Happy Hour at Fifth Hammer Brewing
Fifth Hammer Brewing is a great place in Long Island City that is just one stop on the 7 line from Grand Central. They brew everything on the menu in house plus they always have a food truck outside!
The Polar Bear is Back
Pete Alonso to return to Mets on 2-year, $54 million deal: Sources
Pete Alonso, the first baseman known for his signature power and zest for hitting home runs, has agreed to a two-year, $54 million contract to return to the New York Mets, league sources confirmed to The Athletic on Wednesday. The deal, which will pay Alonso $30 million in 2025, includes a player option for $24 million in the second year.
🔗 Enough With the Substacks
Don’t call it a Substack. - Anil Dash
Email’s been here for years. But the reason Substack wants you to call your creative work by their brand name is because they control your audience and distribution, and they want to own your content and voice, too. You may not think you care about that today, but you will when you see what they want to do with it.
Read the whole thing from Anil. Substack is not some independent place giving you some freedom. It’s another product from the same people you think you are running from trying to lock you in to another platform. You have other options. Find them and use them.
🔗 Chris Hayes in the New York Times Writing About Attention
Our attention is a wildly valuable resource, and some of the world’s most powerful corporations extract it at scale in increasingly sophisticated ways, leaving us feeling like bystanders to our minds. You might say we’ve built a machine for producing boredom and then entertainment to fill it in an endlessly accelerating and desperate cycle.
🔗 Ed Zitron Nails the State of Tech
There are things that you read where every word hits. This is one of those pieces, and it’s long. Ed Zitron says what I have been both feeling and saying for the last decade of tech in his own special way. There was an inflection point where technology companies went from making our lives better to making it worse in most ways, and doing so while making society more reliant on them.
I have pulled a few excerpts from the post below, but please go and read the whole thing. Consumers and customers are not powerless against this, but it will take most coming to terms with the reality first.
The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an unpaid intern, with the goal to juice as much value from the interaction as possible
You are the victim of a con — one so pernicious that you’ve likely tuned it out despite the fact it’s part of almost every part of your life. It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather.
Things are being made linearly worse in the pursuit of growth in every aspect of our digital lives, and it’s because everything must grow, at all costs, at all times, unrelentingly, even if it makes the technology we use every day consistently harmful.
We as a society need to reckon with how this twists us up, makes us more paranoid, more judgmental, more aggressive, more reactionary, because when everything is subtly annoying, we all simmer and suffer in manifold ways.
Gotham Sports App
So many regional sports streaming apps are not good, but the new Gotham Sports App which combines MSG and YES networks is actually kind of good?
Here is a screenshot taken on the iPad.
