Amazon released its trailer for the upcoming Fallout TV series, releasing on April 12 (h/t Dave):
Fallout 2 remains one of my favorite games from my childhood, and it looks like the show will be appropriately grim and weird. Here’s hoping there’s a Tragic: The Garnerning cameo.
As a follow-up to Derek Thompson’s piece on the epidemic of loneliness I mentioned last week, here’s It’s Obviously the Phones by Magdalene Taylor:
There’s an asinine XKCD comic strip people love to cite detailing how every new form of media consumption throughout history has been blamed for the end of socialization. Books, newspapers, television, walkmans have all been cited as reasons why people don’t talk to each other anymore. And yes, maybe the phenomenon of people talking to strangers in public has been dying for hundreds of years now, but there remains something entirely contemporary about what phones are doing to us now.
People were not collectively spending up to ten hours every single day reading. They were not habitually choosing books over real people en masse. Even when people did begin spending hours every day on television and video games, the broader trends in time spent with others did not drastically shift. In 1950, the typical American household already watched four and a half hours of TV per day.
AI Weirdness is a delightful blog that showcases funny AI-related results, including this one that is a perfect confluence of games & 3D engines and AI optimization:
Harvesting energy from crashing into the floor: Another simulation had some problems with its collision detection math that robots learned to use. If they managed to glitch themselves into the floor (they first learned to manipulate time to make this possible), the collision detection would realize they weren’t supposed to be in the floor and would shoot them upward. The robots learned to vibrate rapidly against the floor, colliding repeatedly with it to generate extra energy.
This episode of Gamecraft does a great job explaining the rise of game-specific venture capital, and the problems with many of the newer game VC funds. The first part is a little basic if you already understand how venture investing works, so feel free to skip past that to the good stuff. I have wondered for awhile now why VCs would choose to invest in new studios that are pitching a new game—we don’t expect VCs to invest in single movies, and games (in the sense that they are a hits-driven entertainment business) look a lot like that. It turns out I’m not alone.
I love everything about this from my friend Kane:
Longer reads
The FT ($) on The mysterious rise of the Chinese ecommerce giant behind Temu. If weren’t already aware of Temu, you certainly were after the Super Bowl. Temu has been on an absolute marketing blitz for awhile now, and I admit I am perplexed at how big they seem to have gotten in such a short time. It appears most people are in the dark on how it all works:
Where Alibaba spends $5bn a year on property and equipment, including the upkeep of 1,100 warehouses, PDD owns just $146mn of hard assets — mainly office equipment and IT hardware and software.
It didn’t disclose any leases of warehouses before 2021, when it said its online grocery business, then just one year old, had expanded to serve more than 300 major cities in China. It doesn’t report the size, location or number of the warehouses it rents. Those logistics, like PDD’s servers and customer service call centres, are mostly outsourced, ephemeral and unenumerated. The opacity extends inside the business. Staff use pseudonyms and know little about other teams.And to make things weirder, the founder Colin Huang stepped down in 2021 to research food science and life science, while also committing the first 10B RMB of profits from the company to be spent on an agricultural initiative “to facilitate advancement of agritech, promote digital inclusion, and provide agritech talents and workers with greater motivation and a sense of achievement”.
Whatever is going on over there, I was already in favor of trying to wean America off gorging on cheap Chinese products (which extends beyond Temu). This is not to say there’s nothing good to buy from China—plenty of useful things are manufactured there, like the keyboard I’m typing on, or my Apple MacBook Air. Still, the endless amount of stuff on Temu strikes me as odd. Is America just going to keep buying unending amounts of cheap stuff from the rest of the world in perpetuity? Maybe WALL-E has it right.!!! Warning: Discussion of Dune 2 and some spoilers ahead !!!
Here’s a fun post and academic paper on the political economy of Dune:
Reading Dune is an important reminder (if we need it) of the importance of ideology and religion and other non-material factors in human societies, topics that economists have only begun to grapple with. Dune also undercuts narratives that focus on heroic individuals. The dictum that power corrupts has become a cliche but it is a message that accords with much of classical political economy and public choice. Herbert was similarly skeptical of heroes and of politicians.
Economists and political scientists have devoted a lot of attention to the problem of democratization. This literature has focused on both the threat of revolution from below (as in Acemoglu and Robinson (2006) but also on the role played by political elites in democratization. But many revolutions do not produce stable democracies and the academic literature has less to say on this on phenomenon. On this point, Dune contains both important warnings about reliance on a single, messianic figure and caution about belief in the allegedly deterministic nature of history and of our ability to predict it.I find the Dune movies interesting because they are extremely popular, but the messages from the books (especially after the first novel) are not your typical “good hero defeats bad empire” fare. The first two movies only hint at that: Paul agonizes over unleashing the holy war on the galaxy, but it is set into motion anyway. Otherwise, we can root for Paul and the Atreides because they look like the good guys (and compared to the batshit-crazy Harkonnens they are). But Frank Hebert later said “The bottom line of the Dune trilogy is: beware of heroes. Much better [to] rely on your own judgment, and your own mistakes.”
At least in the books, things are not so rosy for Paul:Thus, Paul’s heroic quest culminates not just in personal tragedy but in the world-ending death of billions. By his own account, Paul has “killed sixty-one billion, sterilized ninety planets, completely demoralized five hundred others”, a death toll that he explicitly compares to Hitler’s (Dune Messiah, p138).
I’m curious to see how Villeneuve navigates this transition. Will a bunch of unknowing people get Atreides tattoos thinking they’re the heroes like they did for Khaleesi? We can only hope!