Friday Links

Friday, December 02, 2022

I skipped last week’s links post because it was the Thanksgiving holiday, and also I didn’t really have anything to share.

  • Netflix apparently wants to be a game studio. I suppose I get why every company is focused on growth, but I kind of miss the days when Netflix was just DVDs, or even DVDs-but-streaming.
  • Jeffrey Funk, et al., have a long article titled Web3, the Metaverse, and the Lack of Useful Innovation—and mostly it does what it says on the tin. Here’s a nice quote: “Our question is whether newly hyped technologies, like the Metaverse, Web3, and blockchain have any chance of changing this basic picture [of economic precariousness and hardship]. There are many reasons to be skeptical that they can.”
  • I was going to link to an article Bobby Harrison published in Mississippi Today about how gerrymandering lowers voter turnout. I think that’s probably true—at least in Mississippi, and at least in the modern era—but the article was so bad, I was going to fisk it anyway. But I couldn’t really devote the time to it, and now it’s been nearly a month since the article was published, so I give up. Long story short, though: don’t publish opinion pieces as “analysis” if you don’t want to irritate me.
  • Justin Gohl put up a translation (and notes at least one difficulty in translation) of Eusebius’ commentary on the Odes of Ascents (Psalms 119–133 LXX).