Fatally Ratatouille'd At Hudson Yards

If you’re like most people nowadays, whenever you’re not perusing your local Tronc newspaper you’re probably telling someone “MAX is the place to watch HBO,” as Mattie Lubchansky cogently observed. “We're saying it constantly and we all understand it. soon we will be saying ‘X is the app to look at twitter.’ it's simple.” There’s nothing closer to a sure bet in the media world than a sudden rebrand, and with a day to become accustomed to Twitter’s new “X” logo, it’s not surprising that most commentators have come to agree with Techcrunch’s Darrell Etherington, who wrote “Here’s why Elon Musk’s rebranding of Twitter to ‘X’ is good, actually,” or Senior Shape Rotator Stella Bugbee in the New York Times, who explained that X is a letter with both a shape and a history. In fact Joshua Benton suggested several more possible rebrands, from The New York Times' analog transformation into “-” (pronounced “hyphen”) to Vox ditching the Vo- and just becoming x (lower-case x, no copyright intended).

Who knows what VICE might be called when it emerges from bankruptcy, but for now its brand remains consistent and well exemplified by Samantha Cole’s report “This Thought-Controlled Sex Toy Lets You Masturbate With Your Mind.” I don’t like to brag but my mind has always been involved. Anyway the device definitely works: Mike Allen tried it once and immediately wrote the horniest Walter Isaacson/Elon Musk slashfic I’ve ever seen.

Isaacson, making a strong bid to retake the title of “tech journalism’s most credulous nitwit” from the lately-resurgent David Pogue, reports that Musk’s plan is to "transform journalism by offering an alternative to subscription models, where people can just make easy payments for whatever strikes their fancy." Easy payments, eh? Maybe… small payments even? We could call them something like… minipayments? Tinycharges? I don’t know, we’ll workshop it. Incredible that no one has ever thought of this before.

Speaking of tech villains, here’s cartoonishly evil surveillance tycoon Alex Karp in the New York Times arguing that we must continue building AI, because much like nuclear weapons development, it will probably destroy humanity. His evidence for this is recent AI improvements like:

If you’re not sure how AI development resembles nuclear weapons development, The Times has helpfully provided a chart showing that in both cases something got bigger over time, sort of:

If you’re not sure how stacking objects leads to humanity’s demise, I have created the following graphic to explain that:

And if you’re not sure why Karp thinks AI being on track to destroy humanity means we should keep building it, you must not know anything about Silicon Valley brain. If AI is going to destroy humanity it better hurry because some climate researchers from Denmark believe that “The Day After Tomorrow” could be arriving in the next couple years. At least we won’t die of subway water-drip poisoning, according to Woman in STEM Clio Chang, but internet conspiracy mongers do believe that we could be fatally Ratatouille’d like Clinton’s and Obama’s private chefs. We might also be crushed by the sheer volume of Cheech & Chong weed gummy ads on Twitter or lost in the Indian Ocean gravity hole. But with the collapse of FTX has gone the last, best hope for humanity’s survival: huddling in a phosphate mine on the wholly-owned FTX subsidiary nation of Nauru with Sam Bankman-Fried and whatever effective altruists he finds fuckable enough to save.

Finally: Hudson Yards is New York City’s Weird Tourist Experience Zone, where you can stand on a glass floor one hundred stories above Manhattan, or dress up like Devo and dangle from a harness even higher up the same tower. You can see an art show under a teflon shell that looks like an eight million pound balloon sculpture of a tardigrade. Or you could visit a public artwork and **** yourself. If you told me there was an underground roller coaster or a family-style sex dungeon at Hudson Yards, I would believe you immediately. Dada Drummer’s Damon Krukowski visited the “Sonic Sphere,” yet another thing that Hudson Yards has for some reason, and found that:

Normal Hudson Yards stuff!

Today’s Song: Blackbird Spyplane talked to Dominic “Elliot from Euphoria” Fike about 90’s stuff today. Here’s Dominic Fike ft. Weezer from his new album “Sunburn,” with “Think Fast.”

Music Intern Sam reports that the album “didn't hit for me” but that “I hear the kids like it.” Personally I enjoyed it. If you listen to it, let us know what you think. Between the Season Eight playlist and the collected Seasons Four through Seven playlist we’re at well over four hundred songs of the day by now! If you found just thirty five of them enjoyable, would you consider tipping us $1 per song? I know I would.