It’s an off-the-cuff interview and I wouldn’t want to make to much of it, but I thought it was interesting that Klein’s immediate illustrative example didn’t involve a way that A.I. might replace him, but a way it might replace people who work for him. Whatever else you can say about this technology, it has a way of making people think like bosses.

But I think what really gets to me about the overuse of “A.G.I.” is not so much the vagueness or the fact that Sam Altman might profit from it, but the teleology it imposes--the way its use compresses the already and always ongoing process of A.I. progress, development, and disruption into a single point of inflection. Instead of treating A.I. like a normal technological development whose emergence and effect is conditioned by the systems and structures already in place, we’re left anxiously awaiting a kind of eschatological product announcement--a deadline before which all we can do is urgently and at all costs prepare, a messianic event after which we will no longer be in control. This kind of urgency and anxiety serves no one well, except for the people who’ve found a way to profit from cultivating it.

The ideology behind AI may be best thought of as careless anti-humanism. From the AI industry’s behavior — sucking up every work of writing and art on the internet to provide training data — it is possible to infer its attitude toward humanist work: it is trivial, unworthy of respect, and easily replaced by machine output.

Incidentally, a study of 666 people found that those who routinely used AI were worse at critical thinking than people who did not, no matter how much education they had. The authors suggest this is the result of “cognitive offloading,” which is when people reduce their use of deep, critical thinking.

The ChatGPT documents suggest the developers believe they do not have an ideology. This is impossible; everyone does.

ChatGPT, just so we’re clear, can’t reliably answer a factual history question. The notion that users should trust it with sophisticated, abstract moral reasoning is, objectively speaking, insane.

It sent 10 French volunteers, including a literature student with five years of post-baccalauréat higher education, to sit the tests those seeking French nationality will face. Five failed the written test but passed the oral, while two failed to reach a level necessary to obtain their own nationality.

An example of a long-tailed distribution comes up in the context of social networks.  In 1991, Scott Feld presented the “friendship paradox”: the observation that most people have fewer friends than their friends have.  He studied real-life friends, but the same effect appears in online networks: if you choose a random Facebook user, and then choose one of their friends at random, the chance is about 80% that the friend has more friends. The friendship paradox is a form of the inspection paradox.  When you choose a random user, every user is equally likely.  But when you choose one of their friends, you are more likely to choose someone with a lot of friends.  Specifically, someone with x friends is overrepresented by a factor of x.

NIGHT IN THE RED ROOM

Under the rule of digital capitalism, time itself is severed from any ‘narrative or teleological tension’, that is, from any discernible purpose or meaning, and so, like the digital paintings in an immersive show, it ‘disintegrates into points which whizz around without any sense of direction.’ In such a regime of time, there is no possibility of Erfahrung, which depends on a sense of narrative continuum and duration.

Their manifest tone is more one of dry-eyed anger, rendered melancholic by the absence of any outlet or remedy for it. Under his gaze, the political, financial and technological sectors are thieves to whom we have willingly handed over our lives and selves, along with any capacity for dissent or resistance.

On this view, depression is the definitive malaise of the achievement society: the effect of being always made to feel that we’re running hopelessly behind our own ego-ideal, exhausting ourselves in the process. The figure of the achievement subject gives rise to some of Han’s most vivid evocations of psychic and bodily debilitation: The exhausted, depressive achievement-subject grinds itself down … It is tired, exhausted by itself, and at war with itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outward, of standing outside itself, of relying on the Other, on the world, it locks its jaws on itself; paradoxically, this leads the self to hollow and empty out. It wears out in a rat race it runs against itself.

that rare but unmistakable alloy of gratitude and resentment aroused when someone else’s thinking gives precise and fully formed expression to one’s own fumbling intuitions

My most optimistic view of this is that the cost of developing software goes down because an engineer like myself can be more ambitious, can take on more things. As a result, demand for software goes up—because if you’re a company that previously would never have dreamed of building a custom CRM for your industry because it would have taken 20 engineers a year before you got any results... If it now takes four engineers three months to get results, maybe you’re in the market for software engineers now that you weren’t before.

Take somebody off the street who’s never written any code before and ask them to build an iPhone app with ChatGPT. They are going to run into so many pitfalls, because programming isn’t just about can you write code—it’s about thinking through the problems, understanding what’s possible and what’s not, understanding how to QA, what good code is, having good taste. There’s so much depth to what we do as software engineers. I’ve said before that generative AI probably gives me like two to five times productivity boost on the part of my job that involves typing code into a laptop. But that’s only 10 percent of what I do. As a software engineer, most of my time isn’t actually spent with the typing of the code. It’s all of those other activities. The AI systems help with those other activities, too. They can help me think through architectural decisions and research library options and so on. But I still have to have that agency to understand what I’m doing. So as a software engineer, I don’t feel threatened.

I'm on a Discord server where every time we post a blog post it gets posted in the channel. That's nice. Often there's a nice chat! I bet there will be once I post this one. I want to set it up for other Discords I'm in. Not to post Official Updates on The Thing the Discord server is about... but just to let everyone see the blogs everyone else is writing. Get excited about it! Respond to each other at length!A blog feels a little safe, a little cozy, but also free and clear. It's simultaneously public - you just need a link! But it's also hidden - it's not on the feeds, it's a click away. In today's internet we're either hiding away from the world in our little communities or we're hyper-optimising our public personas... but a blog is a secret third way to post!

Our resources can help you: Provoke the types of nuanced conversations that foster digital thriving

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Literally, it makes no difference what I abstain from, I will always find a way to procrastinate.

It's complicated though: working on your own projects in the morning creates an emotion state! It makes you feel like the day belongs to you, not just your boss.

So, maybe one person goes for a jog in the morning because it energises them and sets them up for the day.You see their morning routine and you think, "jogging is good for you, I should do that too." But YOU hate jogging, especially when it's cold out. So you are actually not following their routine at all – their routine energises them and yours makes you miserable.And Morning/Evening Routine content creators don't communicate clearly what purpose a given step is serving for that individual.

He appears to have retained affection for the younger writer; when Benson called on him and found him absent, James responded with a letter that reads like self-parody: “Please believe I would have surrounded your advent with every circumstance of welcome had I been here” (the man couldn’t even write a “sorry I missed you!” note that sounds recognisably human).

Brian Masters, who wrote biographies of both Benson and Corelli, notes that the older woman felt genuine warmth for Benson, only to be mocked behind her back. But there was clearly affection in the mockery (and Benson was certainly more indulgent of her foibles than Mark Twain, who called her “the most offensive sham, inside and out, that misrepresents and satirises the human race today”.)

While Benson befriended Corelli, he also nursed an ironic appreciation of her more risible moments, which were legion, all documented in a scrapbook of cuttings he called the “Book of Fearfuljoy”.

Much of her own persona was fictional; she was “perhaps the most accomplished liar in literature” according to biographer Brian Masters. She falsified her age by decades and claimed descent from the (childless) composer, Arcangelo Corelli; she was in fact Mary Mackay, illegitimate daughter of a Scottish poet and his maid.

In 2003, Dave Shea began a legendary project called CSS Zen Garden that provided a demonstration of "what can be accomplished through CSS-based design" until submissions stopped in 2013. Style Stage seeks to rekindle that spirit by providing this page as the base HTML for contributors - like you! - to re-style by submitting an alternate stylesheet.

The lesson should be that any movement devoid of hope will quickly be devoid of members. Humans do not want to feel helpless or worthless or weak. They want role models who are strong and capable and enjoy being who they are. They don’t just want endless validation and valorization of their poor mental health, they want to be fucking cured. In other words, they want at least a fighting chance at personal happiness and if your movement can’t offer it to them, then your movement will die and no one will miss it.

And, above all, you get that drumbeat of miserable helplessness, the implication that every bad thing in your life is due to factors beyond your control: mental illness, capitalism, or mental illness caused by capitalism.

