Is there one link, story or idea that stopped you this week… and made you think, “someone else needs to see this”?

My friends: Alistair Croll (Just Evil Enough, Solve for Interesting, Tilt the Windmill, Interesting Bits, HBS, chair of Strata, Startupfest, FWD50, and Scaletechconf; author of Lean Analytics and some other books), Hugh McGuire (Rebus Foundation, PressBooks, LibriVox) and I made a simple pact years ago. Once a week, each of us would share one link with the others… something we genuinely believed the other two had to see. No trend-hunting… no performance. Just six ideas exchanged with intent. What started as a small ritual between curious friends became Six Links That Make You Think.

These are the six links we passed to one another this week… take your time with them…

• Brunello Cucinelli – Om Malik. “Back in 2007, I started writing for Om Malik‘s publication, GigaOm, which was at the time on par with TechCrunch and other big tech outlets. He sent me to a conference where I filed roughly twenty stories in only a few days. His editorial team taught me so much about writing and editing. When Om suffered a heart attack in 2008, his doctors told him he could only stand for a couple of hours a day. He asked me to MC his first Structure conference in SF, so he could spend those two hours doing what he loved most: Asking hard questions of the people building tech infrastructure. He was a hustler, a hardass, and a credit to journalism. On June 24, waiting for a heart transplant, Om died. He was a superlative writer, so I wanted to share one of his best pieces: a long-form essay on cashmere sweaters.” (Alistair for Hugh).
• Declaration Of Social Media Rights. “I was in SF recently for Foo Camp, and one of the conversations I most enjoyed was talking with Blaine Cook — the lead developer of Twitter, who came up with the @name convention and brought us OAUTH. He’s now working on a new hyper-local non-toxic platform to reconnect with our neighbours. He shared this with me, a response to the question we never really asked: do social media users have rights? What began as sites we chose to use has morphed into necessary platforms for human interaction, and it’s time to demand more from them.” (Alistair for Mitch).
• Ringmasters – Sean Michaels – The Walrus. “Montreal… circus capital of the world?” (Hugh for Alistair).
• Behind The Curtain: Three Big AI Trends Collide – Jim VandeHel and Mike Allen – Axios. “Mitch and I shared a recent meal where the general vibe was: if AI is so great at building amazing software, why does everything digital suck so much? Just one for instance: Facebook is worse than ever as a user (I quit ages ago) and, apparently, as an ad buyer as well. Where are my flying cars? Coming… apparently? Along with societal collapse?” (Hugh for Mitch).
• ChatGPT Is A Blurry JPEG Of The Web – Ted Chiang – The New Yorker. “I was having coffee last week with our mutual friend, Patrick Tanguay (Sentiers), and he mentioned this article. When I got back to my office, he had already texted me the link… turns out it was already saved to my Reader a few months back… so I dug in. The core thesis both made me laugh and think deeply, because it’s a simple way to explain the outputs of AI to those who should know better. ChatGPT (or any Gen AI tech) is compared to a blurry JPEG, meaning it provides approximations of information from the web rather than exact reproductions. This lossy compression can lead to mistakes or “hallucinations” in its answers, making it seem less reliable. While it generates text that feels original (when you zoom out and see the JPG), starting from a blurry copy of pixels isn’t ideal for creating truly original work. And this is something I have been trying to explain to so many people. Writing in a way that connects to an audience is so deeply challenging. It is a very complex art form. I’d argue it’s so complex that most people struggle with the basics. Anything that can do more than the basics seems like a miracle… but for those who understand it, it comes off as pretty weak and inaccurate… like a JPG you can’t zoom in on.” (Mitch for Alistair).
• Behind The ‘Supergirl’ Bomb: Competing Cuts, Creative Differences – Borys Kit – Hollywood Reporter. “I have been a comic book nerd since the early 80s (I spent last weekend at Montreal Comiccon). I always loved the format and considered it ‘high art’ in comparison to most, who consider comic books one of the lowest kinds of media drivel. You have no idea how incredible it is for me to look at the cultural landscape and see companies like DC and Marvel at the top of the box office, while driving billions of dollars in growth… and seeing companies like Disney acquiring Marvel. If you went back in time and told the twelve-year-old me that there would be massive box office hits because of comic book characters like the X-Men and Deadpool, I would have thought you were insane. It’s gotten so big, that it’s actually spiraling in a whole other direction. I’m not sure this story has anything to do with fatigue, but it is wild to me to read how Hollywood and the movie industry still create movies like they are the only content game in town. It breaks my heart that a movie like Supergirl completely bombed at the box office… especially when you consider the money, power, and people behind it. I just can’t circle the square as to how this happens. You would think that the history of movies, comics, books, and every other form of entertainment would have generated new types of creatives that would know how to take a character like this and create a story that would be for the ages. Yet something is really off…” (Mitch for Hugh).

If one of these sticks with you, pass it on… and let us know what earned your attention this week…

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