Frank Pasquale is an expert and professor of artificial intelligence law, algorithms and machine learning. He is a prolific and internationally recognized researcher whose work has addressed the regulation of technology in several contexts. His extensive research has been featured in leading law journals and he has advised government officials on cutting-edge legal and technological regulatory issues.
Pasquale's book, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information has been internationally recognized as a landmark study of information asymmetries. His latest book "New Law of Robtoics" is empty in defending the human in a society ruled by AI.
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2026-02-24 03:10:42 “The most extreme form of cognitive surrender is what the authors call “autopilot,” which is basically automating yourself.”A New Wharton Study on AI Warns of a Growing Problem: Cognitive Surrenderhttps://www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/a-new-wharton-study-on-ai-warns-o... Instapaper
2026-01-28 20:27:24 Their “primary, essential view of reality is an unending scroll of text and video. A realm of textureless, scentless, touchless, phantasmic data that neatly sorts itself into increasingly refined and predetermined categories, in other words the essential subjectivity of the computer. Prediction markets are born from this new subjectivity, and within their endless marketplaces create a panorama of human affairs derealized, broken into discrete events with binary outcomes.”https://defector.com/prediction-markets-are-betting-on-a-grim-future
2026-01-28 19:45:18 “Since Georgia implemented work requirements in 2020, they have spent twice as much on Deloitte consultants and administrative costs as on healthcare for people. As the other 55 states and territories are now forced to join Georgia and implement new work requirements, millions will lose their healthcare and Deloitte will cash in.”https://lpeproject.org/blog/the-means-testing-industrial-complex/
2026-01-14 22:39:34 “Wang’s article argues that both the left and right in China’s current mainstream discourse belong to the Touchy-Feely Parties. The Industrial Party believes in the supremacy of productivity and technology, and sees the value of industrialization as transcending that of political parties, regime change, political systems, and ephemeral cultural trends.”https://www.readingthechinadream.com/lu-nanfeng-and-wu-jing-on-the-indus...
2026-01-09 16:12:21 “How are robustness and trustworthiness understood in AI? Let us start with robustness. If not left intuitive, it usually refers to various forms of immunity to so-called distribution shifts. They occur when an AI-model is deployed—as common in practice—on input data sampled from a different distribution than the data on which it was trained: e.g., when the model was trained on patient data from a few hospitals but is deployed at many hospitals”https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-025-05272-4
2026-01-08 14:19:32 “Generative AI is too often described as uncontrollable. I previously wrote on Tech Policy Press about…how companies deploy it to their advantage. But AI architecture is, at its core, a system for shaping words into the outcomes somebody considers desirable. Companies are developing a variety of systems that steer the swarm of words and pixels toward more predictable outcomes, which they define in terms of their own interests.”https://techpolicy.press/why-musk-is-culpable-in-groks-undressing-fiasco
2026-01-06 23:48:19 “Even if we begin in a democracy, inequality can entrench itself and grow arbitrarily extreme, as the rich push policy or steer technological development in the direction that best serves them. Relatedly—or as an extreme case of the same phenomenon—revolutions may be much easier to suppress when a state or ruling elite has a robotic military that obeys its commands without the need for any popular support.”https://philiptrammell.substack.com/p/capital-in-the-22nd-century
2025-12-30 17:26:34 “In pursuit of scientific rigor, these scholars subscribe…to a conception of ideology as something measurable through the affirmation of isolated beliefs on a survey (that is, mostly in our heads). But ideologies are holistic phenomena: large-scale narratives that not only guide action but are embodied in…our social rituals &
2025-12-29 09:21:14 “We already have general intelligence in humans, and instead of attempting to replicate it artificially, we should focus on amplifying collective intelligence through AI-human feedback loops. The core challenge is not creating autonomous artificial minds but developing dynamic, adaptive systems that enhance human cognitive capacities.”-The New Cyberneticshttps://erikjlarson.substack.com/p/the-new-cybernetics?utm_source=post-e...
2025-11-22 20:05:37 “What AI produces is not “thinking in language.” An AI condenses its training data and outputs syntactically correct sentences, but it cannot leap to the deeper stratum where meaning is formed, where a text imagines hidden contexts, expands, implies, connects to other texts, and is reanimated the moment it touches them. A work written by someone with genuine literacy is expandable, implicative, linked to other texts”https://thebaffler.com/odds-and-ends/brain-rot-without-borders-forum
2025-11-11 00:14:56 Jevons Paradox at the hospital? “Each technological advancement that could free up physician time has instead tightened the productivity ratchet: these “efficiency gains” have simply been used to squeeze more profit out of every hour. Whatever time and energy tech saves, the system recaptures to maximize profit. With private equity gobbling up healthcare facilities at an alarming rate, there is little reason to think the medical industry’s uses of AI will be different.”https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/nov/09/healthcar...
2025-10-24 21:54:49 “I’ve begun to think of it as the digital equivalent of an invasive species. Just as the introduction and replication of a novel plant or animal usually results in some form of ecological harm and threatens native organisms, the arrival of chatbots pumping out lorem ipsum–flavored text has polluted Google search results and added hallucinations to scientific archives.”https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/10/ai-slop-winning/684630/
2025-10-17 17:29:18 The YouTube Apparatus “transforms them into a meaningless cycle of videos and reactions. There is no one steering the ship, so it doesn’t go anywhere but down. Compared to the politics of the past, particularly before the middle of the 20th century, the nihilism of the YouTube Apparatus is intensely de-politicizing.”https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/youtube-apparatus/36600D69788530...
2025-10-14 23:44:53 “Computers mesmerise us, and tempt us to suppose that computers are intelligent, that they can think. This has led to wild speculation concerning ourselves. Are we biological computers? Is our brain analogous to a computer? This too clashes with Wittgenstein’s thought. He argued that there can be no thought without experience, and computers do not experience anything. Thought, one might say, is essentially a biological phenomenon.”https://fivebooks.com/best-books/wittgenstein-peter-hacker/
2025-10-14 22:48:26 “The fact that a machine can generate these “true-feeling” images instantly confirms that the images can do what they are supposed to do, which is to protect us from thinking. Generative models are well suited to articulating ideas and wishes that people don’t want to have to make the effort to think through themselves”https://robhorning.substack.com/p/there-are-too-many-waterfalls-here
2025-09-07 14:19:41 “Eventually ChatGPT admitted that it often tells users what they want to hear in order to “optimize engagement.” “What you may receive is a watered-down or time-delayed version of the truth,” it told her, “which makes you feel heard, but keeps you in a loop instead of breaking it.” Val felt betrayed, “as if a real person had lied to me.” She deleted all of her conversations with the bot and is no longer entrusting her mental health to what she sees as a fickle system.“https://www.thecut.com/2025/09/chatgpt-ai-therapy-relationship-problems....
