NOTES_

Yes yes yes yes!

Brighton's purple tips!

It confuses me why Anna Wintour would stick her neck this far out for John Galliano. I do think people deserve a second chance — while at the same time believing that "a second chance" doesn't include the opportunity to be celebrated. In case you've never heard what Galliano actually said all those years ago, here it is.

A New Yorker piece on where Trump mastered situational immortality.

“He had rules about how to exercise power. . . . You would always try to goad your enemies into being the worst they possibly could be and then turn that against them, so that Roy Cohn would actually look like the good guy, which he virtually never was.”

Also, just look at that face!

It sucks — and it especially sucks for sites like The Numbers, run as basically passion projects by solo developers — but it's inevitable. Any site with valuable data is going to be farmed by AI, so its architecture has to be built for that. At the same time, every LLM and agent that farms that data depends on the site still existing; scrape it into the ground and there's nothing left to scrape. The stable outcome is a Nash equilibrium where sites serve bots efficiently and bots take what they need without killing the host, because neither side gains by doing otherwise. We're clearly not there yet, which is why stories like this one exist.

Let’s look beyond the specifics for a moment and consider what happened here. A beloved, useful, free website, run carefully by a competent, honest person for nearly thirty years, was crushed between two features of the new AI economy. Unsustainable machine traffic hammered it from above, and in all likelihood a financially motivated intruder, operating in a world where breaking into websites has never been easier, took it down.

Casper loves his headpiece!

Sometimes you can come across a director that just speaks your language. I think I've found a new one: Michael Haneke. So far I've only seen Cache and The White Ribbon, but — yes! I'm building up the nerve to see Funny Games.

Two upcoming Criterion items that I must have:
1. Silence of the Lambs
2. The Complete Kubrick

The stuff at Present & Correct is insanely beautiful: pencils, notebook, clocks, calendars, and more.

How hard could this piece of IKEA furniture be to build? Answer: "complexity" = steps x total parts. Now applied to (almost) every product in their catalog.