toronto Will @torontowill.bsky.social · 1d

*Very* self-indulgent pacing. It felt sincere to Gunn's affection for the crew, but it was narratively inert in a way felt out of character. There's barely a scene in the episode where I really felt like I understood, "what was the point of that?" (even the plotty stuff hangs unresolved)

5

Toronto Will @torontowill.bsky.social · 1d

Ohhh, I get it. The problem with circular transactions is that accounting rules require you to consolidate financials with all related companies, so related party transactions net-out to zero. But if you form an SPV and distribute control, their purchase of $X billion in GPUs is revenue.

According to Bloomberg, NVIDIA is creating a company — a “special purpose vehicle” — that it will invest $2 billion in, along with several other backers. Once that’s done, the special purpose vehicle will then use that equity to raise debt from banks, buy GPUs from NVIDIA, and then rent those GPUs to Elon Musk for five years.

Hell, why make it so complex? NVIDIA invested money in a company specifically built to buy chips from it, which then promptly handed the money back to NVIDIA along with a bunch of other money, and then whatever happened next is somebody else’s problem.

1 15

Toronto Will @torontowill.bsky.social · 1d

You can tell he's haulin' ass though.

Toronto Will @torontowill.bsky.social · 1d

I snatched the suddenly-free perpetual licence to the iPad version of Affinity Photo. Maybe I can manage with that. I only need a Photoshop-type program occasionally, but it’s nice to be able to get in and out quickly with a UI that makes sense.

1

Toronto Will @torontowill.bsky.social · 2d

Damn, I was literally thinking of buying Affinity Photo last night. I’ve been planning too for a while, but was waiting for a project that called for it. I gritted my teeth through using GIMP, and guess I’ll have to keep gritting. This sounds unmistakably like subscription pricing + AI.

1

Toronto Will @torontowill.bsky.social · 2d

This is why I cooled on Threads and Tiktok after trying them for a while, the work to "teach the algorithm" (a) grows tiresome quickly and (b) is like ice skating uphill, the minute you stop or slip, things rapidly get worse. It also forced me to be cautious about things the algo could misinterpret.

Toronto Will @torontowill.bsky.social · 2d

You have to try to remember something that flopped, because any tech good enough to stick around didn't *need* to be pushed this hard. Artificial demand is way more expensive and unsustainable than organic demand, they wouldn't be forcing it if they didn't have to.

3 13

Toronto Will @torontowill.bsky.social · 2d

Then on top of that, you have the cognitive dissonance effect of everyone who's bought in. They can't recognize it as a bad product without admitting they were conned (a career limiting error), and so instead they double down and become evangelists.

3 7

Toronto Will @torontowill.bsky.social · 2d

It's an upsell by nearly every tech company at the backbone of modern computing (only exception I can think of is Apple), so the b2b relationship coverage is 100%, and the sales effort could not be any more desperate or intense. Because they've made a historically MASSIVE bet that this will sell.

3 3 12

Toronto Will @torontowill.bsky.social · 3d

It is usually pitchers with the awful politics, isn’t it. Schilling another one. I wonder if there is something about the clubhouse dynamic, that pitchers can be loners, they don’t have to engage with the diversity of the team. Same is true of kickers in football.

1 2

Toronto Will @torontowill.bsky.social · 3d

Haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate,
Bakers gonna bake, bake, bake, bake

Toronto Will @torontowill.bsky.social · 3d

Look, maybe YOU are jaded about how routine it is to fly 40,000 feet off the ground at Mach 0.82 in a 150,000 lb metal bird, and maybe YOU would prefer to fix your eyes on the leaned-back seat in front of you, grinding against your knees, but damn right *I* am gonna look out the window.

12

Toronto Will @torontowill.bsky.social · 4d

I already thought the marketing for this movie was the worst I'd ever seen, *before* I knew about this.

Toronto Will @torontowill.bsky.social · 9d

The commercials for Tron: Ares are the worst I’ve ever (?) seen for a movie with a marketing budget that large.

1