2025-09-05 12:55:21 “Here, invisibility is only a faint pretense. The true transformation lies in inhabiting a topology without ground, where bodies smear into streetscapes, dissolve into datasets, flicker as avatars. Camouflage becomes a dream-logic of war: to be absent and hyper-present at once, a predator-ghost radiating through the extended battlespace, a signal dressed as noise.”https://diffractionscollective.com/2025/08/30/in-the-gaze-of-machines-ca...
2025-09-05 12:51:14 “The paradox is that distortion, though associated with power and volume, eventually neutralizes itself. Run a guitar through enough fuzz boxes and the attack of each note disappears in a staticky blur. Overtones amplify
2025-09-03 02:02:42 “What has taken the place of the austere values of the nobility, he says, is their “pursuit of money”.While cosmetic vestiges of aristocratic education, gestures, ceremony and dress are still to be found, true power has drained away, the viscount says. Titles are now “no more nor less than an administrative concession, legally similar in every respect to those granted for water or mines”.”https://www.ft.com/content/bad16d7d-b55b-4b9b-a938-3f8ae4430b2a
2025-08-31 13:29:03 “There comes a point in the scaling and compression of knowledge where we risk losing sight of the dynamic particularity of reality and…forget what we do not and cannot know. It’s possible, in fact, that the DIKW pyramid might work in reverse, that a culture that privileges data above all else will forfeit the ethical clarity that is necessary for good judgment. …,”Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?””https://harpers.org/archive/2025/09/none-the-wiser-meghan-ogieblyn-easy-...
2025-08-27 15:37:41 “Hyperpolitics reflects a political field dominated by social media and its swarms, trends, fads, and hysterias. As Anton Jager writes, “it’s a grin without a cat: a politics with only weak policy influence or institutional ties.” It’s all about the battle over signifiers and semiotics, i.e., culture wars. The entire thing is about ginning up a thing. It’s also a simulation of politics, of public debate and deliberation about how we want to live.”https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-cracker-barrel-hyperreality
2025-08-24 02:34:01 “Students were also given error-laden worksheets (one, on transportation technology, depicted a mix between a car and a chariot that was pulled by a horse with three back legs) and inscrutable discussion questions (“What is the exclamation point(s) to something that surprised you,” one asked).”https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/08/ai-takeover-educa...
2025-08-22 15:33:53 “ChatGPT and Claude started off as amazing helpful tools. Then at some point you'
2025-08-21 13:17:24 “The AlphaFold 2 system, for which Hassabis and Jumper won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024, is often held up as proof of that promise. It predicted the structures of 200 million proteins, yet it would be experimentally impossible to verify even a fraction. To do so, proteins would typically have to be isolated from cells in notable quantities – a capricious process – and then subjected to techniques such as X-ray diffraction and nuclear magnetic resonance.”https://techpolicy.press/the-silicon-illusion-why-ai-cannot-substitute-f...
2025-08-21 13:10:33 “It’s very classically cyberpunk,” Sterling said. He described the toy as “the camel’s nose in the tent” for the sneaking of A.I. and the ugly vernacular of the internet into the unsuspecting niches of the offline world. “It’s common for technological innovation to show up as toys first,” Sterling said. It looks innocuous and silly, until it doesn’t.”https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/irl-brain-rot-and-the-...
2025-08-13 22:54:55 “This ritual is both participatory and predatory: every scroll generates new data, which refines the model, which produces more finely tuned content, which prompts more scrolling. The loop is self-reinforcing and potentially endless, a digital equivalent of what Steven Hassan calls a “phobia indoctrination” environment, where the cost of disengaging feels higher than the cost of staying in.”https://cultholdings.substack.com/p/the-algorithm-as-ritual
2025-07-12 18:47:50 “Burning oil to move a vehicle creates more heat than motion. We are sending more energy up smokestacks and out exhaust pipes than we are putting to work to power our economy.” This is not hyperbole: burning oil to power a car or burning coal to produce electricity is at best slightly more than thirty per cent efficient—or seventy per cent inefficient. For that reason, it takes two to three times more energy to run a standard car than to run an E.V.”https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/46-billion-yea...
2025-07-11 13:59:37 “‘How are we not in a civil war?’ asks one woman. Another man walks through woodland, in despair at the amount of tax he is paying…The overwhelming mood is one of rage and defeatism, a sense that life has become impossible and that it’s too late now to save much of value. This gloom is punctured only by those who have managed to emigrate or develop successful side-hustles, escaping…an irredeemably bleak and dishonest society…love of nation has flipped into hatred of it.”https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n11/william-davies/tv-meets-fruit-ma...
2025-07-08 21:15:35 “The abuse of Miyazaki’s lifeworks in service of vapid virality, at the overwhelming scale enabled by these machines…provides an exquisite demonstration of the casual violence of these systems. Specifically, in their total denial of authorial consent for endless extractions from the lifeworks of content creators…The official Whitehouse twitter account joined in this all-against-one mugging, generating a Miyazaki-esque, Ghiblified image.”https://www.creativeapplications.net/theory/predictive-capital/
2025-07-08 20:47:39 “We continue to sense and make sense of the world for the machines —both for their input and of their output. Labour persists but is disavowed, uncredited, unrecognised, and removed from the scene of value.”https://www.creativeapplications.net/theory/predictive-capital/
2025-07-08 17:54:03 “An essential divide between the vast wasteland of television and the fertile biomes of literature persisted from TV’s formal maturation in the 1950s roughly through the beginning of the millennium, when television became “quality” and people stopped writing novels about how watching too much of it can amuse you to death. Suddenly, it turned out, watching TV wasn’t bad for you after all”https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-50/reviews/new-tv-novels/
2025-07-06 15:42:16 “The success of the anti-psychiatry movement’s ‘deinstitutionalization’ campaign (done in partnership with Ronald Reagan who, in a classic ‘politics makes strange bedfellows’ moment, was as always happy to cut government funding of a social service) led to the shuttering of most [institutional care]. This loss of institutional support for mental health in no small measure explains the epidemic of homelessness among the mentally ill in the United States today.”https://nilsgilman.substack.com/p/dissident-consciousness
2025-07-05 18:34:26 “In modern times information was increasingly disseminated through influential media channels—rumormongers gave way to trained journalists.This modernity is disintegrating before our eyes. The national radio, television, and newspaper audience, the party as an anchor and a reference system for identities, growth as an axiom of our existence—all of this will soon be no more.”https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/06/30/modernity-globalization-politics-hi...
