Alex Garland

100%, listening to it right now

Indeed. Some really creative remixes from Arab Strap and Mogwai as well on the original single

I have fully done this before and don't even have the excuse of needing glasses...

I’d say a good rule-of-thumb is that “proper” jock sports require actual teamwork - social dynamics, psychology.

Definitely a spectrum - there is a depth of strategy to most team sports that can be fairly nerdy, it’s more that the median player/ fan has to “get” the social aspect.

Also true of climbing based on my experience a few years back. Building up aerobic fitness/ upper body strength doesn’t stop something being fairly nerdy if you can do it solo while obsessing over detail (and possibly listening to a wonky podcast along the way).

Yeah my (imperfect) understanding is with that scale of data you can layer on RAG or _maybe_ mild fine-tuning. If they claim to be doing something additive (customization on top of big foundation models), sure, but the claim they are *removing* dependency on the data used by OpenAI et al... nah...

Disclaimer - I’m clearly not an actual historian, at best I’m saying “this is complex” and agreeing with Stephen’s point that the default public understanding misses a lot.

Byzantium/ Constantinople obviously have a legitimate claim in terms of maintaining a line of actual emperors based on the same continuously-operating system. But the Catholic Church/ western Christendom is an important evolution covering actual-Rome and I don’t think is wrong to focus on.

I find the Roman Empire one here fascinating - IMO it’s really debatable how one thinks about its meaning and legacy once it stops unambiguously referring to the obvious “Empire based in Rome”.

Ha! Used to walk past that every morning on my way to work. Obviously struck me as a weird kind of a landmark; the incongruity around the business model vs what else could profitably go there had not occurred to me.

Yeah weird priority - although I guess it does sidestep the aggressive cognitive dissonance of “hey this looks just like modern Kings Cross with 21st-century everything, which when they turn this corner will include a long line of tourists queuing up for the Harry Potter shop”?

Very interested in “giant lasers” and “dogs that look like chickens”, but I think if I have to read one more word about AI my head might explode so… 🤔

Fantastic story/ set of visualisations (screenshots don’t do justice to the full interactive versions) from @financialtimes.com showing the utter grandiose folly of Neom / The Line... ig.ft.com/saudi-neom-l...

Charitable reading is he just means the instrumental is ctrl-v’d but it doesn’t read that way especially with the ref to Diddy. Then transitions to talking about how innovative it is for Avalanches to layer samples into new compositions - I guess noone home-taped him a copy of Endtroducing in ‘96?

I loved High Fidelity when I read it as a teen (and the film and Hulu adaptions were both 👍); unfortunately reading Hornby's non-fiction it turns out "blinkered music nerd" is less "artfully crafted unreliable narrator" and more "he actually is that guy", which was never exactly subtext but, like, 😬

Flicking through Nick Hornby's 31 Songs - generally kinda sloppy, specifically he **really* doesn't get hip-hop - his example of "this song adds nothing to the sample" is Rakim's "I Know You Got Soul", which yes has a debt to Byrd but also has flows on it that basically reinvented the genre 🤦‍♂️🎤

Yeah 100% came here to say this. “I can arbitrarily delay/ decide when to acknowledge the additional wealth and pay the tax” matters a looooot less - and in less toxic ways - if not combined with “and at some point my descendants magically don’t have to pay the tax”.

America: No Kings

Britain: No Dukes of York

“We’re also Pravda but with higher production values” 🤦🏻‍♂️

Oh wow this is really good. The Kendricks version has a really specific structure and balance of elements, and he manages to leave all of that intact while 100% putting his own stamp on it. I got into D’Angelo just a bit around Black Messiah - sad that he’s gone but great to be pushed to hear more.

Reminds me of your point in ACOUP that strategic thinking requires considering *all* options to achieve known goals - if it is already decided that military action or other forms of violence are the way, likely one is already in to operations or tactics. More generally, a great prompt to re-read MLK

Showing up to a meeting to sagely say "code quality should be higher" and then immediately leaving

Definitely a banger. Not one I generally think of as being underrated but, like, if there are people out there not appreciating it they are absolutely in the wrong…

I mean, it feels very FT that even their attempt at slumming it involves flying to a major European city and commenting on the cultural roots of The Kebab in its Turkish and Germanic forms 🤷🏻‍♂️

Rough flow chart attempting to capture how current market and reality (input price inflation, increased buyer's market for labour) and residual expectations from the pandemic (demand inelasticity, labour-hording) add extra factors to normal price/ demand/ production considerations to make hiring tendency harder to predict.

Enjoyed latest Odd Lots with @tracyalloway.bsky.social @weisenthal.bsky.social talking to Raphael Bostic from Atlanta Fed bloom.bg/3GYMcE2.

Discussion of how current reality plus pandemic overhang make hiring predictions tricky was especially fascinating; tried to diagram to help my understanding.

Fair - agree Curzon as a whole are pretty good and that the food thing is a separate dimension. Guess it does still speak to the general feeling of precarity and fear of committing the effort/ ££ to do something well if you’re going to invest at all.

Everyman have been doing the "bar with a screen" thing for a while and IMHO are pretty good at it, but even Curzon (looking at their Kingston branch) seem to have reviews split between "my viewing was disturbed by staff bringing the guy next to me a pizza" and "I ordered a pizza and it was crap".

Yeah literally this (cost/ value). Chains seem aware they struggle to compete with home viewing and need to be an experience, but can't work out how to do so profitably. Main tactic seems to be the one that happens to also add margin (more food/drink) rather than investing in the viewing experience.

Unfortunately my brain has settled on the hook to Madonna’s godawful “American Life” (and currently threatening to go down the rabbit hole of whether the even-more-godawful rap verse could have the “you know I’m satisfied” bit changed to “sanctified” 🙈)

A meme with a guy standing in front of a modular synthesizer. He's holding his hand up as someone offers him a book with "music theory" on the cover. "no thanks i'm just going o turn on the arpeggiator and hope for the best."