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Now playing: When your life is always part of your surroundings

Night Tapes - 'Drifting'
Preface - 'Palace Hotel'
Haruomi Hosono – 'Tokyo Rush'
JRMX - 'Lady (Hear Me Tonight)' (Extended Mix)
Yppah - 'R.Mullen'

Later

He was willing to do things that he knew wouldn't get huge laughs, but he loved them. I always think about how much he paid attention to language. He had this very Midwestern fondness for odd turns of phrase. [When I was head writer on "Late Night,"] we once did a bit where we had this weeklong project upgrading his desk, adding little features. The NBC crew guy was there with a power drill, and Dave said, "My dream is for 'Late Night' to get its own three-speed drill — and someday, God willing, a variable-speed drill."

It's been such a long time, and I know

I prefer new music to old but recently when Scritti Politti's Provision came up on shuffle I was shocked by how good it still sounds. Even as a fan my impression of the album at the time was that the band had defaulted to a style. Listening to it now, it feels like a fresh vein of smooth R'n'B. Recently Green Gartside spoke to John Earls about the possibility of releasing new material:

"I keep telling myself, 'Yeah, this is all going to get done,' but the problem is, I can't finish songs. Starting something new in music, that's the greatest feeling I've ever had and it happens every day. But the task of finishing a song? That's when I go, 'Oh, really, do I have to?' That's..."

And then he paused.

Starter for 13

Co-showrunner Shawn Ryan on how he teamed up with Ted Griffin for the FX show Terriers:

"We said to Ted: 'Hey, if you ever have a TV idea, come to us," Ryan recalls. "We told him that we'd love to hear it and maybe work with him on it. And after a certain amount of time, he said he did have an idea. It was very loose at the time, but he talked about classic '70s buddy movies. He also talked about The Rockford Files. I don't think he used this word, but I did — 'vibe.' He kept talking about a vibe, and he kept trying to explain [the show's] tone and how the tone was more important than the story in some ways, although the story had to be good. So I think I just said, 'Why don't you just write some pages?' And he did. A lot of the magic that was in the show was in those early pages. I just loved the writing from the beginning."

Popper

Ex-UBS commodities analyst Julien Garren on what makes AI a bubble:

"So, in summary; you can't create an app with commercial value as it is either generic (games etc), which won't sell, or it is regurgitated public domain (homework), or it is subject to copyright. It's hard to advertise effectively, LLMs cost an exponentially larger amount to train each generation, with a rapidly diminishing gain in accuracy. There's no moat on a model, so there's little pricing power. And the people who use LLMs the most are using them to access compute that costs the developer more to provide than their monthly subscriptions."

Going, going...

Patrick Modiano on the fading city:

"In Baudelaire's time the whole Carrousel area was destroyed. He wrote a poem about it ... nowadays Paris is rather aseptic and everything has become more uniform, yet there is still something strange and mysterious about certain quartiers ... I often have a sense of Paris being covered by a layer of cellophane and I feel as though my own memories have become almost imaginary. It's rather like a favourite pet – a dog or a cat – that has been stuffed and sent to the taxidermist. You recognise it, but it's no longer alive."