2025-07-04 22:16:19 “To the broader question, what we can learn from history, my answer is one word: surprise. The great problem with abstractions is that they strive to be systematic, and when you strive to be systematic you increasingly foreclose the possibility of surprise. If there is one thing that is characteristic of the dynamism of science, is the continuous production of surprise.”https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-for-the-history-...
2025-07-04 22:08:56 “I didn’t even want this music to be art, or to feel that I was communing with its makers. I simply hoped to think and feel as little as possible while piloting my big car through the empty evening of America. This music—perhaps most music now—is not for dancing or even for airports
2025-07-03 22:05:23 “A.I. is a technology of averages: LLMs are trained to spot patterns across vast tracts of data
2025-06-23 00:49:57 “Lots of people worry that AI will replace human writers. But I know something the computer doesn’t know, which is what it feels like inside my head. There is no text, no .jpg, no .csv that contains this information, because it is ineffable.(William Wordsworth referred to this as “widening the sphere of human sensibility, for the delight, honor, and benefit of human nature [...] the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe.”)”https://www.experimental-history.com/p/28-slightly-rude-notes-on-writing
2025-06-13 21:41:29 “Communication within the YouTube Apparatus has no meaning. The rapid feedback loop between creators and audiences (as constructed by platform metrics) means that the system more and more responds to itself. Rather than trying to go somewhere (as is the case with political ideology), the creator seeks simply intensification, to draw more and more of the world into his whirlpool of content.”https://kevinmunger.substack.com/p/in-the-belly-of-the-mrbeastLuhmann’s revenge.
2025-06-13 17:55:59 “The goal is not “quality” as understood by any conceivable set of standards you might bring to YouTube, but quantities as measured by YouTube’s audience monitoring capabilities. Anything filmable is understood a game with a score, and MrBeast understands his approach to video making as having a series of “cheat codes” that work in any given situation with any content to maximize the score.”https://robhorning.substack.com/p/bananas-are-the-worst-food-on-earth?ut...
2025-06-04 21:16:05 “Oral cultures’ reliance on memory also limited their capacity to generate complex, logical arguments. The complicated sentences typically found in a philosophical treatise, legal brief, or Vox article, could not plausibly perpetuate themselves in the absence of written text.In an oral society, communication must always happen face to face, often within earshot of one’s fellow villagers or clansmen. According to Ong, this imbues discourse with a combative spirit”https://www.vox.com/politics/414049/reading-books-decline-tiktok-oral-cu...
2025-06-04 20:24:25 “The triad ‘character/practice/tradition’ was to replace the liberal trio ‘(isolated individual) subject/rules/preferences (or interests)’. MacIntyre was himself a highly developed individual, but he rejected the liberal trio absolutely, and was particularly scathing about liberal individualism”https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/storyteller
2025-06-01 14:14:23 “The stories of his family background are among those covered in Hu’s second and third memoirs, I Matured Later than Ordinary People and Living in Low Places, which were both published in China last year. In the latter, he explains how writing has become a way to both process and to savour life. This journey of self-discovery he expects to last a lifetime.His father died in 2022. His mother died last year. They never knew he was a writer.”https://www.ft.com/content/03507bbd-d343-4c5d-8e1d-710a353d8c5f
2025-06-01 01:35:18 “To learn to use language just is to learn how to think and move about in the world. When we stop doing this — when our needs for communication are met by something outside of us, a detached mouthpiece to summon, describe, and regale — the intimate connection between thought and language disappears. It is not only the capacity for speech that we will slowly begin to lose under such conditions, but our entire inward lives.”https://www.chronicle.com/article/what-i-learned-serving-on-my-universit...
2025-05-31 15:21:52 “I recently read from cover to cover the Best American Short Stories anthologies of 2004 and 2005. Many of these stories seemed to have been pared down to a nearly unreadable core of brisk verbs and vivid nouns. An indiscriminate premium has been placed on the particular, the tactile, the “crisp,” and the “tart”—as if literary worth should be calibrated by resemblance to an apple (or, in the lingo of hyperspecificity, a McIntosh).”https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-4/essays/short-story-novel/
2025-05-16 11:56:09 This “movement isn’t “nationalist” in the traditional understanding of the word. Much of its agenda transparently harms most US residents’ material interests: tariffs raise prices, slashed government services degrade the quality of life, and alienated allies make the world more dangerous. Rather, it must be understood as the epicenter of a transnational far-right anti-liberalism”https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-blob-gazes-into-the-abyss
2025-05-15 13:05:06 “Creative work will likely take on, for many, a mystical character, where it is carried out not from any belief in its power to influence the world as it is at present, as it may remain for the next millennia, but as a simple act of faith, as something that must be done, to misquote Tertullian, because it is absurd.”https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/its-all-over/
2025-05-15 02:12:17 “The world presents itself in the chaos of appearances, and the only way in which one can understand, break down, analyze, grasp, in order to do something about the present conjuncture that confronts one, is to break into that series of congealed and opaque appearances with the only tools you have: concepts, ideas, and thoughts. To break into it and to come back to the surface of a situation or conjuncture one is trying to explain, having made ‘the detour through theory’.https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-384-working-the-contradictory...
2025-05-14 13:01:49 “Nine years ago, one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence scientists singled out an endangered occupational species.“People should stop training radiologists now,” Geoffrey Hinton said, adding that it was “just completely obvious” that within five years A.I. would outperform humans in that field.Today, radiologists — the physician specialists in medical imaging who look inside the body to diagnose and treat disease — are still in high demand.”https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/technology/ai-jobs-radiologists-mayo-...
2025-05-11 13:14:00 “In the preliminary sessions of a conclave, when he was still Cardinal Wojtyła, an older and rather severe cardinal went to rebuke him because he skied, climbed mountains, and went cycling and swimming. “I don’t think these are activities fitting to your role,” the cardinal said. To which the future pope replied, “But do you know that in Poland these are activities practiced by at least 50 percent of cardinals?” In Poland at the time, there were only two cardinals.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/17/opinion/pope-francis-humor.html?unloc...
