19 - Hand & Wheel # “Is it still an adventure if you find the treasure and to lose it or is it just a sad fucking life?!” “I’ll do whatever it takes.” —“it’s going to take a lot of us feeling that same way.” “I was going to repay all that was given, by giving you your brother back” “If you want someone to come for you, I will be that person for you”
Not that many big notable set pieces this episode except for the opening. The play within a flashback within a cold open within a play is a strong story beat for Bolaire. Most of the detail we already knew except for one: How the masks and the play ended the Trickster Goddess.
Yang Wenli has a very particular approach to leadership. It’s exemplified in this sequence where he embodies the thing that Jocko always calls ‘The Dichotomy of Leadership’. The leader is always in conflict needing to reconcile the demands from above with the realities and attitudes below.
Let me take note of some highlights for each episode. We’re already pretty far in and it’s easy to forget all the things that happened since the episodes are long and the cast of characters continuously rotates.
Refreshing to see Brian Cantrill talk about ’trust’ and ‘accountability’ in the tech industry. These days it almost seems as if both of those have become dirty words.
A very informative write-up of how you would squeeze out the last bits of performance out of a Rust port. Not sure if I’d ever apply this but I’m happy enough that I can mostly follow along.
Wheel of Time is low key one of the best fantasy tv shows out right now. Each season is going from strength to strength and the next one looks to be the best one yet.
Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think ‘oh, the lawnmower hates me’ – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle.
For a relatively complete and concise rundown of how insane Germany is at the moment, this conversation with journalist James Jackson is highly recommended. Things are really spiralling into pure madness here and it seems likely that that will be the new normal.
A quick look to what’s awaiting Germany-which has bet heavily on hydrogen cars-several decades in the future. California has a hydrogen highway which looks like it is on its way out.
Long distance bike packing races however brutal they may be look like they fulfil an ideal. They have an activity that’s not that fast but where you can still cover a lot of distance and terrain. The contestants are physically and mentally absurdly fit and still they go through hell. The remoteness of the locations usually creates a special connection to the local people and culture.
Herbert believed that progress was an illusion because he was an ideologically motivated reactionary who hated the New Deal, the welfare state, the Civil Rights Movement, and any political leader who promised to help the oppressed.
I would be the last to ever watch anything by Lex Fridman, but TikTok has been feeding me clips from his interview with Bassem Youssef and I can’t help but be impressed. Fridman does a decent job interviewing but of course the conversation is carried by Youssef, who is nothing short of a treasure.
Amos’s style of software engineering historiography accompanied with snide commentary on the state of the art is both educational and entertaining. The weird factoids about Github Actions are the main act here but don’t miss out on the introduction on software delivery or the lead out on capitalism.
I found a new German podcast crush in Hart Unfair which is my favorite format: three people (Anna Dushime, Yelda Türkmen and Ari Christmann) rambling through one another but in a way that’s funny, intelligent and diverse. It’s a shame that they publish so irregularly that I can’t tell if the podcast is dead or not.
The comments online around the Apple Vision Pro have been pretty deranged in a stupid kind of way. Lots of people jumped to the foregone conclusion that Apple released a failure or that it “wasn’t going to be a success”. Most of that seemed to have been motivated by clout chasing.
I’m enjoying another light season of SPY x FAMILY. It’s a light anime whose premise is that of a spy (Loid) who needs live in deep cover in hostile territory and forms a family of convenience. He finds a woman (Yor) who’s secretly an assassin also in need of cover and an orphan child (Anya) who’s a telepath. It’s great fun.
Extremely odd to see a nuanced take on the German political climate by a sociologist on national television. Nils C. Kumkar does a really good job here:
Listening to the Trash Future team describe CulturePulse.ai and the digital twin profile created for entire populations seems very very reminiscent of “The Red Men” by Matthew de Abaitua which didn’t get the attention it deserved but was quite prescient.
Ik weet nog dat bij elk bezoek aan Hilversum het duidelijk was dat de mensen daar geen idee hebben van wat er buiten Hilversum gebeurt. Grappig om te lezen dat dat nog steeds zo is.
A brief English overview of the dizi Alev Alev which truly was very good and focused on empowering women. I still want to make a supercut at some point of all of Ömer and Ozan’s interactions.
Since the first time I saw when I was a kid, I loved Master and Commander. I had no idea that there were 20 books behind it or I would have probably read them.
I just watched and finished season 1 of Gibi which seems to have been enough of a success for them to quickly put out a second season. It’s a Turkish dark comedy show that you can watch online on Exxen. I already wrote it’s a bit like Seinfeld but with a very dark undercurrent.
I’ve discovered a hilarious new Turkish comedy show called “Gibi” (translated to As If). The episodes revolve around a group of friends who get embroiled in absurdist situations and have very nasty but eloquent arguments with each other.
I’m glad reality is catching up with the design fiction proposals we came up back in the day, like here the combination of video conferencing and Snapchat face filters.
The character relations turned into a bit of a tangle so I fired up Miro and quickly charted them out. In the end it wasn’t that complicated but the worlds of Meryem and Peri are very clearly separate.
A strong hint about the real future of virtual reality and a callback to the MUD era which I had a lot of trouble understanding. Seeing it on Tiktok makes it a lot more tangible in a bunch of ways.
I thought I knew how big a deal TikTok was a year ago already but I feel sorry for not diving in back then because it is much bigger a deal than I had thought.
