Friday Reading S14E15

A weekly round-up of what I’ve read and enjoyed from around the web.

I’m interested in journalism, media, technology, and nerdy things found down the back of the world wide web’s sofa. Most weeks I publish a handful of things that caught my eye – regardless of what the algorithms were pushing at me. You can subscribe to get it by email here. And if you read something odd and wonderful you think I’d enjoy, feel free to send it my way.

“Within recent memory, people who made software and hardware understood their job was to serve their customer. It was to identify a need, and then fill it. But at some point following the financial crisis, would-be entrepreneurs got it into their heads that their job was to invent the future, and consumers’ job was to go along with that invented future. In the place of problem-solving technology, companies have jumped on successive bandwagons like NFTs, the metaverse, and large language models. What these all have in common is that they are not built to really solve a market problem. They are built to make VCs and companies rich.”

So argues Elizabeth Lopatto for the Verge in a piece titled Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want

“This was one of his most advanced ‘hacks’ yet: a sophisticated plan of manipulation, which involved him being cruel, vindictive, sycophantic, even abusive. ‘I fell into this dark flow where I knew exactly what to say, and what the model would say back, and I watched it pour out everything,’ he says. Thanks to him, the creators of the chatbot could now fix the flaw he had found, hopefully making it a little safer for everyone.”

Well, I guess training people to fuck with AI is at least one example of it creating jobs rather than replacing them.

Read more here: Jamie Bartlett, The Guardian – Meet the AI jailbreakers: ‘I see the worst things humanity has produced’

Unfortunately doomscrolling out of office hours is very much part of my work routine, and I have a massive stack of unread 2000AD progs. But maybe reading this will shift the dial: The one change that worked – I swapped doomscrolling for reading comic books…

“Instead of reaching for my phone in the evenings, I picked up a comic instead. Reading them as an adult restored a sense of childlike wonder that transcended my anxieties. I found my quality of sleep started to improve. My dreams were more fanciful and less marked by the banal terrors of day-to-day life. I began to wake up feeling revitalised, free of the residual negativity from the previous night’s miserable doomscrolling.”

Read more here: Joel Harley, The Guardian – The one change that worked: I swapped doomscrolling for reading comic books

It is very difficult to take a publication like The Spectator seriously when it has happy to publish this kind of drivel which includes a factual error as part of its main premise. Rory Sutherland writes about The BBC’s shameful treatment of Top Cat but says:

“Language can be triggering. I know that from watching the BBC as a child, when two linguistic absurdities drove the seven-year-old me practically insane. One was the Blue Peter habit of referring to Sellotape as ‘sticky-backed plastic’, a phrase unspoken by anyone else in any other circumstances, except in parodies of BBC children’s programmes.”

OH MATE. THE STICKY-BACKED PLASTIC WAS FABLON NOT SELLOTAPE. OH MATE.

This week’s Guardian Thursday news quiz is its fifth birthday edition! Interrupted dinners and shows, and a salamander. Guest animal: Arnie, who was four-months-old when this picture was taken.

Enjoying Friday Reading by email? Feel free to forward it to a friend – they can sign up here. And if you’ve recently read something you think I would enjoy, do send it my way.

This is a great read from The Cutprice Guignol – “He’s in here…I can feel him”: The Murder of Philip Peters and the Case of the Denver Spider Man – about a murder in the 1940s that sounds like an episode of the X-Files – a drifter moved in to a couple’s home, murdered one of them, and then continued to live hidden there in the attic.

Having worked at Reckless Records in the 90s, I am no stranger to the music business often not being on the level. Shaad D’Souza looks at the cynical viral campaigns giving indie bands authenticity’s veneer.

When I left the cinema after watching Mother Mary on Tuesday I immediately wanted to go back in and re-watch it, despite being oddly unsure about whether I liked it. David Lowery discusses it with Nick Chen.

“Despite decades of archiving, no complete recordings of these shows exist in the archives of their original host broadcasters. We believe that copies – or fragments – of these shows could still exist. In private collections. In broadcaster vaults. On old film reels. Or even tucked away in an attic, long forgotten.”

Sound familiar? For once it isn’t me wanging on about Doctor Who, but this is a global appeal by Eurovision to hunt for what might still exist of the two missing believed wiped contests, Lugano 1956 and Copenhagen 1964.

You know I am the first person to start moaning about logins/passwords/account migration, especially in the context of football TV subscriptions thanks to still one of the maddest bits of law-making in my lifetime, the EU decision that to avoid having a monopoly and to provide competition, football competitions and leagues can’t sell themselves exclusively to one provider. The net result? The price for rights is driven up and up and as consumers you have to have multiple subscriptions across multiple platforms to get access to all your team’s matches. Moan, moan, moan. Anyway BT Sport became TNT and then that got folded into Discovery+ but now that has been moved to HBO Max and the process of migrating my account was… really fucking easy?

The Leyton Orientear – who I don’t always see eye-to-eye with – has crunched numbers on Orient’s mooted stadium expansion and come to the conclusion that:

“The Gandlerplan would increase our capacity in absolute terms by more than 20,000. Only four clubs have added more than 20,000 to their capacity in a single move before: and three of them (Arsenal, Spurs, West Ham) are our close neighbours. Now, that could indicate that North-East London is the absolute epicentre of the game with a vast reservoir of untapped demand, or it could mean that all the excess demand in the area has already been catered for. As usual, the truth is probably somewhere between the two.”

Read more here: The Leyton Orientear – Ambition Bites the Nails of Success: Orient’s new owner continues to talk big about a new stadium, but just how realistic are his goals?

A sober and clear-headed legal look at why it is taking so long to find out what has happened with Manchester City’s 115 charges.

“Perhaps the ex-footballer is particularly susceptible to this kind of radicalisation, spending pretty much their adult life in a kind of gilded cage, living by the hard uncomplicated certainties of performance and self-optimisation, before retiring and being forced to stare irrelevance squarely in the face.”

Jonathan Liew is possibly being too kind to the Jonjo Shelvey, Rickie Lambert and Matt Le Tissier’s of this world in this piece: Captain. Leader. Far-right sympathiser. John Terry joins ranks of football’s radicalised.

Friday Reading is a (usually) weekly series of recommended reads from Martin Belam, covering journalism, media and technology, and other interesting nerdy things found on the internet. It is now in its fourteenth season. Sign up here to receive it by email.