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…Cal Newport argues that we need to recognize the harms that technology has on us and our minds, and that it might be time to more aggressively curate the tools we allow in our lives.

Scott Nesbitt

“Don’t even bother,” the upholsterer told me. I was on the phone, asking for a theoretical quote to reupholster a five-year-old or so midrange sofa, which cost more than $1,000 when new. That task, the upholsterer told me, would run me several times more than the couch was originally worth, and, owing to its construction, it was now worth nowhere near its sale price. The upholsterer proceeded to lecture me, in a helpful, passionate, and sometimes kindly manner, about how sofas made in the past 15 years or so are absolute garbage, constructed of sawdust compressed and bonded with cheap glue, simple brackets in place of proper joinery, substandard spring design, flimsy foam, and a lot of staples.

In short, beyond accounting for new releases, there must be other factors influencing Rolling Stone’s choices.

This project uses Rolling Stone album rankings – twenty years apart in time – to determine what influences “greatness”.

First, musical greatness is shaped by how we listen.

We’re at the end of a vast, multi-faceted con of internet users, where ultra-rich technologists tricked their customers into building their companies for free. And while the trade once seemed fair, it’s become apparent that these executives see users not as willing participants in some sort of fair exchange, but as veins of data to be exploitatively mined as many times as possible, given nothing in return other than access to a platform that may or may not work properly.

Yet what’s happening to the web is far more sinister than simple greed, but the destruction of the user-generated internet, where executives think they’ve found a way to replace human beings making cool things with generative monstrosities trained on datasets controlled and monetized by trillion-dollar firms.

Their ideal situation isn’t one where you visit distinct websites with content created by human beings, but a return to the dark ages of the internet where most traffic ran through a series of heavily-curated portals operated by a few select companies, with results generated based on datasets that are increasingly poisoned by generative content built to fill space rather than be consumed by a customer.

I don’t love the look of mismatched junk, but the mess satisfies a deeper emotional need.

For the umpteenth time, my son, with an Ikea stuffed ball he has had since infancy, is playing football in the living room. He is joined by one of his best friends, an equally football-obsessed 10-year-old who, before slide-tackling in what can only be described as a deliberate attempt to knock my son’s legs off, shouts: “Brexit means Brexit!” Confused, I pass it off as an example of tweenage precocity: which 10-year-old is happy to quote Theresa May while playing football?

Over the next year, however, I will hear the term used again and again when my son plays football at the local park. He turns 11 and is off to secondary school. There, too, the phrase seems to have become a “thing”. One evening, as he recounts the details of how he got a painful-looking graze on his shin, he quotes the attacking player’s prelude to clattering into him: “Brexit means Brexit!” I ask, finally, why people are saying this. Nonchalantly, as he practises “skills” with the same softball, he explains that the Brexit tackle “is a tackle that doesn’t get the ball, only takes out the player”. Urban Dictionary concurs, stating it is, among other things, “when somebody hits a massive slide tackle and usually sends them flying and it hurts them servely [sic]”.

These cafes had all adopted similar aesthetics and offered similar menus, but they hadn’t been forced to do so by a corporate parent, the way a chain like Starbucks replicated itself. Instead, despite their vast geographical separation and total independence from each other, the cafes had all drifted toward the same end point. The sheer expanse of sameness was too shocking and new to be boring.

The cost of medications, testing, retrieval, and storage involved in egg freezing is just one series of numbers in a process and procedure that feels like a combination of math, alchemy, and luck.

Should you be getting Botox? Welcome to Ask Ugly, our new beauty column!

You won’t get suggestions for the best new niacinamide serum from Ask Ugly. Just eat a sandwich. I won’t recommend some celebrity-loved surgery for sucking the fat from your face – it needs fat. Instead, I want to dig into capital-B Beauty here: what it is, what it means, and how it’s been industrialized and assembly-line machine-squeezed into billions of plastic bottles.

To briefly summarize:

• On Friday, then-CEO Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI by the board that governs the non-profit; then-President Greg Brockman was removed from the board and subsequently resigned.
• Over the weekend rumors surged that Altman was negotiating his return, only for OpenAI to hire former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear as CEO.
• Finally, late Sunday night, Satya Nadella announced via tweet that Altman and Brockman, “together with colleagues”, would be joining Microsoft.

This is, quite obviously, a phenomenal outcome for Microsoft. The company already has a perpetual license to all OpenAI IP (short of artificial general intelligence), including source code and model weights; the question was whether it would have the talent to exploit that IP if OpenAI suffered the sort of talent drain that was threatened upon Altman and Brockman’s removal. Indeed they will, as a good portion of that talent seems likely to flow to Microsoft; you can make the case that Microsoft just acquired OpenAI for $0 and zero risk of an antitrust lawsuit.

A VHS copy of the Wizard of Oz and a QR code is also a fun way to store your crypto wallet key.