On art and efficiency at the dawn of generative AI It feels like a weird and perhaps frightening time to be an artist, or to have artistic aspirations. Not long ago, it was common to imagine that the next wave of jobs to be made obsolete by machines might be so-called menial and repetitive ones…
Spotify has arrived in the US! Twitter was all abuzz when the announcement came, and lots of my friends jumped on board as soon as they could scrounge up invites. I was excited to sign up too, but then I procrastinated. And then procrastinated some more. For one thing, I have a pretty big collection…
[Disclaimer: The following post is partly a reprise of one I wrote last year] March Madness is almost here, and my workplace productivity is bound to suffer a little (don’t worry Kyte crew — I promise I’ll get all my stuff done). Selection Sunday is this weekend, and then it’s all about bracketology. I always…
The other day, I was watching – for maybe the fiftieth time – this video by sigur rós for the song “Glósóli” It’s a stunning piece of filmmaking, for a gorgeous song, but if not for YouTube, how would one find such a thing as this? MTV doesn’t show videos anymore, and a band like…
When I was a kid, my parents controlled my TV diet, and while I was hardly deprived, I was never at risk of becoming a glutton. After school each day, I was allowed to 30 minutes of TV time – enough for one show. Our TV set was a 17″ black and white with the…
Am I the only one who wants to punch my TV whenever I see Chad on those Alltel commercials? He reminds me of the pretty rich boy from every teen movie – the one who dates the popular girl, drives a fancy car and treats everyone around him like shit. It doesn’t help that the…
YouTube got a lot of flack for making a recent deal with NBC, so perhaps it was not NBC’s prerogative to lampoon it. Still, you gotta respect the network’s moxie for going head on at the controversy with this video: As long as the root cause isn’t killing anyone, this is exactly what a company…
My next deathmatch post was going to compare these two music recommendation services. I’ve used both pandora and last.fm for a little while, and I’ve been taking some notes. I love them both, but I have my favorite. Thing is, someone else already wrote such a good piece on this topic. It’s way better than…