Weekend Reads (Apr 20): Richard Simmons, Tech Reviews, AI Resurrection
Recommended weekend reading for April 20, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
LuElla D’Amico reflects on the unlikely ministry of fitness guru Richard Simmons. (Yes, that Richard Simmons.)
One of my favorite anecdotes about Richard Simmons comes from one of his famous mall tours of the 1980s and ‘90s. He relayed once that, “I do mostly shopping malls, because everyone will come to a shopping mall, no matter what they weigh, no matter their economic structure, no matter what they drive. The malls are the meeting places of America. And so that’s where I go.” You might think of a parallel here to the diverse crowds Jesus spoke to and who gathered near him, crowds including fisherman and tax collectors, rich and poor, women and men, all of whom sought his guidance and help.
Despite their ubiquity, streaming services are struggling to hold onto users, and glaring mistakes in their catalogs aren’t helping.
Subscribers lodged thousands of complaints related to inaccuracies in Amazon’s Prime Video catalog, including incorrect content and missing episodes, according to a Business Insider report this week. While Prime Video users aren’t the only streaming users dealing with these problems, Insider’s examination of leaked “internal documents” brings more perspective into the impact of mislabeling and similar errors on streaming platforms.
Insider didn’t publish the documents but said they show that “60 percent of all content-related customer-experience complaints for Prime Video last year were about catalogue errors,” such as movies or shows labeled with wrong or missing titles.
I usually don’t include Hollywood scuttlebutt in my newsletters, but I’m pretty excited about this news: The adaptation of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary has a Spring 2026 release date. The movie stars Ryan Gosling in the lead and will be directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie, the Spider-Verse movies). I thoroughly enjoyed Project Hail Mary when I read it a few years back and knew it was only a matter of time before it got made into a movie.
I’ve been a fan of Star Trek pretty much since kindergarten. But if it weren’t for the efforts of John and Bjo Trimble, who launched the original “Save Star Trek” letter-writing campaign in 1967, there would probably be no more Trek. Sadly, John Trimble died this week. Numerous tributes from Trek figures and fandom have been pouring in ever since.
Back in 2016, StarTrek.com reflected on John Trimble’s efforts to save the Star Trek franchise.
Humane’s AI-powered Pin — a new wearable device designed to be “your assistant and second brain” — has been slammed by critics and reviewers. Which has caused some controversy concerning the role and influence of tech reviewers.
Who, though, is to blame, and who benefited? Surely the responsibility for the Humane AI Pin lies with Humane; the people who benefited from Brownlee’s honesty were his viewers, the only people to whom Brownlee owes anything. To think of this review — or even just the title — as “distasteful” or “unethical” is to view Humane — a recognizable entity, to be sure — as of more worth than the 3.5 million individuals who watched Brownlee’s review.
This is one of the challenges of scale: Brownlee has so many viewers that it is almost easier to pretend like they are some unimportant blob. Brownlee, though, is successful because he remembers his job is not to go easy on individual companies, but inform individual viewers who will make individual decisions about spending $700 on a product that doesn’t work. Thanks to the Internet he has absolutely no responsibility or incentive to do anything but.
It’s the very definition of a good critic to post honest reviews for your readers that aren’t beholden to the interests and benefits of the items or products being reviewed. If a critic honestly believes that something sucks, then it’s incumbent on them to say so. As John Gruber puts it:
That same mentality is what made Siskel and Ebert superstar film critics: they loved movies and they judged them for what they were, from the perspective of fellow moviegoers. They weren’t Hollywood insiders, and in the same way Mossberg didn’t give a fuck about XM Radio’s stock price, they didn’t give a fuck about how their reviews might affect opening weekend box office numbers. They cherished the trust of their TV viewers and newspaper readers, and rewarded them by providing nothing less than their fully honest expert appraisals of the movies they reviewed.
Grieving Chinese are turning to AI chatbots to “resurrect” dead relatives and loved ones. And while this primarily seems like a technology story, there’s a significant social and religious angle, as well.
These bots are uniquely prominent in China, especially around the Qingming tomb-sweeping festival in early April — a day to commemorate the dead. With the Chinese government keeping a tight control over religion and spirituality, AI avatars have offered those who have lost loved ones a new way to connect with the deceased.
Ting Guo, an assistant professor of cultural and religious studies with the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told Rest of World that China’s control over religion has left citizens with limited options to explore the afterlife together as a community. She said that while folk religions are popular in some regions, these spiritual activities are not widely practiced, especially in the big cities. “China lacks publicly available resources for bereavement,” Guo said. “Online fortune-telling and AI chatbots became easily accessible means to provide consolation.”
Via NextDraft.
Related: Back in 2013, I wrote about a company called LifeNaut that claimed to create an immortal digital avatar for you using your social media accounts. “We strive to be authentic, and in the process, make ourselves look more authentic, more intelligent, and more with it than we really are (or really ever could be). A service that depends on us and our uploads and social media profiles to gain true insight into our lives is, therefore, working from a very skewed dataset.”
The vast majority of the world’s internet traffic travels over undersea cables the size of a garden hose. If all of these cables were to suddenly break, then society as we know it would cease to exist. Ensuring that doesn’t happen falls on a small fleet of cable repair ships that are stationed around the globe. But as more and more cables are laid, the fleet is stretched thin and finding new recruits is hard.
“One of the biggest problems we have in this industry is attracting new people to it,” said Constable. He recalled another panel he was on in Singapore meant to introduce university students to the industry. “The audience was probably about 10 university kids and 60 old gray people from the industry just filling out their day,” he said. When he speaks with students looking to get into tech, he tries to convince them that subsea cables are also part — a foundational part — of the tech industry. “They all want to be data scientists and that sort of stuff,” he said. “But for me, I find this industry fascinating. You’re dealing with the most hostile environment on the planet, eight kilometers deep in the oceans, working with some pretty high technology, traveling all over the world. You’re on the forefront of geopolitics, and it’s critical for the whole way the world operates now.”
[…]
The industry’s biggest recruiting challenge, however, is the industry’s invisibility. It’s a truism that people don’t think about infrastructure until it breaks, but they tend not to think about the fixing of it, either. In his 2014 essay, “Rethinking Repair,” professor of information science Steven Jackson argued that contemporary thinking about technology romanticizes moments of invention over the ongoing work of maintenance, though it is equally important to the deployment of functional technology in the world. There are few better examples than the subsea cable industry, which, for over a century, has been so effective at quickly fixing faults that the public has rarely had a chance to notice. Or as one industry veteran put it, “We are one of the best-kept secrets in the world, because things just work.”
This is fascinating stuff. But it’s also rather humbling to think that so much of our modern society rests on those little cables and the unsung crews that brave all manner of hazardous conditions — storms, tsunamis, the ocean depths, even nuclear radiation — to repair them.
From the Blog
Post.news — an early alternative to post-Elon Twitter — has announced that it’s shutting down in a few weeks due to inadequate growth.
Although Post.news was ultimately not for me, it’s still sad to see it go if only because its loss means even fewer options for networking and sharing. That said, its impending demise should also serve as a reminder — yes, I’m going to keep beating this drum — of the importance and value of building and owning your own online platform that’s not subject to the vagaries of the market.
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