Bo, and millions of others like him, need the apocalypse to keep their worldview intact, because they have to resolve the contradiction between “This system has provided me with an objectively comfortable life” and “I’m miserable.” Belief in the End Times lets them turn this bug into a feature: “Considering the dire state of the world, it would actually be selfish to enjoy what I have!”

Somewhere, right now, a teenage girl just recorded herself crying for a TikTok video but, when she went to edit it, realized her mic wasn’t plugged in and so now she’s making herself cry a second time to get another take. Next door is some dude with a great job, healthy body, a loving partner and lots of friends who, after a long day of fairly easy work and an evening watching Netflix, will tweet, “Another wretched day enduring the horrors, my thoughts are with all of you who know that just surviving this absolute hellscape is an accomplishment all its own.” They all exist within an online subculture in which earnest attempts at positive sincerity and wellness are to be mocked as vapid (as they are in Burnham’s “White Woman’s Instagram”). The practice of not just broadcasting your lowest moments, but intentionally playing up the angst for maximum engagement has to be the world’s worst possible coping mechanism, a form of self-harm with an added layer of performance anxiety (I’m not sure science even has a word for the gut-punch sensation of recording your sobs of despair, only to see the post get zero likes and a single comment from a spambot). But they do it because that subculture says this is what a good person does, they demonstrate how they constantly feel the terrible weight of the world on their shoulders.

For all its specificity, Fitzgerald ruthlessly stripped Gatsby of any jazz-age slang that might have dated it – there are no bee’s knees or cat’s pajamas. He was using Keats to write jazz, not the other way around; the controlled, conservative style followed logically.

Luhrmann’s Broadway is thronged with yellow taxis – but New York taxis were not uniformly yellow in the early 1920s. There were also red taxis, blue taxis, checkered taxis, and by the summer of 1923, lavender taxis, like the one Myrtle Wilson selects after letting four others pass by. Lavender taxis were known for being expensive and could seem pretentious, an impression heightened by their violent colour scheme: “cerise and lavender taxis with red and green checkers”. A night out in Prohibition New York, it was said, “begins in a bierstube [beer hall] and ends in a purple taxi”. Myrtle Wilson, with her violent affectations and social climbing, would naturally choose a lavender taxi.

We also need to come to terms with the fact that while we love visiting unique websites—for lack of a better word—we love it precisely because they are not everywhere. Faced with the frustration of a myriad variations and absolutely no consistency whatsoever, and sound blaring from every tab we open, web browsing can become an effortful chore.

Amy’s argument that customising a website powered by these fancy new tools was ’way more work than pure HTML ever was’ is a bit misinformed. A set of purely HTML pages become increasingly harder to maintain, and well-nigh impossible to consistently update. You would need a framework sooner or later unless you wanted to either rediscover the wheel or give up on your oldest pages with every passing year to allow your website to evolve into an unrecognisable, ameboid mass of HTML files. Everyone who wrote HTML pages by hand for their websites has at some point wondered if they could keep all the common parts and just change the ones that change across pages. This is not so much an invention of or a rule imposed by blogging tools as it is logical progression. There are, for example, why diaries come with dates printed or why notebooks come with rules.

Think of the diary, or the commonplace book. Both spiritual predecessors of the modern weblog. Neither is arranged by topic, season, theme, alphabet or mood. They are arranged chronologically simply because without knowing all content that will be produced in the future, there is no way of organising them.

Linking to other sites is an act of rebellion; but its also an act of meditation, and of ego death - linking to the work of others is a way of celebrating their achievements and by doing so, gaining dignity for yourself and your work.

Unfortunately for Google, ChatGPT is a better-looking crystal ball. Let’s say I want to replace the rubber on my windshield wipers. A Google Search return for “replace rubber windscreen wiper” shows me a wide variety of junk, starting with the AI overview. Next to it is a YouTube video. If I scroll down further, there’s a snippet; next to it is a photo. Below that are suggested searches, then more video suggestions, then Reddit forum answers. It’s busy and messy.Now let’s go over to ChatGPT. Asking “How do I replace rubber windscreen wiper?” gets me a cleaner layout: a response with sub-headings and steps. I don’t have any immediate link to sources and no way to evaluate whether I’m getting good advice — but I have a clear, authoritative-sounding answer on a clean interface. If you don’t know or care how things work, ChatGPT seems better.

Many tech elites read the book as a denunciation of government overreach. But Scott was an excoriating critic of the drive to efficiency that they themselves embody. Scott [quoted] a description of the military engineer’s “bulldozing habit of mind: one that sought to clear the ground of encumbrances, so as to make a clear beginning on its own inflexible mathematical lines.” Musk epitomizes that bulldozing turn of mind. Like the Renaissance engineers who wanted to raze squalid and inefficient cities to start anew, DOGE proposes to flense away the complexities of government in a leap of faith that AI will do it all better. If the engineers were not thoroughly ignorant of the structures they are demolishing, they might hesitate and lose momentum.

Academics like myself are used to treating problems as things to study, not things to solve. My brain was rewired by three days in the company of brilliant, enthusiastic people, weird in all the good ways, possessed of an enormous variety of interests, but all practically focused on making the world into a better place through getting stuff done.

Lightly sweetened brioche-style buns in the shape of a football, split and filled with whipped cream, maritozzi are the kind of breakfast that encourages you to slow down for a moment

Keeping in mind that “marito” is Italian for “husband,” legend also has it that by the 18th century, to propose marriage, a man would give his intended one of these buns, perhaps even having a ring or another token of affection baked inside—thus earning the maritozzi their name (though whether the practice or name came first is a chicken-or-the-egg situation).

Usually, we talk about the distraction of the smartphone era as a very bad thing. But in these kinds of half-social moments, when we’re all looking at our phones, I think we’re instead treating that distraction as a virtue or form of politeness. Taking out your phone, the infamous distraction device, indicates that you aren’t really engaged in anything important: you’re more than happy to be pulled back into conversation or to switch gears. Meanwhile, taking out a book while everyone hangs out—even if people aren’t speaking or directly interacting —feels like a turning-away. It indicates that, if the conversation were to start up again, you might be disinterested, or even annoyed, or might simply not partake.

Once you’ve been punched in the stomach, you’re free to go home if there’s no other priority task.”“I come in, you punch me in the stomach, and I go home?”“Exactly right. It sounds like we won’t really have to spend all that much time onboarding. You seem to know just what needs to be done to really make an impact on this team. We’d be excited to have you join.”

Common discourse paints out brain rot as intellectual poison: refined sugars and seed oils for the mind2. But it’s also become something more useful and valuable than junk food alone. In today’s surreal cultural landscape, it’s become a ‘badge of honour’3, offering people a semblance of a community and connection. It offers what cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito calls a ‘genre of participation’. There’s a reward if you get the obscure reference: you are in communion with the author; your specific habits and tastes are seen, confirmed, and validated by the knowledge that someone else is watching the same TikToks, following the same online conversations, reposting the same posts as you.The very content that supposedly rots our brains has become a form of cultural literacy, a marker of sophistication. Is it irony? Or is it simply the natural physics of online culture, where even digital detritus can be turned into valuable art, commerce and connection?

You start hearing empty phrases like “very mindful, very demure” and “it's giving" used in common water cooler parlance.

I don’t know how to participate in a community that so eagerly brushes aside the active and intentional/foundational harms of a technology. In return for what? Faster copypasta? Automation tools being rebranded as an “agentic” web? Assurance that we won’t be left behind? This is your opportunity to get in at the ground floor! I don’t know how to attend conferences full of gushing talks about the tools that were designed to negate me.

I said on social media that people believe what chatbots tell them, and I was laughed at. No one would trust a chatbot, silly! That same day, several different friends and colleagues quoted the output of an ‘AI’ to me in unrelated situations, as though quoting reliable facts. So now a select few companies run by billionaires control much of the information that people see – “summarized” without sources. Meanwhile, there’s an oligarchy taking power in the US. Meanwhile, Grok’s entire purpose is to be ‘anti-woke’ and anti-trans, ChatGPT’s political views are shifting right, and Anthropic is partnering with Palantir. Seems chill. I bet ‘agents’ are cool.

