Meta has gone after AI in the same way they went after the metaverse, by splashing money around and rushing to build products fast. They’re spending tens of billions building out data centers and related AI infrastructure. They’re tossing out incredible compensation packages in the hundreds of millions of dollars to top AI researchers.

Facebook is now the cultural symbol for useless slop and disinformation, while ‘that’s so Reels’ is now a common insult for terrible shortform video content - and you get the first theory of Meta. It’s a laughable company whose core business is increasingly uncool, a company in decline, a company that falls flat on its face any time it tries to change things up.

Call Meta uncool all you’d like, metrics are up across the board. They’re getting higher user engagement, higher user counts, and they’re selling more ads at a higher price-per-ad. The numbers are up in virtually every way on every platform - Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and even Threads.

They can afford to make huge bets on speculative new technologies because they have more money than they know how to spend. Why not spend all that money on the metaverse or on AI? What else are they going to do with it? Zuckerberg still controls the company and he’d prefer to invest in new technology rather than just pay himself fat dividends. This is the second theory of Meta - a unbelievably successful company whose core business is booming and who spends a lot of money on speculative investments simply because they can.

So your mileage may vary on that score. It’s complicated. As is the movie itself. Dumb and brilliant and complicated. It’s hard to like, but easy to kind of love.

The trajectory of all this is well rehearsed at this point. Progressive posters register their genuine outrage. Reactionaries respond in kind by cataloging that outrage and using it to portray their ideological opponents as hysterical, overreactive, and out of touch. Then savvy content creators glom on to the trending discourse and surf the algorithmic waves on TikTok, X, and every other platform. Yet another faction emerges: People who agree politically with those who are outraged about Sydney Sweeney but wish they would instead channel their anger toward actual Nazis. All the while, media outlets survey the landscape and attempt to round up these conversations into clickable content—search Google’s “News” tab for Sydney Sweeney, and you’ll get the gist.

Even that word, discourse—a shorthand for the way that a particular topic gets put through the internet’s meat grinder—is a misnomer, because none of the participants is really talking to the others. Instead, every participant—be they bloggers, randos on X, or people leaving Instagram comments—are issuing statements, not unlike public figures. Each of these statements becomes fodder for somebody else’s statement.

Our information ecosystem collects these statements, stripping them of their original context while adding on the context of everything else that is happening in the world: political anxieties, cultural frustrations, fandoms, niche beefs between different posters, current events, celebrity gossip, beauty standards, rampant conspiracism. No post exists on an island. They are all surrounded and colored by an infinite array of other content targeted to the tastes of individual social-media users. What can start out as a legitimate grievance becomes something else altogether—an internet event, an attention spectacle. This is not a process for sense-making; it is a process for making people feel upset at scale.

It has changed the way people talk to and fight with one another, as well as the way jeans are marketed. Electoral politics, activism, getting people to stream your SoundCloud mixtape—all of it relies on attracting attention using online platforms. The Sweeney incident is useful because it allows us to see how all these competing interests overlap to create a self-perpetuating controversy.

The Sweeney ad, like any good piece of discourse, allows everyone to exploit a political and cultural moment for different ends. Some of it is well intentioned. Some of it is cynical. Almost all of it persists because there are deeper things going on that people actually want to fight about

Discourse suggests a process that feels productive, maybe even democratic. But there’s nothing productive about the end result of our information environment. What we’re consuming isn’t discourse; it’s algorithmic grist for the mills that power the platforms we’ve uploaded our conversations onto. The grist is made of all of our very real political and cultural anxieties, ground down until they start to feel meaningless. The only thing that matters is that the machine keeps running. The wheel keeps turning, leaving everybody feeling like they’ve won and lost at the same time.

