stratechery.com

2026.44: At Long Last…

First, the pressure applied by AI will eventually (or imminently?) rupture the global internet that we've come to know for the past 25 years. But second, as society moves to more localized solutions and products, that may in fact be a welcome development for all of us who have come to accept degraded experiences throughout our technological lives.

readtheprofile.com

The $900 Million Lesson Hollywood Learned From Reese Witherspoon

A personality-driven business is somehow both powerful and fragile at the same time. Witherspoon's whole 'homecoming' narrative is complete PR, in my opinion. She sold control of Hello Sunshine when money was dumb.

stratechery.com

Presented by Stripe

if I am honest with myself I have never been truly objective about Stripe specifically, for three reasons. First, Stripe is a foundational business for my business. The then-startup launched the Subscription API (what later became Stripe Billing) in late 2011; Stratechery was predicated on that feature existing.

stratechery.com

Netflix Earnings, Business or Franchise, Disney’s Deal

Netflix has a solid business, which is exactly the problem: the company increasingly seems like a business and not a franchise, at least in terms of growth.

noahpinion.blog

Four eras of San Francisco tech culture

If you could go back in time and tell the 2001 version of me that the President's allies are talking on national news about shrimp consciousness, I would have laughed out loud. (Until you told me who the President was, of course.) Not only that, but you have the New York Post talking about Effective Altruists' sex lives, and op-eds debating EA philosophy in top blogs and the Washington Post.

honest-broker.com

AI-Generated Movie Star Has a Total Meltdown on TV

The audience does not want AI-generated movie stars. They find Tilly creepy. They will launch protests and boycotts. She will achieve even less lasting renown than Hawk Tuah, Harambe, and the Harlem Shake.

platformer.news

What was Hard Fork?

It did not take much time using the product for us to begin taking large language models and the companies building them extremely seriously. Four months into our run, my cohost's long conversation with an unhinged version of Microsoft Bing captivated the world and brought AI safety discussions into the mainstream. (It also drew a fair amount of ridicule, previewing the ways in which the commentariat would continually twist itself into pretzels to deny that anything important was happening with LLMs.)

whyisthisinteresting

The “J Crew Crew” Edition

The models in the catalogs solved murders while trying to sell you cable-knit sweaters. It got passed around avidly on the Buzzfeed-era internet.

honest-broker.com

10 Brutally Honest Predictions on the Future of AI

Analog will gain now immense status for its honesty. It doesn't have to be a superior medium, it just needs to retain its independence from digital rot. In that simple way, analog will gain status as the last untainted source of information in a world of widespread deepfakes and data contamination.

upstartsmedia.com

I Went On An AI Show. It Made Me Feel Better About Human News.

"The avatar is really good at talking, but it's not as good at listening, because it's not trained on it," Misra says.

stratechery.com

Netflix to Sell Streaming Services?, Streamers as Aggregators, Revisiting Roku

Netflix is considering selling other streaming services, and I think it's a good idea; it's also a let-down for Netflix's original goals and potential pivots.

noahpinion.blog

Slopulism is taking over America

Once people decide that technocrats, elites, experts, and gatekeepers aren't worth listening to, they become vulnerable to all sorts of policy scams. Slopulism that arises out of pure ignorance is very hard to correct, and social media — which elevates the dumbest and loudest at the expense of the most well-informed — probably makes it harder. But when slopulist ideas are being promoted by smart people with ulterior motives, it can be a lot harder to wake the populace up.

honest-broker.com

Predictions on the Future of Netflix (and Other Huge Platforms)

Audience capture is rapidly becoming the default approach of the largest companies in the world. So its potential for abuse must be a matter of concern for all of us. This would have been unthinkable a half century ago.

readtrung.com

Blumhouse: How Jason Blum Created A Hollywood Horror Hit Machine

Made on an original budget of $15,000 — which jumped to $18 million including distribution deals, re-shoots and marketing — the film grossed $193 million worldwide.

stratechery.com

YouTubers Win the Box Office, Goodbye Gatekeepers, The YouTube Bar

succeeding on YouTube is a much higher bar than the gates that currently govern Hollywood.

longreads.com

The Prehistory of A.I. Slop

By the early nineteen-sixties, there was enough of this kind of thing going around that it caused both a panic and understandable excitement.

readtrung.com

The Disneyland Dilemma

Parks & Cruises is putting up these numbers while being only a ~1/3 of Disney's $94B revenue. The division is floating Disney's entire transition from dying cable TV assets to streaming….which has been a bumpy ride.

longreads.com

The Last Great Weed Smuggler

A fun caper with more than a few surprising turns (and a solid Jimmy Buffett cameo). Prager's extraordinary court case, which resulted in one of the most unique sentences ever passed down, was a media frenzy in the late 1980s.

upstartsmedia.com

Upstarts Turns 1! Here's What's Next (With Your Help)

I'll be honest that building a new media brand, and continuing to work on high-quality journalism while growing a business, has been the most challenging, stressful and rewarding experience of my career so far.

honest-broker.com

Why Are Tech Bros Watching Videos at 3x Speed

At first I thought this was satire—especially when he gave an example of a video played at that rate.