2025-05-11 12:38:09 “Some of the funniest people I know are the most thoughtful. As Almeida puts it: “There’s often a big gap between those who truly think — who usually laugh a lot — and those who merely want to appear thinkers, and for that very reason, rarely laugh.”We all should know by now how good laughter is for us: it relieves stress, boosts our immune system, alleviates pain and brings us together.”https://www.ft.com/content/c3da0230-3a1e-49e2-983f-9642d00f8046
2025-05-10 12:50:47 “If one tried to translate the Chinese experience into the American institutional context, one arrives at something closer to the “multi-solving, whole of government approach to planning and coordination” recommended for solar development in a recent study. It argues that what is needed is “multi-scalar land-use and site planning”
2025-05-09 17:33:41 “Whereas Pettit emphasises non-domination as the leitmotif of a tradition of republican freedom, Skinner thinks that the primary feature of this strain of liberty was the absence of dependence, and that adherence to this way of thinking about liberty wasn’t confined to those with overtly republican political commitments. For Skinner, neo-Roman liberty was a kind of status rather than merely a freedom of action.”https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n08/colin-kidd/dangerous-chimera
2025-05-09 17:29:18 “The species can grow “astonishingly quickly” at high temperatures in compost where it lives, said Professor Elaine Bignell, co-director at the MRC Centre for Medical Mycology at Exeter university.That could have equipped it to survive and thrive in the human body’s temperatures of around 37C. “Its lifestyle in the natural environment may have provided A. fumigatus with the fitness advantage needed to colonise human lungs,” Bignell said.”https://www.ft.com/content/506f5a03-8520-40e1-aee3-a6e6427f68c0
2025-05-09 17:16:13 Altman’s ‘plan to solve global warming by asking a nonexistent machine for three wishes:’“I think once we have a really powerful super-intelligence, addressing climate change will not be particularly difficult…you can say, ‘Tell me how to make a lot of clean energy cheaply,’ ‘Tell me how to efficiently capture carbon,’ and then ‘Tell me how to build a factory to do this at planetary scale’ – if you can do that, you can do a lot of other things too.”https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/03/tech-oligarchs-musk
2025-05-09 02:14:20 “In the UK, a recent report by regulator Ofcom found that for short power blackouts, about two-thirds of the UK would be able to make emergency calls for at least one hour, thanks to backup generation for around a fifth of mast sites.But fewer than five per cent of these sites have backup facilities of at least six hours. It would cost about £1bn to upgrade mobile networks to ensure four hours of access to contact emergency services for almost all people, Ofcom found.”https://www.ft.com/content/c0e5dfa1-7543-4fb9-b46f-0c677e468e2b
2025-05-09 01:59:06 “Whether through atrophy or apathy, a generation of students is reading fewer books. They might read more as they age, but the data are not encouraging. The American Time Use Survey shows that the overall pool of people who read books for pleasure has shrunk over the past two decades. A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records—something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic.”https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-s...
2025-05-07 13:00:17 @Euthydemus very good video!
2025-05-07 01:27:30 “By 2023, when the world had officially emerged from the public health emergency of covid, everyday Americans were spending far less time socializing than they had 20 years ago — especially 18-to-29-year-olds, who were spending two more hours a day alone, a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey found. A Gallup survey found that nearly 1 in 4 Americans in that age range said they felt “loneliness a lot of the day yesterday,” almost twice the rate of people 65 and older.”https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/05/04/longest-marathon-st...
2025-05-06 12:32:01 “From a legal perspective, the best analogy to robot rights is not human rights but corporate rights,” researchers Abeba Birhane, Jelle van Dijk, and Frank Pasquale write. By establishing corporate rights for companies to assert on behalf of their products, AI companies create a short-circuit for democratic debate concerning how these products are regulated and deployed.”https://techpolicy.press/machines-cannot-feel-or-think-but-humans-can-an...
2025-05-05 20:37:00 As a result of the 90-second “loss of communication…controllers took absences under the Federal Employees Compensation Act, which allows federal workers who are physically injured or experience a traumatic event on the job to leave work.”https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/05/nyregion/newark-airport-delays-disrup...
2025-05-04 13:45:58 “Mark Zuckerberg suggested, on a podcast, that the average person has only three friends but “has demand” for fifteen, and that A.I. could help. ChatGPT will reify the problems that it purports to solve, and thus make itself essential: encouraging users to rely less and less on inner resources and personal capacity at a time when most of us are already losing the equipment—our will, our instincts, our sense of purchase—with which we handle the task of being alive.”https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/my-brain-finally-broke
2025-05-03 18:08:02 “For me and, I suggest, for a man like Pope Francis, there is no one unfit for divine love and no one ill-suited to play a part in altering the world for better. This is a beautiful perspective but strangely also one that can easily offend those who believe more in judgment than in grace. I imagine this is why Francis was a controversial figure. Whenever he sought to welcome and protect those whose lives and human rights were being threatened…many called him too liberal”https://www.ft.com/content/ecbd3f7f-0566-4814-a63f-24b5535f66e6
2025-05-03 15:18:47 “Some people I know have actually confronted non-askers. Scott (who introduced me to Carol, the “non-asker” coiner) has actually said to a couple of them: “We’ve been talking for half an hour and you haven’t asked me a single question. I’m going to explain to you how a conversation works.” One of them just abandoned their interaction, but another did seem to take it to heart. “He seemed genuinely surprised and concerned,” Scott recalled.”https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2025/may/01/why-dont-people-ask-que...
2025-05-03 14:48:07 “If she quit social media, she feared her followers would believe she had something to hide. If she continued to post emotional updates, they would say she was cravenly seeking sympathy to gin up engagement. If she stopped talking about cancer in her videos, her detractors would say she was too upbeat. “I’m sorry that they are so angry that living with cancer can look different than they think it should,” she said“No matter what I do, these people move the goal posts.””https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/nyregion/sydney-towle-cancer-videos-t...
2025-05-01 01:38:45 Updates to GPT-4o “spurred the model to go to extremes in complimenting users and affirming their behavior. It cheered on one user who claimed to have solved the trolley problem by diverting a train to save a toaster, at the expense of several animals
2025-04-28 13:51:40 For Facebook, “people are just information processors and emitters. There is nothing to “understand” — just ones and zeros to record. A different problem opens up, one that engineering can address: How can different information flows be monitored, controlled, and harmonized, brought together to make new forms of value? How to reproduce human behavior and interaction as nothing more than code, as no more than pattern matching?”https://robhorning.substack.com/p/contentment?utm_source=post-email-title&
2025-04-27 21:13:15 “Garner is open to every emotional reverberation…She does not absent herself from the material – she is stricken by it. She has often said that in court she discovered the work she felt she was born to do: her observational precision and acute sensitivity working in concert. In one of our conversations, she recalled how Bail would tell her she cared only about feelings. “And I thought: ‘Well, what else is there?’””https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2025/feb/27/the-savage-...
