📈 first Derivative [110]

✍️ a spring poem | 🇪🇨 Latin American gangs | 🇯🇵 Japan's state visit | 🪦 notable deaths

via Midjourney

🎬 Q1 Film & TV Update

One of my New Year’s resolutions this year was to watch <100 movies to make more time for reading books and the startup I’m working on. So I haven’t seen as many movies as I would’ve normally.

~Q1 | green: 2023, orange: 100-pace, blue: 2024

Of the movies that have come out this year that I’ve seen (5), I only really recommend Dune: Part Two (review) although Dev Patel’s directing debut, Monkey Man, was solid. I’m trying to catch The First Omen, Problemista, and Civil War, which are all out in theaters right now.

Out of all the movies I’ve seen this year (22), I can strongly recommend Network (1976), Legends of the Fall (1994), The Outpost (2019), and The War Room (1993). Maybe I’ll write more about these later in the year but Network (review) was one of the best movies I’ve seen in a while and for me, lived up to its reputation. I’m sure it’s a bit of a cliché to talk about how prescient it was and relatable it still is. Not only did it anticipate the advent of figures like Bill O’Reilly, Jon Stewart, and Tucker Carlson, you could substitute TV in the movie for TikTok today without missing a beat. Faye Dunaway also puts in an electric performance as a manic media Lilith.

On the TV side, I’ve been enjoying Shōgun and Masters of the Air. I wrote a bit about Shōgun here and was on

Gabriel Frieberg

‘s podcast to talk about it. MotA is no Band of Brothers but still an enjoyable watch.

Gabriel and I are interviewing director Ed Zwick (Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai, Glory) next week about his new book: Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood. If you have anything you want us to ask him, let me know.

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I helped

Dwarkesh Patel

out with annotating the latest episode of his excellent podcast, this one with AI researchers Sholto Douglas at Google Deepmind and Trenton Bricken at Anthropic. I highlighted Dwarkesh last fall and an episode he did with Sarah C.M. Paine, a professor at the Naval War College. I highly recommend listening to that episode, especially if the Japan stuff in this issue resonates with you.

I found this AI episode super interesting although much of it went over my head. After listening to it a few times though, I got the odd feeling that like the neural nets under discussion, I’d associatively learned some super specific AI facts and concepts that I didn’t quite understand but now knew how to put, in an abstract and formal way, into relation with one another. Is that reasoning or true learning? Who knows. I will say, the more I learn about AI models the more I’m impressed with the capacity of the human brain. Dwarkesh is a great interviewer and the episode gets super granular about how quickly AI development is scaling, how it can be accelerated, and also the immense value of high agency and independent, shared research in opening up opportunities in one’s career. It’s a great listen but you’ll get more out of if you already have an intermediate+ knowledge of AI.

Inspired by all the podcasting, I’m trying something new this week. Up top you should see my voiceover of this issue. If people like listening the audio, I may keep doing it. Excuse any first-time recording issues.

Good reading (and listening),

—TK

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Here’s a link to my 2024 News Journal where I'm collecting the headlines that catch my interest each day so that when we look back at that under the year, we'll see when things happened, what kind of patterns emerged, without the problem of hindsight bias.

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✍️ It’s great to see A.O. Scott, longtime New York Times chief film critic who stepped down last year, living his best life doing idiosyncratic stuff like this for Times Book Review. I’d never read the poem before, Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke With You”. It feels fitting for the this time of year when spring is creeping back into the city and everyone seems to have a little pep in their step. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

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🇸🇻 I wrote last February about Nayib Bukele’s anti-gang crusade in El Salvador and how his “authoritarian policy… will become an attractive model for others to copy or a cautionary tale.” Homicides are now down ~70% from when Bukele took office in 2019 and he was re-elected earlier this year with more than 85% of the vote, despite criticisms over his suspension of civil liberties and allegations that the government negotiated a truce with the gangs. Still, it’s hard to argue with the results and their domestic approval and easy to shoot back against the civil libertarians: in what way were people really “free” living under the gangs?