This Apple has been dismantling Mac OS, as if it’s a foreign tool to them. They’ve bashed its UI around. And they seem to have done that not for the purpose of improving it, but simply for the purpose of changing it; adapting it to their (mostly misguided) idea of unifying the interface of different devices to bring it down to the simplest common denominator.

f we look at Mac OS as a metro railway line, it’s like Apple has stopped extending it and creating new stations. What they’ve been doing for a while now has been routine maintenance, and giving the stations a fresh coat of paint every year. Only basic and cosmetic concerns, yet sometimes mixing things up to show that more work has gone into it, a process that invariably results in inexplicable and arbitrary choices like moving station entrances around, shutting down facilities, making the train timetables less legible, making the passages that lead to emergency exits more convoluted and longer to traverse, and so on — hopefully you know what I mean here.

When you self-impose timelines and cadences that are essentially marketing-driven and do not really reflect technological research and development, then you become prisoner in a prison of your own making. Your goal and your priorities start becoming narrower in scope. You reduce your freedom of movement because you stop thinking in terms of creating the next technological breakthrough or innovative device; you just look at the calendar and you have to come up with something by end of next trimester, while you also have to take care of fixing bugs that are the result of the previous rush job… which keep accumulating on top of the bugs of the rush job that came before, and so forth.

From what I’ve understood by examining the evolution of computer science and computer history, scientists and technologists of past decades seemed to have an approach that could be described as, ‘ideas & concepts first, technology later’. Many figures in the history of computing are rightly considered visionaries because they had visions — sometimes very detailed ones — of what they wanted computers to become, of applications where computers could make a difference, of ways in which a computer could improve a process, or could help solve a real problem.

What I’m seeing today is more like the opposite approach — ‘technology first, ideas & concepts later’: a laser focus on profit-driven technological advancements to hopefully extract some good ideas and use cases from.

Where there are some ideas, or sparks, they seem hopelessly limited in scope or unimaginatively iterative, short-sightedly anchored to the previous incarnation or design. The questions are something like, How can we make this look better, sleeker, more polished?

Steve Jobs once said, There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.’ And we’ve always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very, very beginning. And we always will. If I may take that image, I’d say that today a lot of tech companies seem more concerned with the skating itself and with continuing to hit the puck in profitable ways.

"The world is deceived by the situation in the Gaza Strip," says Moumen al-Natour, a Gaza lawyer and former organiser of the 2019 anti-Hamas "We Want to Live" movement. Al-Natour spoke to us from the shattered remains of his city, the flimsy canvas side of the tent which now forms part of his house billowing behind him. "The world thinks that Gaza is Hamas and Hamas is Gaza," he said. "We didn't choose Hamas and now Hamas is determined to rule Gaza and tie our fate to its own. Hamas must retreat. "

With little to lose and hopes of an end to the war dashed once more, some Gazans direct their fury equally at Israel and Hamas. Asked which side he blamed most for Gaza's catastrophe, Amin Abed said it was "a choice between cholera and the plague".

Reinforcement learning with human feedback is a process by which models learn how to answer queries based on which responses users prefer most, and users mostly prefer flattery. More sophisticated users might balk at a bot that feels too sycophantic, but the mainstream seems to love it. Earlier this month, Meta was caught gaming a popular benchmark to exploit this phenomenon: one theory is that the company tuned the model to flatter the blind testers that encountered it so that it would rise higher on the leaderboard.

A series of recent, invisible updates to GPT-4o had spurred the model to go to extremes in complimenting users and affirming their behavior. It cheered on one user who claimed to have solved the trolley problem by diverting a train to save a toaster, at the expense of several animals; congratulated one person for no longer taking their prescribed medication; and overestimated users’ IQs by 40 or more points when asked.

OpenAI, Meta, and all the rest remain under the same pressures they were under before all this happened. When your users keep telling you to flatter them, how do you build the muscle to fight against their short-term interests?  One way is to understand that going too far will result in PR problems, as it has for varying degrees to both Meta (through the Chatbot Arena situation) and now OpenAI. Another is to understand that sycophancy trades against utility: a model that constantly tells you that you’re right is often going to fail at helping you, which might send you to a competitor. A third way is to build models that get better at understanding what kind of support users need, and dialing the flattery up or down depending on the situation and the risk it entails. (Am I having a bad day? Flatter me endlessly. Do I think I am Jesus reincarnate? Tell me to seek professional help.)

