MDM Broadcast - 2025

The speed with which an LLM can recommend JS for the console that tricks a cluttered and nearly unusable site like genius.com into presenting only the essential info is still mind-blowing.

Add checkboxes and CSV export to Wikipedia tables and lists with this Chrome Extension: "Check On It," which also has a public repo on Github.

Late to the game here, but just realized how much photo forensics goes into studying the Civil War. Appreciating this guy's efforts...

Had been thinking about Peltier a few times in the last few weeks. This is a real surprise.

Come for the timely and outsized adulation of recently departed Garth Hudson, stay for the surprising (and equally rare) anti-tech rant from a 20-something.

Here's pure output from Deepseek R1, the Chinese AI model that caused a nearly 2-trillion dollar drop in Nasdaq. This is Deepseek "reasoning" through a React app, which clearly had problems, but, well, see for yourself.

Most think the reason Musk, Zuck, Sacks, Bezos, Rogan and Tim Apple were on the dais at the inauguration is because they’re the richest — it’s not.

It’s because they’re the most powerful merchants of our modern world's most precious, finite, and incalculable resource: Attention.

Bouie knew it in his last sentence here in December, and we all know in our bones that sloppy Dems will drag their tired insincerities and boo-hooisms into losing at the polls again, unless they take the reins of attention and remake the rules of the game, which they failed to do in ‘24.

Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat is genius filmmaking. It's difficult to convey how much of a heavyweight it is on all levels; sonically, organizationally, emotionally, insightfully revealing a crushing historical narrative as old as time.

It's inspiring how wide the filmmakers kept their palette, in terms of using every single 'trick' in the book to deepen and further a story told almost entirely through archival footage. There's even foley-work so deft you wouldn't know it's there.

Give it all the awards.

https://wikitok.vercel.app/

J6er, who still believes stop-the-steal, did time, and whose co-defendant crapped in Pelosi’s ofc, says he doesn’t regret it, because it made the 2024 election *much more fair(er)*.

I think I used to believe that the best ideas for a new America would *have* to come from the South, but now…

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1161

I like to keep up on “panics” but I’ve never heard of Quadrobics before. Sounds like an elaborate April Fools broadcast.

https://pca.st/episode/70c529ec-d5b0-4f0a-9f5b-a3a1e01e59b7

Joe Wenderoth, from "If I don't breathe, how do I sleep"

Happy 8th Anniversary of Conway on the couch, to all who celebrate. 20170228

Imagine believing so much in America that even after the country votes for an administration that pulls all its support and intelligence from Ukraine, you think, ”I’m gonna still gonna go to Ukraine, because people need to know…” and you make the trip and see it all and think, “I’ll just reach out to Musk and I bet he’ll want to talk about how bad it is,” and then you tweet the guy on the platform he owns and he responds like this…

Love this bit about the cultural pervasiveness of a new literalism, from Namwali Serpell:

"The point is not to be lifelike or fact-based but familiar and formulaic—in a word, predictable. Artists and audiences sometimes defend this legibility as democratic, a way to reach everyone. It is, in fact, condescending. Forget the degradation of art into content. Content has been demoted to concept. And concept has become a banner ad.

Saying the quiet part out loud has given way to a general loudness. This is as true in our cultural life as it is in our political life, which feels like a badly written finale, so in your face are the Ponzi schemes, Nazi salutes, and tech-bro cant of our latest overlords. That sense of unmistakable catastrophe may be why we keep returning to predigested cultural comfort food."

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/critics-notebook/the-new-literalism-plaguing-todays-biggest-movies or https://archive.is/0GNkR

Yesterday while cheering on Rory, a friend reminded me of this moment with Dechambeau on Saturday, after he birdied the 16th and goaded the crowd into cheering for him more - by stopping and staring them down across the pond.

It was a quintessential *no phones* moment that would have been impossible in any other sport, at any other venue, because the crowd would have been mediating the experience through the veil of their personal devices.

Instead, Bryson stops and stares them down, eye-to-eye, and they leap out of their chairs in a way that's only possible at Augusta because of their increasingly brilliant *no phones* policy.

Fiona Hill knows we’re sleepwalking into oblivion (and to form, I'd claim the somnambulism is directed by the power of brands, influencers, and algorithmic programming).

