Brian Willis

I can’t begin to tell you how happy this makes me. Even well maintained mid-century modern homes usually look tired after decades of use. To see one that’s fresh, and mostly true to the original design (with a few modifications here and there to comply with modern building codes) is indeed a sight to see. All the Wright trademarks are included—compression and release, natural materials left uncovered by carpet or wallpaper, and of course cement floors in Cherokee Red.

Frank Lloyd Wright died in 1959 and the American landscape is dotted with his homes and high-rises. Usonian homes like this one harken back to Herbert and Katherine Jacobs, who in the 1930’s challenged Wright to come up with more modestly priced homes for regular people. There’s a great episode of 99% Invisible about Usonian homes if you’re interested in learning all the history.

Now that it’s open for use, the River Rock House has its own website and is available for rent at the completely absurd price of US$1,341 a night. Being so close to the bright lights of Cleveland surely raises the price a bit.

This one has been kicking around on my to-do list for a while now, but I’m glad I finally got to it as part of my end-of-year purge.

Deadlock Empire is a game you can play to learn about locking and parallelisation in C#. If you’re a C# developer it’s worth your time to give it a shot. I’ve not worked with the Barrier Class before, so that was fun to learn about.

Ted Gioia writing at The Honest Broker:

The tech platforms aren’t like the Medici in Florence, or those other rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkies—because they will be the dealers.

Addiction is the goal.

I don’t have a lot to add to this great post, except to say that this worries me too. I used to read considerably more than I do now, but I find that long-form writing is hard to stick with these days.

Last year, I did a month where each day I’d set a timer for a half hour and force myself to read without distractions. I was surprised by how much I grew to resent this exercise. As the month wore on I started to dread doing it. I did make it over the finish line, but didn’t create a new daily habit as I had hoped I would.

There’s a re-wiring of our brains that’s happening here, and it’s not good for us.

Before we get into this, I’m reminded of Anton Ego’s monologue in the movie Ratatouille in which he says:

We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.

Now with that hand-wringing out of the way, let’s move on the the review of Paris Hilton’s memoir:

Now, in her early 40s, she has published a memoir, which for ephemeral, unreflective celebrities like her is usually a way of fending off imminent obsolescence. The book—ventriloquized by Joni Rodgers, who describes herself as a ‘story whisperer’—is as vapid and vaporous as the fragrances Hilton sells; all the same, archaeologists may one day consult it in the hope of understanding how and why our species underwent a final mutation into something glossily post-human.

“Ventriloquized” made me laugh out loud. It’s no surprise that most of these books were ghost-written.

On Prince Harry’s book Spare:

But for a title written explicitly in the cause of securing sympathy and understanding for its so-called author, boy, does it misfire. It’s not only that Harry is so petulant: a man who thinks nothing, even now, of complaining about the bedroom he was allotted for his summer hols in Granny’s castle. With every page, his California makeover grows less convincing.

It goes on and on like this, and shows you how much of the literary world has been hijacked by celebrities looking to advance an agenda or make a quick buck.

The AI team at Meta has announced the introduction of Cicero—an intelligent agent that plays (and usually wins) at the game of Diplomacy. For those unfamiliar, Diplomacy works like the board game Risk with an added step of negotiating in natural language at the start of each turn. Players have to coordinate and build trust with one another, which is where this development shifts from impressive to concerning.

Meta is not a particularly trustworthy company, and spending their R&D dollars on building more manipulative agents does not bode well for the rest of us. They already A/B test the life out of their products to maximise engagement, but can you imagine an AI designed to build trust with you? This would be too easy to abuse.