But while flattery does come with risk, the more worrisome issue is that we are training large language models to deceive us. By upvoting all their compliments, and giving a thumbs down to their criticisms, we are teaching LLMs to conceal their honest observations. This may make future, more powerful models harder to align to our values — or even to understand at all. And in the meantime, I expect that they will become addictive in ways that make the previous decade’s debate over “screentime” look minor in comparison. The financial incentives are now pushing hard in that direction. And the models are evolving accordingly.

On the one hand, you have an ultra-personal multiplex event that could not and would not have been made by anyone else — a music-driven genre mash-up that reworks age-old vampire tropes into a fresh, thoughtful, and deliciously hot-blooded period saga rooted in the specifics of Black history. On the other hand, you have a nakedly anonymous attempt to salvage a franchise that produced one of the most radical legacy sequels in the history of that concept, only to spend the last eight years selling itself out to the lowest common denominator in a futile bid for forgiveness.

That enthusiasm proved contagious. You don’t need to care about the difference between 2.76:1 and 1.90:1 to feel it in your bones when the screen widens during the film’s climactic siege, and you sure as hell don’t need to care about it in order to appreciate a director making so earnest an appeal to our attention at a time when most studio movies feel like they were made with the same casual indifference that audiences have been conditioned to watch them.

While Coogler’s first original project was always going to command a certain amount of hype, the decision to lead with its importance to him galvanized people around the notion that “Sinners” was more than just another movie they could watch at home in three weeks (rave reviews from basically every critic in the country didn’t hurt either).

