50 lives you haven't lived
Plus the cutest story I've seen on the web in a while. (#514)
This is David, your decidedly human web crawler, and you're reading the Weekly Filet, the newsletter for curious minds who love when something makes them go «Huh, I never thought of it this way!». As every Friday, I have some recommendations for you, to make sense of what’s happening, and imagine what could be. It's great to have you.
1. All The Different Ways Your Life Could Have Turned Out
When we imagine different lives we could have lived, we tend to think about decisions we made, and roads not taken. What is far less appreciated, Morgan Housel elaborates in this podcast episode, are random events that could have changed everything. I'm fascinated by the experiment Housel describes – and cautiously curious about trying it myself: He wrote a detailed description of the life circumstances of his 20-year-old self. He then gave that description to ChatGPT and asked it to write 50 stories of how that 20-year-old's life would likely continue. He got 50 versions of how his life could have been, including some shocking ones.
Pocket Casts
2. Goodbye to the lost children of Gaza. You were loved, you are remembered, you did not deserve it
«I would like you to pause with me here for a moment, at least for the duration of this column, and allow those statistics to become tragedies. Each one of those deaths is a singular tragedy: a child robbed of a future, of a chance to find out who they are, to know the world, to be a person.»
Nesrine Malik
3. DeepSeek Mania Shakes AI Industry to Its Core
Silicon Valley is in panic mode after a Chinese start-up has released a new large language model. It's not better than what AI made in America is capable of. No, what shook the AI industry is that the Chinese model took waaaaaaay less money and resources to train. No idea what the fuss is about? 404 Media has you covered with.
Emanuel Maiberg
4. Cozy comfort
Cutest story I've seen on the web in a while. An explainer of how cozy video games can be an antidote to stress and anxiety, told in the form of a cozy video game.
5. The Art of Calling Out Room Dynamics
Some helpful tactical advice for saving meetings that have gone off the rails. «Take a deep breath and ask yourself: What’s really happening in this room right now? And then? Say it out loud.»
Csaba Okrona
What else?
Instant-gratification links that make you go wow! or aha! the moment you click.