Dave Lee

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.

Bishop Mariann Budde (who angered the Trump and Vance by suggesting they be compassionate) writes thoughtfully on the dark cloud of violence over our society today.

In the same weekend that the Pentagon promised to let us watch one man die by firing squad, an offer now thankfully rescinded, a Philadelphia police officer, the father of two small children, was shot dead on a porch, and eight people were killed in a home in Erie, among them a one-year-old and a pregnant woman. Erie Police Chief Rick Lorah said that the crime scene was the worst one he had seen in twenty-eight years.

Events that would have once dominated the news cycle for days passed by with little notice. Chief Lorah’s words are also a sobering reminder of what witnessing gun violence is like, an argument that retired Admiral Henry McRaven made when voicing his opposition to live-streaming a firing squad execution.

There is no direct connection between the debate about how many should watch Nidal Malik Hasan die for killing thirteen people at Fort Hood military base in 2009 and those who died by gun violence in Pennsylvania. Except that the specter of violence is seemingly everywhere, and we are not the better for it. As our Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe wrote about the proposed livestreaming, it would “cause moral injury to everyone involved.”

A Plea for Restraint: On Violence, Spectacle, and Human Dignitymariannbudde.substack.com“I am among those who believe that the death penalty, however exercised, is contrary to the teachings of Jesus.”

Poynter on the ripple effect of Trump's unconstitutional war on the press. Smaller jurisdictions see it and emulate it.

Across the country, journalists at the state and local levels are experiencing many of the same access issues as their national counterparts. They are being turned away from press conferences, stonewalled by politicians and excluded from government spaces they previously had access to. Those measures don’t stop them from reporting on their elected officials, but they do make their jobs harder. Stories take longer and cost more. Sometimes they get shelved indefinitely, leaving the public with less information about the people who govern them.

A shrinking local press is making it easier for public officials to restrict access - Poynterpoynter.orgReporters across the country say they’re being denied credentials, shut out of government spaces and stonewalled by public officials

Mike Masnick on how the Censorship Industrial Complex that the right was warning us about is real — because they've created it. Majors are being removed, syllabi altered. Automated processes are deciding what material is "acceptable."

Where are all the folks who spent years screaming about “academic freedom” and insisting that colleges were censoring conservative speech? Remember how Bari Weiss and Joe Lonsdale created their “University of Austin” because (they falsely claimed) there were no universities where people could speak freely — and then they fired someone for suggesting that there might be some value in thinking about the importance of diversity.

Hilariously, Texas Governor Greg Abbott had signed a bill back in 2019 guaranteeing “free speech on campus.” But as Serwer’s piece details, these days there are all sorts of banned topics on Texas college campuses, and basically none of free speech grifters who spent years crying crocodile tears over supposed attacks on “campus speech” seem to have anything to say about it.

MAGA Built The Censorship Machine It Spent Years Falsely Accusing Democrats Of Buildingtechdirt.comThis is not a unique or new observation, but so many MAGA attacks on others are projection, claiming that Democrats were doing the very things that MAGA always knew they would do if they were in ch…

I'll be following Bobby Ghosh up this particular hill:

But on one small matter of punctuation, a strange consensus has pursued me from city to city, editor to editor, byline to byline. The em-dash — that elegant horizontal stripe which hinges one clause to another — is unseemly. Real writers don’t use ‘em, I’ve been told a hundred times. Real writers use commas. Real writers trust the reader.

Well, real writers can go pound sand. I have spent forty years ignoring this advice, and I do not propose to stop now. Which is inconvenient, because a new antagonist has arrived, armed with better lawyers than any copy chief ever had: artificial intelligence.

Friends, Romans, Copy Editors — Lend Me Your Em-Dashesbobbyghosh.substack.comI come to defend two of my favorite literary devices from the evil that LLMs do.

I’m not going to work for a gambling company and have blood on my hands.

Nicole Noren: “I’m not going to have blood on my hands.”cjr.orgWhy Nicole Noren, a decorated ESPN producer, quit in protest.

Horses will no longer be clopping through Central Park. Gothamist:

Council Speaker Julie Menin on Tuesday announced the chamber would hold a vote on legislation to ban the industry on Oct. 22. For years, animal rights advocates have called for the end to the park’s once iconic carriage horses. Their push gained momentum in June after a carriage horse collapsed and died. Weeks later, teen tourist Romanch Mahajan died after he fell from a runaway carriage horse in the park.

NYC Council set to ban Central Park's carriage horse industrygothamist.comMayor Zohran Mamdani has said he supports the ban, and a majority of city councilmembers have signed on to support legislation that would end the industry.