Mark Englehart Evans

What’s a tiny piece of advice that has improved your life substantially? Mine was from a chef I worked for: “taste everything twice”

Power Ballad bangers make shopper buy more. John McPhee. HTML Tags ruined literally everything. P ≠ NP... we hope. Another bucket of weird stuff in Shiny Things 28/ open.substack.com/pub/magpie…

“There’s a growing consensus that we probably won’t be able to achieve everything that we want in AI just with deep learning.” -- so... then what? meet 3DP3. This is #asingleshinything from a previous issue of my newsletter. buff.ly/45IPa7j

Lupe Fiasco's latest release is a LLM collab with Google - you read that right. New Yorker has details on boy-king Elon Musk controlling critical battleground technology and 3 more internet oddities in this issue of Shiny Things. #newsletter buff.ly/3Liinhc

Shiny sports! Magisterial Messi, Baseball in Bhutan and a bunch of unrelated shiny things from the junk drawer of the internet buff.ly/44CvsJ9

Hey Mark, what's the weirdest book you've read recently? UNDERBUGS. buff.ly/464sm1C there's an amazon review somewhere that says "this book is about termites the way the bible is about men with beards." This is #asingleshinything from a previous shiny things newsletter.

The awkward realities of digital book lending -- Private Equity, Public Good, Publishers, authors, internet activists, it's a fascinating mess. buff.ly/45oviGn

shiny questions 24 - wait what the F#*@? buff.ly/3QYmUJq

Shiny things 23 -- a bunch of links asking the hard questions. buff.ly/3DQUpoW

five tasty links exploring how to do everything: buff.ly/3YhObYH

shiny things 21/ variations on a complex topic A brief dive into the past and present of complexity Science, through resources plebes like me can understand. buff.ly/3OhpgA4

In 10 years we will remember Twitter like we think of livejournal today. Fun at the time but in retrospect WTF

Newsletter! Shiny Things 20/ everything is probably probabilistic buff.ly/3rJskND

This is truly a pile of shiny bits from the junk drawer of the internet. Oppenheimer, ultra-nerd market dynamics, a podcast about the preposterous universe and a timely reminder that eugenicists suck. Shiny things 19/ microfractures in microstructures buff.ly/3DFn9kN

Remember when we were all into sea shanties? What a weird Tuesday.

How on earth are there still Long John Silvers restaurants?

Paging @allroads

I’ve shifted my newsletter a bit - each edition will have an idea, a book, a podcast + a pile of other shiny links. Idea: What happens to aesthetics when everything must be quantified? Book: the great reclamation Podcast: Infinite Loops buff.ly/3pHDS3y

In this pile of shiny bits: "We were in a Vibes-cession, now we're in a Wage-cession" Also: Loneliness is as damaging as 15 cigarettes, another example of amazing symbiosis between fungi and fauna, and an extra grumpy product expert talks about Agile. buff.ly/3OfSdO4

It’s hard to argue against the dominant narrative: The case for carbon central banks, a brilliant essay by an old friend, grumpy professors “telling it how it is”. #keeppushingthatrock Magpie Chronicles 16/ buff.ly/3pHKMFW