570: trauma reads, the Deepseek crash, and meme linguistics
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Las Terrenas is the next beach town over from Cabarete with an international airport, except this one has nonstops from France, not Germany and Spain. So everything here is in French, with French retirees and business owners and whatnot. Seems the DR is the Caribbean all in one island, with distinct European powers laying claim.
Go there or to the Samana peninsula only if you’re really into gorgeous beaches, on which it delivers 100%. Anything by the Mosquito brand in town is worth a visit - the hotel, art bar, restaurant, and beach bar.
I also finished A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, which is probably the book I have read the most avidly that I do NOT recommend unless you are a trauma voyeur.
The beautiful writing sucked me in at first and there were a few choice life lesson paragraphs in there but the protagonists complete unwillingness to help himself in adulthood despite all his resources, coupled with the authors sadistic desire to continue putting him through hell, turned the book into a traumatic un-empathetic slog I was speed skimming just to get to the unsatisfying end.
Technology
The big news this week was Deepseek, the Chinese AI made for $5M (pennies) that outperforms the latest version of ChatGPT.
This pierced the AI bubble and crashed most US stocks last week, because it raises questions about how well the US AI giants can defend their models against upstarts here and abroad. Atrioc broke it all down comprehensively in this video.
Orai is a speech coach that listens to you talk and gives you feedback on filler words, conciseness, and so on.
Apple released Invites, which is a Partiful clone. But it won’t be as good because it won’t play nice with Android users, so Partiful may be safe.
Ideologies
Via reader Geo, this deep dive with a viral Harvard linguist was fun. Apparently ‘bae’ and ‘fam’ already mark me as an out of touch millenial. D:
And in social media times, people will use certain terms because they know the algorithm likes them, which in turn popularizes those terms. Fascinating!
This Within Reason channel looks promising too - theology major explores culture war topics.
Memes
This content creator reviews old movies and cracks decent jokes about how poorly they’ve aged, which is a winning formula and an eye opening view into where the Overton window was those days.