All roads lead to...well, shit
An issue about money, love, and money again (#426)
Welcome, curious minds
This is David, your diligent curator, and you're reading the Weekly Filet for another carefully curated set of the best things to read, watch and listen to. It's great to have you.
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1. Tiktok's enshittification
Why is your Facebook timeline full of posts you don't want to see? Why is Google's and Amazon's search littered with bad results? Why are Twitter and TikTok pushing certain content and throttling other? Well, money, obviously. Or, as Cory Doctorow calls it: enshittification. An excellent essay that explains how all large internet platforms inevitably become «a useless pile of shit».
Cory Doctorow
2. Looking for Alice
If you're dating, have ever dated, or plan to date anytime in the future, you should read this. «The type of person I’m assuming we’re looking for here is 1) someone that you will find fascinating to talk to after you’ve talked for 20,000 hours, 2) you feel comfortable with them talking through the hardest and most painful decisions you will face in your life, and 3) the conversation is wildly generative for both of you, in that it brings you out, helps you become.»
Henrik Karlsson
3. The Art and Science of Spending Money
This turned out to be a lot more interesting that the title suggested. It's not advice on how to spend money well. Instead, it presents a number of ways of thinking about money. I liked this idea: A lot of people have no idea what kind of spending will make them happy. Because they haven’t tried enough new and strange forms of spending. (Have you, for example, ever tried spending money on a newsletter membership? 😉)
Morgan Housel
4. Why the world needs a Ukrainian victory
In case someone needed a reminder.
Timothy Snyder
5. AI Cookbook — Techniques to improve reliability
The current hype phase of artificial intelligence makes it easy to find confirmation for your preconceptions. It's easy to find examples that make it look extremely capable. It's just as easy to find examples where it looks embarrassingly clueless. Where it gets really interesting is in between: the techniques humans can use to elicit more accurate answers from the AI when it fails on its own (for example, by telling it to «think step by step» or, funny enough, «don't make stuff up»).
openaiWhat else?
- «We are not winning!» — Al Gore tells it like it is, at the WEF 2023 in Davos.
- It's easy to forget how much bigger than the Earth the sun is. Nice animation.
- Fun little game: Guess what year a photograph was taken.
- Winners of the 2022 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest
- Type any phrase, see snippets from movies where it is being said.
- Hard to imagine that someone could paint something like this more than 300 years ago. (It's on Google Street View, too)
- This scene from Werner Herzog's «Lessons of Darkness».
Thanks for reading. I wish you a nice weekend and hope to see you again next Friday!
— David 👋