Every week, I compile a list of articles in order to give subscribers like you something interesting and thought-provoking to read over the weekend. Note: If you’re a paying subscriber, then I hope you’re enjoying this month’s playlist and podcast episode.
This year’s Comic-Con wrapped up last week, with Marvel, DC, Apple, HBO, Amazon, et al. announcing their upcoming films, TV series, and other projects. Among this year’s announcements: Ryan Gosling will be the Ghost Rider; David Jonsson is the new Black Panther; Rick Moranis returns as Spaceballs’ Dark Helmet; and Simon Pegg is the Balrog in The Rings of Power.
Related: Fans of dystopian sci-fi can rejoice; the best trailers from this year’s Comic-Con were all cyberpunk.
In order to continue training their models, AI companies are turning to a new technique: buying millions of physical books, scanning their contents, and then destroying them.
[M]any companies, including Anthropic, have turned to ingesting physical books instead, which they can buy countless used copies of on the cheap. According to the settled lawsuit, Anthropic used a hydraulic powered cutting machine to neatly remove the pages from the books it procured from book resellers and then scanned them using industrial-grade imaging equipment. In other words, it was literally ripping off authors’ books to train its AI.
This process took advantage of a legal concept known as first-sale doctrine, which allows a buyer to do what they want with a purchase without the original copyright holder’s say-so. And since Anthropic was turning the original physical texts into digital ones — rather than redistributing them as new copies — a judge found this to be “transformative,” and therefore protected by fair use.
Two thoughts. First, our legal system really needs to get up to speed with modern technology and its ramifications. And second, it seems like every passing day gives me yet another reason to hate AI.
And speaking of hate, Chris Person really hates Adobe.
Very few software companies outside of Microsoft have the kind of leverage over entire industries. Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Lightroom and After Effects are all load bearing to some extent within their respective fields despite the fact that many people I know loathe using them. Creative Cloud as an app sits on your computer’s tray like a sleep paralysis demon, while the individual apps make your laptop hotter than the sun and your GPU fan spin louder than it needs to, countless years of shitty legacy code attaching itself to the apps like barnacles.
I can always tell Creative Cloud is running in the background because my computer’s fan starts whirring like crazy. I’ve been trying to disentangle myself from Adobe for some time now, but given the range of their services that I use, that’s easier said than done.
Alright, let’s keep the hate train going… Stephen Moore argues that we don’t hate social media influencers enough for what they’re doing to the world, and to us.
They’ve destroyed the concept of an honest review, with the line between a genuine recommendation and a paid advertisement completely erased. Remember, influencers are marketers! And marketers are always self-serving by the nature of their trade. (A good rule of thumb: If an influencer calls something life-changing, assume it is garbage.) They’ve blurred the idea of filming with consent, collectively deciding it doesn’t matter, leading to many strangers and randoms either caught up in content, or unaware they are the content.
Why do some of the world’s most popular websites look like they’re stuck in the early 2000s?
To a modern UI designer, Amazon is cluttered, Google is “empty,” and Walmart is utilitarian at best. However, these “dated” designs are not accidents of neglect; they are triumphs of cognitive psychology. While overly designed websites are failing, these titans continue to shine because they understand that the best interface is the one that disappears.
Via TLDR Design.
Obviously, a stripped down, ultra-utilitarian, early 2000s design doesn’t make sense for every website. However, a lot of the flashy design techniques that denote a “modern” website (e.g., “scrolljacking,” “scroll fading”) are bad ideas that make websites harder to use and less accessible.
Earlier this year, I wrote about the controversy surrounding Fender and its attempts to prevent other guitar manufacturers from using the Stratocaster design. (That’s still ongoing, with Fender sending a cease-and-desist to Yamaha.) But the guitar world was hit with a second controversy this month, when string manufacturer D’Addario accused of using generative AI in a product demo video.
The video was scrutinized by the online guitar community. Some believed the pitch and tempo discrepancies between the original demo and the response proved AI had in fact been used.
But now D’Addario has published a lengthy statement explaining the making of the demo track, asserting that generative AI was not used, but AI-assisted production tools were.
