Hi Crowd!
Everywhere I look the last few days people are debating if Netanyahu is dead. You’ve seen it too I’m sure. Pointing to videos as proof of life, pointing to the same videos as proof of coverup. Missed meetings, no press conferences, but leisure coffee shop visits and friendly hallway chats. I don’t have any sense what is real myself, and I think that’s ultimately the more interesting thing – we’ve passed the point with AI where people can trust video. Because real or fake, people think it’s fake. And now kind of, in a way, “real” means only “what confirms my assumptions” and any evidence that doesn’t support those prior assumptions is easily written off as fake. As I’ve been saying repeatedly, the world today is very different than it was yesterday, and tomorrow is going to be crazier.
Case in point – Val Kilmer is staring in a new film. Yes he’s dead, and yes it’s AI. The replies on this post show how immediately people are outraged about the mere idea of it. But as things often are, this isn’t black and white. Val was cast in this years before he died, the project was very important to him, and he worked with the director to find a way to participate even being too sick to attend the set. His family was involved and the film has their full endorsement. So the fight will now be people who knew Val and knew what he wanted vs people who didn’t know Val but insist they know what Val would have wanted, because they want to believe Val would have agreed with their own personal positions. So again, “real” becomes this jelly like thing because the people who are opposed to this won’t accept anything other than total agreement that it’s terrible. But this isn’t one direction, in Japan the popular band Neon Oni was “discovered” to be AI generated but rather than going away, the creators hired musicians to assume the roles of the characters and they atarted playing shows. Is this anymore “fake” than a boyband or some other popstar who performs material written by others? These hard lines are going to start being a lot blurrier.
In addition to entertainment, Andrew Yang laments the coming death of white collar jobs as AI is fast replacing them all. I expect we’ll be reading cheers and celebrations of upper management being kicked to the curb by people who were panicking about AI negatively impacting their own professions just last week. On a lighter note, the relaunch of DIGG has been shelved due to the beta site being immediately overrun with AI spammers.
Vanity Fair published a profile piece yesterday on Crypto’s “True Believers” which is more accurately described as a hit piece. The commentary around it is almost as entertaining as the “is he really dead?” stuff. I mean, these photos are rough. The story is even worse. I saw someone (sadly I lost track of who) say “there are at least 3 people in this photo who should fire their PR people for even agreeing to all them to be photographed in the same room as two other people” which is brilliant because every one in that photo could easily play either side of that. It’s just a mess. And even more so, since the story is largely about extravagant lifestyles, and it came out the same week both OpenSea and Kracken announced delays in token drops/IPOs due to poor market conditions. Premier NFT platform Foundation officially closed their doors this week and the team published a post-mortem about what they hoped to do, what they did along the way, and what the learned. It’s a good read and more companies should embrace this level of immediate self reflection.
Brian Doherty died last week. He was an incredibly prolific author who many probably know as Senior Editor of the big L libertarian rag Reason Magazine. I knew him mostly as an ex-roommate’s ex-roommate who wrote “the” book about Burning Man way before most people had ever heard about it, and was a genuinely nice guy the handful of times I found myself in the same room as and we’d start talking about shared friends and music and Florida. The people who really knew him, his friends, are crushed. By all accounts he was a rarity, who will be missed. My friend Pat who often speaks about the massive influence he had on him very early one boiled it down these key lessons, which I think we’d all be better off doing a lot more of:
Again I didn’t know him the same way, and can’t even remember the last time we talked – 15 years ago maybe? Anyway, I just think the world needs more interesting people, and it sucks anytime we lose one.
I don’t have a good transition from that, but lots of people are pissed about Adobe and new pricing models on Photoshop specifically which now costs over $800 a year on the cheap subscription. Affinity is the frontrunning replacement many are switching to though it’s got a significant learning curve because while it does the same things, how it does them is different. For people like me, who have lived in Photoshop almost daily for 30+ years that’s a hard one. Which is why I was kind of amused this morning to learn about PhotoGIMP. GIMP of course is the just as old as photoshop but free image editor that anyone using Photoshop could never consider using because the UI was complete garbage and using it was worse socially than using an Android device in the early 2010’s. BUT! It’s opensource and someone just made a new interface for it, including all the keyboard commands, so it’s just like Photoshop. It’s wild. With Affinity I need to look on youtube for tutorials to see how to do a thing, with PhotoGIMP 9/10 things work on my Photoshop muscle memory.
Speaking of Android, your iPhone might be hacked. The MAGA civil war is raging, and the international community fully understands at this point that Trump doesn’t seem to be able to connect the actions of one day to the outcomes of another, and therefore have no reason at all to play ball with him anymore. Speaking of Trump more Epstein files data visualizations are being built and the distractions from them continue to pile up. But least we’ve learned this heartwarming bit about cockroaches mating for life.
My new newsletter thing I hinted at the other day is probably going to be open for anyone to use any day now, I’ll keep you posted.
-s