The Zeitgeist Digest 01—Tuesday, 4 February, 2020

Streaming the 'spirit of the times' in culture / tech / startups / future and chill, every Tuesday ✌️

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Ultra HD Lioness Takedown and Chill? 

— “Intellectual” (and not) fodder for your streaming addiction 🍿

what I’m binge-streaming on Netflix right now—

1. The Stranger
2. Night on Earth

why I think you should binge it too—

1. Three words: English. Comedic. Timing. This show, while not intended to be hilarious, never misses an opportunity for relief—and whether phallic or llama-shaped in nature, every moment is a gosh-darn delight. Think JoJo Rabbit meets Revenge.
2. Samira Wiley (Poussey Washington, Orange Is the New Black; Moira, The Handmaid's Tale) makes for a refreshing update on Attenborough, though, (not) regrettably, still too soothing to keep me awake for a sustained length of time.

latest Netflix news from around the web—

Netflix Tech Stack Has No Chill: How To Account for 15% of the World's Bandwidth written by Abhishek Kumar for hackernoon

Night on Earth on Netflix CGI? I watched about 20 minutes and I’m convinced its nearly all CGI. I thought the “low light thermal” cameras were just a way to hide imperfections in the rendering. When the lions attack things you can tell theyre not even tracked correctly...? Am I wrong? raised by u/FlatBox_ on reddit.com/r/vfx/

( •_•)ノ墓ε*✝( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
The Cult of Coverage Around: #CoronaVirus

—kulture news to keep us all up-to-date & kewl this week 🤞

what the kids are talking about—

1. Coronavirus.

some options for what you might say when you talk about it too—

"Coronavirus Crisis Shows China's Governance Failure" :

"As the Communist Party cements control, more officials worry about pleasing their bosses than taking care of the people."

—nytimes

other hot techulture news from around the web this week—

Google (sort of) just launched a TikTok competitor:

The new app is called Tangi and it resembles apps like TikTok and Instagram with its vertically-oriented short-form videos. What sets Tangi apart, however, is that the app is intended for how-to videos specifically, and creators need to apply to participate.

—producthunt

Europe has a plan to break Google and Amazon's cloud dominance:

By now, you’ve likely come to terms with the fact that escape from Jeff Bezos is impossible. You may have weaned yourself off that sweet sweet next day delivery, procuring all your worldly needs from a boutique array of small local shops, but if you venture online, Bezos still wins – cutting out Amazon’s cloud computing services renders the internet literally unusable.

Now Europe has a plan to challenge this US and Chinese cloud dominance – it's called Gaia-X.

—wired

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nobody listens to techno: AI predicts Coronavirus

—humans using their brains to talk/write about machines using their brains 🤯

An AI Epidemiologist Sent the First Warnings of the Wuhan Virus:

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had gotten the word out a few days earlier, on January 6. But a Canadian health monitoring platform had beaten them both to the punch, sending word of the outbreak to its customers on December 31.

BlueDot uses an AI-driven algorithm that scours foreign-language news reports, animal and plant disease networks, and official proclamations to give its clients advance warning to avoid danger zones like Wuhan.

—wired

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stop Synchronous Communication, start Thinking About Thinking About Thinking, continue Building Values-Driven Businesses

—new ideas around how to be a better colleague and/or human this week 💚

stop—Synchronous Communication:

Synchronous Communication is the New Cocaine in Silicon Valley:

Today's synchronous (real-time) communication tools and methodologies are increasing your company-wide anxiety quotient.

—PSNinja

start—Thinking About Thinking About Thinking:

Lessons on Thinking: Learn from James Clear, Scott Young, Shane Parrish and More:

Clear thinking is tied to how much we know about the world, our ability to learn continuously and building a latticework of mental models.

—Andreea Serb

continue—Building Values-Driven Businesses:

5 Prompts to Help You Define Core Values at Your Early-Stage Startup:

Good core values should outlast founders.

—IbaM

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challenge thy ear holes with our weekly "I’d Hack To This" playlist

—curated by the Hacker Noon Team (mostly Austin) 🎹

that's all for today, folks!

see you next week, same time, same format (probably) ✌️