-
What it’s like being a popstar
Charli XCX candidly writes about what it’s like being a popstar.
Sometimes being a pop star can be really embarrassing, especially when you’re around old friends of family members who have known you since before you could talk. The discrepancy in lifestyles becomes more and more drastic the more successful and paranoid you become. As a British person the longer you stay in LA the more you lose touch with the realities of certain things, but that’s why being a pop star can also be seriously humbling too, especially when your old friends mock and ridicule you for caring about something absolutely pointless. In ways being a pop star makes me think about the person I used to be compared to the person I am now. How is that person different? Or is she still the same?
-
AI Agents and the DoorDash problem
If you are a business owner, what happens when your customer tells the robot to buy something for you based on only set parameters, and ignores everything else such as discounts, loyalty, rewards, or upsells? That’s the possible future with AI agents performing tasks such as ordering a sandwich, or the DoorDash problem.
But if people stop using the apps and websites and start sending agents instead, that business really starts to break down. Because DoorDash and all the other service providers make their money by having a direct relationship with customers they can monetize in lots of different ways. It’s basic stuff like promotions, deals and discounts, ads for other stuff, their own subscriptions like DashPass and Uber One, and whatever other ideas they might have to make money in the future.
But AI doesn’t care about any of that stuff — if you ask for a car to the airport, an AI might just open Uber and Lyft and always pick the cheapest ride. These big App Store era services might just become commodity databases of information competing on price alone, which might not actually be sustainable, even if it might be the future.
-
Worldwide music dashboard
If you like music and dashboards, charts, and numbers, here is a very detailed dashboard of the music throughout the world.
-
Teens develop affordable housing portal
Two teens created an affordable housing portal for New York City.
First, he taught himself to code. “I basically spent the first two months of summer in my room, learning from YouTube and A.I.,” said Beckett, 17. “Those are my teachers.”
In July, after countless bleary-eyed hours on bedroom computers, he and Derrick Webster Jr., his classmate, launched Realer Estate, a website that combines public data with real estate listings, allowing users to search for below-market and rent-stabilized apartments — something the grown-ups who run New York City have never managed to do.
-
Amazing color picker
If you have ever programmed anything for the web, you’ll know that trying to find the right color and then coding it can be one of those annoying, trivial tasks. Different prefer have different trade-offs. The Internet offers plenty of different color pickers, however, here’s a very cool all in one with different approaches for the different methods.
-
Sarah Jessica Parker shares her experience as a Booker Prize judge
Sarah Jessica Parker shares her experience as a Booker Prize judge. As someone who reads a lot, this part is validating.
For me as a reader, the idea of not finishing a book, I just really, really struggle with. But with the Booker, you sort of have to adopt a brutality, because if you’re on Page 110 and you’re waiting for the book to rise ….
Occasionally when I would be reading something, I would reach out to Roddy [Doyle, the judging panel chairman] and say, “Have you touched on this book yet? Here are my feelings about it, but it’s possible I’m spot-on wrong.” And he would write back on WhatsApp and say, “You’re not, I just put that book down, too.”
-
100 years ago, an all-Black team beat the KKK on a baseball diamond
100 years ago, an all-Black team beat the KKK on a baseball diamond.
The Monrovians’ game against the KKK might have been set in motion by an open invitation that the Black team had announced in the Wichita Eagle three weeks earlier, saying they were “open for games with any team in Kansas,” according to a 2008 story by the Society of American Baseball Research.
The game, which took place 11 years before Jesse Owens would shatter the myth of white supremacy by winning four gold medals at the 1936 Nazi Olympics, provided a less-noticed dent, with the Monrovians winning, 10-8.
There was little coverage of it in the press. “Monrovians Beat K.K.K.,” ran the headline in the Wichita Eagle, in a story that was just two sentences long: “The Wichita Monrovians won from the K.K.K. team in a close and interesting baseball battle at Island Park, Sunday 10 to 8. A good sized crowd watched the colored team win the contest.”
