Streaming fatigue continues. The Verge captures the slow, steady movement that is backlashing streaming consolidations and DRM lock-ins. Also, a minor point not often cited, is bandwidth issues:

It’s not just the cost of streaming that I have to worry about, either. Last year, I nearly exceeded my ISP’s data cap after I downloaded Baldur’s Gate 3 and kept up my heavy streaming habits. That was all the more reason for me to invest in DVDs.

I’ve actually noticed some of this with Comcast over the last couple years, where I’m exceeding my “unlimited plan,” and subsequently getting charged overages by 10GB increments. I’m not downloading huge games, either, so it’s likely high definition streams.

I forgot who linked to this originally, but Groundbreaker has one of the more finely-worded perspectives about what’s happening with AI in the financial markets.

Essentially, just as the subprime mortgage machine of 2008 relied on ever-accelerating home prices to support refinancing, current AI infrastructure relies on sustained, accelerating growth to service massive take-or-pay debt commitments. These debt commitments end up functioning as a massive, opaque “loan book” rather than standard capital expenditure budgets.

Companies like OpenAI, the author argues, operate as a subprime borrower in this system, relying on constant equity valuation markups to finance its operations. And it’s apparent that OpenAI lacks sufficient profit to cover its massive obligations.

We could argue that another industry saw something similar not too long ago, albeit sans real estate/credit/energy, but with cars, roads, and people (Uber), and that — shockingly — turned out okay, but this is a much more entangled situation:

Three errors, stacked, recreate 2008. The market is pricing AI as a technology cycle when its financing is the machinery of a credit-and-real-estate cycle. It is watching the level and the velocity while the structure breaks on the acceleration.

A bleak, but likely prophetic take from Aftermath of the collapsing videogame industry — insofar as larger, AAA games are concerned. Independent development, however, has been particularly healthy, fun, and innovative, and I hope that corner continues to grow.

Own your own content:

POSSE it, they say. Own your content. Publish once, fork it five times. RSS, Mastodon, Bluesky, webmention, pick your parasite. Fix the typo in two minutes. Already too late. Fossils wearing your name.

The author’s footnote is also sage advice: “Length is not depth.”

The white line on the right side of US roads. Someone fought the good fight to get these accepted and implemented… who doesn’t love an origin story like this.

Equal parts Negroni.

The only way to make arguably the best cocktail. And a confirming essay from Everyday Drinking’s Jason Wilson, though… I’d contend it’s always Negroni season.

‘Olievans’ made a virtual Criterion closet that you can gaze around in 3D and pull out each case for inspection (or get a link to the Criterion Channel, if applicable). Love this. We also spent an hour watching Closet Picks on YouTube the other night – lots of new ones!

~via Kottke

The path of art takes artists on journeys of knowledge. Good one on the humble but highly complex octopus from Strook. New to me was the Mimic Octopus:

[…]discovered as recently as 1998, is capable of mimicking various predators. It chooses which species to mimic based on its attacker.

Double-feature on Panic’s Nova app, first with Unsung’s notes and the linked-to piece by Nathan Manceaux-Panot. The gist is discovering and respecting thoughtful design choices that guide you into more desirable behaviors. It’s an incredibly fun, powerful app often overlooked for trendier editors.

The history of the chopsticks sleeve is kind of riveting. Even more surprising is that non-Japanese restaurants never took to advertising on equivalent fork-knife-spoon utensil packaging (as almost immediately after wider deployment, “printed paper chopstick sleeves became vernacular advertisements for shops and restaurants”).

(~via Veronique.)

In continuing to promote the “small web” of writers out there, I bumped into a site called Bubbles.town. It acknowledges the difficulty in discovering voices outside of larger properties, even with great infrastructure like the Fediverse and Kagi’s Small Web index.

They’re attempting to build a community voting system around these voices, (like HN), explaining the methodology in some detail here. What’s not to like?

Found on the Internet: Owls in Towels

Wildlife rehabilitators often wrap owls in fabric so they can be weighed, treated, and fed. If not, the owls get in a flap

Have a nice evening.

