Heartcrossings

Interesting list but not sure what to make of the word "important" here. Important to whom? The cucumber recipe that was all the rage in 2024 was something even I became aware of earlier in the year - without ever having seen the video or having a TikTok account. Suddenly everyone I ever talked to about food was talking about this cucumber salad. Each person had their own take on it but the foundation was this salad. Garam Masala is featured gets on the list in 1973 thanks to Madhur Jaffery.  Presumably that was year when Indian food found its place in the world. Reading through the list got me thinking about each person's list of top twenty five foods at various stages of their life. There would be a time when they would not even be able to come up with five lacking age and experience. Hopefully there is also that other point in life where twenty five seems incredibly small to cover the full list of loves. Some items would stay in the list forever others could come and g...

This interview was a good read. Loved how streaming is compared to be fed instead of going on a hunt to find something special ..when I was a teenager, I took the train to go to the record store to find rare stuff. Spotify is way more convenient, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out and to feel like you’re hunting, to feel like you’re living your life. I’m going to the movies, I’m going to this show. What streaming has done—it’s very convenient, but it’s taken the feeling of going hunting and turned it into we’re all just being fed. We’re all farm animals that are just being fed, and we’re being fed content. You can just stay home.  Just stay home. We’ll just feed it to you.  No wonder everyone’s depressed. A few days ago at dinner with with a couple of old friends, we got chatting about the first LP or cassette tape we ever owned. Everyone has a story - that event is so memorable that it can be recalled effortlessly decades later. Today, no such "first" occur...

 It seems great than an interpreter app can translate your speech in one language to another while still sounding like. Magically, a person can speak several dozen languages fluently. As a parlor trick this is great but not sure of the value beyond that given the many things that could go wrong. Impersonation and deep-fake opportunities abound. More fundamentally, people will lose desire and motivation to learn a new language, if there is such a lazy and easy alternative. The app will broker the conversation as it sees fit with both parties coming into it blind.  Learning a language is an transformative experience - a person goes from basic competency to fluency and being able to pick up on nuance and subtle humor. It is like being able to go through an obstacle course with each step providing greater clarity and freedom. With such tools, those joys will become artifacts of the past - everyone will speak like a native right from the start. Having struggled to learn new langua...