Below are things I’ve learned or found interesting in the past month: Late because I forgot the month rolled over!
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The Super Mario 64 strategy guide in Japan had cute dioramas of each of the levels.
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Courtesy of Experimental History, running with Ethiopians.
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Courtesy of Austin Kleon, George Saunders on reading problematic authors.
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The Nintendo DS had so many cool applications outside of gaming. The Louvre had a 3D map and narration app, which was discontinued earlier in September of this year. And the Mariners (baseball) used to have an app that let you order food or watch replays from your seat. And this was 2007! That’s when the first iPhone came out.
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Humans can tell which birds are pretty by sound. Or rather, we have the same preferences as other animals. Neat!
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Thanks to Platformer for surfacing this: In current events, Amazon is planning to hire 250,000 (temporary?) workers this holiday season, then pivot to an influx of permanent robots over the nex two years. This shouldn’t be surprising; in 2022 an internal report indicated they could run out of people they COULD hire with the conditions and wages they offered. It’s inevitable, when a corporation is faced with paying for the rising costs of humans or cutting them out entirely, the math always ends the same way. Estimates say that robots could replace 600,000 workers. One pithy commenter, nobel prize winner Daron Acemoglu, was quoted as saying “one of the biggest employers in the United States will become a net job destroyer, not a net job creator.”
Update: since posting the above, Amazon confirmed plans to lay off 30,000 corporate (non-warehouse) employees. The bulk of their workforce is warehouse workers. And since posting the previous update host gotten a head start
\8. I came away from this excellent train article with brand new opinions about grades and train crossings. Worth a read!
\9. In honor of the 18-inning game 3 of the world series, I present the longest ever professional baseball game.