Had a wonderful month visiting friends and whānau in NZ/Aus – and also a much needed break from the Northern European winter. January on the Kapiti Coast can be tumultuous (20mm of rain one day, clear blue horizons the next), but I like these contrasts – and the mighty clouds that make sunsets all the more beautiful.
Nothing beats a Kapiti Coast sunset (vol. II)
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Kiwi summer
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Kiwi critters
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Adelaide
In contrast to the rain in NZ, it had been dry in Adelaide. We luckily dodged a 45+ °C heatwave, but still had some very warm days in South Australia.
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Photo of the month
Not a traditional sunset, but I loved how the clouds diffused the light and created layers of soft colour. A 20 second exposure to smooth out the ocean foreground.
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Interesting things I’ve read/watched
Absolutely fantastic long-form journalism about “AI” startups. I thought the reference to the following short story was particularly interesting:
There’s a short story by Scott Alexander called “The Whispering Earring,” in which he describes a mystical piece of jewelry buried deep in “the treasure-vaults of Til Iosophrang.” The whispering earring is a little topaz gem that speaks to you. Its advice always begins with the words “Better for you if you . . . ,” and its advice is never wrong. The earring starts out by advising you on major life decisions, but before long it’s telling you exactly what to have for breakfast, exactly when to go to bed, and eventually, how to move each individual muscle in your body. “The wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family,” writes Alexander. After you die, the priests preparing your body for burial usually find that your brain has almost entirely rotted away, except for the parts associated with reflexive action. The first time you dangle the earring near your ear, it whispers: “Better for you if you take me off.”
Some great news that Europe is making moves to support a pan-European payment system to wean itself off Visa and Mastercard. For context, Visa/Mastercard are a U.S.-based duopoly that exploit their market share to charge too much for too little (hence why their profit margins are north of 50%). It’s not just money that’s being siphoned out of Europe to the U.S. but also enormous quantities of European payment data (presumably to feed surveillance capitalism).
More based songwriting (from 1991).
Interesting video about infrasound.
Good piece by Brian Merchant on Big tech and authoritarianism.
