#mint / Here’s a feel good story, especially if you're into comics.

“A Metro Detroit father kept a secret for 50 years, but now his son is on a journey to uncover the truth. And what he found is one of the largest and most valuable comic book collections in the country."

The story will be told in an upcoming documentary called, “Selling Superman.”

There is a 40-year hidden family secret that only a few people knew about. Darren’s father had Asperger’s (ASD) and it led him to collect comic books in a genius yet obsessive way that overtook the home, destroyed the family, and caused everyone great mental trauma.

Now, after his father’s passing, Darren is left with a holy grail collection of over 300,000 comic books - including the prized possession of his father: Superman #1 (7.0) valued at over $3.5 million - making it one of the most valuable comic books of all time.

He didn’t just collect comics but also toys and trading cards and unlike anyone at the time, bought multiple copies of everything. Watch the trailer to get a glimpse of a staggering collection of 80’s Star Wars toys mint-in-box—as they say.

#Indieweb / “How to take back control of what you read on the Internet.”

The Atlantic makes the case for RSS.

As long as we rely on social-media sites to curate what we read, we allow them to control what we read, and their interests are not our interests. Fortunately, there already exists a long-standing alternative that provides users with what social media does not deliver: RSS.

There’s a lot of anger towards Elon for what he’s doing to Twitter, but lets not forget the damage Google did when they turned off their RSS reader. We’ve lost a too much freedom, independence, and curiosity to corporate algorithms.

#hacking / The Confessions of Marcus Hutchins, the Hacker Who Saved the Internet.

Fantastic hacker story from Wired via Waxy.

#byebye / Boeing has delivered the last 747.

Thousands of Boeing workers, suppliers, and customers gathered in Everett Tuesday to send off the jet maker’s final 747 to customer Atlas Air.

The first version of the plane took flight in 1969, followed quickly by larger passenger and freighter variants. Ultimately, Boeing designed nine commercial versions of the 747 model, which was an intercontinental travel trailblazer capable of carrying 400 or more passengers

Fifty four years! The only other vehicle I can think of with such longevity is the Volkswagen Beatle which began production in 1938, and it’s still in production. What a fantastic achievement of engineering and ingenuity.

#rif / Identifying as someone who categorically rejects books suggests a much larger deficiency of character.

When reading a book becomes an issue, that’s when I really start worrying about the future.

#hal / OpenAI paid Kenyan workers less than $2 per hour to make ChatGPT less toxic.

From Time magazine:

The work was vital for OpenAI. ChatGPT’s predecessor, GPT-3, had already shown an impressive ability to string sentences together. But it was a difficult sell, as the app was also prone to blurting out violent, sexist and racist remarks. This is because the AI had been trained on hundreds of billions of words scraped from the internet—a vast repository of human language. That huge training dataset was the reason for GPT-3’s impressive linguistic capabilities, but was also perhaps its biggest curse. Since parts of the internet are replete with toxicity and bias, there was no easy way of purging those sections of the training data. Even a team of hundreds of humans would have taken decades to trawl through the enormous dataset manually.

By “toxic and bias” what they really mean is content that “described situations in graphic detail like child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest.”

Perhaps $2 per hour is a lot in Kenya, but that’s no excuse for exploiting people. And given the absolute cesspool that OpenAI asked these workers to sift through, they should have included additional hazard pay.

#hal / ChatGPT Will Disrupt McKinsey Before it Disrupts Google.

Greg Larkin shares an interesting insight on the future of companies like McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and Bain & Company. Or as he calls them, the “Term Paper Industry.

ChatGPT will emerge as a viable first draft for people who need better answers than what the Term Paper Industry historically offers. I believe that when they seek an outside perspective for a complex problem they will build a baseline hypothesis of the current state using Chat GPT, and will then pressure test the results by seeking out the actual ‘experts’ whose insights stem from years of hard-earned trial and error. This will lead to defections from the term paper companies. These defections will first be small, but will then become large and irreversible, and eventually lead to large scale fragmentation in management consulting, and investment banking.

Using AI to generate a hypothesis of the current state is intriguing, especially if it’s paired with design labeled (I’m totally rolling my eyes as I type this) practices like “design research” and “design thinking.”

#hal / Something in the Way: AI-Generated Images and the Real Killer.

A moving perspective from a successful cover illustrator:

Machine-driven narrative will get better and better as the taste for popular narrative gets more and more watered down. And again, it won’t necessarily be because the AI does better work than working visual artists and writers, but because the audience settles for accepting the mass convenience of “good enough,” drowning out the need for quality of content. Audiences cherish convenience over quality. It’s what drives our ethos, at least here in the U.S. No reason to believe people are suddenly going to wake up and change.

The arrival of AI generated-images (and how industry chooses to use it) goes far beyond what happened upon the advent of photography or even Photoshop. This is NOT the same conversation. AI is a tidal shift from the center of human context that defines meaning. We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto. Choose your yellow brick road very wisely, folks.

“Good enough” is the perfect description for AI content. Paired with the Internet, you have the right combination to placate a majority of the population—either by personal choice or class discrimination. Which means AI is the Walmartification of the Internet.