Analog formats are back to save us from the inundation of digital malaise. Racket points to an “insane” demand for CRT television sets in the Twin Cities area.

Retro video gamers are the driving force, lured to the dated tech because, well, old systems look like shit on 4K LCDs. VHS and DVD enthusiasts have stoked the boom, as has a less tangible reaction to the algorithmic, AI-supercharged feeds streaming across modern TVs. The thrum, the glow, the physical media rituals—there’s analog comfort to CRTs in an increasingly ugly digital world.

I still have my Super NES for this reason alone.

Kai from Dense Discovery with a pang of sad annoyance at the state of Internet communications of late:

I know it’s a bit naïve to appeal to common decency when the same technology is busy guiding weapons systems, but please don’t outsource sincerity. Don’t pretend to care about someone or something just to get their attention. The damage isn’t just annoyance. It’s suspicion that gets attached to genuine messages. Emails I would have read warmly now carry an asterisk. Did a person write this? Does this person actually care about my work, or is this just another prompt in the dark?

This feeling extends way beyond the example he shares. The wide deployment and usage of AI has made us discerning critics of almost everything. Much like we taught ourselves to be wary of malicious email, the same now goes for every single thing anyone digitally shares with you.

A collection of thirty 1950s Milwaukee bus tickets harkens back to terrific typographic design.

(via Robb Knight)

This whole essay is elite sports writing (by Andrew Sharp), and he captures every bit of why we’re lucky to have the Timberwolves to watch.

What I love most about the Wolves is the reward they give to people who have been paying attention. That dynamic, by the way, is the inverse of many stories the NBA offers today. Study many stars and teams up close and it’s easy to become disillusioned with what sort of behavior is rewarded, who’s succeeding, and at a general level, how annoying everyone is. Not so with Minnesota.

NASA drops more than 12,000 new photographs from the Artemis II mission.

So many fun quotes to pull from in this LA Times piece on VHS revivalism. While not a “good” format, this is one of a few solid takes on why VHS is still interesting:

“If a film came out originally on VHS in the ’80s or ’90s, it feels right to watch it on VHS because this is how someone in 1989 would’ve watched this movie,” Conor explains in our living room. “I like watching on VHS so I can feel like a time traveler.”

The Onion (aka Global Tetrahedon) taking over Infowars is the most lit thing to happen in a while.

This will be a dank, sunless place, one where panic and capital feed on each other like twins in the womb of a hulking, unknowable monster—a monster known by many names, but which I like to call modern-day America.

Andrew Sharp’s incredibly convincing take-down of one of the NBA league’s most pressing problems: the Oklahoma City Thunder.

…the problem with the Thunder is not that they are too good, but that nothing about what makes them good is interesting. They are boring as villains and unconvincing as heroes.

This is basically the over-optimization problem we see in just about every other industry, and maybe to a degree in other sports leagues, but I’m no expert). It’s not that it isn’t impressive to see a team like the Thunder, it’s that it operates like “a charmless, borg-like juggernaut that doubles as a wonderful foil for would-be playoff heroes”.

Internet linking semantics, still relevant after all these decades.

What does IMAX mean? You’ll leave Todd Vazari’s post none the wiser, but somehow, more informed.

…it’s super clear what “IMAX” means.

Two master illustrators meet for an interview — Luis Mendo chats with Satoshi Hashimoto. I’ve loved Hashimoto’s work ever since perusing the pages of Monocle over 15 years ago, and just recently starting recognizing more of Mendo’s work. This was a delight to read.

A reasonable take.

AI could have sped up the development here and there. But Jobs bet Apple’s entire future on the iPhone. And it worked because he trusted the humans he’d surrounded himself with to take one of the biggest business risks in generations. It was an irrational gamble. No machine can make that call, and never will. Innovation is a fundamentally human endeavor. We shouldn’t forget that.

Something mystical and timely about the subject of this read — a series of now-removed pixelated videos on YouTube, with the premier one backed by a tune from Donkey Kong Country 2 (SNES), that operated as the “internet checkpoint” for many people during its ephemeral couple of years of existence.