It's interesting that Substack became a prominent platform for writers just by vertically integrating email newsletters, blogging and payments. I think it tapped into three internet trends:
1) Smaller communities—after the era of 'everything is public' on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, we're seeing retrenchment into smaller, forum-like communities such as Subreddits and Discord channels. It's why Facebook Groups are far more relevant today than the Newsfeed.
2) Creator economy. We all know about this trend by now, right? Substack lets people subscribe to paid articles, the way you can became a paid member of someone's Patreon
Interesting... tried using @gpt_index to summarize a podcast transcript that is otherwise too many words to directly paste into a GPT prompt. It can do this with collections of documents too
I gave it about 6,700 podcast episode descriptions from the past month matching the keyword "movie" and asked "what's the latest about movies". It used a couple dollars of GPT compute for this response, which is alright but shows that asking overly general questions is not useful
1) When the Covid crisis is over, one of the strangest sub-plots will have been the fracas around Hydroxychloroquine. Starting from medical practitioners worldwide adopting its usage in a ‘cargo cult’ way, mimicking what other doctors were doing, to Raoult’s low-quality study…
2) To people in Silicon Valley picking up the idea (notably Elon Musk), then the explosion in the political sphere, from Trump pushing it at the White House podium, to the Indian PM Modi reversing an HCQ export ban for Trump, to French PM Macron talking it up...
3) All the while as it remained unproven for Covid use, while people trying it got hurt by cardiac side-effects (and one couple in a prominent incident mistakenly taking different chemicals with a similar name), & patients with other conditions ran out of HCQ due to shortages…
1) I’m dismayed how much media traction the idea that the BCG vaccine for Tuberculosis is protective against COVID-19 is getting based on correlations. Folks, even if you believe in eyeballing a world map to make correlations, the data is incomplete—lots of deaths still to come.
2) Maybe there’s something to it—after all, doctors are trying many medications for COVID-19 that are typically used for other diseases. But so much hype for a weakly-reasoned non-peer-reviewed study feels to me like the media is continuing to let us down during this pandemic.
3) In fact, the ‘let down’ here is related to the earlier let-down of many in the media not taking this pandemic seriously. In both cases (‘this is not going to be a big deal’ vs. ‘TB vaccine is protective’) there is wishful thinking that certain populations won’t be affected.