fv/
Posts
🤔 FASTER V BETTER

🤔 FASTER V BETTER

In the 20th Century, R&D made things faster. In the 21st, R&D is making things better

February 14, 2023

FATE V FUTURE

What you want to know in culture, tech, travel, luxury, media, marketing and more. We’re on a mission to curate the Internet’s best newsletter. Any feedback? Simply reply.

The first Dave’s Hot Chicken was a pop up in an East Hollywood parking lot. 5 years later, the company has sold franchise rights for some 700 branches.

FUTUREBOARD

🔼 Dave’s Hot Chicken. The LA-based restaurant specializing in spicy chicken tenders (the spiciest ones require diners to sign a written waiver before eating) was born just five years ago in a parking lot in East Hollywood, and has quickly zoomed past 100 locations —from LA, to Brooklyn, Canada, and Dubai— with another 700(!!) in the works »»

🔽 Lumber prices. Over the past eight days, lumber futures are down some 21%, reflecting questions about the strength of North America’s housing market. (But: Lumber futures surged 37% in January) »»

💬 “I made almost $500,000 on Upwork last year.” An SEO consultant shares tips for scaling a sales pipeline and how to construct proposals on the popular freelancer marketplace »»

🛩️ The best après-ski scenes in Europe, from Chamonix to St. Moritz »»

👗 Pharrell Williams will succeed Virgil Abloh as Louis Vuitton's men's creative director »»

💎 Check out the top 25 most expensive homes in the world currently for sale. The list starts at US$87m and goes up from there »»

QUICKFATES

Nike’s new ZoomX Vaporfly Next% 3 running shoe is designed to return more energy than ever before (Nike)

How Spotify's podcast bet went wrong »»

AI voice transcription app Otter.ai unveiled OtterPilot, a feature-heavy “meeting assistant” »»

Apple's iOS and macOS have a nasty vulnerability, so update now »»

McDonald's introduced the Cardi B & Offset Meal »»

Is TikTok working on a paywall? »»

Why shared private jets are growing in popularity »»

Uganda is on track for its first-ever oil output by 2025. The East African nation is a new addition to the list of oil-producing countries »»

The 8 best places to live in Mexico, according to real estate experts »»

Check out the newly-independent German airline Condor’s unusual, new business class product »»

Hoka and Salomon are changing the sneaker resale game »»

The secret Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast suburbs where the median price is hundreds of thousands of dollars cheaper than everywhere else »»

A new Banksy appeared in Margate, England… then local authorities carted half of it away »»

Trance is back—and it’s no joke »»

Nike’s most popular racing shoe is getting a reboot »»

The third generation of Porsche’s SUV readies itself for another reinvention »»

DEEPFATE 🤔 FASTER V BETTER

Through much of the 20th Century, R&D was focused on making things faster. In the 21st, R&D has focused on making things better. What does that mean for tech like ChatGPT?

A fully-enclosed First Class “private suite” aboard the Emirates A380 (Emirates)

BIG FASHION IS stuck in the 20th century.

According to industry expert Joanna Williams, the fashion business is increasingly looking as dated as the Ford Model T assembly line.
Ford’s founder famously said that his customers could have their car in any colour, “so long as it’s black.”
See, Ford streamlined production by only offering the Model T in one color.
The way most fashion giants continue to create and market their products is reminiscent of the autocratic (sorry) early days of mass automobile production.
Basically, big fashion is broken.
And there’s more than one reason why.

DID YOU KNOW that the fashion industry generates as much as 50% wastage?

That’s because the industry’s economics favor firms that are able to secure the cheapest cost to churn out the highest volume of a single item.
You might know that that single item is usually decided upon a year before it hits the market.
But did you know that many centralized design departments at corporate HQ still want to have the final word on “labdips, fabric and stitch options, handfeel swatches, yarn dyes, fit samples, trim cards” —and often request multiple samples of each, instead of empowering trusted suppliers and representatives to make these calls on the ground?
This laborious, centralized process is what created the empty space for upstarts like Shein, which “relies on third-party suppliers in China to produce small batches of clothes, about 50-100 per item. If an item does well, more batches are commissioned; if not, the lines are immediately discontinued.”
Some styles go from inspiration to production in an astonishing 10 days.
But is this really progress?

THE MODEL T analogy was inspired by a thought-provoking piece by the author Ed Conway.

In it, Conway — who’s also the Economics Editor of Sky News— breaks down the advancements in car paint over the years.
Yes, car paint, as in literally the process of painting new cars.
Painting cars —like many commercial and industrial processes— has become much faster, and much better in the century since Ford released the Model T.
But Ed also makes a very interesting observation about the purpose of R&D these days.

FOR MOST OF the 20th century, R&D tended to focus on making industrial processes faster.

In the 21st, they’ve been focused on making processes cleaner and better.
This got me thinking. What are some non-car paint examples of this?
For starters, look up.
In the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, the most glamorous way to travel (commercially) was the Concorde.
The narrow-body supersonic jet ferried movie stars and corporate titans across the Atlantic in less time than it takes to drive from Manhattan to the Hamptons.
It sounds like it was an exciting, one-of-a-kind experience, but —by most accounts— a loud and a shaky one as well.
Today, the best possible way to fly commercial is in a First Class private suite aboard an Emirates A380, a model which is nearly 16 years old, and moves at a bit more than half as fast as the Concorde.
Flyers in this class of service slide the doors to their cabin shut, “turn down the ambient lighting, and retreat into a private cinema” or dining room, as the airline puts it.
In other words, this experience is not faster but it is certainly calmer, quieter, and more decadent than the Concorde was— and probably cleaner (on a per passenger basis) as well.

SO WHAT DOES this all mean for you and me?

There’s a connection between all of the above and the most talked about products in tech these days, ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.
Zoom out: what’s the main benefit that most people assign to these AI tools?
Well, in addition to their impressive ease of use, most people seem to marvel at the speed at which ChatGPT returns answers to our queries.
I've used it and, sure, it seemed to save me time. At first.
On closer inspection, I found —as many others have— that the quality of the output just wasn't where I'd want it to be.
In the end, I probably spent more time editing and rewriting the copy as I would have if I had just followed a trusted framework and written what I needed from scratch.
This, I think, is the point I'm trying to make:

BEWARE OF THOSE saying ChatGPT is the most important invention of the era.

They may be applying 20th century criteria for R&D (faster) to a 21st century market demand (better).

More

Joanna Moore’s LinkedIn post about fashion being stuck in the 20th century »»