Some folks aren’t buying D’Addario’s explanation, however.
Irish singer-songwriter Glen Hansard, who was frontman of The Frames and won a “Best Original Song” Academy Award for “Falling Slowly” from 2007’s Once, was killed in a motorcycle crash this week. He was 56 years old.
For those who first came to Glen Hansard via his music — perhaps after his Oscar win or his collaborations with luminaries such as Eddie Vedder — it may be a surprise to go all the way back to 1991, to Alan Parker’s smash-hit Dublin-set comedy The Commitments.
There he is, barely out of his twenties and with a shock of curly, red hair, as the working-class soul band’s laidback guitarist Outspan Foster.
The film’s director Alan Parker searched for real musicians to make up the fictional band, and the then 20-year-old accompanied a mate to the auditions with no intention of going in himself — but producers were looking for a red-haired guitarist and there was Hansard.
Via Treble.
Tributes to Hansard have come pouring in from Bono, Bruce Springsteen, The Mountain Goats, and more.
Related: My review of Once, starring Hansard and Markéta Irglová. “For starters, the film made me very nostalgic for the days when I used to be in a band… the scenes of Glen Hansard (lead singer of The Frames, and the male lead) and his friends jamming together, melding somehow into one and creating something much greater than the sum of its parts were just beautiful.”
Greg Prato lists 13 brilliant B-sides that should’ve been A-sides, featuring Pearl Jam, The Who, Nirvana, and Oasis.
Every so often, a band tucks away a song on the flip side of a single that’s every bit as good as — sometimes better than — the hit it’s supposedly supporting. Whether it was a contractual afterthought, a leftover from the sessions, or simply a case of the label picking the “safer” cut for radio, these b-sides prove that some of the best material never got its proper shot at the spotlight. Here are 13 that deserved to be the main event.
My favorite B-side of all time is The Cure’s “This Twilight Garden.” Originally released as a B-side for “High” from 1992’s Wish, it’s easily as strong as any album track in the band’s considerable catalog.
I further explained my love for “This Twilight Garden” in my April 2022 podcast episode.
Substack has completely changed the online publishing landscape in good and bad ways, but Scott Carney posits that the Substack bubble is starting to pop.
Without a bigger pie individual Substack creators are instead forced into direct competition with one another. The only way to grow is to pillage the paid subscribers from other creators. And this only works if you assume that when people cancel their subscriptions and then allocate that money to another writer — which I doubt happens all that frequently. Instead I think users of this platform probably pay for a few subscriptions to their favorites and, when they get tired of it, cancel and move on to scrolling an endless feed of free content.
It’s interesting to me that the higher-ups at Substack didn’t see this coming a long time ago and head it off before we reached a crisis point.
Back in the day, Readers’ Digest had a feature called “That’s Outrageous” that would highlight the craziest, most bizarre, and most infuriating news stories. This would certainly count as such: a man spent 18 months in prison because of a missing underscore.
Police were looking for a man using the Kik messaging service under the name “fus__ro_dah” (two underscores after “fus”), but they accidentally requested records for the username “fus_ro_dah” (one underscore after “fus”). This one-character difference led them not to the perpetrator but to a Canadian man named Brandon Klayme.
[…]
Despite finding no evidence of the crime on his digital devices, Canadian police arrested Klayme in 2020 on child sex abuse charges. He was convicted after a trial in 2023 and sentenced in 2024 to 18 months in prison. He served the full term.
I sincerely hope there’s a big payout in Mr. Klayme’s immediate future.
Today marks the 40th anniversary of one of my all-time favorite films, Disney’s Flight of the Navigator, directed by Randal Kleiser and starring Joey Cramer as a young boy who suddenly finds himself eight years in the future with no memory of what happened to him. The film’s visual effects still hold up to this day, as does Alan Silvestri’s electronic score.
Several attempts at a remake have been made over the years by directors including Colin Trevorrow and Neill Blomkamp. The most recent attempt is set to be directed by Bryce Dallas Howard, who has previously directed episodes of The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett for Disney+.
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