In this issue:

OVERWORLD:
-Fight for Humanity: Elon Vs. OpenAI-
-Mini-Stories: Israeli Soldier Rizz, Apple’s Fat Fine, You’re Full of Poison-

THE DEPTHS:
-This Style Spread Like the Plague-

“No security guard can stop a refrigerator falling off a skyscraper.”
— Jadakiss 

✦Top Trends✦

Tech

Elon vs. OpenAI, in a nutshell.

On May 25, 2015, a concerned Elon Musk emailed Sam Altman:

At the time, Google, led by Larry Page, held an overwhelming dominance in the AI space with its DeepMind project. Musk was afraid that Google did not understand the dangers of AI, and was only looking to win the dollar game.

When Musk expressed to Page his fear that “artificial intelligence systems might replace humans, making our species irrelevant or even extinct,” he didn’t feel heard. Larry called Musk a “specist.” … a racist, but for species.

That’s why, in 2015, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Greg Brockman founded OpenAI to be a…

Basically, a counterweight against Google’s rapid for-profit operation.

✦Do you see the irony?✦

A lot has happened since then. Musk has very little to do with OpenAI anymore, and today it’s the opposite of non-profit open source.

Yes, it’s a for-profit, closed-source corporation, 49% of which is owned by the world’s most valuable company, Microsoft, which invested $10B in 2023.

✦And that’s why Musk sued OpenAI and Altman last week✦

He claims that the terms upon which he founded OpenAI with Altman and Brockman have been broken. This isn’t just about legality for Musk, there’s a grander, ethical purpose: the safety of humanity.

✦Is Musk lying?✦

So Musk, the owner of a for-profit AI company (xAI) is suing a competing and more advanced for-profit AI company…

…because he claims that the latter doesn’t care enough for the good of humanity…

… so he is asking a court to force them to make their technology public, erasing their competitive advantage…

Wonder who will gain from this?

This obvious bias has led certain critics to imply that Elon’s concern for humanity is just a mask for his actual intentions: to win the AI race.

As always, time will tell.

✦Mini Stories✦

-Israeli Soldier Rizz, Apple’s Fat Fine, You’re Full of Poison-

New Rizz Identity Unlocked: Literal Warmonger.
Imagine a Vietnam soldier with a film photograph of his high school darling on the inside of his helmet - classic culture trope! The 2024 version? The soldier just has Tinder.

Israeli soldiers are attempting to up their swipe game by adding pictures of them fighting in Gaza… That means selfies with soul-stripped buildings, fit pics in the private basements of escaped Palestinians, and candid photos of ya boy sniping children.

This was brought to Western eyes as Hen Levi, an Israeli woman, started posting Tinder screenshots to Twitter. 404Media contacted Tinder about the profile, and a Tinder spokesperson said that the images “do not violate the community guidelines.”

🗓Apple just got hit with a €1.84B ticket from the EU
Regulators gonna regulate, and the EU, the world’s MVP regulator, just fined Apple for a crazy sum of €1.84B. The reason is a breach of antitrust rules in the music streaming market.

The fine is mostly focused on Apple’s “anti-steering” provisions, a system that restricts music streaming apps’ ability to tell consumers about cheaper alternatives outside the App Store.

Basically, buying subscriptions and services can be cheaper if you do it outside of the App Store, and Apple hasn’t been notifying consumers about that.

So if you didn’t know: If you’re an iOS user, always see if you can buy a subscription directly from the service on your computer/web browser first. You might save some moola.

🕺You’re probably eating chemicals that stay in your body forever.
Heard of “forever chemicals”? They’re toxic compounds that can stay in your body… forever. And they’re everywhere:

• Got a nonstick pan?

• Held a receipt recently?

• Got a stain-resistant couch?

• Been drinking the residue firefighting foams in your tap water?

All of these are exposed to PFAs (per- and polyfluoralkyl substances), which are used to treat a bunch of products to make them resistant to heat, oil, stain, grease, and water. It’s a huge family of chemicals - over 15,000 different compounds - and these days, everybody has them in their bodies.

If you want to minimize your PFA exposure: 
They’re easy to clean, but that’s the only thing good about them, so get rid of nonstick pans, they’re full of PFAs. Also, move from plastic containers to metal or glass ones. And cook with whole ingredients, as preserved foods are full of PFAs - even pizza boxes and microwave popcorn bags.

✦Quick hits✦

• Reddit is reportedly seeking a valuation of $6.5B ahead of their stock market debut.

• Dune 2 just lit up the box office - a $178 million debut worldwide, making it the biggest opening weekend of the year.

• Yikes: Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest sold $45 million worth of Coinbase shares last week. That’s 217,305 shares.

• A killer whale was seen killing a great white shark for the first time ever.

• Comme des Garçons FW24 is bananas.

• Read: The con man who sold the Eiffel Tower — twice. (3 min)

• Watch: World's shortest productivity course, actually. (6 min)

• Listen: A very, very good reimagination of Vivalvi’s Spring by Max Richter. (3 min)

THE DEPTHS

/Architecture

How Art Noveau Spread Across Europe Like the Plague, and Then Quickly Died.

Art Noveau very bluntly means “new art”. It’s a vague title, as any new art movement has technically been “new art” at some point. The vagueness ends there, however, as anything considered Art Noveau can be spotted from miles away: Floral patterns, curves, swirls, curving glass, impossibly intricate metal fencing.

A great example of these style tropes can be found in the Saint-Cyr house in Brussels, pictured below.

Yes, the late 1800s aesthetic is primarily a decorative art movement, meaning architecture, doorways, furniture, graphics, windows, and stairwells, are the places where you’re most likely to spot some Art Noveau.

The movement appeared in Belgium in the 1890s, and the idea of “new art” was a reference to attempting to find new forms, methods, shapes, and decorations. Simply something different. And how different it was, below you can see an insane take on a simple door in Brussels by Ernest Delune in 1893.

From Belgium, Art Noveau spread to France and then took over all of Europe. Its wonkiness was generally an experimental departure from the Gothic and neoclassical trends which by the end of the 1800s had become uniform across Europe.

And sometimes it’s so different that it starts looking a little alien, and sci-fi. Like the Casa Battló in Barcelona.

Oddly enough, this movement only lasted for about 20 years. It spread across Europe like the plague, but by WWI people were suddenly over it.

Well… okay, not quite. Much like a disease, Art Noveau mutated into what we today call Art Deco, a more straight-lined, stoic but still equally wonky and opulent version of Art Noveau.

Thankfully, the 20 years that Art Noveau was around were prolific and left us with some of history’s most imaginative building facades in Europe.