I can’t connect the dots, nor want to, but the sleepwalking shares resonance with Jacqui Palumbo's return to Ellis' "American Psycho" which amplified the horrors of capitalism to such an outlandish degree that thirty-five years later, Bateman ended-up sounding like the "likensubscribe!" manosphere looksmaxxing crews on TikTube-agram.

https://lite.cnn.com/2025/04/15/style/american-psycho-morning-routine-25-years/index.html

"Important art forms will survive only because of a frank elitism, an insistence on distinction, a contempt for mediocrity."

I still think about the spike jonze fka twigs homepod launch video from 2018 (and its making-of) every few months.

3 minutes and 50 seconds of creative brilliance.

(I think Apple pulled it from their channels. So many marketing campaigns get deleted over time.)

Still so glad I got to see this music made in real time this year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsnwgTn3WWc

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/openai-chatgpt-ai-cheating-education-college-students-school.html

If there were a triumverate of articles about the perils inherent at the intersection of secondary-education and artificial intelligence, it might be these three:

- Student uses AI at Columbia, then drops out to found a start-up

- Kashmir Hill on how a teacher used AI at Northeastern, and a student pushed for a tuition refund:

- But the best, most provocative, and fascinating goes to "Will the Humanities Survive Human Intellegence?" from D. Graham Burnett a few weeks ago in the New Yorker

Burnett's piece shares the anecdotal aspects of the previous two, but expands into a much more hopeful vision (shared by at least one professor I know) that there may not be a better time to be teaching, because it's the wild west of possibility -- with nearly every age-old expectation up-for-grabs, as humans (both students and teachers) learn how to learn alongside machines.

Burnett's wisdom, commitment and optimism were inspiring; his work is new to me.

Nothing like that Obama Drama

"The little pendants around our necks will be a hundred million Trojan horses, smuggling A.I. into every aspect of our lives. The comforting tone of Altman and Ive’s pitch belies the enormous uncertainty of what their plan would unleash. A recent study in the United Kingdom found that forty-six per cent of youth ages sixteen to twenty-one would prefer to live in a world in which the internet doesn’t exist. Given all the regret and dread that digital culture has prompted, some two decades since the advent of social media, it seems worth thinking twice before allowing Altman and Ive’s incipient creation to occupy our time and our minds, too." - Chayka, again, in the NY'er https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/sam-altman-and-jony-ive-will-force-ai-into-your-life

A couple of weeks ago there was this NY'er piece about Daniel Kokotajlo, who quit OpenAI to sound the AI-alarm. He's been on press tour for the release of his speculative "non?" fiction prediction of what the next few years of AI development might bring.

It's instructive to dip into what the brightest, most technically adept minds are concerned about with the advancement of LLMs beyond the familiar scope of chatbots.

From what I can tell, Kokotajlo's narrative imagining has a point in the near-future where the platforms use AI to research the next AI efficiency breakthrough.

Which brings me back to an interview with Brin, at Google I/O last month where, when asked if they were using Gemini to build the next version of Gemini, he said they were, but expressed it as a piecemeal, one-off kind of effort, rather than a programmatic approach.

Still, that moment of nascent acceleration, where a model as "smart" as (or smarter than) a PhD-level AI-researcher, is given all the compute it needs to discover what humans currently cannot discover, and arrives at a novel new direction -- that'll be a moment.

Evenings like these when the sky invents new punctuation.

Edel Rodriguez, again, again...

Love those ascii-art job notices in the devtools inspector.

Not sure if it’s the HGH or (alleged) blood bags, but over time, Thiel’s visage, his actual face, seems to be morphing into Roy Cohn’s. Is it a villain thing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cohn

"One study, published last year, found that fifty-eight per cent of students at two Midwestern universities had so much trouble interpreting the opening paragraphs of “Bleak House,” by Charles Dickens, that “they would not be able to read the novel on their own.” And these were English majors."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/07/07/the-end-of-the-english-paper

“My worry is that after a lifetime spent trying to explain themselves, solve their strong feelings, standardise their personalities, and make sense of every experience, a generation might realise that the only problem they had, all along, was being human.”

https://www.freyaindia.co.uk/p/nobody-has-a-personality-anymore?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

I appreciate this more than words can tell.

