|
 A lot of my posts are basically links to other stuff I found interesting, maybe with a pithy comment or two. I assume you and others find these fun, and I've characterized my role in bringing these to you as "the Ole Filter". Obviously if I passed everything through it would be too much. I may be moving in that direction :) Now adjusting filter granularity...
The 2023 505 World Championship is in San Francisco this year, and I am planning to go. How - in which boat, with which crew, and whether I am accepted to sail - is yet to be determined. But in 2021 I sailed in the J/70 and Moth worlds, and this year in the J/70 Worlds in Monaco (!), so I have hope.
Oh yeah, this picture is a 505 racing sailboat :) - 505 centimeters long, or about 16', a two-person racing dinghy which has been around since time zero but remains a wonderful boat to sail and race.
 News you can use: The World's 50 Best Restaurants. Aka, my bucket list. I have not dined at any of them, although I've been in many of those cities and have enjoyed many of their competitors... #1 is Geranium in Copenhagen. So be it! 
 A contest: you pick a word, change one letter to make a new one, and add the definition. OMG is this hilarious. My favorite is Sarchasm. (click to enbiggen...)
Mark Suster: Praying to the God of Valuation. In which people often built companies to do something, and only incidentally to make money, and often did anyway, but now it's just all about money and many companies do not do anything. At all. It's great to read that the pendulum is swinging back.
 Wired: The year the NFT died and came back to life. Crypto - I don't get it. Yeah, I get how it works - probably better than most - but I don't understand why you need blockchains and crypto protocols to associate value to digital assets. Alternate headline: "the year the crypto emperor was revealed to be naked". Anyway...
From Instapundit: The 21st Century is stupid. In which a Norwegian actress faces 3 years in prison for saying men can't be lesbians.
Chris Dixon interviews Bob Iger, the ex- and now again CEO of Disney. I just read his book, Journey of a Lifetime, and found it to be most interesting. The people stuff is so fascinating, imagine doing deals with Steve Jobs, Stan Lee, and George Lucas...
 Essential travel tips for the Holidays ... if you're visiting The Shire, Hogwarts, Endor, Emerald City, Westeros, etc.
 Wow! That's just about all I can say about this picture of Nasa's Orion spacecraft, with the Moon and the Earth in the background. This is not CGI (at least, I don't think so). Oh yeah, click to enbiggen.
Joel Spolsky reports: Progress on the Block Protocol. A year into his project to define an API for incorporation of "blocks" into websites, essentially, ways to display and interact with specific types of data. Who would underestimate Joel - after Fogdogs and Stack Overflow (and oh-by-the-way Citydesk, the venerable publishing tool I still use for this blog) - but this seems like a tough problem.
 Gerard Vanderleun: the Gift of the WalMagi. In this rerun of a great old post, he revisits the incredible efficiencies of value chains and scale which enable a great winter jacket to be made in China and sold at Walmart in the US ... for $7. It is truly amazing. And of course now you can get that same coat delivered to your door by Amazon :)
 Still think the NYTimes are respectable journalists? Here's their crossword puzzle last Sunday, the first day of Hanukkah. They actually denied it was a swastika. What can you say?
 Via Instapundit: Happy Hanukkah.
AI-based information management tools like DALL-E and OpenGPT have been in the news lately, but the impact of AI on Robotic services is even more profound. Combine this with the counterproductive efforts to raise minimum wages for people, and we get: Robots at McDonalds and Robots cleaning your hotel room. And if you can't roboticize, you might have to go out of business.
 And finally, some truly important news you can use: How to track Santa on Christmas Eve. I'll be using the NORAD tracker as always, and maybe even blogging about it :)
BTW that picture at the top came from Facebook, and I would love to link to the post, but, I can't. Weird that Facebook became so popular despite not having this capability. But I wonder how much more popular it would have been if it had it?
| 