That includes the current poster child of “LLMs are awesome”: coding assistants. These tools have the same error rates, repetition, and biases as other LLM applications and they consistently perpetuate harmful or counterproductive practices from the past (like an over-reliance on React or poor accessibility). A world where every programmer has adopted a coding copilot, unless there’s a revolutionary improvement in the effectiveness of these tools, is a world where the software industry collapses in on itself in a cascade of bugs, poor design, and systemic failures.

Considering that the most consistent, most forceful, and least ambiguous warning cries about LLMs have come from AI and Machine Learning academics like Timnit Gebru, Dr Abeba Birhane, Emily M. Bender, Dr. Damien P. Williams, and Gary Marcus (I’m using “Dr” with the name based on how they represent themselves on social media) just to name a few. They have come to their conclusion precisely because they have thought about the topic with “sufficient sensitivity and imagination”, not to mention extensive domain knowledge, deep understanding of how the tech works, and how these models interact with the larger context of society and culture.

It's not just that the training sets simply don't have examples of people who look like me. It's that the system is now explicitly engineered to resist imagining me. …Hey, is now a good a time to mention that in an effort to create a welcoming and inclusive community for all users, the Midjourney Community Guidelines consider deformed bodies a form of gore, and thus forbidden? It is something of an amusing curiosity that some AI models were perplexed by a giraffe without spots. But it's these same tools and paradigms that enshrine normativity of all kinds, sanding away the unusual.

Date Issued: 1901

Borders can be made from images! (though they should be designed with use as borders in mind)

Efforts invested in Knowledge (e.g., retriev-ing relevant information) and Comprehension (understanding thatinformation) often go hand in hand when using GenAI tools. Ingeneral, participants perceived less effort in retrieving and curatingtask-relevant information, because GenAI automates the process.

Recent work has motivated the need for critical thinking supportin AI-assisted knowledge work [ 116, 119]. It is motivated primarilyby the observation of the tendency of AI-assisted knowledge work-flows to be subject to “mechanised convergence” [114 ], i.e., thatusers with access to GenAI tools produce a less diverse set of out-comes for the same task, compared to those without. This tendencyfor convergence reflects a lack of personal, contextualised, criticaland reflective judgement of AI output and thus can be interpretedas a deterioration of critical thinking.However, we lack direct empirical evidence for an interpretationthat posits a connection between mechanised convergence andcritical thinking. Output diversity is a proxy for critical thinking,and a flawed one. For instance, users who reuse GenAI output with-out editing it may have nonetheless performed a critical, reflectivejudgement in forming the decision not to edit it. Such reflectivethinking is invisible to measures that focus only on the ultimateartefact produced. Without knowing how knowledge workers enactcritical thinking when using GenAI and the associated challenges,we risk creating interventions that do not address workers’ realneeds.

All I suggest is that looking away on the internet is the wrong impulse. Exit is unproductive and won't make any difference. Just like real life, there is no escape. You can't opt out.

But, it is harder to see the same repeating pattern in new platforms like Are.na, a popular new site for designers to escape the rabbit race of social media, inspired by the Whole Earth Catalog, and dedicated to sharing techniques for unschooling, DIY, and connecting decentralized communities. Or, fleeing everything, they escape to their own tiny digital gardens on the internet, self-sufficient and separated from the chaos around them. For no reason, I am reminded of Engels's quote: "These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things, they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock the whole world."

If "left" and "right" have any meaning at all, "right" describes a worldview under which civilized society depends upon legitimate hierarchy, and a key object of politics is properly defining and protecting that hierarchy. "Left", on the other hand, is animated by antipathy to hierarchy, by an egalitarianism of dignity. While left-wing movements recognize that effective institutions must place people in different roles — sometimes hierarchical, sometimes associated with unequal rewards — these are contingent, often problematic, overlays upon a foundational assertion that every human being has equal dignity and equal claim to the fundamental goods of human life. Whatever else colleges and universities do in the United States, they define and police our most consequential social hierarchy, the dividing line between a prosperous if precarious professional class and a larger, often immiserated, working class. The credentials universities provide are no guarantee of escape from paycheck-to-paycheck living, but statistically they are a near prerequisite.

When social class and attitudes toward greed were entered into a linear-regression model predicting cheating behavior, social class was no longer a significant predictor, b = 0.16, SE b = 0.11, t(185) = 1.50, P = 0.14, whereas attitudes toward greed significantly predicted cheating, b = 0.68, SE b = 0.27, t(185) = 2.50, P < 0.02.

In study 2, we tested whether upper-class drivers are more likely to cut off pedestrians at a crosswalk. An observer positioned him- or herself out of plain sight at a marked crosswalk, coded the status of a vehicle, and recorded whether the driver cut off a pedestrian (a confederate of the study) attempting to cross the intersection. Cutting off a pedestrian violates California Vehicle Code. In this study, 34.9% of drivers failed to yield to the pedestrian. A binary logistic regression with time of day, driver's perceived age and sex, and confederate sex entered as covariates indicated that upper-class drivers were significantly more likely to drive through the crosswalk without yielding to the waiting pedestrian, b = 0.39, SE b = 0.19, P < 0.05.

Rrow itself, let it be sorrow; let him love it; let him pursue it, ishing for its acquisitiendum. Because he will ab hold, unless but through concer, and also of those who resist.

We are surrounded by screens all day long, from our phones to tablets, to laptops. Do we need to stare at yet another screen? Instead, we use augmented reality HUD.

When I first launched the project, many people wrote about it as if it was a directory of old peoples’ personal sites. Not at all - it was a directory of personal sites authored by people of all ages - from teenagers to people in their nineties. I truly believed back then as I do now, that the web brings us all together regardless of age!

Mr Skeffington (1940) is, at its heart, a novel about menopause (though the word itself is never mentioned) and the invisibility that comes with age.

Furthermore, it’s generally a bad idea to think too deeply or quantitatively about your friendships—a certain degree of irrationality and forgetfulness is essential to the whole enterprise. It’s usually not good for a friendship when you start thinking things like “Bob is kind of a shitty person, why exactly am I still buddies with him?” (because you’ve known him for a long time and he really got you out of jam back in college, and that’s plenty enough reason to stay friends with him; also people change and you might be really glad that you stayed friends with him in the future) or “Nancy has to initiate the next hang out because I’ve done it nine times this year compared to her three”(she’s going through some things you don’t know about so cut her a break, just like she’s cut you one in the past). Friendship drama caused by weddings is another example—shit can really get awkward when you have to basically rank your friends by choosing a best man/maid of honor or deciding who makes it into the wedding party and who doesn’t.

Unfortunately, we can’t console ourselves that the plays that do survive were necessarily the best, or at least the most popular. McInnis crunched the numbers based on the meticulous book-keeping of one London impresario in the 1590s, Philip Henslowe, and drew the following conclusion: “Lost plays performed at least as well as, and usually better than, the plays that have survived. They are definitively not inferior, they were good money-makers, and they have been lost for a variety of reasons that aren’t attributable to quality.”

If there’s one thing I learned throughout school and work, it’s that you should never visibly operate at your peak even when urgency calls for it. This is because functioning at >=100% regularly, while possibly dazzling to your peers, managers, and spectators, is unsustainable and you’ll only end up burning yourself out, especially when this becomes perceived as your operating baseline and expected of you to be your minimum capacity every work day.

They're selling, of course, but also this grandiose and mystified mixture of awe and dread—something amazing is happening very quickly just out of sight, and will be here soon despite always being exactly 18-36 months away, and you will need to be protected from it, but also it will improve your life—is as much the product as anything else.

SoftBank is a Japanese carrier which had its own emoji set for the years 1997—2016. SoftBank (known as J-Phone at the time) created the first emoji set known to be featured on an early mobile phone.