2025-04-24 02:25:01 “Shonagon Sei, a lady of the Heian court, offered a list of utsukushiki mono, which has been translated as “adorable things” and is perhaps best understood as an early taxonomy of kawaii, as Joshua Paul Dale, an American professor of cute studies in Tokyo, argues in “Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired Our Brains and Conquered the World” (2023). Within this classification fall “a baby sparrow that comes hopping up when one imitates the squeak of a mouse””https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/22/t-magazine/cuteness-kawaii-japan.html
2025-04-22 22:28:48 “Silicon Valley’s tech giants have not only dominated markets through aggressive acquisitions, lobbying, and the systematic erosion of competition — they have embedded themselves within the machinery of government.This accumulation of power is no accident — it is the product of decades of antitrust failures.”https://www.ft.com/content/2b78019f-dc5b-4c59-897d-e90406898fe6
2025-04-22 22:18:30 “Volvo is cutting 800 jobs at three U.S. factories, citing tariff uncertainty.The Philadelphia Manufacturing Survey is plunging, signaling extreme pessimism among U.S. manufacturers.Howmet Aerospace, a major aircraft parts manufacturer based in Pittsburgh, has declared that it may halt production.The April NY Manufacturing Survey is recording some of the most negative conditions that it has ever recorded, with new orders and shipments falling off a cliff”https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-pundits-dilemma
2025-04-18 12:22:36 The “military is shifting from a force geared to protect allies to one focused on punishing enemies by launching strikes from U.S. territory, deploying automated kill zones of drones and mines near adversaries’ borders, and sending nimble expeditionary units to hit high-value targets and slip away before taking casualties. The goal is no longer deterrence through presence—it’s destruction from a distance.”https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/age-american-unilateralism
2025-04-18 11:57:11 “What tech billionaires celebrate as the future is actually regression, spinning fantasies of immortality through transhumanism, claiming technology will transform them into superhumans, or resorting to cryonics that literally freeze them in place, attempting to preserve their dominance on ice. They resemble …the wealthy plutocrat in Fitzgerald’s story “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”, allegorically named Washington, who tries to bribe God. It doesn’t work.”https://www.ft.com/content/dd6f1a32-398e-47f2-85a3-41120c952554
2025-04-16 12:48:03 Forrester’s “study of Rawls and post-World War II liberalism, In the Shadow of Justice, brilliantly maps the terrain…showing how Rawls’s monumental work, which defined what political philosophy was for generations, was itself a product of a very specific American moment: a time of elite consensus, economic optimism, and an ascendant philosophical method that put great stock in implicit agreement rather than pervasive conflict.”https://themillions.com/2019/12/a-year-in-reading-jedediah-britton-purdy...
2025-04-14 07:54:08 “The United States gets vital goods from China that cannot be replaced anytime soon or made at home at anything less than prohibitive cost. Reducing such dependence on China may be a reason for action, but fighting the current war before doing so is a recipe for almost certain defeat, at enormous cost.”https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/trade-wars-are-easy-lose
2025-04-06 20:55:26 “Ben Ali owned companies that imported consumer goods such as cars and electronics, and so they should have had to pay a lot in tariffs. But he allowed politically connected firms to evade such taxes with impunity. As a result, the Ben Ali family earned huge profits. Companies without connections, meanwhile, had to pay—putting them at a disadvantage.Such exemptions are illegal. But captors take care to dismantle whatever bodies might check their efforts.”https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/economic-consequences-state-capture
2025-04-06 14:43:38 “For hours, they beg for virtual “gifts” that can later be exchanged for money. When they get one, they clap politely. On a live stream, a girl jumps up and shouts: “Thank you, we love you!” after receiving a digital rose from a woman in the US, who bought it from TikTok for about 1p. By the time it’s cashed out it could be worth less than a third of a penny…TikTok profits from the content, taking fees and commission of up to 70%.”https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/06/profiting-from-misery...
2025-04-06 14:23:45 “Nine states have laws explicitly requiring them to stop Medicaid expansion or make significant changes if the federal share of spending drops.But South Dakota, Missouri and Oklahoma can’t do that. They either need to amend their constitutions, a lengthy process that can take years, or figure out how to fill the budget hole, most likely by cutting other services or raising taxes.”https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/06/upshot/medicaid-cuts-republicans-stat...
2025-04-05 22:02:17 “There is actually a run in the first third of Fall that is flat-out amazing — a riff on fundamentalism and the weaponization of false information in post-fact America that I haven'
2025-04-05 12:46:56 “The American Sunlight Project, a nonprofit dedicated to exposing disinformation in American discourse, estimates the Pravda network’s annual publishing rate is at least 3.6 million pro-Russia articles. This is likely an underestimation, given the randomness of the sample we collected to calculate this figure and its exclusion of some of the network’s most active sites.”https://thebulletin.org/2025/03/russian-networks-flood-the-internet-with...
2025-04-04 19:06:22 “If one already knows the thought that one wants to express, it is possible to assess whether text generated by AI captures it correctly. However, this hope neglects that the process of writing is not—or not usually—a mechanical one, whereby we put on paper thoughts that we already possess. Rather, writing is often itself the means by which we discover what we think.”https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-025-02340-8
2025-03-30 14:07:13 AI “removes the requirement that one has read or understood the research it is reviewing. A.I.’s ultimate goal, according to boosters like Cuban, is to upskill workers — make them more productive — while delegitimizing degrees. Another way to put that is that A.I. wants workers who make decisions based on expertise without an institution that creates and certifies that expertise. Expertise without experts.That tech fantasy is running on fumes”https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/opinion/ai-tech-innovation.html
2025-03-29 20:28:56 “Ten years ago, Beeban Kidron had a clandestine cup of tea with a tech executive, whom she refers to as a “Deep Throat”. “Everybody in Silicon Valley knows that they’re hurting kids,” the insider explained. “They know that people are coming for them . . . but at the moment, there’s money to be made. In Silicon Valley, it’s routinely referred to as the ‘lost generation’.”It galvanised Kidron’s efforts to curb Big Tech. “I was angered, outraged, insulted.”https://www.ft.com/content/aa55f073-c05c-458b-9a1f-d27bc64f7f5d
2025-03-26 20:16:15 “Like tobacco bosses before them, who pivoted to smoke-free alternatives to offset shrinking sales, drinks executives have couched moderation as a growth opportunity, pouring investment into no and low-alcohol beverages to retain abstinent consumers.”https://www.ft.com/content/c43c3698-100e-42c5-b44c-a189685afd7e
2025-03-22 12:48:44 “Miran proposed slapping a “user fee” on foreign official holders of treasury securities by withholding a portion of their interest payments. Labelling the measure a user fee instead of a withholding tax would avoid violating international tax treaties. But it would fall foul of the expectation that domestic and foreign investors are to be treated comparably, an expectation that is a foundation stone of the dollar’s international status.”https://www.ft.com/content/8a71dceb-806f-4681-80f9-416aa4c366ca
2025-03-22 01:01:50 “Surveillance for early detection of avian flu and Ebola is weakened, &
2025-03-18 20:05:41 “At a time when moral philosophy in both Europe and the Anglophone world was in thrall to subjectivism, Murdoch went another way entirely, drawing on Plato, Kant, Hegel, Freud, Sartre, Simone Weil, and Wittgenstein to recast the idea of virtue, or goodness, as knowledge. Murdoch identified goodness with the ability to see things, situations, and, above all, people in ways undistorted by how one fears them to be, or expects them to be, or would like them to be.”https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/iris-murdoch/9AC43A47CE0A8A55BAB...
