Best of newyorker.com on Kiwi News
Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
7 stories from newyorker.com have been shared on Kiwi News since 17 April 2023, with 14 upvotes and 2 comments in total. The latest was shared on 24 April 2024. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- The Friendship That Made Google Huge
In March 2000, Google's core indexing systems had stalled for months, leaving search results five months out of date while the company negotiated a Yahoo deal that depended on a much larger index. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat found the cause in binary data: memory chips in Google's cheap, mass-produced machines were corrupting bits, and the engineers wrote code to compensate for the failing hardware. The article credits their later work, including storing the index in random-access memory and developing new encoding and compression schemes, with reshaping Google's economics and capacity, and it says the two are Google Senior Fellows, the company's first and only Level 11s.
- L.P.D.: Libertarian Police Department
This satirical short story follows a libertarian detective who will investigate the theft of $447 million in bitcoins only for a fair market rate. He chases down a suspect who confesses because he fears an economic future free of central bankers, then reveals that he is a central banker himself. The detective offers gold bullion and memorabilia as payment, and the story ends with the suspect paying him by credit card for his arrest.
- Holly Herndon’s Infinite Art
Holly Herndon and Mathew Dryhurst are experimenting with AI as a way to decentralize control over an artist's identity, using machine-learning models trained on Herndon's embedding and voice. Their project "CLASSIFIED" explored her embedding in an OpenAI neural network, producing images such as "x | o 40," generated from the prompt "A building that looks like Holly Herndon." Their Holly+ model, trained on Herndon's voice, can translate any audio into her voice and is run by a decentralized autonomous organization of "stewards," with Herndon holding a veto. Herndon describes the model as a "vocal deepfake" and her voice as an input, while Caroline Polachek says voice modelling will eventually be outside artists' control.
- How David Beats Goliath
Vivek Ranadivé coached his daughter Anjali's mostly twelve-year-old basketball team to the national championships by having them play a full-court press in every game. Political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft found that stronger sides won 71.5 per cent of wars against weaker ones over the past two hundred years, and that when weaker sides used unconventional strategies, their win rate rose from 28.5 to 63.6 per cent. The article also recounts T. E. Lawrence's campaign against the Ottoman Army in Arabia, where mobile Bedouin fighters struck the railway and took Aqaba by attacking from the desert.
- What Bluesky Tells Us About the Future of Social Media
Bluesky, a new Twitter alternative, is built on a decentralized vision that its backers say would give users control over moderation and algorithms, but the article argues that for now the platform remains largely theoretical. Bluesky runs on one central server, with no immediate timeline for switching to its federated AT Protocol model, and its "What's Hot" feed is curated from simple popularity rather than user-built algorithms. The author says the early community has been shaped by harassment fights, a viral "hellthread" of nudes and a heavy white, liberal tilt, and argues that its main appeal so far is that it is not owned by Elon Musk.
- Why you can’t get a restaurant reservation
Reservations at New York's most in-demand restaurants have become hard to get, and a growing market of resellers now sells them for profit. Pete Wells, the Times critic who gave Sailor three stars, wrote that its reservations "disappear within minutes of being offered." Jonas Frey launched Appointment Trader in July 2021, a marketplace where people buy and sell reservations, and he said it cleared almost six million dollars in reservation sales over the past twelve months. Frey takes a twenty- to thirty-per-cent commission.
- Can an Artists’ Collective in Africa Repair a Colonial Legacy?
An artists' collective in Lusanga, DR Congo, is using art sales to try to reverse the legacy of a former Unilever palm-oil plantation. The Congolese Plantation Workers Art League, founded in 2014 with about thirty local artists, makes clay sculptures that are scanned, cast in chocolate in Amsterdam, and sold mainly in European galleries; the proceeds help buy back more than two hundred acres for ecological farming. The collective has brought in more than a hundred thousand dollars, while plantation workers there earn twenty or thirty dollars a month. The project, facilitated by Dutch artist Renzo Martens, has drawn sharp criticism, including a Guardian reporter's description of Martens's aim to "gentrify the jungle" as a "sick joke."