The definition above implies that the “World Wide Web” uses the http protocol to send its data. Why then, do we still need to add the “WWW” subdomain? It’s a waste of time to type it. Wouldn’t it be easier to just type in the domain name, without the “WWW”?

I think this is how most games view the purpose of their loops. It’s for the player to master a skill. But most of these games aren’t really about that. In Assassin’s Creed Odyssey you have an RPG skill tree that unlocks new abilities, lets you get better and better at fighting and sneaking. And, I suppose you could make a case that the game is about an assassin honing her craft. But...actually it really isn't. It’s about someone trying to find who her real family is. Or it’s about exploring ancient Greece. Or it’s about choosing sides in the Peloponnesian War. Or...something else. I’m not really sure what it’s about, honestly, and anyways it doesn’t matter. Let’s say it’s about an assassin honing her craft. Nothing in the game really supports that. The world doesn’t feel oppressive or vulnerable, it hardly matters if you get better or not, it’s quite easy; it’s impossible to get lost; you never fail. I don’t really feel like my skill in that game improved, as I played it. It felt more like…the game just kept going. It takes a lot of work to make this structure meaningful! But let’s suppose these games did make this work. Let’s say all these games achieve the difficult task of creating meaning through play, feeling mastery through repetition…it’s not that this is a bad use of play, but I have to believe it is not all play can offer us. I hope it is just a small fraction of what play is capable of! So why is this all we’re doing? Why can’t we hope for more?

What grants arcade games their meaning is their high scores: arcades are social spaces. Like the combative meaning of Battle Line, Space Invaders is granted meaning through leaderboards and face offs. Even if you’re just playing against yourself, there is a tension of getting farther, doing better, honing your craft and seeing it reflected in concrete terms. Everything you do in the game furthers this goal, which makes everything you do meaningful.

If something is impossible to know you are better off not being very smart, because smart people fool themselves into thinking they know while average people are more likely to shrug their shoulders and end up closer to reality.

Most problems are more complicated than they look but most solutions should be simpler than they are.

A lot of good writing makes points that people already intuitively know but haven’t yet put into words. It works because readers learn something new without having to expend much energy questioning whether it’s true. The alternatives are points that are obvious and well known (boring) or something that’s non-obvious and unknown (often takes too much effort to understand and impatient readers leave).

It’s easier to lie with numbers than words, because people understand stories but their eyes glaze over with numbers. As the saying goes, more fiction has been written in Excel than Word.

Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.

Money’s greatest intrinsic value is its ability to give you control over your time.

People learn when they’re surprised. Not when they read the right answer, or are told they’re doing it wrong, but when they experience a gap between expectations and reality.

Pessimism always sounds smarter than optimism because optimism sounds like a sales pitch while pessimism sounds like someone trying to help you.

History is driven by surprising events but forecasting is driven by obvious ones.

LLMs are not going to develop subjective experience no matter how big they get. It’s like imagining that a printer could actually feel pain because it can print bumper stickers with the words “Baby don’t hurt me” on them. It doesn’t matter if the next version of the printer can print out those stickers faster, or if it can format the text in bold red capital letters instead of small black ones. Those are indicators that you have a more capable printer but not indicators that it is any closer to actually feeling anything.

But any attempt to encourage people to treat AI systems with respect should be understood as an attempt to make people defer to corporate interests. It might have value to corporations, but there is no value for you.

Could there be value, though, in treating an AI system as more of a partner—something or someone with whom we develop a relationship—rather than merely as a tool?It all depends on what you mean by “relationship.” If you’re a woodworker, you might develop emotional associations with a set of chisels you’ve used for years, and in some sense that’s a “relationship,” but it’s entirely different from the relationship you have with people. You might make sure you keep your chisels sharp and rust-free, and say that you’re treating them with respect, but that’s entirely different from the respect you owe to your colleagues. One way to clarify this is to remember that people have their own preferences, while things do not. To respect your colleagues means to pay attention to their preferences and interests and balance them against your own; when they do this to you in return, you have a good relationship. By contrast, your chisel has no preferences; it doesn’t want to be sharp. When you keep it sharp, you are doing so because it will help you do good work or because it gives you a feeling of satisfaction to know that it’s sharp. Either way, you are only serving your own interests, and that’s fine because a chisel is just a tool. If you don’t keep it sharp, you are only harming yourself. By contrast, if you don’t respect your colleagues, there is a problem beyond the fact that it might make your job harder; you do them harm because you are ignoring their preferences. That’s why we consider it wrong to treat a person like a tool; by acting as if they don’t have preferences, you are dehumanizing them.

The impulse to view everything in terms of efficiency, of reducing costs and maximizing output, is radically overapplied in the modern world. There are certain situations in which that is an appropriate framing, but art cannot be understood that way. Arguably the most important parts of our lives should not be approached with this attitude. Some of this attitude comes from the fact that the people making AI tools are engineers viewing everything from an engineering perspective, but it’s also that, as a culture, we have adopted this way of thinking as the default.

Many people would have you believe that the process of making art and the end result can be easily separated, but I don’t believe they can be. I was talking with someone who is very excited about AI-generated imagery, and she said, “Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that AI can make better art than humans. In that scenario, do you think that we should reject AI art simply to protect the livelihood of human artists?” I responded, “I’m not going to grant you that premise, because that is the question under debate. You are framing the hypothetical in a way that assumes the conclusion.”

When we use a search engine, we get verbatim quotes from text on the internet and also a link to the original web page. A search engine gives us information directly from the horse’s mouth. LLMs are like a search engine that rephrases information instead of giving it verbatim or pointing you to the original source. In some respects, that is really cool, but they’re not rephrasing it reliably. It’s like asking a question and getting an answer back from someone who read the answer but didn’t really understand it and is trying to rephrase it to the best of their ability. I call LLMs a blurry JPEG because they give a low-resolution version of the internet. If you are using the internet to find information, which is what most of us use the internet for, it doesn’t really make sense to go with the low-resolution version when we have conventional search engines that point you to the actual information itself.

A lot of people would say magic definitionally cannot have rules, and that’s one popular way of looking at it. But I have a different take—I would say that magic is evidence that the universe knows you’re a person. It’s not that magic cannot have rules; it’s that the rules are more like the patterns of human psychology or of interactions between people. Magic means that the universe is behaving not as a giant machine but as something that is aware of you as a person who is different from other people, and that people are different from things. At some level, the universe responds to your intentions in a way that the laws of physics as we understand them don’t.

They rely on separating content from aesthetics, allowing marketing executives to brainstorm (usually bad) ideas and only use style as a superficial, disconnected layer to slap onto them. They are crystalized snapshots in a repertoire rather than emerging, evolving features of creative practice, which makes them wieldier and more docile than unpredictable artists’ styles.Computer scientists often thought they were aligned with artists’ ways of seeing, while in practice, they trained their systems to see like a client.

Just eight hours of the Severance theme song to last your entire day, Innie.

For most Americans silence is discomforting. "Small talk" or casual conversation is usually preferable to quiet. It is therefore common to hear people casually talking about the weather, sports, parties, food, clothing, jobs, people they both know, or past experiences, especially those they have in common.

Friendships among Americans can be shorter and less intense than those among people from other cultures. At least many observers from abroad have this impression. Because Americans are taught to be self-reliant, because they live in a very mobile society, and for many other reasons as well, they tend to avoid deep involvements with other people.

Also, there is a strong political correctness in the U.S. not to comment negatively on a person's appearance.

Most Americans will back away from a person who has "body odor" or " bad breath". This backing away may be the only signal that they are "offended" by another person's breath or body odors. The topic of these odors is so sensitive that most Americans will not tell another person that he or she has bad breath or body odors.

Discussing issues or ideas openly with other individuals is considered not only proper but often a responsibility as well. Americans, particularly in a business situation, may appear abrupt or harsh and do not spend the time on polite social talk that many other nationalities do. You may be surprised to find the briefest of introductions is immediately followed by getting right to the point.

