Patch Notes #12
Patch Notes #12
GeoGuessr, 内卷, Zildjian, bugfixes and performance improvements
My friends have suddenly gotten into GeoGuessr, a game where you are shown a Google Street View shot, and have to pinpoint where you are in the world on Google Maps. Here’s an example of a pro-level player playing:
It’s much more fun than it sounds—we played for three hours straight the first time we tried it. It leads down some very strange rabbit holes as the people who decide to get competitive start learning things from the Finnish road numbering system to specific roads in Kazakhstan.
Neijuan or 内卷:
is an English loanword of the Chinese character for involution. Neijuan is made of two characters which mean “inside” and “rolling”. Neijuan has disseminated to nearly all walks of life in mainland China in the recent few years, due to the uneven distribution of social, economic, and educational resources and ongoing economic malaise, especially in terms of higher education bodies and labour markets. Neijuan reflects a life of being overworked, stressed, anxious and feeling trapped, a lifestyle where many face the negative effects of living a very competitive life for nothing.
Via
a fun chart showing the short period where people bothered caring about ringtones—a delightful encapsulation of that brief pre-internet but widespread-cellphones (remember how cool the Motorola Razr was?!) era:
Warriors' Klay Thompson accused of 'brick-vandalism spree' by Elon Musk's confused AI:
After the Warriors had their season end in a blowout 118-94 loss to the Kings in the play-in tournament, the AI-driven side of the social media platform’s timeline showed some fans a stark headline: “Klay Thompson Accused in Bizarre Brick-Vandalism Spree.” An explanation appeared underneath: “In a bizarre turn of events, NBA star Klay Thompson has been accused of vandalizing multiple houses with bricks in Sacramento. Authorities are investigating the claims after several individuals reported their houses being damaged, with windows shattered by bricks. Klay Thompson has not yet issued a statement regarding the accusations. The incidents have left the community shaken, but no injuries were reported. The motive behind the alleged vandalism remains unclear.”
- has a great Substack with six infographics a week. This past week he covered Millenials, and included this graphic with the caption that the world has been a consistently scary place for them, which I guess includes me:
I think about this question a lot—are things really scarier/worse/weirder now than before? Certainly the world goes through cycles; the 60’s and 70’s were more turbulent than the 90’s. But without trying too hard… if you were born in 1964, your first 30 years included: the Vietnam War, the Stonewall Riots, Watergate, the Munich Massacre, the War on Drugs, rampant inflation (and interest rates of 20% set by Volcker to combat them!), the Challenger explosion, Chernobyl, the crash of 1987, and the Gulf War. Sounds pretty bad too! Perhaps the real difference is simply that they didn’t have the internet and social media to make us hyperaware of it all the time.1
- has a great piece on the convergence of technology, labor laws, and outsourcing for retail, with some futuristic / dystopian (or both) remote cashiers:
The internet constantly provides new and frightening ways to disrupt “normal”. I suppose this is providing some human touch over robotic self-checkout, but also only barely, and also the Philippines and NYC are twelve hours apart.
Benedict Evans on the search for AI use cases:
I often compared the last wave of machine learning to automated interns. You want to listen to every call coming into the call centre and recognise which customers sound angry or suspicious: doing that didn’t need an expert, just a human (or indeed maybe even a dog), and now you could automate that entire class of problem. Spotting those problems and building that software takes time: machine learning’s breakthrough was over a decade ago now, and yet we are still inventing new use-cases for it - people are still creating companies based on realising that X or Y is a problem, realising that it can be turned into pattern recognition, and then going out and selling that problem.
You could propose the current wave of generative AI as giving us another set of interns, that can make things as well as recognise them, and, again, we need to work out what.The Avedis Zildjian company that specializes in cymbals is just over 400 years old:
The first Zildjian cymbals were created in 1618 by Avedis Zildjian, an Armenian metalsmith and alchemist. Like his father, who was also a metalsmith, he worked for the court of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople. He made an alloy of tin, copper, and silver into a sheet of metal, which could make musical sounds without shattering. Sultan Mustafa I gave Avedis eighty gold pieces as a bequest, in addition to officially recognizing the surname Zilciyan or Zildjian, meaning "Son of a Cymbal Maker" or "Family of Cymbalsmiths" in Armenian (with zil being Turkish for "cymbal", ci meaning "maker", and ian being the Armenian suffix meaning "son of").
My dad was a drummer, and I played guitar in a band a long time ago, so I of course knew about the Zildjian brand, but I had no idea they’d been around for that long, or what the name meant. I just assumed that it had been dreamed up by some marketing expert to sound exotic, and that the quality of the product ended up making the brand valuable. There is something definitely un-modern about the name meaning literally “family of cymbalsmiths” and the family continuing to do exactly that for hundreds of years, surviving through an Armenian resistance movement, fleeing the Ottoman Empire, eventually immigrating to the United States, and just… continuing to make cymbals.2
CNN’s 24-hour news broadcast also didn’t start until 1980, and adoption took some years to take off, so well over half of the period from 1964 to 1994 was blissfully disconnected.