who knows, maybe he had giant gambling debts or other addiction(s) or bad real estate investments and/or lost half of it all to an ex-wife first. things that Jony might be readily aware of. assuming there is more than a kernel of truth to this - and i can't imagine not, the OpenAI comms guy who responded already scrubbed his X account - it doesn't surprise me that Tan was a criminal, it's that he was such a bad criminal
the point is sort of both (i've been nerdy and signalling enough in these general and personal trying times, so why stop there)
- Chris Crawford created Balance of Power (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game)) and had some writings saying games are more important to / have a greater capacity to aid learning than the modern education system at large, citing the little games mother cats play with kittens to teach them how to survive (or something to that effect). that stuck with me but either way, without BoP and WarGames you don't have, say, Twilight Struggle
- Another thing later on that stuck with me are media theorist Marshall McLuhan's concept of hot versus cool media (perhaps more famous for the medium is the message / massage). I am not going to consult AI for this, but I contextualized it as how much work the "recipient" has to do. I.e. baseball or War of the Worlds on the radio is "cooler" than red-hot NFL football or Independence Day on the screen
So then Contagion is hot media, passages from David Quammen's Spillover are cool(er) media, and Plague Inc.'s porridge is just right. or play Augustus while I, Claudius is one while getting ripshit on Ovid and wine
That is actually a reference to the underrated Mark Belanger, who has the second highest dWAR ever behind Ozzie Smith, and a few percentage points ahead of teammate Brooks Robinson: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/b/belanma01.shtml
that he has a .228 lifetime batting average makes him more endearing, although shortstops couldn't really hit then
also i thought there was an LBA before an LBAC, but the more important thing is literacy regarding the entire concept
yes, that is happening to me real-time, the article in the Economist reminded me (https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/01/can-bending-sp...), right down to Evernote being the one they are attempting to gouge me on at best and charge illegally at worst. so i had a closer look at bank and PayPal GLs
i found similar issues with Paddle (attempted to quit), Proton (double charged), Splashtop (attempted to quit), and Bloomberg via Apple (attempted to quit) and the common thread is PayPal. never Stripe.
my PayPal account is ancient (2002) and knowing what i know about payments (perhaps a little) i believe there is something akin to a hole regarding legacy pre-auth tokens in a PayPal architecture which is old enough to run for the US House. at least Bending Spoons would be willfully exploiting such a hole, because after i refunded / cancelled, 9 days later they were able to charge again. PayPal also seems to have an open marriage with PCI-DSS / SOC2
Eric Cline is great - when i had a tooth removed in a somewhat nasty procedure i spent a Caturday hepped up on goofballs watching his videos on LBA while playing Hatshepsut on Diety in Civ VII 1.4 (i got to play test 1.3.2 via Firaxis via discord, ooh la la i call a car hole a garage)
in my personal "immersive learning" period starting 2021, i discovered acoup.blog when Old World came out and extended into reading while playing Civ VI and CK III. it actually started the February before COVID, playing Plague while watching Contagion and reading whatever peer-reviewed shit i could find. total Chris Crawford with a brain-eating amoeba action
EDIT: in the blind i'm guessing the port city of which you speak is Ugarit, which i had never heard of. IIRC everything was weakened by drought and famine, and Ugarit's armies were pulled over to the Hittites who abandoned Ugarit to The Sea Peoples. and the Sea Peoples always came off like a "cosmological constant" fudge factor where constant advances in shipwreck archaeology should provide more clarity in its merry time
history is dope. it never repeats itself but it always rhymes :)
> "Oh yeah here's a 1,500 year-old city, but it was 7,000 years ago and then disappeared so you've never heard of it."
pull it in a bit and you have Ugarit :)
i am convinced if / when AI leads to the collapse of civilization it will be akin to the Late Bronze Age collapse; i.e., not with a bang but a whimper. it was a very delicate economic ecosystem complete with circular dealing; but 3500 years ago people were fighting over Cypriot copper and today we're doing the same only in Lobito (along with Cobalt and Lanthanides) in praise of the almighty god Compute
just to flog the analogy like a Mycenean slave, Compute runs out (with a humorous sidebar where someone tries to put a modern equivalent of arsenic into the chips to perpetuate the self-dealing; hilarity ensues). society collapses (but Musk makes it because like Egypt he has all the gold) and like the Iron Age a Quantum Age comes along out of desperation and the will to survive after yet another Dark Age. if we're lucky.
eh, i backed up in a few places a bit ago. the actual concern is BS charged me when they shouldn't have (5x the former price, annual), won't refund, and turned off the account anyway. and PayPal seems to have an open marriage with PCI-DSS/SOC2 right now
Holger Czukay is what happens when you combine Stockhausen and that amazing mustache. him Liebezeit Karoli and Schmidt were so far out there they drove not one but two singers crazy (take that, Roger Waters). there was a band Mooney Suzuki named after them although their chief achievement was that one of the members later joined The Strokes (Nikolai Fraiture)
i just listened to some Steve Reich last week. since the Guards game was rain delayed alongside whatever the hell happened ith Fable i might have to interpolate a Tago Mago / Ege Bamyasi / Future Days triple frontier with the WC on this fine Sunday
(In slight contrast to my other comment) I think Larimer Square in Denver is trying to do something akin. There was a land-edge-lord kerfuffle and gone are staples like The Market and Ted’s Montana Grill (RIP, I was also just in Bozeman). rn one side is bookstore - jewelry & artsy - African jewelry & artsy - Rioja (Denver famous food) - John Fluevog (Vancouver shoes) - Osteria Marco (Denver less famous Italian) - Van Leewuen (NYC ice cream). I hope it all works...
now, bookstores here are a whole other mess. two words, Tattered Cover. there are ample used bookstores, though, i found a copy of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals for $6.50 on Colfax that should probably be handled with BSL-3 precaution which is as it should be
There is a really cool place in Denver called Wizard’s Chest. I think they make good money off costumes, but also Warhammer 4k (and to a related lesser extent DnD). Nice people, too.