Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. “Twain is alive, vibrant and vitally relevant.”

In an age of terrible acceptance speeches during award shows, Conan O’Brien delivers a masterclass. Here’s O’Brien receiving the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor:

Twain was suspicious of populism, jingoism, imperialism, the money-obsessed mania of the Gilded Age, and any expression of mindless American might or self-importance. Above all, Twain was a patriot in the best sense of the word. He loved America but knew it was deeply flawed....Some of you might be thinking, What does this have to do with comedy? It has everything to do with comedy. Everything! The comedy I have loved all of my life is comedy that is self-critical, deflating, and dedicated to the proposition that we are all flawed, absurd, and wallowing in the mud together. Twain is funny and important today because his comedy is a hilarious celebration of our fears, our ineptitude, and the glorious mess of being human.

O’Brien’s full speech can be seen here.

2. Winning by Losing

Vegas Matt, the YouTube phenom, lost $404,000 from gambling last year, according to Slate. Each loss was filmed for a legion of dedicated online followers. And therein lies the twist: “he has managed to turn losing money into an enviable living—and is one of the only people on Earth to do so.” Slate elaborates:

On a chilly January afternoon, a crowd of fans gathered to watch one of the world’s most famous gamblers at work. Some had come all the way here just to watch him play. They savored every detail—how he cut chips, ruffled his cash, bantered with the dealer. He was dressed for the job. His gray hair was molded into a tight crew cut, and he wore a knitted gold necklace low across his collarbone and a Super Bowl–sized ring with a Ruby 777 jackpot dangling from his hand.

The scene was impressive, except in one way: This man absolutely sucked at gambling. 

The secret, of course, is advertising: “Our watch hours on YouTube [in December] were, like, 5.7 million hours. And there’s a commercial every 10 minutes.”

3. Meghan Markle’s Bad Bet

Who better to assess Meghan Markle’s latest Netflix venture than Tina Brown, the royal-watching, highbrow-chronicling, unsentimental Brit? Brown’s takedown of the Dutchess of Sussex is not only unflinching, but it offers wise counsel:

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that, at age 94, the monarch clearly had only a few years more to live, at which point the family chess pieces would start to move around the royal power board. All Meghan had to do was shut up and wait. Go quiet for a couple of years, start a family, keep her eyes trained on the splendid royal real estate that would soon come up for grabs. (As it is, King Charles is so overhoused, he could sleep in a different palace every night.)

The moment William ascended to his role as Prince of Wales, there would have been new global gigs and red-carpet rollouts raining down on the Sussexes’ heads. But no. Offered the Commonwealth or Netflix, the Sussexes, with naive avarice, chose Netflix.

4. A Booming Industry: Fraud

Deep inside Stripe’s annual letter is a shocking observation on the state of fraud:

Fraud is a bigger drag on the global economy than you might think: one report found that fraud cost 3% of a typical online business’s revenue. Fraudulent actors today operate on an industrial scale, with teams of engineers, managers, and data analysts. (We are yet to verify whether they have HR departments. If you know, please tell us so we can give them some peer feedback.) Fraudulent actors generally target times when fraud teams are offline—we see more fraud on Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays—but we see subtler patterns, too, like the fraudsters’ own work schedules. Fraudsters are particular about their lunch breaks.

5. Average U: Students Can’t Read

A long-time public university philosophy professor vents on Substack about disengaged, indifferent undergraduates:

 Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel”…Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done. They’re like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training. Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn't even take the time to read the question properly.

6. AI vs. PDF

What is preventing AI from conquering all the world’s data? According to ArsTechnica, it is the lowly, ubiquitous PDF. Created in the 1970s, PDFs are stumping even the world’s most sophisticated LLMs:

The PDF challenge represents a significant bottleneck in the world of data analysis and machine learning at large. According to several studies, approximately 80–90 percent of the world's organizational data is stored as unstructured data in documents, much of it locked away in formats that resist easy extraction. The problem worsens with two-column layouts, tables, charts, and scanned documents with poor image quality...."It is a very real problem for almost anything published more than 20 years ago and in particular for government records.”

Websites Worth Reading

The State of AI: McKinsey’s take

Google’s AI Robots: AI in the physical world 

Amazon’s Robots: AI in the physical world

Feeds We Follow

@awfulannouncing: Sporting commentary gets roasted

@cityaestheticss: What cities get right and wrong

@TheHubCanada: Canadian election watch