Week Links: 6/7/26
The Bird Kid. Must-see, sound on.
This week’s must-read:
Presence is a favorite word of Zuckerberg’s. The feeling of presence, he explained in a promotional video from 2021, would be “the defining quality of the Metaverse.” The video cuts to a scene of Zuck’s cartoonish Metaverse avatar playing poker with a giant robot in a space station. No one could mistake that for presence. Variously mocked and ignored, the Metaverse withered. As of last month, Reality Labs’ losses since 2020 totaled more than $80 billion.
Some interesting drawings and thoughts on making them by Atticus Lish at The Metropolitan Review:
Although I’m usually wary of The Economist, this short article is interesting:
The true symbol of Goma, however, is an idiosyncratic, man-powered wooden scooter known as a tshukudu. It looks as if it has been drawn by a child, with its simple, angled frame and two-metre-long deck. Yet as a way of carrying cargo in this chaotic city, it has proved perfect. It is narrow enough to zigzag through busy markets. Rubber strips around the wheels and a spring beneath the cow-horn handlebars help absorb the shock of potholes. It can bear more weight than a bicycle: riders brag about carrying loads of more than 500kg on a single tshukudu. At $200, with no petrol costs, it is cheaper than a motorcycle.
China builds first offshore wind turbine:
I would love for my next car to be a Chinese EV, but that seemed like an impossibility. But wait…
Chinese EVs may hit U.S. within a few years, one way or another, CNBC:
Because direct imports of Chinese-made EVs into the U.S. seems highly unlikely, allowing them to be manufactured here is becoming a realistic option. In January, President Donald Trump expressed support for letting China set up shop in the U.S. as long as they employed American workers. The remark led to wide speculation that the issue would be raised at the recent Beijing summit with Xi Jinping, yet there are no reports that it came up. Among the entourage of CEOs that accompanied Trump, the only auto executive was Tesla’s Elon Musk, whose company has a presence in China, though it is far behind domestic leader BYD.
Sally Rooney to publish Hebrew translation of novel with BDS-compliant publisher, The Guardian:
Rooney is publishing her bestselling 2024 novel, Intermezzo, through November Books, an independent Israeli publisher that supports Palestinian rights, with +972 Magazine and Local Call, two independent media outlets in Israel and Palestine.
The 35-year-old has published four wildly popular novels that have been translated into dozens of languages. The first two – Conversations with Friends and Normal People – were translated into Hebrew by the Israeli publisher Modan. But in 2021, Rooney turned down a translation offer from the publisher for her third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, citing her desire to support the BDS movement, a Palestinian-led, global campaign that seeks to “end international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law”.
The cover art:
Section 224 has passed. I guess that’ll maybe cut down on all the espionage Israel is conducting directly on the Pentagon (NYTimes), or maybe it will help ex-spy Jonathan Pollard’s electoral chances.
There is no real direction here, neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made – at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all around assholery.
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
AI Watch
Universal vaccine design. Promising, but still a promise.
The vaccine triggered immune responses in the volunteers not only to SARS-CoV-2 and SARS, but to related bat viruses that could potentially jump from animals to humans and cause future pandemics.
This trial proves the safety of an entirely new way of designing vaccines. The technology uses an AI-designed ‘super-antigen’ to provide lasting protection against a broad range of viruses - for example the Ebola group, or Sarbeco coronavirus group - even as they mutate.
But also needle-free! I wonder if that’s an effect of vaccine designers now thinking about post-pandemic public health issues—or just marketability.
Stealth facial recognition technology, you say? Meta’s back on their bullshit. From WIRED:
Meta has quietly embedded face-recognition technology for its smart glasses into an app downloaded to millions of phones, according to a WIRED analysis of the company’s software.
Code discreetly added to Meta’s AI app over multiple updates this year shows that the feature, internally called “NameTag,” identifies people captured by the glasses’ camera and, when activated, alerts the wearer when it recognizes someone.
Xwitter’s new algorithm, analyzed. Reddit.
The biggest architectural shift is that they removed all hand-engineered features. There is no manual weighting for follower counts, account age, or historical engagement rates. Instead, the core ranking layer is entirely powered by a Grok-1 transformer. It takes a raw sequence of your historical interactions and predicts probabilities for 19 distinct actions (likes, replies, continuous dwell time, off-platform sharing).
I wonder how this will affect this finding. Nature:
Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects1. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk’s platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users’ feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X’s algorithm has persistent effects on users’ current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.
Fiction from Craig Bernadini. At Conjunctions:
Today, Ana, or “anA,” as she is known to her adoring public (“fanAtics”), who come to her concerts bearing bouquets made from eleven small sheaves of tightly-wound barley to leave upon the stage, the gift the Russian oligarch is said to have received when he first took little Ana to Moscow—or wearing one of dozens of T-shirts with logos of the same—has become one of the most sought-after and respected artists of her generation: a musician of broad interests and curiosity, a performer of commanding technique widely praised for her expressive artistry and the effortless yet disciplined lyricism of her movement. Called a tour de force, palindrome and paradox, cipher and cynosure, anA has brought her quiet revolution to concert stages in every major musical capital of the world.
The Knicks may have a true ref problem on their hands in the NBA Finals. The opening tilt against the Spurs featured plenty of officiating controversy, though there was hope a new crew and how things played out in Game 1 would cause a course correction.
Instead, New York’s questionable whistle on both ends continued in Game 2, and was arguably even worse than Wednesday night. Following two contests that have now unfolded with a heavy San Antonio leaning from the refs, it’s difficult to write this off as a non-issue for the Knicks.
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