I just saw something incredibly beautiful while waiting in line at Dunkin Donuts at the JFK arrivals hall Two French tourists who just arrived, can barely speak English, the guy asks for coffee. The lady behind the counter just barrages him with questions about all the possible modifications he might want to make, and he has absolutely no idea what she’s saying.

Hard to square the larger narrative of Twitter as a struggling business with the extraordinary rise of the Thread Guy There’s always been various kinds of thread people on here, they rise and fall like the empires of old. But the Thread Guy is such a hyper evolved version, and there seems to be dozens of new Thread Guys emerging fully formed each week

Your summer Friday treat is this amazing NEOM feature: bloomberg.com/features/2022-… There’s so much going on in this NEOM story but the highlight for me is they want to put canals alongside the roads, filled with swimming pool water, so people can swim to work bloomberg.com/features/2022-…

This discussion between a Google engineer and their conversational AI model helped cause the engineer to believe the AI is becoming sentient, kick up an internal shitstorm and get suspended from his job. And it is absolutely insane. washingtonpost.com/technology/202… FWIW I thought this was a great thread re the “is AI becoming sentient” debate, TL;DR being that it’s an interesting question but it’s dramatically less important or urgent than the actually existing issues around ethical/responsible use of AI right now

https://twitter.com/giadapistilli/status/1530136739959951361

This could be the rare unicorn of a story where everyone involved is simultaneously wrong—the doctor, the TV station that interviewed him and wrote it up, the places that aggregated that write up, the hospital that corrected him, and the people triumphantly citing the correction

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1434538877642027015

To begin with: Maybe it’s just editing, but in the original TV interview that all this drama is based on, the doctor never actually says it’s ivermectin overdoses that are overwhelming emergency rooms kfor.com/news/local/pat…

Apologies for the upcoming binge of whataboutism, but an American magazine asking “how much time must pass before we must regard Australia as illiberal and unfree?” is pretty comical theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… America has more prisoners than China and Russia combined. It has more than 125,000 people being tracked with GPS ankle bracelets. Judges sentence drug addicts to work for no wages in commercial poultry slaughterhouses as rehab.

Great story & it's bigger than Starbucks: the move to app-based / kiosk ordering removes a "shame barrier" in how ppl order fast food—they're way more likely to request like, triple bacon triple cheese at a McDonalds kiosk than when speaking to a human buzzfeednews.com/article/katien… I remember one of the fast food chains talking about this a while back - benefit to replacing humans with kiosks for ordering is order size tends to increase, people just less embarrassed to get an extra large fries to go alongside the large fries that come with the meal, etc

So many Gazans - not just 8 year olds, but teenagers - have lived their entire lives under siege. Not really anything else like it on earth

https://twitter.com/JimLaPorta/status/1393040224217968660

It's just so hard to imagine, there's two million of you on a strip of land 25 miles long, ten miles wide. You can't leave and if you get near any of the borders a person or robot shoots you. That's been your entire life and it will likely never change

Fully credit to the man, the Piers Morgan news cycle has now lasted longer than the Meghan / Harry / Oprah one. This is how it's done.

https://twitter.com/anoushasakoui/status/1369782232290795524

"Breaks his silence", incredible stuff

The first person listed here is maybe the world’s most prominent advocate of an all-encompassing war against Islam

https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1367582413048537088

“No. Islam, period.”

I got vaccinated at the new FEMA site in Brooklyn today, and one thing I didn’t expect was just how good it would feel seeing the kind of mass public mobilization that’s been missing for the last year The site is running like clockwork and just cranking through the vaccinations, must've done hundreds in the 15 mins I was there. Was staffed by a huge number of really delightful National Guard people from all over the country - the people who gave me my shot were from Georgia

What a disaster of a statement from Robinhood blog.robinhood.com/news/2021/1/28… (FWIW, maybe Robinhood are nefariously doing this to protect Wall Street or whatever. But my assumption is that it’s really for more practical / technical reasons, which makes this hyper ambiguous and useless statement so much worse)

The basically universal support for the Reddit guys in their war against the hedge fund guys is a nice throwback to the early 2010s era where people thought stuff like anonymous and Wikileaks and Reddit swarms were cool and good Anyhow, lots of 2000s omens for the Biden era: in the roaring post vaccine ‘20s we’re bringing back Chuck Norris style memes (but Bernie), techno optimism, there’ll be a ska revival, Jon Stewart has a new show, indie blogging, it’s all happening

Old millennials: in the mid-90s did you have any sense at all that the Foo Fighters might be the most enduring of the 90s rock bands? (My main Old Millennial endorsement of the Foo Fighters is that *everyone* had that first album when it came out, and the first 30 seconds of the first song - “visiting is pretty, visiting is good” was just incredibly catchy and memorable in a way that Dave Grohl really *scaled*)

I think a gun fight just happened right outside my apartment? Like literally on the street in front of us. About eight gunshots within a few seconds of each other. Crazy. Six cop cars arrived within about 90 seconds, incredible

Some personal news: this week I started a new job, and it's a huge career shift for me after almost 15 years in journalism: I'm working at Facebook, in the office of its CTO, Mike Schroepfer, aka @schrep I'll be doing a whole bunch of things in this new gig, but in short, it'll be writing - helping put into words all the work Schrep and his crew are doing on stuff like AI, virtual reality, and all the other wild technological challenges involved in keeping the lights on there.

The enforced constraints of Vine and TikTok really solved the eternal problem of how you *end* a comedy skit, which even the best comedy skit shows had never quite figured out in a consistent way Monty Python sometimes came close by just suddenly cutting to a nude man playing the organ or something, which if anything is sorta the closest thing to how the TikTok skit comics do it

This is a deep cut for the Malaysian food lovers of Twitter, but just behold this beautiful roti canai I just mauled in Sydney Obviously had to try the nasi lemak as well for verification / data integrity reasons

If you’re a bubble tea fan, keep your eyes out for the new hotness: it’s basically bubble tea but instead of tea it’s yogurt and instead of boba it’s grains like purple rice, corn, oats etc. Apparently it’s huge in Shanghai, and it’s everywhere in Chinatown in Sydney now So far I’ve tried the one with oats (left) and purple rice (right) and they were both FANTASTIC. I hope it makes its way to the US soon!

Say what you will about absolutely every other part of this story, but TikTok ending up being co-owned by Walmart is the funniest of all the possible outcomes Walmart ending up owning TikTok wouldn't just be very funny, it would be weirdly fitting for this political moment: it must be one of the single largest corporate beneficiaries of the American manufacturing base being dismantled and sent to China

I just read The Guardian’s very negative review of TENET and it made me think film critics should take one for the team on this one, submit all reviews to a wartime-style censorship board focused on maintaining public morale. We need this one. We’re clinging on by a thread right now, TENET will be the first movie we see whenever it is that we can go to cinemas again. The honorable masses, committed as ever to victory at any cost, will pretend it’s good even if it sucks. Our film critic elites need to do their part