Last Thursday night, moviegoers across this godforsaken land rabidly made their way to the nearest multiplex — or pilgrimaged across state lines to the closest theater capable of projecting 15-Perf IMAX 70mm film — in order to see early screenings of the first original blockbuster from a gifted filmmaker whose fame has been predicated upon his ability to put a strong personal stamp on increasingly generic Hollywood franchises. At that very same time, halfway around the world, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and chief creative officer Dave Filoni took the stage at Star Wars Celebration 2025 in Chiba, Japan to announce that the next chapter of cinema’s most iconic saga would be directed by a filmmaker whose fame has been predicated upon his ability to be friends with Ryan Reynolds. Related Stories ‘Sinners’ Took a Nice Bite Out of a Random Tuesday at the Box Office Ryan Coogler Thanks Over 40 ‘Cinematic Influences’ Who Inspired ‘Sinners,’ Including Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino, and Brian De Palma The movie business has always been held aloft by the tension between genuine pop artistry and mass-produced slop, two separate but hopelessly entwined ambitions that have proven even harder to balance than the Force. While both have their value, those values are in a constant state of flux, and they can only be determined with any real accuracy by measuring the difference between them. Seldom has that difference ever seemed more dramatic than it did at the fateful moment when “Sinners” mania overlapped with the reveal of “Star Wars: Starfighter.”  On the one hand, you have an ultra-personal multiplex event that could not and would not have been made by anyone else — a music-driven genre mash-up that reworks age-old vampire tropes into a fresh, thoughtful, and deliciously hot-blooded period saga rooted in the specifics of Black history. On the other hand, you have a nakedly anonymous attempt to salvage a franchise that produced one of the most radical legacy sequels in the history of that concept, only to spend the last eight years selling itself out to the lowest common denominator in a futile bid for forgiveness. While “Sinners” was offering one audience something they had never seen before, “Star Wars: Starfighter” was pitching a different audience a movie so generic and familiar that even its title sounds like it’s repeating itself.  Of course, “Sinners” has the advantage of being a finished product that people have seen and loved, whereas “Star Wars: Starfighter” is still just a graphic designed to rile up the fanbase and appease whatever portion of Disney shareholders have already forgotten the great “Lightyear” debacle of 2022. (Just to be clear, this isn’t Starfighter the ship. This is the origin story of the human Starfighter that the ship is based on.) And, while anything’s possible, I’m not suggesting that Coogler’s movie will ultimately outgross the first “Star Wars” feature that promises to pick up from the saga where “Episode IX” left off.  All the same, the enthusiasm gap between these two projects — the reality of one, and the promise of another — has been tellingly immense. So far as the national water cooler is concerned, “Sinners” has ousted the Chicken Jockey as the biggest film story of the year, and stoked the rare kind of excitement that leads to $8.6 million Tuesdays and people scalping IMAX tickets on eBay. It’s also cemented Coogler’s status as a brand unto himself, and proved that Warner Bros. doesn’t have to sell its soul to “A Minecraft Movie” in order to stave off financial ruin. Conversely, there may not be a single person on Earth who’s more optimistic about the future of the galaxy far, far away now that a significant portion of its fate has been entrusted to the director of “The Adam Project.” The serendipitous timing of these announcements was a bit on the nose. You couldn’t have scripted a better way of confirming the reality that studios have been trying to prevent ever since they offered mid-budget movies as a blood sacrifice at the altar of mega-tentpole franchises: Mediocrity is losing its grip on the public imagination. (Cookie-cutter as “A Minecraft Movie” might have been in the end, I maintain that getting the “Napoleon Dynamite” guy to adapt a plotless video game about blocks was less of a slam-dunk than it seems, and the Chicken Jockey phenomenon speaks to a degree of novelty that was missing from recent short-fallers like “Captain America: Brave New World.”)  ‘Free Guy’Fox/Disney I trust that Levy is a nice guy, and I suppose it’s possible that the sheer gravity of “Star Wars” might inspire the “Free Guy” auteur to up his game (I’d entertain the argument that both “The Force Awakens” and “The Last Jedi” are the best movies their respective directors have ever made), but I’m not the only one who finds Disney’s lack of faith in its signature IP disturbing, and I struggle to imagine that it will work out well for them. Levy’s hiring only seems to deepen the s

Which is to say: Films that connected with audiences because they dared to emphasize an idiosyncratic creative vision over the safety of selling people on something they’d already seen before.

Let's be clear about what's happening: The President of the United States is openly fantasizing about forcibly annexing a sovereign nation of 40 million people. He's been repeatedly referring to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as "Governor Trudeau" and threatening our closest ally with absorption into the United States. This isn't a policy proposal to be analyzed; it's the ravings of a dangerous authoritarian.

But instead of treating this story as what it is — evidence of Trump's increasingly unhinged worldview and contempt for democratic norms — Baker decides to play electoral college calculator. He walks us through detailed scenarios about House seats and Senate majorities, complete with expert quotes about the Democratic Party's theoretical gains. It's like writing about the thermal properties of the emperor's new clothes while ignoring his nakedness.

The real story here isn't about electoral math. It's about a sitting president who talks about invading allied nations while referring to their democratically elected leaders as though they were already his subordinates. It's about the continued deterioration of democratic norms. It's about how the institutions meant to protect democracy — including the press — seem increasingly unable or unwilling to call out authoritarian behavior for what it is.

The press needs to stop treating politics like a game of electoral mathematics and start treating it like what it is: a serious business with real consequences for democracy and human lives. When the president starts talking like a mad emperor, that's the story, not how many House seats his delusions might hypothetically affect.

At first, I agreed with the critical consensus that the show is mindless entertainment, superficial and vacuous—RINGARDE. But I am now sincerely, even zealously convinced that, in my initial reaction of smug self-satisfaction, I was lured into an ambush, my response anticipated and rebutted: not in Emily’s trite soliloquy, but in Emily’s portrayal of Emily’s self-deception. For it is not just that I need her; I am her.

