·
When a card is used to buy something, the shop pays a fee that goes to the cardholder’s bank. In the US the fee on a premium credit card is around 2.1% of the sale. On a debit card from a large bank it’s 0.7%. The shop recovers the fee through its prices. The bank…
·
Oliver Laxe’s Sirat is that rarest of things, a film that operates simultaneously on the senses and the soul. A father and his young son travel to a desert rave in southern Morocco searching for a missing daughter, and what begins as an offbeat road movie gradually, inexorably, transmutes into something far more primal and…
·
Product managers cite Steve Jobs, Netflix’s culture deck, or Amazon’s working backwards. I learned more from Mark E. Smith and The Fall, a post-punk band from Manchester that existed from 1976 to 2018. The Fall were the longest-running post-punk band in history, releasing 31 studio albums over 42 years. Mark E Smith was the only…
·
Someone has built a website called Just Buy Nothing that lets you browse products, add them to your basket, and checkout without actually buying anything. It’s meant to help people with online shopping addictions get their fix without spending money. The execution is clever. You can browse categories like “Home & Garden” and “Electronics,” complete…
·
Back in 2023, Andrej Karpathy said “the hottest new programming language is English“, one of those sounds-very-clever tweets that continues to pop up like a mad Auntie at a wedding propping up a family myth. Turns out the best Open English-understanding models are Chinese-developed. Hugging Face’s trending models are dominated by Chinese companies, with Alibaba’s…
·
What’s the Greatest Album of All Time? It’s an impossible question, which is precisely why it matters. The answer changes depending on your age, your heartbreak, when you first heard Pet Sounds or What’s Going On. Why should we care? Because albums are complete thoughts. They demand your attention and reward your patience. When Music…
·
The notifications arrive throughout the month like unwelcome houseguests. Netflix on the 3rd, Spotify on the 12th, Adobe on the 18th, that meditation app you opened twice on the 27th. Each ping announces another £9.99 departing your account, another small commitment made during a moment of digital optimism. These billing dates spread across the calendar…
·
The Tamagotchi teaches us more about human-AI relationships than many AI ethics paper published since ChatGPT launched. While product teams obsess over training data and model capabilities, they’re missing decades of evidence about how humans actually behave when technology makes emotional demands. Product managers keep building AI features that repeat every psychological trick perfected by…
·
There’s something perverse about watching a grown adult justify spending £150 on an album they’ve owned since 1973. We’re living in the golden age of the “super deluxe edition,” a phenomenon that transforms music fans into willing participants in their own financial exploitation whilst convincing themselves they’re preserving cultural heritage. The latest victim is Queen’s…
·
I’ve just checked my Google Photos storage. Again. There are 16.07 GB of photos accumulated since 2013. That’s twelve years of digital memories: blurry shots of meals I can barely remember eating, screenshots of things I thought were important at the time, and approximately forty-seven photos of the same sunset from different angles, as if…