This week's best things

Melbourne Recital Hall's rebrand, Zuckerberg's MAGA pivot, the ongoing impact of AI on search, weird tech at CES, pinball restoration, and some Czechoslovak classics.

This week's best things
Photo by Kelly Sikkema / Unsplash

Happy 2025, I hope you had a good break, I did too much travelling.

Melbourne Recital Hall rebrand

Some of last year's most popular links were about rebrands, so here's a whole load of info about the recently unveiled work from Studio Mass for the Melbourne Recital Hall.

There's the usual blather you'd expect, but I was intrigued to read about a "sound-toy that responds uniquely to the waveform of the music to generate a visual expression of sound". I have no real idea what that means.

There's also a new institutional website to accompany all this, from Studio Bravo.

Studio MASS / MRC identity
We embrace the freedom to be creative, we encourage our employees to think differently, to think critically and to solve a problem in a new way. Our capabilities include Branding, Service Design, Design Research, User Exeprience and Interface Design. We are based in Fitzroy, Victoria, Australia.
Melbourne Recital Centre Home
Where every experience is yours for the taking.

Zuckerberg's MAGA pivot

This is perhaps not an enormous surprise given Meta/Facebook's (recent) history with misinformation, genocide promotion, negative impact on teen mental health and generally being a malign presence in the world.

This week Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg announced the end of 3rd party fact-checking (a change they put in place after the 2016 election) for content posted on Meta products in favour of an (Elon Musk-inspired) 'community notes' approach. He has wrapped this announcement up in a focus on 'simplicity' and 'free speech' but also admitted that these changes will mean “we’re going to catch less bad stuff”.

These changes were welcomed by Donald Trump who said, “I think they’ve come a long way” (Trump was banned from Meta products in 2021 but allowed back on in 2023).

Casey Newton has a useful piece on all of this which includes interviews with former Facebook employees, “I really think this a precursor for genocide,” a former employee tells Platformer. And the folks at Platformer have also seen new internal guidance on the type of speech that no longer violates Facebook's policies.

This post on Linkedin from Haydn Corrodus (and the discussion in the comments), is perhaps a useful conversation starter about all this if you're at a cultural organisation.

AI means the end of internet search as we’ve known it

Continuing on something I've shared a bunch of perspectives on over the last 12 months, this article from Mat Honan in MIT Technology Review looks at the potential impact of AI tools on search products.

"The biggest change to the way search engines have delivered information to us since the 1990s is happening right now. No more keyword searching. No more sorting through links to click. Instead, we’re entering an era of conversational search. Which means instead of keywords, you use real questions, expressed in natural language. And instead of links, you’ll increasingly be met with answers, written by generative AI and based on live information from all across the internet, delivered the same way. "

AI means the end of internet search as we’ve known it
Despite fewer clicks, copyright fights, and sometimes iffy answers, AI could unlock new ways to summon all the world’s knowledge.

The weirdest tech at CES 2025

This week the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has been taking place in Las Vegas. CES is an annual trade show that showcases the latest consumer-focused technology, it's often where new products are launched and can be a useful window into the direction things are heading in.

It's also where loads of weird and probably useless shit is demoed.

Air purifiers that double as cat trees? Smart engagement rings? Furry little robot sloth companions? A side table that doubles as an indoor garden? A robotic cat that cools down your coffee? This article in The Verge and this article in Tech Crunch give you a rundown of 2025's offerings.

The weirdest tech at CES 2025
Here’s a roundup of the unusual gadgets we spotted at CES.
CES 2025: The weirdest tech products and claims from this year’s event | TechCrunch
CES 2025 is in full swing. While the conference features reveals from tech powerhouses like Nvidia, Samsung, and Toyota, there are also some very strange

Five things you need if you run a small, low-risk user-to-user service

There are some legislative changes coming in the UK (that have been quite badly advertised) related to the (relatively new) Online Safety Act.

This Act was ostensibly designed to reduce the likelihood of users coming into contact with harmful content online, and places obligations on the folks who run web services.

Exactly what those obligations are, who they affect, and what you might need to do has, thus far, been quite unclear.

Fortunately Rachel Coldicutt and the folks at Promising Trouble have been in contact with Ofcom and have shared their findings (so far).

There are still a number of things that you will need to do if you run a site where users share content, but those things are becoming clearer and (seemingly) less onerous. These are things like:

  • have an individual accountable for illegal content safety duties and reporting and complaints duties
  • a content moderation function to review and assess illegal and suspected illegal content, with swift takedown measures

Which, in the light of the Meta news above, feels ironic.

Meet the man keeping hope, and 70-year-old pinball machines, alive

A lovely long read in Ars Technica about Steve Young who runs The Pinball Resource, "the world's greatest collection of rare parts and schematics".

There's lots in here for anyone who loves collectors, stories of restoration, mild obsession, and vintage games.

"If there's one thing you need to know about pinball machines, it's that they break—a lot. You'd never know it, thanks to the surprisingly effective sound-deadening properties of the glass under which it's played, but a game of pinball is shockingly violent. Each 80-gram silver ball gains remarkable inertia as it catapults from one target to another.

Remove the glass, fire up a game, and you'll quickly be reaching for some hearing protection. It's unpleasant, but playing like this is a good way to appreciate how much of a pounding a pinball machine takes every time you pull that plunger.

Factor into that hundreds of incandescent bulbs slowly baking all the machine's internals, plus grit and debris accumulating in every mechanism as the machine wears, and you have a recipe for something that needs a lot of attention to keep operating."

Meet the man keeping hope, and 70-year-old pinball machines, alive
Steve Young’s passion built a business that keeps historic tables running.

This week's consumption

When I was in the UK over the New Year I took a trip to Foyles on Charing Cross Road (one of my favourite bookshops) and bought...way too many books. I've started 2025 with The Secrets We Keep by Lara Prescott which is about how the CIA plotted to smuggle Doctor Zhivago into the USSR (a story I first heard about via the excellent and fun Wind Of Change podcast), and Mayflies by Andrew O'Hagan - "it’s 1986, and Tully and his friends are escaping the world of their fathers by heading for the festival of the Tenth Summer at the G-Mex centre in Manchester".

We went to see Conclave (which only just came out in Swedish cinemas) which was excellent. I was also pleased that I understood most of the Swedish subtitles for the parts where they were speaking Italian/Latin/Spanish, which indicates the Swedish lessons are working.

We've been watching Kaos on Netflix which is good fun. I suspect there are a whole load of Greek mythology-related easter eggs that I'm not getting.

Over Christmas I watched a lot of classic Czechoslovak and Soviet Christmas films including the charming Tři oříšky pro Popelku (Three Wishes for Cinderella) and the deeply strange Mrázik (Jack Frost) - to get a sense of this one here's an excerpt from a review someone left online "it's filled with witches, mushroom mages, pig sleds, black cats, bear men, fair ladies, and of course father (jack) frost himself".

I also watched The Gray Man which is a lot of (very punchy) spy fun

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