Dave Lee
My WorkBlogupdated 1 day ago

Interesting links, noteworthy journalism and other miscellanea from around the web.

The FT declares iTunes cool again.

[T]he iTunes Store is re-emerging as an unlikely venue for pop stars to hawk collectibles to superfans, reach untapped audiences and bolster chart positions. Last month, pop superstar Ariana Grande surprise-released a live version of her latest album Petal as an iTunes-only exclusive. This follows a string of iTunes-exclusive releases in recent years from artists such as Taylor Swift, Charli XCX, Doja Cat, Summer Walker and Tinashe.

How iTunes came back from the deadft.comRecord labels and artists including Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande are using the throwback music store to bolster their chart position and cash in on their fandom

City of Dreams

The terrific New York: A Documentary Film, has had an update — some 27 years after the original aired on PBS. To my mind, it's the greatest documentary series ever made. A reminder, in these Fielder-esque times, of what can be achieved classic storytelling and informational techniques. Do yourself a favor — add the PBS package to your Amazon Prime account and dive in. It's a mere 22 hours long.

Anyway, a while ago I looked on Spotify to see if the stirring soundtrack had been added and was disappointed to find it missing. Since the new episodes, it appears to have been finally added — all eight hours of it. A wonderful music bed to your work day.

Memes as a love language.

As communication goes, sending a meme is one of the lowest-lift—one might even say laziest—ways to stay in touch. It’s barely a step above not saying anything at all. But a surprisingly large body of research on meme-sharing has found that it can serve an important function in relationships and bring people closer together.

Sending a Silly Meme Is an Act of Lovetheatlantic.comThe case for a common, occasionally annoying, and secretly sweet digital habit

Cruel...

Those Madison Square Garden employees got their hopes up at the end of September when the Knicks sent an email to a long list of employees, which gave recipients a first glimpse at their would-be championship rings. Atop the email, a copy of which The Athletic has obtained, was a graphic of two differently styled rings.

“Congratulations, your Employee Championship Ring is here,” the email read.

“(Employee name), this one is on the house. MSG is issuing a complimentary employee championship ring. The same jeweler, the same craftsmanship, personalized with your name. No cost to you.

“There are two designs to choose from: Championship Gold and Garden Classic. Reserve the one you want below.”

But the email was a fake-out, a phishing test Madison Square Garden sent to see if those employees would click, multiple team sources said.

Those who did click the link at the bottom of the message did not get to choose any jewelry; instead, they were forced to attend a mandatory cybersecurity class to help satisfy some of Dolan’s growing cybersecurity concerns, those team sources said.

Knicks coaches didn’t get rings on banner night; MSG staff received phishing email: Sourcesnytimes.com“We are not disclosing anything about the rings,” an MSG Sports spokesperson said in a statement Thursday evening.

Love this idea. Plug a location into Wikipedia and only see articles related to places within a mile or so. My tip: cycle through them all with the random feature.

In late September, the Journal published its first story using Doppler News AI, a custom tool built to help expand the publication’s midterms coverage. So far, Doppler has ingested more than 25 million TikTok videos, roughly 500,000 podcast episodes, and thousands of Instagram videos and cable news segments. The Journal uses the tool to monitor trends across the internet and to identify voter priorities, concerns, and sentiments that traditional polling might miss.

The Wall Street Journal’s new AI tool, “Doppler,” forecasts the issues that will shape the midterm electionsniemanlab.orgAhead of Election Day, the tool has ingested 25 million TikTok videos and 500,000 podcasts to gain new insight into U.S. voters.

LOVE this. Bloomberg's Mike Jordan writes:

The saxophone enjoyed center stage in American music before a drought in popularity starting in the 1990s. But recent signs suggest that the instrument has shed its cheeseball stigma and regained a place in pop culture.

Popular recent sax-forward acts have grown large audiences on social media from sharing recordings of gigs and impromptu public performances. Even regular consumers are finding their way back to the sax as a hobby that lets them unplug from life online.