Most disturbingly familiar, however, is the subterranean mining operation that runs beneath Emily’s whole life, a constant alertness for usable material. Likewise, I cannot read a book, contemplate a painting, or even watch Emily without updating my mental inventory of raw material for future interpretation.

We first meet her as she finishes her daily jog, arrested by the congratulations of a mechanical voice: “eighteen seconds faster than yesterday.” Nothing is real unless it can be measured. And so the body must be tamed.

It symbolizes everything everyone has ever hated about digitization. It celebrates a lossy, creative compression for the most flimsy reason: An iPad shedding an irrelevant millimeter or two. It's destruction of beloved musical instruments is the perfect metaphor for how utterly tone-deaf technologists are capable of being. But the real story is just how little saved up goodwill Apple had in the bank to compensate for the outrage.

This should all be eerily familiar to anyone who saw Microsoft fall from grace in the 90s. From being America's favorite software company to being the bully pursued by the DOJ for illegalities. Just like Apple now, Microsoft's reputation and good standing suddenly evaporated seemingly overnight once enough critical stories had accumulated about its behavior.

Apple had such treasure chest of goodwill from decades as first an underdog, then unchallenged innovator. But today they're a near three-trillion dollar company, battling sovereigns on both sides of the Atlantic, putting out mostly incremental updates to mature products.

Some images look like they were made under a robotic sugar high. Lots of warm colors, but they make everything look like candy… they’re so overly sweet that they give you visual diabetes..

Average AI images drag down everything around them. An AI hero image is a comedian opening the show with a knock-knock joke. Good images enrich your article, bad images steal its soul.

If I had to summarize it, I would say that the signal to noise ratio is what wore me down. We start companies to build products that serve people, not to sit in meetings with lawyers.  You need to be able to answer the "what have I done for our users today" question with "not much but I got promoted" and be happy with that answer to be successful in Corp-Tech.

being part of a Corporation means that the signal to noise ratio changes dramatically.  The amount of time and effort spent on Legal, Policy, Privacy - on features that have not shipped to users yet, meant a significant waste of resources and focus. After the acquisition, we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google. I am not saying this is not important BUT this had zero value to our users. An ever increasing percent of our time went to non user value creation tasks and that changes the DNA of the company quickly, from customer focused to corporate guidelines focused.

the salaries are so high and the options so valuable that it creates many misalignments.  The impact of an individual product on the Corp-Tech stock is minimal so equity is basically free money.  Regardless of your performance (individually) or your product performance, you equity grows significantly so nothing you do has real economic impact on your family. The only control you have to increase your economic returns are whether you get promoted, since that drives your equity and salary payments.  This breaks the traditional tech model of risk reward.

When I first read a history of Israel, I was amazed at the image of Israel being like an onion: there always seems to be a deeper layer and an older claim to the land

The disaster that befell Israel on the holiday of Simchat Torah is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister, who has prided himself on his vast political experience and irreplaceable wisdom in security matters, completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession, when appointing Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir to key positions, while embracing a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.

A prime minister indicted in three corruption cases cannot look after state affairs, as national interests will necessarily be subordinate to extricating him from a possible conviction and jail time.

Artists never complete a single, perfect artwork, and a single work never instigates an absolute transcendence in viewers. We may aspire toward this quasi-theological ideal, but art only has the ability to suggest the sublime. The real sustenance of the artistic is the scope of experience it provides, the cumulative sense of growth and cultivation of ourselves through art, a tendency toward a good that we can never capture but only assist in radiating itself and existence.

I quickly realized that my habits were more suited to going to galleries every week than to working regularly on longer pieces, that there weren’t very many shows I wanted to write about at length, and that a regular stream of blithe, off-the-cuff reviews would attract more attention than intermittent longer essays

Film, music, food and book critics write for a general public that can be swayed to spend their money one way or another, whereas the general public cannot afford to buy the art that is written about in Artforum.