Hello oh glorious you!

And welcome to your weekend reads!

First things first, we have postponed our Cannes Lion and Nudgestock wrap up to next week Thursday, 18 July at 3 pm BST, so now you have a few extra days to make sure you don't miss that 😉

Now, feast your eyes on Benedict Evans' sceptical yet hopeful view on an AI summer, one of the funniest ads to come out of Thailand, a whimsical listicle from Steven Pinker, and more!

Big love,

Chris & the 42courses team

• The slow boring hunt for product market fit: In Benedict Evans' latest essay, he makes the case for an AI summer, saying that this could be it, the all powerful new AI, but we have to be more patient than we thought. Well worth a read!
   
• Large Language Models won't lead to Artificial General Intelligence: At least that's the opinion of Francois Chollet and Mike Knoop, in this insightful episode of the Dwarkesh Podcast.
   
• When brands laugh at themselves: Self deprecating humour is not common in advertising, but this one was so good, and so original, yet so relatable, it won a Gold Cannes Lion. Enjoy!
   
• Seven Pinker's likes and dislikes: This Harvard Professor of Psychology gives us a simple list of things he likes (graphs, irregular verbs, hardware stores) and dislikes (SUVs, the curse of knowledge, chocolate) for a surprisingly delightful look into his mind. Why not write your own such list?
   
• Are we too impatient to be intelligent? Time was the topic of Rory Sutherland's excellent  keynote speech at Nudgestock 2024, which happened last Friday. (This link actually leads to a recording of the entire live stream, if you fancy it).

• 1785 - The first manned flight by gas balloon takes place in the Netherlands 🪂
   
• 1843 - Mormon leader Joseph Smith declares that God allows polygamy 👀
   
• 1928 - The first televised tennis match is aired 🎾
   
• 1933 - Congress passes the first minimum wage law (33 cents per hour) 💵
   
• 1957 - US Surgeon General Leroy Burney connects smoking with lung cancer, and advertising changed forever 🚬
   
• 1962 - The Rolling Stones play their first-ever gig 🎸
   
• 1979 - At a baseball game in Chicago, fans destroy disco records, causing the White Sox to forfeit to the Detroit Tigers, foreshadowing the musical rise of techno over house 🎧
   
• 2017 - The world's largest iceberg (later christened A68) breaks away from the Larsen C Ice Shelf in Antarctica, measuring about 6,000 sq km in length 🧊