The Saxophone Is No Longer Pop Music’s Punchlinebloomberg.comThe saxophones are indeed getting louder. The once-maligned woodwind is back on hit records and social media, while a new generation picks it up.

The ongoing challenge of building a robot that can mimic the mesmerizing complexity of the human hand. IEEE Spectrum:

“Hands are a ruthless design trade-off,” Alberto Rodriguez, director of robot behavior at Boston Dynamics, tells IEEE Spectrum. “There’s no way around it, you’re always giving up on something. And many of the current designs are giving up on things like reliability and manufacturability.” This is what invariably happens when you try and cram everything necessary to make a robotic hand function within the form factor of a human hand: It’s going to be either very fragile or very expensive, and likely both at the same time. The unfortunate reality is that for now, and likely for the immediate future, all that these sorts of hands are good for are research and demos.

How Atlas’ Four Finger Robot Hand Gets Superhuman Grip and Controlspectrum.ieee.orgMaking a hand that’s capable, reliable, and manufacturable is a very hard problem

White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia waits to enter the press briefing room before her first press briefing.
Andrea Hanks/White House/ZUMA Press

Loved this image from the Wall Street Journal's tick tock of the hiring and instantaneous firing of hapless White House press secretary Katie Zacharia. Here, the 41-year-old not-lawyer walked into the press briefing room to face an audience that wanted to eat her for lunch. Days later, they'd been fed.

University of Cambridge professor Chris Marquis on how business schools are creating a leadership cohort that doubles down on flawed ideas.

I have taught in business schools for over 20 years, at Harvard, Cornell and Cambridge. While some students appear to care only about their future compensation, I have met many with nobler goals: engineers who want to commercialize clean energy, physicians determined to fix the health care system, nonprofit leaders who have watched good missions fail for want of good management.

These students enroll hoping to learn what business schools say they teach: how to manage people, how to allocate capital and resources and how to make the world a better place through leadership. But I’ve come to see how the institution can reshape the worldviews of those who enter it, often undermining the very ambitions that brought them there.

Opinion | I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down.nytimes.comStudents come in with noble intentions and leave with flawed expertise.

The memory crunch might widen the digital divide. To put it somewhat crassly — your DoorDash driver likely doesn't use an iPhone. The end of cheap smartphones could alter the global economy in big ways.

The shift could affect more than consumers looking for cheaper phones. For people who have yet to buy their first smartphone, higher prices could make it harder to get online at all — potentially widening the digital divide. The consequences will also reach the U.S. as more essential services move online and the global supply chain for smartphones becomes more expensive.

GSMA, the global mobile industry association, had earlier said nearly 800 million more people will use mobile internet by 2030. But it is concerned that rising smartphone costs would affect this projection and widen the gap of digital inequality, Claire Sibthorpe, head of digital inclusion at the group’s nonprofit foundation, told Rest of World.

The AI boom is making the world’s cheapest smartphones disappearrestofworld.orgAI data centers are driving demand for memory chips, pushing phone makers to raise prices and abandon some of their most affordable models.

A very good take from Matteo Wong and Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic on what happens if everyone has an AI bot hustling for them.

These AI agents promise to bulldoze the inefficiencies of daily life. Think about all of the opportunities you’re currently leaving on the table: You don’t change cell-service providers for a flash sale because of the paperwork involved. You haven’t fiddled with your 401(k) investments in years. You have kids to pick up, a date to dress for, sleep to catch up on. But your AI agents are different—they’re relentless, tireless, and shameless. They work in the background, without supervision, eagerly helping with all of these tasks and a bunch you didn’t even ask for. They use every tactic and loophole at their disposal to get you the best price and the highest-quality service because they’re able to pay attention to everything at once.

Imagine Every AI Agent on Earth Buying the Same Cheap Paper Towelstheatlantic.comAI agents are doing our shopping for us, and wreaking havoc on the internet.