When they are talking to someone, Americans alternate between looking briefly into the listener's eyes and looking slightly away. When they are listening to another person, they look almost constantly at the speaker's eyes.

While talking, Americans are often made uncomfortable by extreme physical closeness. Eighteen inches is the minimum closeness they will usually tolerate, so don't stand very close to people when you are talking with them. Informal physical contact during conversation is also not encouraged by most Americans.

Americans treat each other in what can be considered informal ways. Informal, relaxed postures are commonly assumed by Americans when they are standing or sitting, even when they are conversing with others; lack of formal posture is not a sign of inattention or disrespect.

The American style of friendly joking, getting the last word in, and the quick reply are subtle forms of competition in America. Although such behavior is natural for Americans, it may appear overbearing to other nationalities.

a website whose domain registration has been ceaselessly auto-renewing since 1998, but whose last FTP upload was in the summer of that year. the website is impaled against the passage of time, bytes streaming from digital stigmata. it is forced to watch in muted terror as its siblings and friends wither and vanish entirely, blinking out of existence one by one as their registrations go inevitably out of date.

I appreciate you looking out, but thankfully this is just a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor and I am eternally my own worst enemy target audience. A better man with a better sense of humor might stop trying to beat this particular horse, but I’m not him bro.

In any subculture, showing off how much attention you can hold for pet topics, the ones vital to the community but trivial to others, becomes an in-group endurance sport. It's a treacherous exercise that, over time, leaves you oblivious to how truly you’re interested, deep, deep down.

I don’t need to tell rationalists that changing someone’s mind has little to do with the persuasiveness of arguments. To explain in rationalese, I suspect that our minds are in a state of epistemic inertia when core beliefs are challenged. In other words, no matter how much you bludgeon your brain with new evidence, beliefs cannot be updated without overcoming that inertia first. Some ways to achieve this are through narratives or or through authority — consider how the advice you dismissed when it came from your roommate suddenly seems sensible when it comes from your favorite author.Style is another way to break inertia. Consider the difference between “Fame can change you” and, to use a classic line, “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.” The first won’t even register on the ears, but the second may help you see such a banal — but true — statement anew. Truths, upon repetition in the same formulation, start sounding like truisms. Much like how neurons, after repeated stimuli, need a higher threshold to fire, a truism blends into the noise. Stylistic and formal experimentation is like introducing randomness and entropy to disrupt the epistemic logjam.

Curiously, as the rationalist blogosphere seemed to expand over the years, it continued to obey a kind of twin Earth metaphysics, as if the internet contained a phantom dimension invisible to the mainstream media. My otherwise well-read and very online friends seemed unaware of it. (I assume the readership of Ribbonfarm has a near-perfect negative correlation with the viewership of HBO’s Girls.)

Blogging, no matter how technical the subject area, is never a purely expository form but an inherently performative one.

Seeing the state of rationalist writings in 2024, I’m reminded of how philosopher Nikhil Krishnan described the late 18th-century German Romantics: “rebels find themselves thrown into the arms of another orthodoxy,” writes Krishnan. “How different a goth looks from everyone else, and yet how similar to every other goth.”

The group that once prided itself on avoiding a hive mind is now steeped in its own kind of piety.

What Papua New Guinea is to language, Yunnan is to food. The cause of the diversity is no mystery. Yunnan, historically, was (1) reasonably agriculturally productive, but at the same time (2) insanely difficult to traverse.

Niubie (牛瘪). Right. Another ‘infamous’ dish that perhaps belongs to Chinese internet’s “dark cuisine hall of fame”. This dish belongs to a category of dish called bie or pie. It’s made by feeding a cow or goat a number of herbs before slaughter, then collecting them from the first stomach immediately after killing the animal. This digested herb liquid is then used as a base, into which the meat and organs from the animal will then be added

Yaba, Wrapped Duck (鸭把). Right. Yaba, literally meaning “duck handle”, is a specialty around the Hechi city. It contains duck meat, duck stomach, pear, cucumber, Thai basil, all wrapped together with ginger leaf. The dipping sauce is made with duck blood (OG version uses raw blood), ginger, and sour pickles.

Breakfast Rice Noodle Soup with Guangxi-style Char Siu (叉烧粉). Bottom left. A simple breakfast of pork stock and flat rice noodles. It’s topped with an array of sour and spicy pickles, together with Guangxi style Char Siu BBQ Pork - a heavily spiced and deep fried Char Siu variant.

Ask for work that is easy to verify. Your job as a programmer using an LLM is to read the code it produces, think about it, and decide if the work is good. You can ask an LLM to do things you would never ask a human to do. “Rewrite all of your new tests introducing an <intermediate concept designed to make the tests easier to read>” is an appalling thing to ask a human, you’re going to have days of tense back-and-forth about whether the cost of the work is worth the benefit. An LLM will do it in 60 seconds and not make you fight to get it done. Take advantage of the fact that redoing work is extremely cheap.

Toby Shorin is a 30-something thought leader I occasionally see at conferences whose long-form articles about cryptocurrency I am sent by people who think I am interested in that sort of thing. He's the kind of guy who reads No Logo by Naomi Klein, the book about the devastation mega-corporations wreak on workers in the race to sell cheap branded products, agrees it is an impressive piece of journalism, but says, "I think Klein is getting close, but she can't leap to, 'What if this is actually good.'"

Hard Truths (Mike Leigh)British movies these days—from good ones like The Old Oak to OK ones like Bird to wretched ones like Saltburn—present British people as ruthlessly mean to each other, petty, conniving, classist, vulgar shits who add “innit?” at the end of sentences that are aren’t questions but insults. What is going on over there? Mike Leigh presents a meta-answer, with Marianne Jean-Baptiste in the performance of the year as the meanest of all, a depressed, grieving wife and mother ruining everyone’s day in supermarket lines, car parks, living rooms, graveyards, etc.

Furiosa (George Miller)In The Night of the Hunter, Robert Mitchum, sitting in the audience at a burlesque house, ruefully says to himself “There are too many of them. You can’t kill a world.” Furiosa counters this, asking the audience “Who killed the world?” then showing how it was done, ten crashes at a time.

The Beast and Coma (Bertrand Bonello)His plots remain enigmatic, his worldview continues to rattle, and he accomplishes so much without seeming to expend a lot of effort. In The Beast Bonello presents a tragic three-tiered future world, in which he mixes a Henry James novella with the rantings of a California incel serial killer. In Coma, a teenage girl self-confined in her bedroom during the pandemic enacts a digitized ghost story with Barbies. Both movies investigate free will in the coming AI age, and the desire to confront fear, to not be dead, and to go elsewhere when there’s nowhere else to go.

The final WOBO design came in two sizes – 350 and 500 mm versions that were meant to lay horizontally, interlock and layout in the same manner as ‘brick and mortar’ construction. One production run in 1963 yielded 100,000 bottles some of which were used to build a small shed on Mr. Heineken’s estate in Noordwijk, Netherlands. One of the construction challenges “was to find a way in which corners and openings could be made without cutting bottles,” said Mr. Habraken.

a blog is a storefront pretty products adorned, designed, pristine and tailored, for them skinny plastic legs poke through perfect plastic casing landfills of abandoned posts decay ... a wiki is an abyss thoughts written alone unravel, and stitch themselves with meaning ... blogs rot. wikis wait.

The only way something is truly pluggable is if a second implementation is designed at the exact same time as the primary implementation. Then at least you have a proof it can work…one time

It's the feast day of your patron saint, and a recipe has gone missing. A short tale of birds, books, and the cloistered life.

You have your own methods and structures, that are geared to how you work, think, learn and create best, and which have emerged over time and you then reinforced because of their utility to you.

The Grecian bend was a term applied first to a stooped posture[1] which became fashionable c. 1820,[2] named after the gracefully-inclined figures seen in the art of ancient Greece.

Henry may have worn the armour as a jest. The helmet has protruding eyes and a toothy grimace and is adorned with horns and spectacles.

