Pizza in a smart car

Hi Reader,

It's been a while since I've sent an email. The truth is, the longer the gap, the more I overthink this.

It comes to a point where you prepare something I think you will find interesting, and just hit send.

So, let's get straight into it. Have your browser tabs ready.

NEWS: Recovering history with AI

Vesuvius Challenge - I love this. The kind of AI use case we don't talk about enough. A previously hidden text has been revealed from a scroll burnt by the Vesuvius eruption 2000 years ago. The scroll was part of a collection buried under ash and scorched into solid black lumps by the Mount Vesuvius eruption.

Now, without unrolling them, researchers were able to read one of them, uncovering what may be a work by a well-known Stoic philosopher.

The machine learning model found ink: faint traces indistinguishable from carbonised papyrus to a human eye. Turning that signal into readable Greek took papyrologists, months.

The model didn't read anything. It made reading possible.The breakthrough comes from the Vesuvius Challenge, an international research effort to read the scrolls digitally. Read more about it here (The Guardian) and here (National Geographic).

​Reconstructing Pelé's "lost" goal - For many, including probably you and me, Messi is the GOAT. Older generations would say "yeah, but you didn't see Pelé and that goal in '59", until now.

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Google published a reconstruction of a goal Pelé scored in São Paulo on 2 August 1959. Three sombreros in a row, past two defenders and the keeper, the ball never touching the ground. There's just one photo from it and no video footage. For sixty-seven years it lived in the memory of the people who were in the ground.

The historian Anita Lucchesi and her team gathered nearly two thousand records (blueprints, newspapers, family albums) and sat eyewitnesses down with a scale model of the stadium to walk back through what they saw. A crew shot the sequence on the actual pitch. Then Veo and Gemini laid Pelé's likeness and the 1959 stadium over it, traditional VFX handled the ball and the grain, and the whole thing went through a filmout machine to pick up the look of fifties film. It's in the Pelé Museum in Santos now. His daughter said he always thought it a shame the goal was never recorded.

DIGITAL PLATFORM DESIGN LAWS

On 10 July the European Commission issued preliminary findings that Instagram and Facebook breach the Digital Services Act by design. Four features named: infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, personalised recommendations. The Commission's phrase for what they do is autopilot mode.

What it wants: autoplay and infinite scroll off by default, real screen-time breaks, a recommender tuned away from engagement. Exposure runs to 6% of worldwide turnover. Meta disagrees, and gets to respond. Nothing is decided yet.

​Questions for your next content meeting:

• Would this still work if autoplay vanished and scroll time was halved?
• If the infinite scroll went dark tomorrow, how much of your strategy survives?

Ask these questions, and it will reveal how reliant you are on platform mechanics.

VIDEO: The smallest pizzeria. Nothing will reset your algorithm the right way like watching a 10-minute video of a guy making pizzas in a Smart car in New York. Wholesome, hook-free, slow-paced. Yummy.

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Note: If you share YouTube videos in your newsletter, you should know that Gmail often flags shortened YouTube links as spam. Consider copying the full URL from your browser.

RESEARCH: I’m very interested in seeing where people spend their time online. Earlier this year I surveyed 322 people across Bages about their digital habits.

I’m amazed by whoever designed this graphic making it look like a patchwork quilt. Some recent research by Northeastern University.
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If you don't understand: email is a way more important channel than any single social media company. If you have an engaged email list, you are never dependent on volatile algorithm changes. Alphabet alone takes over a third of desktop time, and people spend longer in Gmail than on the bottom 300,000 websites combined.
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​The inbox is not a minor channel. An engaged list survives an algorithm change, because the relationship isn't rented.

I'm finishing up a report on the digital habits survey I ran in the area earlier this year. There's a taste of it with a couple of graphs (and photos of me looking all professional) here. Full version coming in August.

TOOL: Animos.app. Use it whilst its still free. Add some motion to your designs with easy-to-use templates. Just drop in your media, tweak the settings, and export an MP4 straight from the browser. Like this here below that I might use for some content I'm preparing for August.

If you got this far,

you're part of 68% of subscribers, so thank you, Reader.

Which one did you actually open? Reply with the word: scroll, feed, data, tool, pizza, and I'll know what to send more of.

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See you soon.

​Peace,

Has

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