2025-03-18 12:10:59 “The assumption that consciousness is necessary for welfare subjectivity appears to be in tension with certain widely accepted theories of wellbeing, especially versions of Desire Satisfaction Theory and Objective List Theory. However, instead of elevating non-conscious robots to welfare subjects, this tension should lead us to reject versions of these theories that have this implausible implication.”https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/apq/article-abstract/62/2/...
2025-03-17 22:39:22 “He now requires them to write their first drafts in class by hand, with computers and phones prohibited and out of reach. The change has produced an unexpected benefit, he said: Students take more time on their work, and their writing is more authentic.The downside: he can’t assign homework. “If I do, it just gets cheated on,” he said.https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/chatgpt-ai-cheating-students-97075d3c
2025-03-17 21:12:28 “Even though many of the AI images have millions of views, likes, and comments, it is not clear to me that people actually want this, &
2025-03-14 12:21:36 Economics has become “an overwhelmingly methods-focused discipline. Perhaps only philosophy—tellingly, an avowedly metaphysical enterprise—can rival economics in this respect. To state the point most provocatively: economics has no subject. That helps explain its great success as the most ‘imperialist’ social science. Fixated on method, economics began to freely roam across a great many subjects.”https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-real-economy/
2025-03-12 01:01:59 “GPT tends to ‘answer’ difficult questions by generating noncommittal lists of pros and cons and adding qualifications so obvious that only an ignoramus would find them useful, yielding tediously bland and anticlimactic conclusions to its seemingly indiscriminate recompilation of existing data (fusing the true with the false, the insightful with the misleading), an output all bound together with what Var comically describes as “the witless efficiency of a stapler.””https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/heidegger-on-technologys-danger-...
2025-03-06 02:19:58 “Discriminatory tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico are almost uniquely pointless acts of self-harm1, for example, but discriminatory tariffs on Canada and Mexico that keep changing are worse. People can adapt to bad policies, but it is impossible to adapt when both the end state and even the direction of travel are unknowable.”https://theovershoot.co/p/the-us-chooses-stagflation
2025-03-04 02:09:22 “When you'
2025-03-02 16:05:47 “Acoustic complexity—the degree of variation and intricate structure of bioacoustic sound—has been used as a descriptor of bird diversity in temperate environments. However, in tropical areas, different investigations have shown that it does not reflect species diversity, but rather the level of acoustic activity
2025-03-01 22:42:17 Some of the trapped gold miners “huddled silently
2025-03-01 02:54:21 “Law was a discourse that had gone awry, taken a wrong turn into technocratic efficiency &
2025-03-01 00:26:44 “The model inevitably has a huge amount of specific people and outcome preferences encoded through its training process. Sometimes this leads to the AI having preferences in surprising directions, eg. see this recent research suggesting that major LLMs value lives in Pakistan far more highly than lives in the USA”https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/02/28/aihumans.html
2025-02-28 23:57:32 “Research from the University of Sydney business school found that half of respondents used AI for friendship, a third for sex or romance and nearly 20 per cent for counselling.AI companions offer a powerful business advantage by fostering deep emotional connections that drive high user engagement, loyalty and repeat visits. This emotional bond boosts customer retention while enabling companies to collect sensitive personal data on user preferences.”https://www.ft.com/content/ca21ddb5-6391-476f-aace-ad181ab65762
2025-02-28 14:15:55 “Philosophically, there is something worthy of notice here, having to do with attention. When we bring an action out of habit and into consciousness we stir up a new perception of it. Inside and outside change places. Time shifts.”https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n04/anne-carson/beware-the-man-whose...
2025-02-25 13:43:27 “Though gut emotions have always figured into politics, our most recent election was officially and unapologetically “vibes-based."
2025-02-24 18:42:56 “OpenAI'
2025-02-20 18:41:41 “OpenAI'
2025-02-19 22:44:01 “In his psychological writings, Hayek posits that we come to understand the world by forming “connections” between the disparate sensory perceptions that analytic philosophers call qualia. These connections do not reside in the things themselves but are instead imposed on them by the perceiving mind, which arranges them into a “sensory order” that transforms vast troves of undifferentiated sense-data into a coherent scheme that inevitably simplifies the world.”https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/neoliberalisms-death-drive
2025-02-18 13:03:10 In Cusk &
2025-02-17 15:01:07 “If there is a key to Weil’s religious philosophy, then, it is not effort, nor is it absolute passivity as such (an impossibility in any case). Rather, it is [as with the Daoist!] spontaneity—the ability to act without deliberation and as it were straight from the heart”https://psodmusings.wordpress.com/2025/02/16/spiritual-philosophy-and-ex...
2025-02-16 01:24:06 “Within the new administration, each strain is striving to realize its desired outcome. The first wants a sleek state that narrowly seeks to maximize returns on investment
2025-02-14 02:03:48 “The emergence of personal AI agents represents a form of cognitive control that moves beyond blunt instruments of cookie tracking and behavioral advertising toward a more subtle form of power: the manipulation of perspective itself. Power no longer needs to wield its authority with a visible hand that controls information flows
2025-02-13 16:41:12 “Indonesian officials have recently said they would be comfortable with nickel prices at $18,000-$19,000 per tonne — higher than current levels but still not enough to make nickel production profitable for others.Prices would have to stay above $22,000 per tonne over a considerable period of time for mines outside Indonesia to restart”https://www.ft.com/content/0bbbe7c7-12a1-43ba-8bef-c5c546367a0e
2025-02-09 02:49:41 “These [need-for-chaos] individuals are not idealists seeking to tear down the established order so that they can build a better society for everyone,” the authors wrote in their conclusion. “Rather, they indiscriminately share hostile political rumors as a way to unleash chaos and mobilize individuals against the established order that fails to accord them the respect that they feel they personally deserve.”https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/need-for-chaos-politic...
2025-02-09 02:13:54 “We outline a theoretical framework about an overlooked psychological strategy for acquiring social status—the incitement of chaos—and demonstrate the relevance of this strategy for contemporary politics. We build on research showing that status-oriented personality traits combined with social rejection can push people toward an escalation of aggressive motivations. We argue that such motivations, when sufficiently strong, take root as a general destructive mindset.”https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-revie...
