Filet-O-Ish

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March 21st, 2022

Arby’s called Pusha T, who already had ba-da-ba-ba-beef with the food clown, and asked “What if the beef was fish?” And so Pusha T made the beef fish. On my first listen to Pusha’s newly released (deep breath) Filet-O-Fish diss track, I thought “that’s actually not too bad” but then I listened to it a second time and realized it sucks, so my advice would be to listen to this exactly once and then never think about it again:

Fish is just one of the many things you still can’t buy using Bitcoin in El Salvador, report Anna-Cat Brigida and Leo Schwartz, who checked in on how the Central American nation’s big crypto experiment is going for Rest of World (it’s going bad). Other things you can’t buy with Bitcoin include: everything else. Edward Ongweso Jr. went to SXSW and found a bunch of rainbow crypto vomit that literally no one involved seemed to believe in. Even newsletter DAO jpeg mogul Kyle Chayka pointed out in Dirt today that Bored Ape Yacht Club’s big $APE coin launch is just another in the failed legacy of “vague ICOs, which already peaked c. 2018.” Erin Kissane says that Omicron is probably coming back. The goblin space program is canceled. For St. Patrick’s Day, Bono wrote “three maudlin limericks in a trench-coat” about Ukraine and then Nancy Pelosi read them to introduce Riverdance, reports Aaron Bady in Gawker’s first good post. And in a paper for Nature Machine Intelligence, a team of researchers working on drug discovery AI reported that they were able to generate 40,000 new chemical warfare agents by turning their model’s “don’t kill people“ switch to “actually, do kill people.” I’m not lovin’ it!

It took me a while to read this Input story about “TropeTrainer” because I kept thinking it was about TvTropes and I couldn’t risk crossing the event horizon of the internet’s most powerful time-suck. But S.I. Rosenbaum actually wrote a beautiful profile of Thomas Buchler and his Torah chant training software:

But the software wasn’t just a study aid—it was a deep archive of sacred text and music, comprising dozens of different traditions, made easily searchable and infinitely customizable.

With Buchler’s death in 2019, and Microsoft and Apple deprecating the only platforms TropeTrainer still ran on, it looked as though the software Buchler dedicated his later life to developing might be dead too. But after the story was published, Jes Wolfe figured out how to run it on virtualized hardware, and Andy Baio wrote a three step how-to that fit in one tweet: “Took me about 10 minutes,” lol. Now TropeTrainer sings again:

Bill McKibben has a long New Yorker article with the unfortunately scoldy title “In a World on Fire, Stop Burning Things.” But it’s not another lecture about your carbon footprint, it’s actually a restatement of the climate crisis from a thicket of hopelessly interconnected global systemic changes to the fairly straightforward goal “stop burning things,” and then a lot of evidence that we could just… do that. Right now.

The more data sets that [Doyne] Farmer’s team members included, the more robust numbers they got, and by the autumn of 2021 they were ready to publish their findings. They found that the price trajectories of fossil fuels and renewables are already crossing. Renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuel, and becoming more so. So a “decisive transition” to renewable energy, they reported, would save the world twenty-six trillion dollars in energy costs in the coming decades.

I guess let’s do that, then, yeah? Seems good.

Poached:

Also Noreen Malone went to NYT Style from Slate, a publication which is still “definitely not in any kind of a crisis.” Definitely in some kind of a crisis is global food production. More like won’t Butler. As many guessed, Caroline Calloway did not move out of her apartment voluntarily, but did reach unparalleled levels of goblin mode. And the big boat is still stuck, currently being dug out by the same company the dug out the other big stuck boat. I love this for all of us.

Today’s Song: The Radio Dep’t, “Heaven’s on Fire”

~ The tabs I mean, no one has seen them made or heard them made, but at spring mending-time we find them there. ~

Does Pusha T know his name looks like "Pus Hat?" I tweet @fka_tabs and @TodayinTabs. Thanks to unsquare from the subscriber Discord for today’s song. Thanks to Robert Frost for being America’s most misunderstood poet. Thanks to you for reading the whole signoff. Registered at the post office as “the exact discourse I recommend against reading.”

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