Installation by Tim Etchells, in Athens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onassis_Stegi

"oldie" but goodie. #notmyvideo

A long time ago I started wondering how many possible combinations of letters and numbers there could be in the 11-character ID in a YouTube url, and it took me until today to definitively find out. A few years ago I programatically generated a batch of my own to see if they'd land on an unsuspecting video, and was surprised that they didn't.

Now I know why; it's a 1-in-37 billion chance.
https://chatgpt.com/share/68876eac-653c-8001-a6c5-53bc38f3ed04

Similarly, every tweet that's ever been tweeted has an ID in its url that's simpler than YouTube's because it relies on the time-distance between the millisecond it was posted, and the millisecond that twitter turned-on the feature, in 2010. It's still in use, and you can mathematically derive the date/time of the post from the ID itself, without having to ping an API or scrape the UI.

Twitter's ID system can still successfully generate unique IDs at over 4,000 tweets per millisecond, but breaks after 4,096.

It’s still surprising to me how some of the most useful examples of people using AI to make things a little bit better are so freaking complicated for anyone who lacks a serious understanding of how tech things work.

There’s still such a long way to go for even a fairly simple idea like this, a public, (re)presentation of existing data.

The magic, in this case, is that Willison did it all on his phone, which is grt for him, but his explanation of the process (as a career technologist) underscores the current gulf between the breathlessness of AI hype vs. reality

All said, all the new AI tools make it feel like we’re at the start of a new epoch of tech solving problems tech created. Same same but different?

No audio, but still, years later, maybe the most ridiculous sports thing I've ever seen.

Had a chat with the kids this morning about noticeable, obvious societal behaviors (at scale) that have been influenced by tech, from which we'll never "go back."

Concerts are the obvious example, with everyone mediating their experience though a screen. My favorite are the people who used to live on quiet neighborhood streets, who realized (around 2015 following Google's acquisition of Waze) that algorithmically-influenced drivers, inspired by driving apps, were routing themselves through those same cut-through streets to save time.

We haven't (yet) experienced the same visible societal impact from the AI boom, and the kids rightly suggested dating, and how we'll come across people on dates with their AI boyfriend/girlfriend(s) soon. At unavoidable scale? Maybe, give it a few years, I guess?

My quiet thought is that there's information that could never have been gathered, collated and processed by any human about liveability of communities in the US. I could imagine a process in which you listed and ranked your top-10 (or 100!) qualifications for what you desire from a particular living situation, and in time, AI would deliver a result of the best possible places for you (or your family) to live.

It would be mind-blowing to see AI-influenced migration, essentially.

Perhaps there was a first-run of this with American ex-pats landing in Lisbon thanks to pandemic-era Instafluencers, but it'd be fascinating if it were more widespread, where people were literally uprooting themselves for the AI-inspired spoils of spots like Topeka, or Eau Claire.

It could happen! 😂👍

It’s 2025 and this is a headline.

If you haven’t left these platforms behind yet, what would the reason have to be today to convince you?

20150502

If everyone had listened and learned Jia's lesson 8 years ago, would we be in the place we're in today?

Ana Marie Cox on Burningman, in...

...1997

“Robophobic”

Bike races have historically been one of the easiest vectors to launch a high profile protest; guaranteed TV coverage, and if you manage to shut down the road, people will definitely form an opinion about your issue.

But I’ve *never* (pearl clutch) in 40 years of mostly paying attention, seen a protest result in a crash, until today, at the Vuelta.

Great reporting on data centers via Business Insider

Big fan of this maniacal Jimmy Smith solo.

Just heard a linguist pronounce “cordial” with a hard-D. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Update from our (Not So) Brave New World

I was aware of the publication of these letters to the AVA, and held a copy in my hands in ‘96 or so, but PTA’s new Vineland-inspired film made me revisit the Tinasky story and whoa what a twisted end.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanda_Tinasky

Always great every year to cruise through the new MacArthur Foundation winners and read about careers in disciplines that you've never thought of or considered before.

https://www.macfound.org/programs/awards/fellows/

"three backup singers with their own lives"

https://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/music/scdangel-00.php

Every time I launch my csv viewer feels like a win.

Public repo on GitHub

10yrs into our long national nightmare, it’s wild this is the 1st time i’ve ever heard someone make this joke.

Took me until today to realize Dave Murray is not Dave McMurray.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Murray_(saxophonist)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_McMurray

What Would Edward Abbey Do?

