Hi Crowd!
I’ve been really into this series of photos I’ve been taking and posting recently and think I’m going to build on it a bit more. I don’t know how much I want to talk about what is drawing me to them just yet but there’s a few levels of tension and unease in them that I’m just loving. I don’t know what anyone else thinks about them yet, but if you are enjoying them as much as I am stay tuned.
I’ve been amused at the headlines over the last few days that statutory rape defender and Epstein lawyer Alan Dershowitz has left the Democrats and become Republican. First of all, because who cares? Secondly, because he’s mad that Democrats aren’t pro-Israel enough, which (unfortunately) isn’t true but also who cares? But mostly amusing because he already threw a temper tantrum and quit back in 2024. I guess it’s good for headlines or whatever though so maybe we’ll see him make the same announcement again in a few years? Turns out this is a thing, in a huff Sean Hannity announced that from this moment on he’s no longer Catholic. This of course spawned by the “tough situation” (spoiler: it’s not actually tough) that a lot of MAGA-Catholics are finding themselves in having to pick sides between Trump and The Pope. Again memories seem to be failing because Hannity already announced he’d left the Catholic Church back in 2019. It’s almost like these are just performative labels that can be applied when beneficial and thrown off when it makes a good headline. Speaking of MAGA and changing beliefs, it seems like a growing number of the Trump faithful are suddenly questioning if the Butler assassination attempt was staged.
Speaking of staged, social media is being flooded by tons of AI-generated influencers who really love Trump. And while this appears to be a concerted effort with a specific purpose, apparently it’s not hard to fool people and randos are realizing that making fake AI Bible loving MAGA devotees can be a very profitable grift. I looked around and seems like this is only really happening in one direction, which is a whole story in and of itself. It gets worse, people are now making fake testimonials from fake abuse victims to push regime change in other countries. Unless you know the person or are seeing it live, pretty hard to trust any video online at this point. To balance that out, somewhat, human influencers are apparently being hired to spread panic about AI bringing about the end of humanity. So that’s fun.
While the doomer narrative is everywhere, I thought this comment from 02UI about the newly released Claude Design was an interesting take: “People are saying designers are cooked, but I think the opposite – now designers can cook!” Design friends, that 12 minute video is worth watching. As new models and new products are shipping almost everyday now I think it’s really easy to get overwhelmed and if are in one of the fields that AI is likely to impact, or has already impacted (which is almost all of them) then trying to think of opportunities rather than sinking into fear is probably advisable. I think “I have an entire design and dev team working for me now” is going to help people sleep better than “this AI can do in 10 minutes the think that takes me a week, so I’m toast.” Taste is still yours and valuable, it’s execution which is losing it’s mystique.
Speaking of toast, the Iranian Lego trolling videos are just insane. I’m sure Lego is not happy about them, and I can’t even imagine what is going on behind closed doors at the White House but it’s relentless and at this point anytime something newsworthy happens theres a Lego parody music video circulating in a few hours. The point here which should be obvious is you can just do things now. Like, for real. The separation between having an idea and delivering it to the world has been reduced to just deciding to make it. Its really exciting and I feel like I should be doing more, what about you?
In case you missed it there’s a new Massive Attack song with Tom Waits doing vocals, which is fantastic and they just posted the isolated vocals. The Strokes ended their Coachella set with a heavy political statement which is already being scrubbed from all official feeds. I love musicians seizing the moment like this, but I had to watch it muted because I still can’t stand The Strokes.
Talk soon.
-s