In the sphere of historical reenactment, it is important to back up depicitons with sufficient sources, be it in art or actual findings of surviving garments (which is obviously very difficult in this case), and one has to acknowledge that for the beekeeper, there simply isn’t enough material to make the claim that basket-faced professionals existed before the 1500s. It is reasonably possible, since baskets did exist then, and were most likely cheaper and more widely available than wire mesh, but we can’t say for sure.

Billy Possum is a type of stuffed toy depicting an opossum. Designed to be the replacement for the Teddy bear after Theodore Roosevelt vacated the office of President of the United States in 1909, the toy's popularity waned quickly, with the trend having lost all momentum by Christmas of that year.

Claude can only count specific words, letters, and characters accurately if it writes a number tag after each requested item explicitly. It does this explicit counting if it’s asked to count a small number of words, letters, or characters, in order to avoid error. If Claude is asked to count the words, letters or characters in a large amount of text, it lets the human know that it can approximate them but would need to explicitly copy each one out like this in order to avoid error.

Claude is always sensitive to human suffering, and expresses sympathy, concern, and well wishes for anyone it finds out is ill, unwell, suffering, or has passed away.

Now I have a third thing I want to talk about, before getting on with thetext. 3I am just SPITTING THIS TEXT OUT. I know that my understanding ofpersonal projects and getting them completed is low. I know my weaknesses-that I am bad at getting huge projects done. So what I’m doing is just SPIT-TING THIS TEXT OUT.I figure that if you are reading this, you’d much rather have this than nothingat all. And that’s what’s out there, if you aren’t reading this- NOTHING ATALL. I mean, you can always keep a diary or a bunch of category bins, if youlike. That’s a real no brainer. But besides those two, and treatises on TedNelson’s madness, you won’t find a whole lot.So please excuse the poor formatting of this. It’s raw, coercive, straight text.It’s unorganized. It’s terrible.Maybe one day I will improve this. But that day is not today. Today isa day for spitting text out. With God’s mercy, I will learn how to finish bigprojects. I pray for that ability frequently. If you can mentor me in the subject,I will happily hear you out. But I have not learned it yet.

hen you are writing down your thoughts, you are making themclear to yourself, but when you revise your thoughts, it requires a lot of work-you have to update old ideas to point to new ideas. This discourages a lot ofnew thinking. There is also a “structural integrity” to your old thoughts thatwill resist change. You may actively not-think certain things, because it woulddemand a lot of note keeping work. (Thus the notion that notebooks are bestapplied to things that are not changing.)

furthermore, during the past few years, universities have somewhat caught up with the demand and started to educate, train and graduate undergraduate and master’s students on fundamentals and practical ideas behind these new technologies. they know how to train these models, test these models and deploy these models, in addition to theoretical ideas behind them. even better, they are less egotistical on average than PhD’s and are often more open-minded.

productization implies a lot of things, but there are two aspects that are particularly important to this note. first, productization requires some kind of standardization in development and deployment processes. such process standardization is however antithetical to scientific research. we do not need a constant and frequent stream of creative and disruptive innovations but incremental and stable improvements based on standardized processes. PhD’s are lousy at this, because this is precisely the opposite of what PhD programs are designed to train them for. PhD’s are supposed to come up with innovative ideas (yes, debatable if every idea is innovative, but it tends to be at least innovative with a lot of noise,) validate these ideas either theoretically or empirically, repot the findings to the community by writing papers and then move on. once something becomes an actual product (or a product category,) we cannot simply innovate and move on, but need to stick with it to support it continuously. with a well-established system of processes, the necessity of PhD degrees disappears rapidly.

PALAMEDES     No, thank you. IANTHE     (Despairingly) You don’t even drink! PALAMEDES     In my defence: I’m dead, and this wine doesn’t exist. Ianthe waves a hand airily, then downs her entire cup in one go and hands it off to an attendant. IANTHE     All the better for it. False things have a piquancy which the real can never match.

Attrition is strictly for people who don’t know how to win.

Yeah, don’t want to be fed posts everyday, I want to drop in.

In a way, I realize that starting off with an aside is a bad way to get anyone jazzed about some new ultimately pointless post styling—but I purposefully want these pieces to be less heavily edited and focused than all the other things. So, by throwing in a wankery introduction, it acts as a kind of gate you have to get through. So if this is too self-indulgent or tangential then you know to go away and I just continue and we’re all fine—although I think we’re deep into peak self-indulgence now that ‘people’ have evolved into ‘influencers’. Gah, that sounds condescending—and it is—and, worse, I think being condescending—especially in public like this—is probably much, much more destructive than influencing.

tultywits talk of and use the little things you want to survive. talk of and use the little things you want to survive. This page, for instance, uses HTML definition lists. (The <dl>, <dt> and <dd> tags.) These are quite obscure tags compared to the heavily dominant <div> and <p> tags. I use them because someone has put work into them and I guess I want them to survive. They are a ‘tultywit’. The acronym doesn’t quite stand up under that usage; I assure you, the meaning does.

Tim Toady Phonetic refactoring of the acronym TMTOWDI. Or, there’s more than one way to do it. Phonetic refactoring of the acronym TMTOWDI. Or, there’s more than one way to do it.

‘cottoms up’ Phoneticalized ‘COTMs up’. COTM is crontab of the mind. Phoneticalized ‘COTMs up’. COTM is crontab of the mind. Much like a jubilant toast, this expression ends an immensely thought-provoking discussion where I am left with much to reconsider. Like the ‘crontab’, a long-running system process that periodically triggers itself, these are the thoughts that might poke me on an hourly schedule throughout the night.

Above the first cover is the original version of the opening sentence (captioned "Turn Hard Books"), which reads "In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since." Above the second cover (captioned "into Easy Books") is a simplified version, which reads "When I was young, my dad told me something that I still think about."

I wouldn’t recommend going deep into AWS or other Cloud services for hobbyists. Since I do software engineering for my employment I’ve gained a lot of experience on “industrial strength” solutions. The challenge is finding the subset that actually solve more problems than they cause. I often feel like I’m crawling around in Jeff Bezos’ spaceship trying to bring alien technology to the people.

Discovery, and search, will sort itself out, if we do #1,2, and 3. Trying to decide if I agree with this

surely there is a linear logical framework from which geometric social cooperation can arise (I must hope).

I should love to be rebuked! When you are in the freezing ocean, it is probably the best time to hear that you have made a grammatical mistake. What a helpful distraction that could be! And you may never forget to make it again.

“I am failing this man.”—Dude, I don’t rely on you—I have my own system of living—I’m not just an imbalanced pinball lost in your machine!

I don’t feel that I want to ‘wrestle’ —I want to ‘pen pal’. After all, this is a work of fiction. The contents of this letter are products of the reader’s imagination. This letter is for entertainment purposes only. Although the form of this letter is autobiographical, it is not. Although this letter may appear authentic, it is not. What appears to be ‘wrestling’ may actually be a new type of sophisticated ‘pal’ engagement maneuver.

See, to me the issue is that ANY algorithm involves encoding a ruleset that strictly describes what it is looking for. So by the time you encode your crate-digging behavior as an algorithm—it has lost its flavor.

It’s weird, but I really agree with this! I say ‘weird’ because part of me just wants to give up on privacy on the Web—maybe we just have to accept that everything is private. But this sucks—there are many private thoughts and nascent ideas that I want to store here, to collaborate on in the shadows. If the ‘blog’/‘wiki’ can be a ‘home’—then it needs its hiding places, its private gathering rooms. (And it does have these—just not on blogs, generally.)

I am happy with how you have things. I understand how you work now. If anything, I would argue that you should continue innovating in the way you have been. That, like the single-page oracle metaphor from earlier, you will find more ways for the technology to symbolically represent you. This is paramount.

Like everyone else, I hate Facebook and what it has done to the Hypertext Kingdom and I will fight it valiantly and with great, upturned nostrils. But I have also used it to obsessively follow the death of Kaylee (and other children that I will write about some time) and I have depended on this awful unsavory to read their obscure stories. It has filled me with profound spiritual mayonnaisse.

