Work Related

But First

💈 Happy Festivus! The holiday for the rest of us is here and should be honored. I hope I don’t have to get the cassettes from the archives or demand you compete in the feats of strength.

Feats of Strength

• Congrats to Landon McNamara for winning this year’s Eddy, the North Shore big wave competition! I don’t surf but always appreciate the extreme athleticism required for things like this.

• How Athletes Become Brands is a terrific panel discussion from the Dealbook Summit featuring Jordan Chiles, Napheesa Collier, Bomani Jones, Renee Montgomery, Jesse Palmer, Justin Tuck, and moderated by Jess Sims of The Athletic. The panelists cover everything from managing themselves as businesses, NCAA NIL deals, and the challenges of being a social personality.

Robots Rise

• 🤖 Liz Pelly at Harpers has a pretty amazing though sadly not that shocking report on the unbelievable amount of garbage polluting the Spotify with fake artists and auto-generated tracks which have created a new generation of payola. I’d seen this initially mentioned in Ted Goia’s excellent newsletter where he’d picked up on all kinds of strange jazz artists.

• Ars has a roundup of everything OpenAI released for their 12 Days rollout this December. It’s quite a lot as the pace of releases across the category shows no slowing …

• Google did an uber-blog covering a similar volume of news. I recently caved and decided to give Gemini a more considered look by paying for premium access. So far I am not disappointed with the new level of access across my workspace instance as well as the deeper features in the product directly. As soon as I paid, I tried to get some complex sheet magic to manifest and was frustrated to learn that there are limits within the sidebar, but if you ask the same type of question into the main Gemini prompt you can get what you need and simply paste it back in. In my case, this was a pretty complex (to me) data sort and “REGEXMATCH” to generate a new sheet with what I wanted out of a massive preexisting set of data. I had definitely not ever done anything like that in a spreadsheet before and simply describing the problem I was looking to solve generated some code to paste back into the cell. 💰️ 

• 🚍️ I can‘t decide if we should be concerned or excited by the prospect of a massive number of cars coming online without steering wheels or pedals … fully autonomously driving around. Regulations are getting easier for this to all push forward, so get ready either way.

• 🏎️ While the robo taxis may be coming, the track seems to be safe for the time being as the human factor still handily defeats the machine.

Add to Cart

💸 Venmo for Vices is not an expression I’d heard before but thanks to the ease of mobile and courtesy of the social feed that’s always been native to the platform, people are using Venmo for some “off book” purposes now. Friendly reminder, you can set transactions to private …

🕹️ This absolutely amazing game controller for your phone is coming to market via crowd funding early next year. I expect it will receive some real hype at CES in a few weeks which should boost the likelihood of success. Early vibes are already very strong!

👜 Hermès has mastered the art of creating demand at the ultimate level in luxury goods. You cannot make a purchase even if you can afford to until meeting a set of unspoken criteria. While they certainly deliver on the craft side vs machine manufacturing, it will be interesting to see just how long the tolerance and patience required lasts. 60 Minutes tried to probe and the key questions we well evaded… I found the segment a great watch.

Brain Melter

🧠 Please pardon this high-key cringe, but for real piece that will leave you shook because it slaps. Yeah I know … It’s just that a year of Brain Rot will do it to ya.

Have a great holiday! As always, please feel free to hit reply with any feedback or questions.

I have served.  I will be of service.

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