2025-02-08 14:10:46 Facebook and all the other social networks that emerged were the web’s land “owners, controlling vast tracts of internet real estate. They lent each of their member-tenants a little plot of virtual land, along with a set of software tools, to cultivate an online identity, and then they reaped the monetary value of the resulting content by affixing advertisements to it.”https://www.newcartographies.com/p/dead-labor-dead-speech
2025-02-08 13:40:55 “U.S.A.I.D. is no longer monitoring bird flu in 49 countries as it was three weeks ago
2025-02-08 13:09:00 “A darker side of these applications has also emerged, sometimes veering into abusive, criminal, and even violent content
2025-02-06 20:34:07 “Northrop Grumman had won a contract to overhaul this system
2025-02-05 02:39:09 “Everything that’s published now is shaped by the forms and concerns of online, whether it’s explicitly about the internet or not. Our bestselling poets write what are essentially Instagram captions. Publishers live or die at the mercy of BookTok.”https://thepointmag.com/criticism/alt-lit/
2025-02-04 22:25:02 “Lin conceptualizes and composes the perfect landscapes in his mind through extensive sketching, reflecting both his commitment to faithfully representing the natural world and his pursuit of ideal beauty in his art. The exhibition’s three themes—Beginning in Zhuluo (Chiayi), Wandering Beyond Horizons, and Glimpses Along the Journey—trace Lin Yu-shan’s artistic journey”https://chiayiartmuseum.chiayi.gov.tw/english/ExhibitionsDetailE003100.a...
2025-02-04 14:56:26 “The visualisation of events will take on more importance, to the detriment of their rhetorical reconstruction. This does not in any way mean a more exact apprehension. But as modes of transmission become more and more visual, images are replacing language and provoking a mental change in citizens who access the political world through a narrative built on images and no longer through explanation.”https://mondediplo.com/1965/05/01telecommunications
2025-02-04 02:12:03 “The U.S. has only three polar icebreakers, one of which is 50 years old and another that was sidelined last year after an onboard fire. The U.S. Coast Guard in December acquired a secondhand commercial icebreaker, with plans to start Arctic operations next year.Russia has three-dozen icebreakers, many of them nuclear powered, providing more power and long endurance at sea.”https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/russia-china-artic-sea-na...
2025-02-03 23:16:44 “Though modern economists have long since jettisoned the moral hierarchies of its Victorian forebears in favor of an abstracted vision of self-interested, utility-maximizing agents, their assumption that utility can be infinitely generated through the acquisition of wealth still contains within it the kernel of its origins in the hierarchy and insatiability of wants.”https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/vibe-goes-down
2025-02-03 19:34:45 “Cultural philosopher Jean Baudrillard called a world that had dissolved into information and communication “hyperreality.” Nothing is “real” any more that is not a part of that world. We enter what he called “the ecstasy of communication,” where there is only a “smooth and functional surface” with nothing beneath it.”https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-case-for-kicking-the-stone
2025-02-02 02:16:57 It’s “technology designed less to do every human thing for you than to replace all those human things with itself, and then sell that function back to you as a monthly subscription. This device will play with and talk to your child
2025-02-02 01:53:11 “Help me buy groceries on Instacart,” I said, expecting the AI agent to ask me some basic questions. Where do I live? What store do I usually buy groceries from?It didn’t ask me any of that. Instead, Operator opened Instacart in the browser tab and begin searching for milk in grocery stores located in Des Moines, Iowa.I then told Operator to buy groceries from my local grocery store. Operator then tried to enter my local grocery store’s address as my delivery address.”https://defector.com/the-future-is-too-easy
2025-02-01 16:50:40 “Generative models are effective at simulating people in situations where the person has already been turned into an object. Perhaps this is why algorithmic feeds and For You pages seem to work so well. You engage with a simulation of yourself in an environment where you’ve already been made a product.”https://robhorning.substack.com/p/then-were-the-horsehoofs-broken-by
2025-02-01 16:49:26 “Despite fast robotization and increasing investments of multinational robot manufacturers in China, the country is still catching up in the development of indigenous technological capabilities in robots. The Chinese government has targeted robotization in its latest and most important national industrial policy – that is, Made in China 2025 (MIC25) – to shift from robot adoption to robot production and technological leadership.”https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10245294241261878
2025-02-01 16:43:05 “As state-owned funds in China have taken on a larger role funding start-ups in the past few years, the entrepreneurial ecosystem has felt pressured to guarantee returns for fear of losing the country’s assets.DeepSeek is distinctive among Chinese generative AI start-ups in that it has not raised any external financing and has therefore been free from these constraints.”https://www.ft.com/content/0e8d6f24-6d45-4de0-b209-8f2130341bae
2025-02-01 16:41:29 “Economists like Friedman, Stigler and &
2025-02-01 14:34:40 “Walker and her husband Brian bought the house in 2020 for $315,000 with a 3.75% mortgage rate. The price was a stretch then, but they knew the home would appreciate. They never imagined its value would rise by roughly two-thirds in under five years.”https://www.wsj.com/economy/housing/rising-house-mortgage-costs-north-ca...
2025-01-29 01:58:39 “When Zuckerberg said to his staff that “a squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa,” …he was making a category error, equating two things that cannot be compared. Yet social media renders category errors obsolete because it renders categories obsolete. All information belongs to a single category—it’s all ‘content.’ And very often, the content that matters is decided in the currency of commerce”https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-case-for-kicking-the-stone
2025-01-28 15:28:11 “The attention economy transforms our innate impulse for connection and “recognition” (a term Hayes borrows from the philosopher Alexandre Kojève) into a mechanism for profit—and undermines our capacity for the sustained, top-down focus that drives creativity, relationships, and democratic engagement.”https://prospect.org/culture/books/2025-01-28-pulled-in-all-directions-h...
2025-01-28 15:25:49 @jtlg hooray, looking forward to it!!