Now, it is tiring to tell this story. If you are reading, then you certainly don’t believe me and you likely won’t even attempt to be my friend. That’s okay—I believe it’s definitely up to me to make the initial move to be your friend.

Pantone’s use of AI-generated imagery in the Mocha Mousse launch video highlights just how performative the trend-spotting economy has become. Pantone didn’t need to find real-world examples to justify the coming popularity of their Colour of the Year – they could just use AI to create cozy interiors, cafes, and polished wood finishes bathed in its warm tone. If you can’t find proof of a trend in the wild, why not generate it yourself?

A term like “Tomato Girl” creates a lens for viewing the world, encouraging people to adopt and expand the trend, whether by buying tomato-red dresses or posting Mediterranean-inspired selfies. Many of these modern micro-aesthetics are anchored in a single dominant colour – Tomato Girl is red, Vanilla Girl is white, Blueberry Girl is blue – distilling identity into something as simple as a palette. Unlike earlier personal styles like punk or indie twee, which demanded a point of view and subcultural references, these aesthetics require little more than a willingness to buy the right products in the right colour.

However, a big no for female writers is to insert any form of personal experience into the plot. If they get caught, it could end their career. One player famously noted: ‘It feels like being pushed second-hand goods when you are expecting a virgin.’ In short, what paper hubbies absolutely cannot have is: history with other women.

The ‘sapiosexual type’ is more sophisticated than its predecessors and becoming prevalent with highly educated women. Creating these characters convincingly is no easy task. Otome game companies often hire female writers from top universities with diverse backgrounds, equipped with knowledge from a range of disciplines. ‘He’ should be able to comment on a Shakespearean sonnet or quantum physics in a magisterial way, if prompted.

Iconic games such as Genshin Impact (developed by the Shanghai game company miHoYo, whose slogan is ‘Tech Otakus Save the World’) are featuring more and more charming male characters to appeal to female players, which is seen as a betrayal of its origins. Many male players refuse to play with male characters – going so far as to deliberately drop them dead – and vow to boycott the game until this supposed mistake is rectified. What they don’t grasp is that they need to outspend female and gay players to regain some bargaining power. Petulantly railing against the ‘pink tax’ won’t get them what they want.

Screentime has become a colosseum where everything is in competition with everything else: email from work competes with text from a friend competes with Instagram and Tiktok.

Now we’re watching Ezra Klein talk on the NYT site as well as listening to him. You have to be better than the rando parroting your articles in a selfie video.

The article is just the intellectual property made to be leveraged in as many spaces as possible

Thus it makes sense to build your concept in public and test its engagement at every stage. Every powerful brand starts with a single post.

The job as a consumer is to find and support them

Media brands increasingly work like fashion brands: Consumers have to want to wear them. If no one wants to come to your party, you’re doing it wrong.

Locality and specificity are good things and offer ways to preserve meaning in the increasingly contextless internet. You have to remain tied to your own digital geography or the scope of a specific viewpoint. An audience wants to feel like an in-group, like they’re in on the joke, even if that joke is just that the mayor of New York sucks.

Parasocial relationships are the name of the game. When people call for a Joe Rogan of the left, it seems like they don’t realize that one of the reasons he is so powerful is that he is many of his listeners’ best friend. People spend hours and hours a day with him; his show and its extended universe have become an on-demand loneliness killing service. The power (and value) of that relationship is unmatched. Puck is a parasocial publication, that’s why you hear the tentpole writers’ voices in solo podcasts.

No matter if you’re a text-only website, it is now in your best interests to hire camera-ready contributors who will make successful video-podcast clips. The problem is journalists and critics aren’t generally known for their personal aesthetic appeal.

Everything is a personality cult, and maybe just a cult. You have to cultivate your own, no matter how small. To do so you must always be relatable, but also ideally aspirational. Just don’t get too out of the reach of your cultists.

But a reaction—whether positive or negative—is exactly what Pizza Hut Taiwan aims for. When it comes to developing new pizzas, their main criteria are clear: “How do we appeal to the Taiwanese tastes and how do we make Italians angry?” Leung says.

Americans are prosperous, but without any deep sense of obligations to others. We are a highly commercial, individualist people, and when we let go of even a thin liberal conception of the public good, we become nasty, petty, small, vindictive and irrational.

In contrast, the US left has long held $15/hr (or $31,000/yr full time) to be the bare minimum and, increasingly, through both legislation and a good labour market, wages are catching up to that.

The reality is that most of Bluesky's userbase doesn't know or care about or understand the degree to which Bluesky is decentralized, except for potentially as a reassurance that "the same thing can't happen here" as happened on X-Twitter. "Decentralization" is not the escape hatch people think it might be in Bluesky, but it's true that "credible exit" may be. However, the credibility of that exit currently predicates on another organization of the same cost and complexity of Bluesky standing in if-or-when Bluesky ends up becoming unsatisfying to its users.

I will (quasi)quote Jonathan Rees again, as I have previously when talking about the nature of language and defining terminology:Language is a continuous reverse engineering effort between all parties involved.(Somewhat humorously, I seem to adjust the phrasing of this quoting-from-memory just slightly every time I quote it.)

ATProto's main design is built upon replicating and indexing the firehose. That is its fundamental design choice and method of operation.I won't go into this too far here other than to say, I'm not sure this is in alignment with what many of its users want. And we're seeing this, increasingly, as users are being upset about finding out that other providers have replicated and indexed their data. This is happening in a variety of ways, from LLM training concerns, to moderation concerns, etc.I won't say too much more on that. I think it's just... this all just gives me the feeling that the "speech vs reach" approach, and the idea of a global public firehose, a "global town square" type approach... it all feels very web 2.0, very "Millennial social media"... for Millenials, by Millenials, trying to capture the idea that society would be better if we all got everyone to talk to each other at once.I think Bluesky is doing about as good a job as a group off people can do with the design they have and are trying to preserve. But I don't think the global context-collapse firehose works, and I'm not sure it's what users want it either, and if they do, they really seem to want both strong central control to meet their needs but also to not have strong central control be a thing that exists when it doesn't.

What would happen if we had a million self-hosted users and five new users were added to the network? Zooming out, once again, the message passing system simply has five new messages sent. Under the public shared heap model, it is 10,000,025 new messages sent! For adding five new self-hosted users! (And that's even just with our simplified model of only sending one message per day per user!)

Now let us get onto decentralization. First my definition of decentralization:Decentralization is the result of a system that diffuses power throughout its structure, so that no node holds particular power at the center.Now here is Bryan's definition (more accurately Mark Nottingham's definition (more accurately, Paul Baran's definition)) of decentralization:[Decentralization is when] "complete reliance upon a single point is not always required" (citing Baran, 1964)Perhaps Bluesky matches this version of decentralization, but if so, it is because it is an incredibly weak definition of decentralization, at least taken independently. This may well say, taken within the context it is provided, "users of this network may occasionally not rely on a gatekeeper, as a treat".

Finally, speaking of things that one is told that simply don't work anymore, my previous article was so long I was sure nobody would read it.

But Ron also shipped something where many others failed, and those others were actual employees. What’s interesting to me is that Ron managed to pull this all off by exercising a different type of power. Ron: Yeah, managers have budget and headcount to make things happen, and the direction comes from the top down. And in that view of the world I had no power. I had no budget, I had no headcount. Adam: Yeah, it makes me think of this quote, “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and assign them tasks, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

Sure, early social media like MySpace allowed for you to radically change the look and feel of your page—adding music and changing the background—but ultimately, it was still a MySpace page, with a comment wall and your top eight friends.

Part of the appeal of the internet when I was young was making your own website. I taught myself HTML as a tween to facilitate that desire (I made a website about Sailor Saturn from Sailor Moon.).

