Navin Iyengar @navin_

Me using Claude Opus 4.8 to rename a file

There's a TV show in Japan that has run for over 30 years. The premise: a parent sends their two or three-year-old child on an errand. Alone. To the store. To buy tofu. Across actual streets. A camera crew follows secretly, hidden, never helping, as a tiny human in a backpack completes a task most countries wouldn't let a child attempt. The kid cries. The kid forgets. The kid gets distracted by a dog. And then the kid comes home, holding the tofu, glowing. It's the most-watched thing of its kind in the country. Americans who discover it cannot believe it's legal. In Japan, we cannot believe it's remarkable.

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Mexico paid $20 million for eight minutes in this movie. Then those eight minutes forced them to invent an entire cultural tradition. Before Spectre, Mexico City had no Day of the Dead parade. The holiday was celebrated at home, at cemeteries, with family altars. Quiet, intimate, centuries old. Sam Mendes fabricated a massive street parade for the opening sequence, shot it with 1,500 extras in skeleton costumes across the Zócalo, and audiences worldwide assumed they were watching a real annual event. Mexico's government had negotiated hard for the placement. Leaked Sony hack emails showed officials offered up to $20 million in tax incentives for four minutes of positive portrayal. Sony was drowning in a $300 million budget. The deal included script changes: the Bond girl had to be a Mexican actress, the villain could not be Mexican, and the city's modern skyline had to appear on screen. Then the movie opened in 182 countries and tourists started booking flights to Mexico City for the parade. The parade that did not exist. Tourism authorities panicked. Visitors were arriving expecting the spectacle they saw in the film and finding nothing. So in October 2016, the government spent $500,000, hired 650 volunteers, built dozens of floats and giant skeleton marionettes, and staged the first real Día de los Muertos parade in Mexico City's history. 250,000 people showed up. They openly called it a "Spectre-style parade" in press materials. Ten years later, the parade draws millions. Anthropologists call it the "pizza effect," where a cultural element gets exported, transformed abroad, and reimported as authentic. Mexico's most famous public celebration of its most sacred holiday was invented by a British director shooting a $300 million spy movie. That tracking shot is doing more for Mexico City's economy every November than the $20 million they paid for it.

cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic

a week ago

The opening of Spectre (2015) is so good it almost tricks the brain into thinking the entire movie is about to be a masterpiece. That Día de los Muertos tracking shot through Mexico City is pure Bond flexing for five straight minutes.

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Les feinte de Messi, ils te les sort 100 fois tu te fais avoir 100 fois

Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke explains Goodhart’s law and why he doesn’t like KPIs or OKRs “Goodhart’s law is real. The moment a metric becomes a goal, it’s no longer a useful metric… No metric by itself is a complete heuristic for a complex business. There’s a million different tensions in a company, and you can’t keep all of them in harmony by optimizing for one thing.” For this reason, Shopify doesn’t use KPIs or OKRs. But as Tobi explains, this doesn’t mean they don’t value data and metrics. “We are extremely data informed. We have invested enormous amounts of money and time into systems that give us basically everything at our fingertips… But what Shopify attempts to do is just not over-fit for what’s quantifiable.” People love optimizing for highly-quantifiable things because there’s immediate gratification that comes from seeing a number go up. But Tobi thinks that the most important aspects of a product are rarely quantifiable: “The overlap of the most valuable things you can do with a product and the things that happen to be fully quantifiable are like maybe 20%. Which leaves 80% of a value space unaddressable by the people who only look at quantifiable things.” He continues: “Shopify is comfortable with unquantifiable things like taste, quality, passion, love, hate… The sort of deep satisfaction that a craftsperson feels when they’ve done a job well is actually a better proxy if you allow it to be.” They then have robust analytics systems that tell the company if something’s wrong or a new rollout breaks something. “We think about it as a cockpit for a pilot. The decisions are still made by pilots, and we think this leads to better results… I think there needs to be more acceptance in business of unquantifiable things… And then metrics take a support function.” Source: @lennysan (Feb 2025)

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The moment Ron Taylor won #FunnyAFwithKevinHart LIVE on Netflix!!! Winning the live vote, Ron will go on to star in his very own Netflix comedy special.

the braintrust at pixar is a pure “standard‑holding” mechanism. it concentrates experience, pattern recognition, and taste, but not authority. directors are obligated to listen and to engage seriously with the feedback, but they are not obligated to obey it. so you still get the benefit of accumulated taste without freezing the system around a small set of decision‑makers. new work can still emerge that doesn’t look like the previous hits, because the standard is advisory rather than veto power. basically, architect your organisation so that taste is maximally shared and consulted, but minimally centralised in the actual decision pipeline.

Eliot @CDTEliot

a month ago

ed catmull basically solved one of the hardest organisational problems in creative work: how do you keep very high standards of taste without turning the people who hold that taste into gatekeepers that slowly strangle new ideas? his answer is elegant and I think underrated: you

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Japanese engineers developed a “Sword Tip Visualization System” for the Fencing World Championships, and it makes fencing look absolutely incredible to watch.

We see our home planet as a whole, lit up in spectacular blues and browns. A green aurora even lights up the atmosphere. That's us, together, watching as our astronauts make their journey to the Moon.

i did not expect to identify so deeply with the method of taking damage in sonic games: i accumulate bits of gold, then suddenly, i am struck by an unexpected force. the capital explodes out of me in all directions, i see and feel it recede from me. can i gather it again? unknown

PMs don’t just ship features. They kill them. Shipping isn’t the job. Shipping the right product is. A great PM doesn’t fall in love with the roadmap. They fall in love with the problem and have the guts to say: This isn’t solving it. This adds complexity. This doesn’t matter. Every feature, setting, UI, element should fight to exist. At Nest, we had one rule: If you can’t explain why it matters, it doesn’t ship. You had to tell us the why. The reason a real person would care. That one rule killed dozens of features.

LINK NOOOOO!!!!!!

IT’S WILD THAT THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAY TO SAVE SOMETHING AS A PDF IS TO LIE TO YOUR COMPUTER THAT YOU’RE ABOUT TO PRINT IT 😭😭😭

We finally made it to perfect February. What a beautiful calendar

Curry instincts are crazy 😭

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this is one of humanity’s great athletic achievements. Alex is too humble to make that case but given the severity of failure and the pressure of the crowds, I think it’s up there. Congratulations @AlexHonnold!

Star Search returns tonight as a LIVE interactive show. You'll be able to use your remote to vote on who wins, with results impacting the show in real time. Can't wait for everyone to see what the team has built! Episode 1 goes live tonight at 6pm PT. netflix.com/tudum/articles…

The Japanese style of wrapping gifts

Fascinating slow-motion footage of what happens when a droplet falls into a pool of water, a phenomenon known as a coalescence cascade. 📽: Steven Trainoff