Aggregated Notes on the Annotated Commentary

Our moment! I'm so concerned about our moment.

January 24th, 2023

Every night, when I wake at 3am drenched in cold sweat, the thing that woke me is the fear that one day I’ll write something that Molly White takes a very personal and detailed interest in reading closely, the way she previously took an interest in Kevin Roose’s work and has now taken an interest in what Sam Bankman-Fried had to say for himself in his recent ill-advised newslettering début:

Side by side annotation screenshot. SBF writes: “In mid November, FTX International became effectively insolvent. The FTX saga, at the end of the day, is somewhere between that of Voyager and Celsius.” which Molly annotates just the first sentence with: “It's probably a bad sign that SBF is starting right out the gate with a blatant lie. He is—once again—claiming that everything at FTX was just fine until disaster struck in November. In reality, November was when the general public learned that FTX had been insolvent for a while,1 2 propping up its balance sheet with illiquid tokens they themselves had created and extending loans of billions of dollars of customer assets to Alameda Research…” It goes on for longer than I’m allowed to put in an image description, please click through to read the whole thing.

Also Today in Mollies, Molly Fischer elegantly allowed Pamela Paul to roast herself for The New Yorker. After gushing “I don’t know who’s funnier than Amy [Schumer],”

Paul told me that she’s sometimes disappointed by readers’ failure to recognize humor. “There was this one instance where I wrote a piece looking at the downside of losing masks, and I said, ‘Without having masks, you’re not going to be able to politically pigeonhole people in five seconds or less,’ ” she recalled. “Some people were, like, ‘I think it’s really wrong to politically pigeonhole people.’ ” She attributes this disconnect to the tenor of public discourse: “Our moment is so humorless,” she said.

Our Moment! Our Moment Is So Humorless And I’m Also Scared About Our Moment. Mindy Kaling apparently thought our moment needed cartoon characters that “constantly pause the action to call out and summarize narrative tropes rather than letting the story unfold,” wrote Shirley Li in her Atlantic review of the truly abysmal “Velma.” Andy Baio recovered a political tv clip that everyone of A Certain Age remembers but had apparently been lost to internet history: the Bill Clinton “boxers or briefs” moment. And sensing their moment of culture-war attention might be waning, M&Ms attempted to juice it one more time by declaring Maya Rudolph their new spokescandy.

Holy Fucking Bingle: NationuWu secuWuity was (allegedly) compromised by programmer and tumblr-blog-aesthetic ”tiny kitten” maia arson crimew who got bored one night and went looking for exposed Jenkins servers in Zoomeye, eventually finding a development server that contained the TSA No-Fly list, cleverly named “NoFly.csv.”

the nofly csv is almost 80mb in size and contains over 1.56 million rows of data. this HAS to be the real deal (we later get confirmation that it is indeed a copy of the nofly list from 2019).

holy shit, we actually have the nofly list. holy fucking bingle. what?! :3

If you’re a journalist who’d like to dig into this carefully-sourced and no doubt legally defensible list of names, you can request access here.

Very occasional media newsletterer Daniel Stone is back with an investigation into whether FT could possibly be correct in its 2018 reporting that “every partner [at “the esteemed law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore”] is entitled to a procession of past and present partners at their funeral, after which the assembled lawyers chant: ‘The partner is dead, the firm lives.’” (Spoiler: no, but it’s interesting where it probably came from.)

Toot by Sarah Kite reading “nightmare hands clasped meme” with a meme image of one hand shaking a thing that looks like an arm segment with a hand-like appendage on each end, the other end of which is also shaking another hand, all labeled like an “epic handshake” meme in which “humans on psychedelics” and “AI” shake hands over being “unsure of how any fingers people are supposed to have.”

Cory Doctorow wrote a grand unified theory of “platform enshittification.” Speaking of enshittified platforms, former Tweetbot developer Tapbots tapped out of Twitter entirely after being arbitrarily banned by Elon Musk, and have just released the first official build of their Mastodon client Ivory. I’ve been using the testflight beta for a few weeks, and it’s good. Please leave Twitter, it’s harming your soul. Also here’s a list of handy Mastodon digest tools and utilities—if you miss Nuzzel, try Quintessence.

Having first discovered that CNET was secretly posting AI-written articles, and then discovering that those articles were also full of basic mistakes, Futurism now reports that the error-riddled AI articles are also heavily plagiarized. Every part of this genuinely rules and I hope they never stop finding new depths to this nonsense.

Katie Notopoulos reports that the “‘Trad Life’ Carnivore Influencer” Carnivore Aurelius is not Caeleah Taylor. The Buzzfeed story is very light on corroborating evidence but I trust Katie to know her job. That leaves us with an anonymous (but allegedly male) liver-chip peddler who outsources the “operations of [his] e-commerce business” so he has plenty of time to post RETVRN memes using stolen images of blonde women. Seems legit!

Toot by @ves@mastodon.online: “Layoffs:Google - 10,000 (market cap $1.3T, Q3 2022 profit $13.9B)Microsoft - 10,000 (market cap $1.8T, Q2 2022 profit $34.6B)Amazon - 18,000 (market cap $992B, Q2 2022 profit $16.7B)Salesforce - 8,000 (market cap $151B, Q2 2022 profit $5.6B)Facebook - 1,000 (market cap $365B, Q2 2022 profit $22B) None of those companies are even close to struggling and yet they'll throw people to the wolves.”

Tabs Senior Contributing Editor and Intern Emeritus Bijan Stephen, who relentlessly refuses to stop doing inspiring creative work, made a space-emo text game on Itch.io called “Turn Out The Lights.” It’s really great, and your robot companion sounds like Artemis, so I’m considering it part of the larger Fun City Cinematic Universe.

Today’s Song: "SHINIE (Escha & Ytem Remix)” by Varg2™ & Bladee

My internet at home has been out most of the last three days THANKS SPECTRUM so I apologize for missing yesterday, being very late today, and generally being even less focused than normal, if that’s possible. Tune in tomorrow to see if Tabs continues to exist or if I have gone permanently and involuntarily off the grid.

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