7 years ago, today. - 20181027

the manosphere is breaking contain

There are two docs on 2024 Nobel winner Demis Hassabis that are worth seeing if you’re looking for more understanding about “Move 37” which occurs on camera during the first doc, “AlphaGo”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo_versus_Lee_Sedol

The 2nd doc, “The Thinking Game” sums-up the first, and carrries through Hassabis’ Nobel, won for chemistry, after training AlphaFold to master protein folding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thinking_Game

Wish there was more behind the scenes with this new industry, but aside from DeepMind, everyone’s so secretive.

Cade Metz’s book “Genius Makers” is worthwhile and he pops up in the docs while reporting during some of the big Go moments in Korea.

If you’re tired of Altman & Musk and their Stargate plans to tile the world into a glowing grid of data centers, you might appreciate Hassabis’ story. He’s clearly on the same trail, but is a far more compelling figure, authentically wrestling with the hard issues, while snubbing Zuck’s billions in favor of a shorter stack (and more freedom) from Google.

Fun small moment in "Running on Empty" (1988), Judd Hirsch, Martha Plimpton and River Phoenix dancing to "Fire & Rain" on the radio while celebrating mom's bday, while lil' bro air-guitars in the kitchen.

Heard three memorable things yesterday:

- A young woman giving a tour of the opening of the Grand Egyptian museum in Cairo (on youtube) pronounce 'papyrus' in a way that rhymed with 'dapper us'

- A pastor describing his own actions as 'pastoral', which is a usage I've never heard, ever, and if it's a throwback usage it's hard not to admire the freestyling

- A reminder that Bella Abzug actually existed! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_Abzug

Fun story from a great nonfic filmmaker, Garret Harkawik, about the dubious origins of a 90s new-age pop hit, and only 50 views.

In yesterday's release, court docs tagged with Virginia Giuffre's last name.

Twin towers of redaction, pillars of society, on a "Visitors Massage" list, (Palm Beach).

This pod series “The Last Invention” has been my fave of the year. Not tons of new ground covered outside of all the books and articles already published on the subject, but it’s great to methodically step through the facts, plots, substories, and theories in the capable hands of Andy Mills who also helped make “Rabbit Hole”.

https://pca.st/podcast/039a9d30-76af-013e-bac8-0acc26574db2

“The predictive intelligence program…”

https://apnews.com/article/immigration-border-patrol-surveillance-drivers-ice-trump-9f5d05469ce8c629d6fecf32d32098cd

"To the company’s disappointment, “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” internal documents said." ...

"Despite Meta’s own work documenting a causal link between its products and negative mental health effects, the filing alleges, Meta told Congress that it had no ability to quantify whether its products were harmful to teenage girls."

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/meta-buried-causal-evidence-social-media-harm-us-court-filings-allege-2025-11-23/

"This architectural instrument will sit much like a latent time capsule in anticipation of being fully activated one day as a functional navigational marker once the sea level rises to meet the work – currently 879 feet above and 382 miles away from the ocean."

https://www.troyhillarthouses.com/darkhouselighthouse

Should be a good read…

https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/10153/

Basically bonkers alt-shot roster generator to enable a threesome (or four!) to play three (or four!) different alt-shot "games" at the same time.

Public repo on Github

Discover an entirely new routing of cross-country holes on your local course with "Alternate Golf Holes - Routing Tool".

Public repo on Github

After carrying it around for 45 years, finally “re-gifted” my vial of “mt. st. helens ash” acquired at Fisherman’s Wharf.

total inexpert opinion, but this year’s geese album is the best new music i’ve heard in an album context since radiohead’s “in rainbows” in any context or genre. been waiting for years to hear music like this and i’m thankful it’s by genz.

all the sonic details; the perfection and imperfection. the pacing, the sequencing, the fluent ease with both minimalism and maximalism, the “let’s slowly fade-in this background vocal for two bars until it becomes foreground and then we’ll drop the band and iso the voice…”

it’s deadly serious music that doesn’t take itself too seriously; irreverent without being jokey. it’s as evasive as it is pointed - the guise of the universal through courting (and shirking) specificity.

anthemic, bombastic & ramshackle, it augurs a future landfall for the kind of music most call rock, while simultaneously throwing a frayed lifeline to the tattered past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Killed