Nilay Patel
Honestly, this is a work of art.
Apple has long loved unlabeled chip performance charts, but this chart from the M4 iMac intro video claiming a faster chip can make you 1.7x more productive in Excel is incredible.
Nilay Patel
Editor-in-Chief
Editor-in-Chief
More From Nilay Patel
An endorsement of democracy, solving problems, and Kamala Harris.
Nilay Patel
The Airbnb cofounder discusses being ‘in the details’ and why traditional management is doing it wrong.
Nilay Patel
Nilay Patel
“Everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t know how anything works.”
Mike Masnick riffs on this excellent Hank Green video about ballot design and lands the best shot at “first principles thinking” I’ve read in a while:
Elon Musk, somewhat incredibly, seems to lack the basic intellectual curiosity to ever try to seek out why something is the way it is. He always assumes he can somehow “reason from first principles” as to why things are the way they are. This makes him ever more susceptible to the dumbest fucking conspiracy theories around. He’s constructed for himself a media environment mostly designed to reinforce those biases, rather than challenge them.
Worth a read!
Nilay Patel
Wonder is the weirdest kind of fast food delivery.
Our friends at New York peek into Wonder, the rapidly-expanding fancy food hall / delivery app that partners with fancy chefs and restaurants to bring their signature dishes to more locations. The back-end is, well, food kits?
Once items make it to the larger menu, they’re prepped in a centralized commercial kitchen in New Jersey and sent daily, mostly as kits, to Wonder’s stores, where everything is finished to order. (Not for nothing, Wonder acquired the meal-kit service Blue Apron last year.) It’s not heat-and-eat, as Blue Apron is, or even reheated, Wonder’s CMO, Daniel Shlossman, assured me, but it is true that all of the finishing can be done in the restaurants’ all-electric kitchens by non-chef staffs, which are outfitted with quick-cooking ovens, hot-water baths, and electric fryers. There are no flames in Wonder kitchens.
One the one hand: brilliant. On the other: weird!
Wonder Is Everywhere, But What Is It?
[Grub Street]
The latest AI manifesto, from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, says a lot about the industry’s current moment.
Nilay Patel
Nilay Patel
Egregious!
Here’s a video clip of my Decoder exchange on tax lobbying with Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi that the company called “egregious” and “disappointing” and asked us to delete. Fair warning: it’s a TikTok so it’s edited, but you can listen to the entire unedited clip on the pod this week.
Nilay Patel
How will Tom Brady call NFL games without being able to criticize the officials?
In what feels like a preview of the influencer media problems of tomorrow, Touchdown Tom is now both the lead analyst for Fox and a part-owner of the Raiders. He’s still allowed to call Raider games for some reason, but part of the NFL’s overall solution to the obvious conflict of interest issues is to bar Brady from criticizing officiating during games. The Athletic asked a number of sports TV producers for their read on it:
The producers also noted something interesting: You will have people actively listening specifically for whether Brady says something critical about another franchise or officials. The converse, too. People will evaluate whether he is intentionally avoiding what is in front of him. That’s a mess for everyone.
“You have to at least know you have the freedom to share your opinion about officiating,” said a veteran NFL broadcaster who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “These are split-second decisions on air. You can’t ponder whether the league will be happy.”
Brady calling Chiefs / 49ers this afternoon; we’ll see how he handles it.
Nilay Patel
“To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid.”
That’s a federal judge ordering Ron DeSantis’ deeply weird surgeon general to stop threatening local TV stations with criminal proceedings if they air an ad in support of Amendment 4, which would restore abortion rights in the state. At least one station stopped airing the ad, but the judge in the cast issued a temporary injunction, saying
By threatening criminal proceedings for broadcasting a “political advertisement claiming that current Florida law does not allow physicians to perform abortions necessary to preserve the lives and health of pregnant women,” Defendant has engaged in viewpoint discrimination.
DeSantis sure does love going to court to learn about the First Amendment!