Linked List: September 30, 2024

Monday, 30 September 2024

The Talk Show: ‘Shipping vs. Shipping’ ★

Jason Snell returns to the show to discuss Apple’s September product announcements, and Meta’s Orion prototype AR glasses. Absolutely no baseball talk, almost.

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‘Our Unevenly Distributed Future’ ★

Allen Pike:

As I understand it, my first experience in a self-driving car was typical:

Minute 1: “How safe is this? Will it notice that cyclist? What about those construction cones?”

Minute 10: “This is wild. It’s driving so calmly and safely. I love it.”

Minute 20: (Bored, checking my email in the back seat.)

It was like a firmware update to my brain.

Imagine how exhilarating subways must have been a century ago — zipping across cities in high-speed underground trains. All technology becomes mundane quickly. It’s kind of amazing when you notice it happening with yourself.

‘The iPhone Content Machine: A Visual Essay’ ★

Om Malik, after Apple’s September 9 “It’s Glowtime” event at Steve Jobs Theater:

I decided to become a fly on the wall and chronicle the spectacle unfolding in front of me. I focused on those who were there to create content about the devices, not the devices themselves. It was fun to just float among the crowds with my Nikon Zf and a 40mm lens.

It was a wonderful spectacle — just to bask in this new kind of raw media energy. Content for the sake of content. Events for the sake of content. Fog of content. It’s the new way of the world. As a student of media, I love this chaos and change — because from chaos and change comes the future.

I’m linking to this photo essay despite, not because of, the fact that it includes a portrait of yours truly dicking around on his phone in the small room where the media wait for post-event briefings. Steve Jobs Theater is a beautiful and unique space, but there are aspects of the space that are hard to capture in photos. Om’s collection here captures the feel of it.

I tried to return the favor by photographing the photographer.

Pete Rose Dies at 83 ★

The Cincinnati Enquirer:

Pete Rose, the Cincinnati native who became baseball’s all-time hits leader as well as one of the most divisive figures in the sport’s history, died Monday, according to a TMZ report, which was confirmed by his agent, Ryan Fiterman. He was 83.

After reaching the pinnacle of the sport he loved, Rose was banned from baseball in 1989 for gambling while manager of his hometown Reds. That came just four years after Rose had broken Ty Cobb’s hit record, a mark that still stands. He is MLB’s all-time hits leader with 4,256.

Even putting aside the betting scandal, Rose was, by all accounts, a rotten person — peculiar at best. But he was an astonishingly good and captivating baseball player, with a nickname for the ages: Charlie Hustle. He played with a maniacal intensity. When he drew a walk, he’d sprint to first base, because that’s the only way he knew how to traverse the bases: at full speed. He drew 1,566 walks in his career. I met him once, during his post-baseball career selling autographs at Las Vegas sports memorabilia shops. My favorite Rose play wasn’t a hit. It was this catch in game 6 of the 1980 World Series.

Simon Willison on NotebookLM’s Automatically Generated Podcasts ★

Simon Willison:

Audio Overview is a fun new feature of Google’s NotebookLM which is getting a lot of attention right now. It generates a one-off custom podcast against content you provide, where two AI hosts start up a “deep dive” discussion about the collected content. These last around ten minutes and are very podcast, with an astonishingly convincing audio back-and-forth conversation.

Here’s an example podcast created by feeding in an earlier version of this article (prior to creating this example).

I listened to the whole 15-minute podcast this morning. It was, indeed, surprisingly effective. It remains somewhere in the uncanny valley, but not at all in a creepy way. Just more in a “this is a bit vapid and phony” way. I think that if you played this example podcast for a non-technical person who isn’t informed at all about the current state of generative AI, that they would assume for the first few minutes, without question, that this was a recorded podcast between two actual humans, and that they might actually learn a few things about generative AI. But given that the “conversation” is literally about creating artificial podcasts like this very example, I wonder how many would, by the end, suspect that they were in fact listening to an AI-generated podcast? It’s quite meta — which the male voice on the podcast even says during the episode.

But ultimately the conversation has all the flavor of a bowl of unseasoned white rice. Give it a listen, though. It’s remarkable.

Update: Jiminy Christ, listen to this one, where the prompt was a document with nothing more than the words poop and fart repeated over and over.