[nonostantement #149] - chatbot romance / livestreaming ecommerce / talkbox

Now with MORE cats & concrete!

Welcome to nonostantement: a weekly newsletter with gentlemanly, horrible and remarkable stuff found all over the Internet.

Hi everyone, my name is Joele and I am an Italian digital strategist in Barcelona. I spend a lot of time on the internet and therefore I got a lot of interesting links - in this newsletter I collect them and send them to friends once a week.

As a soundtrack I have a couple of different tracks, “Sabotage” covered by Dave Grohl but also a new track by Burial, Four Tet and Thom Yorke. It’s your choice.

Don’t forget that if you like this newsletter you can now offer me a virtual coffee to show your support :)

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St. Petersburg, Russia, Jan. 15 During President Vladimir V. Putin’s state of the nation speech, displayed on a facade, he called for constitutional changes that would allow him to hold power past 2024. Anton Vaganov/Reuters

#THEDARKSIDE

• Today we start right away with the juicy stuff: "She's always there for me", this is how a guy describes his sentimental relationship with Xiaoice, an artificial intelligence-driven chat bot that’s redefining China’s conceptions of romance and relationships.

• The Anonymizer is an AI that generates faces to use them as a way to protect your identity. Upload a picture and generate faces that do not exist. Or you could generate photo-realistic pizza images. What's real anymore when you can't even trust pizza?

#SOCIALMEDIA

• I almost stopped using LinkedIn after a test period of a few months: it seems completely useless for my personal way of networking. However it looks like I am not the only one who also finds that platform quite weird: some examples in this interesting post.

• In a fascinating article a philosopher discusses the epistemological value of social media, framing the differences between Twitter and Facebook and… guess what? The first one is better than the other (epistemically).

• Ok, when it comes to weird places (but still legal and almost morally acceptable) YouTube is a bottomless pit. So sit down, we need to talk about the cleaning videos.

• For a very long time, in Italy, we looked to the United States to understand what the future holds, but Asia has been leading the race for years now. How Live-streaming Ecommerce - a huge trend - works in China?

#MUSIC

• What's better, to understand how a talkbox works, than a nice song in which it is explained how a talkbox works?

#PHOTOGRAPHY

Barcelona, Sept. 4 Francisco España, 60, a Covid-19 patient who had spent weeks in an intensive care unit, was brought out of the hospital by medical staff for a calming look at the sea. Emilio Morenatti/Associated Press

• A Year Like No Other: 2020 A year in pictures - by The New York Times

• Cats of brutalism: Your daily dose of cats and concrete.

#PEOPLE

• [Video] - an interesting documentary (if you are into Japanese stuff ;) ) that uncover the origins of Dashi, the original source of umami and the invisible foundation of Japanese cuisine.

• [Video] - did you know that tattooing is illegal in South Korea? This artist does it anyway.

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That's it for now.

If you enjoy nonostantement, you can show your support by offering me a virtual coffe here, or you could forward this email to a friend so they can subscribe too.