Hey friends, welcome back to Follow Friday! This week, we’re talking about contact sharing, robot elephants, When Harry Met Sally, and more. But first, here are some AI-generated ducks living out their hoop dreams:
I’m going to leave it all on the court today, because programming note: Follow Friday will be off next week. If all goes according to plan, I’ll be back in your inbox on Friday, October 18.
🍎 And now, a lil rant about privacy
In the New York Times this week (gift link), Kevin Roose spotlights a change Apple made in iOS 18 that I literally can’t believe is only happening now, in 2024: When an app asks to access your contacts — you know, the names, phone numbers, email addresses, and maybe physical addresses of literally everyone you’ve ever met — you’ll now have the option to not share all of that information in one tap.
“iOS has allowed users to give apps selective access to their photos for years,” he writes. “Shouldn’t the same principle apply to their contacts?” YES. All-or-nothing sharing is only good for businesses, not for users.
Apple’s laziness affected me personally this year, when I joined WhatsApp to talk to family members overseas. I don’t trust Meta and declined to give it access to all of my contacts, which makes the app WAY less convenient to use: I can type in other people’s numbers, and they can type in mine, but I can’t label anyone’s number with that person’s name. If anyone messages me 1:1, I have to hope their picture shows me who they are, and/or just memorize their phone number. This is so shitty and I’ve been mad about it for seven (7) months.
Kevin acknowledges that Apple’s long overdue change to contact-sharing will, unfortunately, benefit incumbents like Meta, who already have all of your contacts, while new social apps won’t be able to scale as quickly. I say Apple should be bolder and let you revoke every app’s access to your contacts in one tap. Make everyone start over!
📰 What I’m reading
When dead relatives become AI slop: “Our memories have become forever digital debris to be sucked in, digested, and reanimated by machine learners. Our lives, our dead, and their data are becoming a kind of digital compost. Maybe it’s a bit like a woodland burial? Well, except no, it’s not anything like that. We are not vegetable scraps, and no trees will grow from my father’s online remains.”
Robot elephants for Hindu temples: “The animatronic, which cost almost $6,000 to build, is part of a limited campaign by PETA and another animal rights organization, Voices for Asian Elephants, to demonstrate how robot elephants can replace real ones, minimizing cruelty to animals and risks for humans.”
The Onion endorses Joe Biden: “Joe Biden may be young by Washington standards, but he’s packed a lot into 81 short years. He’s fought hard for working Americans, be they on the factory line or on the board of Blackstone Group. He’s stood up to everyone who threatened this great nation, from Vladimir Putin to Anita Hill. And he supports women and minorities, based on that seemingly random lady he chose to be his vice president.”
Confessions of a prison librarian: “We did not keep detailed circulation information and incarcerated people shared books off the record, so I usually could not deduce whom these treasures belonged to. Mementos languished, waiting for someone to send a frantic message over the electronic kiosk, hoping to recover the photo of their little girl. I could not help with many of the problems people face in jail, but I could provide small kindnesses that made me feel lighter amidst the heaviness of the place.”
Smart glasses are creepy and you shouldn’t buy them: “‘To use it, you just put the glasses on, and then as you walk by people, the glasses will detect when somebody’s face is in frame,’ the video says. ‘After a few seconds, their personal information pops up on your phone.’” Sorry for the second tech privacy rant, but like, facial recognition and recording people surreptitiously are two features that a lot of people expect and want from smart glasses. Hackers will always find a way to enable them, as they did here with the Meta/Ray-Ban smart glasses. Although there are great industrial applications for AR, I think anyone who wears these things in public is a creep until proven otherwise.
🎧 What I’m listening to
Via Podcast the Newsletter, I’m really enjoying a new podcast called Love, Factually, which applies the science of romance to famous rom-coms. Professors Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel kick it off, of course, with Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally, which might be my favorite movie of all time (thanks, Emily). Although its famous big thesis — that men and women can never be friends — is a work of convenient fiction, the hosts discovered a lot of truth in everything from Harry and Sally’s friends-to-lovers journey to “I’ll have what she’s having.”
I know I literally told you to go listen to Question Everything two weeks ago, but the latest episode is even better than the already-excellent series premiere. It’s a convo between Brian Reed and celebrated journalist Barton Gellman about why Barton left his career behind to become an advocate for democracy at a nonprofit. It raises some urgently important questions about the role of journalism and what the hell we’re supposed to do if the preisdent does not care about facts at all.
I edited this: On Grit, Huntress CEO Kyle Hanslovan spoke to Kleiner Perkins partners Joubin Mirzadegan and Ev Randle about his sometimes-divisive leadership style, hiring for conflict, and the intense love that his company gets from its users. One of them even promised to name their child after Huntress, and Kyle wrangles a similar promise out of Ev if he hits $1 billion in annual revenue.
And I produced and edited this: Building Better CMOs is BACK for another season! MMA Global CEO Greg Stuart interrogates what makes great marketing leaders tick, and he couldn’t have found a better guest to kick off season 2 than Manolo Arroyo, the global CMO of Coca-Cola. They talk about the Olympics, AI, why Manolo wants his team to be “selfish,” and a lot more.
🙏 Hey, thanks!
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💯 The single best thing I’ve seen online this week
is Gisnep, an ingenious word game that I think I found through Hank and John Green’s Complexly email newsletter. You drop letters into squares below to create an iconic quote. Try it out!
🍿 What I’m watching
I only saw one movie this week?? I guess I was busy.
Hoop Dreams (1994) - ★★★★ ½ - I have never cared about basketball as much as I did while watching this. One of those long documentaries that feels long, and yet you don’t care because you have to know what happens next. Much credit to the late Roger Ebert for championing this film when no one else would — a gold standard for low budget docs.
Follow me on Letterboxd for more reviews as-they-happen!
💀 What I’m TikTok-ing
Nirvana, but make it bluegrass
🦆 About the Ducks
Here’s the ChatGPT prompt I used this week:
draw a colorful picture, with a landscape aspect ratio, of two ducks playing basketball on an outdoor street court. one of them is not wearing a jersey and trying to defend the hoop, while the other *is* wearing a jersey, holding the basketball, and is in midair, going for a dunk.
Interesting that the AI doesn’t seem to understand the concept of “shirts vs. skins,” but at least the jerseys are different colors.
See you in two weeks!