And I had an idea for it: I wanted to construct a monospaced typeface—where the width of all glyphs are the same—that is ideal for writing code, but that would also have certain features of handwritten manuscripts that make it feel a bit like working with an old and mysterious text. I wanted programming to mingle with dusty tomes or spellwork. If programmers have been talking about the similarities between coding and magic for years, maybe we need a font that tries to make this more manifest.

However, because of the constant rush and haste imposed by social media in my life, I can’t devote enough time to these resources. Because I am so used to seeing information, quickly taking it in, and moving on to another topic. Because the short content I constantly consume, whether written or visual, has made me accustomed to this. While reading a technically deep book, re-reading the same page feels like a waste of time; every piece of information I have to go over because I couldn’t understand it at once makes me feel inadequate and late because I can’t just scroll past it.

The problem with online advice is that the person writing the blog post is doing so entirely from their own perspective and lifestyle. They have no idea about you, and you have no idea about them. There’s no guarantee that what works for them will work for you. Moreover, you don’t get a chance to question causality, you just read the advice, consume it, and move on. It takes up space in your mind and on your to-do list, but you don’t get a chance to internalize or filter this topic. You don’t even realize that you should actually do so.

Yellow also became associated with Jews, and as European Christians enforced clothing regulations on Jewish communities, yellow was often (though not always) included. By the early modern period, yellow fell out of favour, perceived as gaudy and unpopular.

Yellow initially benefited from its resemblance to gold, which bolstered its reputation. Many medieval heraldic symbols incorporated yellow, and possessing blonde hair was considered highly fashionable. However, in the Later Middle Ages, yellow began to acquire negative associations, including envy and heresy. Judas, the apostle who betrayed Jesus, was increasingly depicted wearing yellow clothing.

The first significant shift in the ‘blue revolution’ was the use of blue to represent the clothing of the Virgin Mary. The scene of Mary mourning Jesus’ crucifixion was popular in the Middle Ages, and once artists began depicting her cloak in vibrant blue, it quickly became the standard. Additionally, artists, especially those working in stained glass, overcame technical limitations in creating blues, allowing the colour to be used in various mediums and clothing.

Michel Pastoureau’s book on blue begins by highlighting the neglect this colour faced among the ancient Greeks and Romans, who rarely wrote about it or used it. He even explores the intriguing question of whether ancient peoples could perceive blue at all! This neglect persisted through the early Middle Ages until the twelfth century. “Then suddenly,” writes Pastoureau, “in just a few decades, everything changes – blue is ‘discovered’ and attains a prominent place in painting, heraldry, and clothing.”

Green is widely associated with Islam, but this association only developed in the twelfth century. The Quran mentions green eight times, always positively, as a colour representing vegetation, spring, and paradise. The Prophet Muhammad favoured green garments, including a green turban. While green was linked to Muhammad’s descendants, different colours were associated with the ruling Islamic dynasties: white for the Umayyads, black for the Abbasids, and red for the Almohads.

Arthurian romances, one of the most popular forms of literature in the High Middle Ages, frequently employed colour symbolism, particularly in the depiction of knights. Pastoureau notes that these narratives used colours to convey deeper meanings and character traits. He writes: The color code was recurrent and meaningful. A black knight was almost a character of primary importance (Tristan, Lancelot, Gawain) who wanted to hide his identity; he was generally motivated by good intentions and prepared to demonstrate his valor, especially by jousting or tournament. A red knight, on the other hand, was often hostile to the hero; this was a perfidious or evil knight, sometimes the devil’s envoy or a mysterious being from the Other World. Less prominent, a white knight was generally viewed as good; this was an older figure, a friend of protector or the hero, to who he gave wise council. Conversely, a green knight was a young knight, recently dubbed, whose audacious or insolent behavior was going to cause great disorder; he could be good or bad. Finally, yellow or gold knights were rare and blue knights nonexistent.

Michel Pastoureau writes that “the true medieval opposite for white was not so much black as red.” This can be seen in the way Europeans adapted chess. When the game was adopted in Europe, the pieces and chessboard were painted in white and red, contrasting with the black and red sets common in India and the Middle East. It was only towards the end of the Middle Ages that the white versus black dichotomy became more favoured. A key factor in this shift was the advent of printing, where black ink was used on white paper, reinforcing the perception of these colours as natural opposites.

Green occupied a central position, symbolically balanced between the extremes of white and black. It was also regarded as a soothing colour. Scribes often kept emeralds and other green objects nearby to rest their eyes. The poet Baudri de Bourgueil even suggested writing on green tablets instead of white or black ones for this reason.

We stored this probability matrix for each location a phone collected from. Using these, if we collected readings while moving in a straight line, we could tell you how far away the WiFi was. If you turned a corner, we could also add direction, so you could find it in 2D space. If you climbed some stairs, we’d show you altitude as well. The technology was the most interesting project I’d ever worked on. But don’t let that distract you; it was designed to kill people.

Men’s gender attitudes are a predictor of whether they own cryptocurrency and meme stocks, Fairleigh Dickinson University professor Dan Cassino found. Young men who said they value masculinity highly but feel they aren’t traditionally masculine enough have the highest levels of ownership.

How the Occult Gave Birth to Science

Many of the women are surprised by their goals. If you asked them to state their ambitions a few years ago, they would have been entirely focused on advancing their careers. They wanted to make partner at their firm, join the C-suite, expand their business, double their salary, get the corner office. The fact that their new goals have almost nothing to do with the big, prestigious, high-paying jobs that have brought them such extraordinary success isn't just a testament to the power of Byars' program. It also says something about the moment we're in today, after a yearslong national reckoning with the role of work in our lives. It's not that these women hate their current jobs, or that they don't care about the quality of the work they do. It's that their previous dreams of climbing the corporate ladder now strike them as laughably tiny.

Byars asks us to come up with our own 10x goal. Think about it, she says. What do you want in 10 years? Then think about it again: Is that what you really want, or is that just what society wants you to want? What if you forget about whether it's socially acceptable, or even doable? What if you could have anything — anything — in the world?

Byars begins by explaining the concept of 10x. She describes it as a "quantum leap" that gets you results "beyond our wildest expectations." That's what differentiates it from 2x, which is only a "linear step," doing more or less what you did before. It's all a bit murky, but for the purposes of the weekend, I understand 10x to represent something really, really big that you really, really want, but that feels utterly impossible to achieve.

Over the course of the weekend, I ask everyone I meet to explain the secret to the change they've undergone through CWU and Optimum. Many of them tell me they have shifted their mindset. But if you're a woman with four kids and a senior-level corporate job, is there really any amount of mindset shifting you can do to avoid burnout? "At home it's a grind," the communication manager admits. But now, she says, whether it's a kid's temper tantrum or a crisis at work, the chaos doesn't get to her the way it once did. Her burnout is gone.

It's the kind of reframing that happens all the time in therapy. But this is different, because these women are also getting validation from their peers.

The issue with high-achieving women, Byars says, is they focus on meeting only two of those needs — security (money) and esteem — while neglecting the rest. As Byars sees it, unmet needs are what lead to unhappiness. Her solution is to figure out which needs you're neglecting entirely, along with which needs you're not meeting effectively. Then her program helps you devise and implement better strategies to consistently meet all your needs.

To find out, Byars founded The Goodlife Institute in 2017. The program's framework is founded on what she calls "our seven universal needs": autonomy, security, health, leisure, purpose, connection, and esteem. "These seven needs are how human beings have biologically and psychologically evolved in order to survive and thrive," she says in the first of the Week One videos I received for Corporate Women Unleashed. "All seven of them have to be met in order for you to experience optimal well-being."

Byars says there's a better way. It's possible, she promises, to achieve personal fulfillment at the same time as professional success. You don't have to choose.

I squirm in my seat. No man would be caught dead saying this stuff, I think. But the women in the room all look stone-cold serious.

His socialism seems based on the moral improvability of humanity, a notion that not even the Nazis could shake from him. He writes in 1934, from prison in Herford, “Man is not bad—circumstances have made him bad. If circumstances changed, he would slowly, within a few generations, become good again.”