Curated Commons // Edition 73
Thank you for subscribing and welcome to the 73rd edition of Curated Commons. Do consider sharing the newsletter on your social networks if you like it! Let’s dive right in ($ indicates potential paywall).
Print sales in the US are on the rise. One reason - BookTok
US consumers purchased 825 million print books in 2021 making it the top-selling year for print books. Since 2004! - Read here
Build at scale. Endure pain at scale. Perish at scale?
Facebook wanted to connect the whole world. For good or for bad. It seemed well on its way to do so. Till recently. Now it looks like it might have peaked in 2021. - Read here ($)
Also, while on $FB
AI is beginning to eat dubbing
What happens when you can have every piece of video content in every language possible? What does that mean for local low-budget content when they have to compete with global content, but in a local language on the same day as a global release? What does that mean for phonetics and language? - Read here ($)
Did r/wallstreetbets really stick it to Wall Street with GameStop?
Not quite, says this interesting WSJ report. - Read here ($)
On Jan. 27, at the height of the GameStop rally in 2021, Citadel Securities executed 7.4 billion shares of trades for retail investors. That was more than the average daily volume of the entire U.S. stock market in 2019,
Internet shutdowns and techies
What happens when your Govt shuts down the Internet? If you are a techie, you start figuring backdoors in the Cisco equipment that your Govt relies on. Which is what some in Kazakhstan did. Also imagine how this situation would have been when Satellite internet (like Starlink) is cheap and ubiquitous. - Read here
Automation + remote work = Threat to blue collar jobs?
What if automation made physical jobs remote jobs? It’s already happening in some industries (mining, for eg.). Limited impact for now, but the writing is on the wall. - Read here
The humans behind the buttons
One of the worst jobs created, thanks to the Internet, is that of content moderators. Those who trawl through every reported picture/video on facebook/YouTube and elsewhere. They aren’t employees of big tech, but contractors. A story that touches on this invisible workforce, along with the humans behind Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program and how they are rising up for better work conditions - Read here ($)
Trust Influencers to do the wildest shit
There apparently exist, not in the metaverse, but in this universe, a category of accounts called Petfluencers. And they are busy cloning pets to flaunt online - Read here
Can you detect Alzheimer’s with just a voice sample?
Fascinating new approaches using AI to detect Alzheimer’s. - Read here
Science publishers plumb new depths
Elsevier apparently fingerprints every pdf downloaded. Nope, not for trying to figure out who downloaded what - Read here
On a related note, will be failing in my duty if I don’t inform you not to go to this website.
Can you inoculate against disinformation?
Estonia is trying. - Read here
Right-click, save
Nope. Not NFTs. But Wordle. NYT should probably have done this ;-)
Who owns your house in augmented reality?
Will you? Should you? Or is it already too late? There’s a new game that allows people to buy, develop, rent out and sell virtual land parcels based on real-world property borders. Monopoly meets Google Maps! Fascinating concept, with likely real-world legal implications if it takes off. - Read here
Meet the famous female phreaker from the 1980s, a master of social engineering
This is a great read on Suzy Thunder, a phreaker (hacker of telecomm systems), and a social engineering maestro. As someone who first learnt and obsessed over 2600 and the phreaking culture some two decades+ ago, this was a great story - Read here
This is India’s top edtech firm
Sigh…
More interesting reads:
Do you need to be a maths or science graduate to succeed in finance? Interesting take - Read here ($)
Playstation creator isn’t a great fan of the metaverse. He has different ideas - Read here ($)
The best profile ever of a real estate agent. Hilarious - Read here
Very good profile of Nate Anderson, the short seller who brought down Nikola, the fraudulent EV maker. Some great lines - “fake-it-till-you-make-it, flack-it-till-you-SPAC-it” - Read here
Good content attracts users to streaming services. But it is not enough to retain them - Read here ($)
Coups are back in fashion. Between 2015 and 2020, the world never saw more than two successful coup attempts in a year. But there have now been eight coups in the past 12 months - Read here
What is web3? Good read from a smart journalist, Peter Kafka - Read here
Code writing code! DeepMind says its new AI coding engine is as good as an average human programmer - Read here
Do animals understand what it means to die? - Read here
Thought several times if I should include this utterly NSFW tweet in this edition. Please be warned - it is crude and gross. But there’s a lot going on in this video and the calm narration. You can’t unsee it, and you’ll likely end up with more questions. Don’t ask me or @ me.
And finally, trust nothing!
Stay safe, and happy reading! And if you liked the newsletter, thank you, and maybe consider sharing it? My DMs on Twitter are always open for any feedback.