Media — February 2025

Never mind that it’s halfway into March. I’ve been having fun with The Composition Challenge and family gatherings and online D&D and a rather busy work schedule so I’m going to have to declare RSS bankruptcy soon and catch up on what I’ve been enjoying.

Reading

AI Snake Oil

At first I thought I wasn’t the audience for this, but I think it balances the technical and accessible well. I would recommend this to anyone wondering about the negative impacts of “AI” (current generative trends but also classifiers more broadly). They do a good job of hammering now many use cases just don’t work (and in many cases can never work).

I think the authors are a little less negative than I am on some applications but remain highly skeptical and definitely believe we already have a lot of the right regulatory frameworks. I also like how they see most of the problems as requiring social solutions more than trying to engineer technical ones.

Still a lot to think about here for myself, since my career has been and remains rather machine learning centric.

Range

This is a nice piece from Louie Mantia on non-algorithmic discovery of interesting things to read online, using RSS. More than that it emphasizes the value in being a little hard to find, compared to being targeted on algorithmic social media.

Watching

Rewatched some favorites (including Star Trek VI) and introduced kid to Into the Spider-Verse and Barbie, both of which he really enjoyed.

You’re Cordially Invited

This was a pretty hilarious R-rated romcom (which obviously just Andrle and I watched). I had remembered seeing the trailers a while ago and it is pretty much what it looks like on the tin. We laughed a lot. It was predictable in most of the trope beats but that’s fine. Farrell still delivers his usual. Others didn’t like it.

Flow

I had heard a lot of Oscar buzz about this one so we watched it for one of our movie nights. It was surprisingly stressful at points! Fun to watch a scifi movie that’s just vibes. I think it worked better that the world wasn’t super explained. Astounding that so much of it was basically one guy in Blender. (Pike hated all the dogs in it though.)

SNL50

We watched both the concert and the anniversary special. As with many SNL things some of the sketches went on too long, and the celebrity appearances were sometimes excessive, but there were several callbacks to our favorites or some good song performances. Post Nirvana (with Post Malone in place of Cobain) was a particularly good combination.

Listening

We technically watched The Grammys but it helped us check out or revisit some music. A definite highlight was Janelle Monáe moonwalking through a cover of Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.

Abracadabra

This was a surprise music video premiere during The Grammys. This made us excited for her new album (more on that in this month’s post, probably) because it was very much a return to the dance pop we loved on Fame Monster as new music when Andrle and I were first dating.

https://youtu.be/vBynw9Isr28?si=EDwbZYxakOL9NiGc

Decoder — Bookshop

Enjoyed Nilay’s interview with Bookshop’s CEO Andy Hunter. Even working for the Big A I still care a lot about independent booksellers.

InvestiGates 304 — Sonequa Martin-Green

In addition to the usual Trek behind the scenes stories, some interesting thoughts on parenting and work-life balance.