Being nominated once and winning once is great, congrats. But nominated a bunch of times and never winning is worth a lot. Edward Norton: 4 nominations. Ralph Fiennes: 3. Like how LeBron with 10 trips to the NBA finals and “only” 4 championships is still the greatest of all time. (Wait, what?!) 🤪
Citation Needed
• Molly White
Issue 78 – President on brink of bailout for bitcoin
Trump tries to breathe life back into the crypto markets’ “Trump pump” while federal regulatory agencies wash their hands of any crypto industry oversight
There is nothing like a live performance of Defying Gravity. Even on TV, I still get chills when they nail it. Great way to start the Oscars. 🍿
Looking forward to the Oscars tonight. I’ve only seen 4 out of 10 of the best picture nominees — A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Dune 2, and Wicked. Wanted to catch The Brutalist but never got to it. For best animated feature, I like either Flow or The Wild Robot. 🍿
The best revenge is none
Pamela Short: The best revenge is none. Heal yourself, forgive, move on and don't become like those who hurt you.
There's a pragmatic reason for this. I found, when I was young and didn't know better, that getting revenge didn't just hurt the target, it also left me with a d...
Can we like both the open web and AI?
Ben Werdmuller has a good post today about returning to the distributed publishing roots of the web and thinking about how technology should redistribute wealth and power to many people:
It starts with software designed for people rather than for capital. The web once thriv...
Something is wrong with Trump
We can all see it. It is beyond political parties. Beyond ideology. Beyond whether he is corrupt or competent.
David Brooks, on the PBS NewsHour after the Trump and Zelenskyy meeting at the White House:
All my life, I’ve had a certain idea about America. That we’re a flawed...
One America Together, day 2
I tried to get ChatGPT to draw an Amazon ad for the cap. This was the best we came up with, and it's not great. I'd like a model who is more everyday American, but this might help move the idea forward a bit.
One America Together ad. Mike Myers as Elon Musk
Video of Mike Myers doing Elon Musk in last night's SNL cold open.
Myers does Musk almost as well as Musk does Musk.
If I understand correctly, this TechCrunch article is misleading the same way the Bluesky company misleads. There is no benefit to users of either app that they use the same complicated and new structure to communicate, where simpler and established standards would work just as well. There is a way they could make this work. Come up with a plugin architecture and something like an app store, so developers could define new data types, and then we'd really have something. I would probably do an outliner plugin first, then a Markdown plugin.
The Daily
• The New York Times
The Sunday Read: ‘The Cryptocurrency Scam That Turned a Small Town Against Itself’
Jim Tucker could hardly believe what he was hearing. It sounded like fiction, a nightmare too outlandish for an unassuming town like his.
It was July 2023, and Tucker was hosting a meeting of the board of Heartland Tri-State Bank, a community-owned business in a small Kansas...
Watched Away We Go and really enjoyed it. Totally missed this when it first came out in 2009. 📺
What happened in the Oval Office yesterday was as horror-inspiring as the riot in the Capitol on 1/6/2021.
My America is still a democracy and still part of the western world. A pretty great country, far from perfect, but my home. It's rich in all kinds of things, including money. We made a mistake in electing the person we did. Can we admit that and start fixing the mistake now? If not now, when?
A Smart Bear
• Jason Cohen
"I scratched my own itch" isn't good enough
This isn't the humble-brag you think it is; The most common origin story is also common to startups that fail. But it's a start.
The Blue Report is amazing. The most clicked on articles are right here
theblue.report
https://theblue.report/
GPT-4.5 preview thoughts… and Steve Jobs
OpenAI released GPT-4.5 this week to Pro subscribers and via the API, but it’s not what I was expecting. It is much more expensive, about 15-30 times the cost of GPT-4o. For my simple needs, like figuring out the keywords in a photo or summarizing a web page, older models ar...
One America Together
AOC asked for ideas of what to do for the SOTU.
I suggested we come up with a new slogan. Like this.
“One America Together”
Make hats, purple — enough for everyone, including the Repubs.
During applause, Dems rise and chant “One America Together.”
What do you think?
Wordle Kitty throwing out the first pitch of the baseball season. Earth is our only home.
The tab key now switches between the main editor and title editor in WordLand. Still a little work to do there.