13 Comments
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Blashswanski's avatar

Dig the format change. Makes it easier to read in a couple of sittings.

Andrew Day's avatar

Glad you like it! As for your second comment, we almost wrote an item about SK but it didn’t quite make the cut. Declaring martial law ends up being not a very momentous event went parliament overrides it a few hours later… Though there are interesting things to say about that situation I’m sure.

Blashswanski's avatar

SK will always mean Saskatchewan to me (I froze my ass off for a decade there, once).

My (very cursory) understanding is that parliament would technically have been dissolved during martial law, so wasn't in a position to rescind anything. I once read a rejoinder to the Maoist saying that 'power comes from the barrel of a gun': power comes from the look in the eye of the person with the gun pointed at them... it's not very pithy, but there might be something to it. The woman who reached out and grabbed the barrel of that soldier's gun, while he pointed it at her, might just have a future in politics.

Blashswanski's avatar

I think something might have happened this week in South Korea too?

Ben's avatar

Perhaps the next obvious step in the evolution of Nonzero would be to add to your talent roster a person or two on the philosophy, religious, or general science side, now that you have foreign policy expertise onboard. We cannot all be “galaxy brain “ polymaths like the folks covered by Decoding the Gurus. (And I mean that most respectfully). One Bob is enough. Let’s build another Bob from parts. That would be worth a donation to the foundation.

Robert Wright's avatar

I agree that the proportion of foreign policy content is at least as high as it needs to be. There are various ways to balance this--hiring (very expensive), commissioning pieces (somewhat expensive), and others. I'll definitely keep thinking about ways to expand and diversify content at the same time.

Gargarensis's avatar

Speaking of galaxy brains, it is nigh time to have a Weinstein back on the podcast

Alfredo Louro's avatar

Bluesky is a profit-maximizing corporation so it's algorithms will be designed to maximize returns to shareholders and investors. The only social medium that doesn't follow that rule because it's not for anyone's profit is the Fediverse. The reason why so many have gone from Twitter to Bluesky is marketing. Bluesky has been marketed very well.

Ernst Hafen's avatar

Social media and search rely on marketing and advertising revenue and are therefore inherently less reliable that subscription models (like this newsletter). Something that also holds for ChatGPT or Claude. A point that is made in Robert Pearl’s book “ChatGPT, MD How AI empowered patients and doctors can take back control over US medicine”

Robert Wright's avatar

I bring bad news: This week there were reports that OpenAI is considering the ad revenue option: https://mashable.com/article/openai-considering-ads-chatgpt

Ernst Hafen's avatar

Oh, this is not good indeed.

Chris's avatar

Yes, quite a worthwhile improvement, also graphically. Thanks for your efforts.

Grumpy's avatar

Laughing at the hunter pardon poll currently being exactly evenly split between the three options