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Cancel My Subscription (to Everything)

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Ed Bennett and Chris Boyer kick things off with a rant about the subscription economy. From Columbia House record clubs in the 1970s to the boom of Blue Apron, Birchbox, and Stitch Fix, subscriptions once promised convenience and novelty. But today? Fatigue is setting in, boxes are piling up, and companies are scrambling to pivot away from the model. This week’s recommendation: author Ted Chiang. His short stories pack a punch, sparking big questions about tech, humanity, and the future. Ed swears everyone should be reading him — preferably before bedtime, so your dreams get extra weird. And for the GenAI test, it’s a showdown of summarization. A 140-page Google Research paper was too long to read, so Ed fed it to ChatGPT (which spit out a 10-page summary). Chris then used Google’s NotebookLM to turn it into a tidy 6.5-minute audio briefing. Did it work? Was it useful? And did either of them actually learn anything? Spoiler: subscriptions may be dying, but AI-generated Cliff Notes are just getting started.

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