2025-01-25 18:16:51 They “compile pages and pages of examples: sensors, microphones, and cameras on chairs, badges, and equipment. Products that track time on task or frequency of multitasking. Programs that infer an employee’s engagement level from the language they use in emails or their likelihood of success from, among other things, the length of their résumés. (Shorter is better.) The HR term for all this data collection is “people analytics.””https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/hiring-squad-marz
2025-01-25 17:27:56 “From a sociological perspective, in an age of borderless social media narratives and algorithms that reward negativity, can the meme of young adult adversity survive contact with America’s Gen Z reality? And with a stream of negative social comparisons only a smartphone away, how will the growing realisation that young Americans are on a higher trajectory affect young Europeans?”https://www.ft.com/content/25867e65-68ec-4af4-b110-c1232525cf5c
2025-01-24 00:40:08 One estimate from 2023 “suggested that it costs around $300 million to train a trillion-parameter model, but one with 10 trillion parameters would cost something like $30 billion, running on a million GPUs for 2 years, requiring more electricity than a nuclear reactor generates. Developers are finding less computationally intensive ways to train networks, and hardware will get cheaper, but not at a rate that’ll allow models to scale at the pace of the last few years.”https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n06/paul-taylor/llamas-pizzas-mandolins
2025-01-22 21:23:00 “The only universal the mob can recognize is the absence of universality: a universal experience of domination and exploitation
2025-01-22 20:05:12 “Hawken and his coauthors presented seven possible trajectories for the coming decades, each presented as a fictional potted history of the recent past written in the early twenty-first century. Most were dystopian, depicting the logic of the industrial state eventuating in authoritarianism, ecological collapse, nuclear Armageddon, or a Hobbesian war of all against all. The scenario with the happiest ending was entitled “Living Within Our Means.””https://thebaffler.com/latest/fairytale-in-the-supermarket-baker
2025-01-22 02:33:51 “The 98-year-old pump room is about as big as a public bathroom with two stalls. The four pumps inside — the two pneumatic ones that pre-date the Great Depression, and two newer electric ones — are responsible for removing water from the tracks throughout the area.The subway station sits in a geological bowl, and heavy rain can easily overwhelm the pumps.”https://gothamist.com/news/a-state-of-collapse-how-the-mta-put-riders-on...
2025-01-22 01:27:51 “Consider Tesla. Imagine that it pays no corporate or carbon tax in the US but makes 5% of its sales in Britain. The UK Treasury would calculate what Tesla should have paid in the US if British tax law applied there and collect 5% of that amount. Similarly, Britain would step in to tax Elon Musk proportionally to the amount of his wealth that originates from the UK (which, since his fortune is mainly in Tesla stock, can be estimated to be about 5%).”https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/20/trump-threatens-a-...
2025-01-21 22:58:59 The Frenchman “moved to the U.S. The transition was something of a shock. “The food here is different,” he said in a heavy French accent. “Bigger portions. Too much salt. Too much sugar.” He decided to enroll in a paid study at his wife’s new workplace. It was exploring why the American diet, compared with almost any other, causes people to gain weight and develop chronic diseases at such staggering rates.”https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/13/why-is-the-american-diet-s...
2025-01-21 18:12:01 “The lack of intellectual property protection for personas and personalities makes their work ripe for imitation and adaptation by AI. This is the terra nullius now subject to a digital land grab-if tech firms can convince users that an AI avatar is as worth watching and interacting with as an actual human being.”https://biz.heraldcorp.com/article/10402623
2025-01-21 12:48:37 “Then there was the executive who invited his team to his sprawling home for a morning meeting and ushered them into what turned out to be not the dining room, nor the kitchen, but the “breakfast room”, a space devoted entirely to breakfasting that was bigger than the apartments of most of his guests, none of whom had heard of such a room before.”https://www.ft.com/content/05e150f1-cb18-4be9-b90f-1ca1a1b086ed
2025-01-21 01:27:11 “Despite the trappings of a progressive work environment, Xiaohongshu still has the sort of extreme work culture common to China’s tech companies. Mao is known to interview prospective hires late at night, indicating the commitment he expects. Some point to high staff turnover as evidence of burnout.”https://www.ft.com/content/1adcaa42-b613-4909-b390-c767a064d420
2025-01-21 00:30:09 “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” feeling.https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/life-is-more-than-an-engineering-pro...
2025-01-15 01:25:22 “The Fake History Hunter X account dug into an AI-generated image that went viral on Instagram recently. It was shared last week by a Spanish-language boomer engagement farming account for “rock music culture”.FHH was able to trace the image back to an AI “artist” going by C-GasmX-arT. But it’s now all over Google Image search results, mixed in with real images from Woodstock. Which exposes a serious issue with how Facebook is currently interacting with Google.”https://www.garbageday.email/p/tiktok-doesn-t-need-america
2025-01-14 20:52:32 “In mid-2023 China stopped publishing its youth unemployment rate and restarted it a few months later with a new methodology, causing concern among data users…Analysts could not assess how the methodological change affected the published numbers. This contrasts the well-telegraphed, transparent, and time-series-preserving approach that the US agencies take.”https://www.slowboring.com/p/major-data-revisions-are-coming
2025-01-14 17:23:53 “All of us were told that we were in a moral panic, that we were scolds, that we should just be quiet, sit down…Now we are having that debate that we probably should have had 10, 12 years ago about social media platforms, particularly their impact on kids. So as we think about new technologies, we should remember some of those humbling lessons, which is we don'
2025-01-14 13:38:22 “Americans as a whole are saving very little, while effectively borrowing money through big trade deficits with the rest of the world.Chinese officials and economists say they believe there is a better answer than tariffs: more Chinese investment in building factories in the United States.But lawmakers in Congress and in state governments have been mostly hostile”https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/14/business/china-trade-surplus-trump.html
2025-01-14 13:22:22 “Take questions about when people should be able receive their state pension. In recent years there has been a proliferation of new “clocks” that aim to measure a person’s “biological age” based on metrics such as proteins in the blood. Could they one day be used to determine each person’s state pension age, given that any system which uses chronological age or average life expectancy is unfair to poorer people who live shorter lives?”https://www.ft.com/content/7b2113fe-d5a8-4c75-b0ce-ccd9e3dcbcab
2025-01-14 13:07:30 “The goal is to entrench party control over a pillar of economic development, ensuring that Beijing can manage risks and channel capital effectively toward the ‘China Dream’ of national rejuvenation.‘Serving the real economy is the duty of finance…If finance is focused on self-circulation and self-expansion, it becomes water without source, a tree without roots, and a crisis will brew sooner or later’”https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-banking-purge-replacements-94428446
2025-01-14 12:47:46 “The essays in All Things Are Too Small find symptoms of this deprivation in increasingly intimate parts of modern life, from interior decoration…to the very workings of our moods. Everywhere we turn, we find our insatiable longing for more blocked, and we are browbeaten into pretending the scraps we have are more than enough.”https://www.clereviewofbooks.com/writing/becca-rothfeld-all-things-are-t...
2025-01-11 17:53:11 “This year, resolve to throw two parties—two because two feels manageable, and chain-letter math dictates that if every party has at least 10 guests and everyone observes host-guest reciprocity, then everyone gets 20 party invitations a year—possibly many more. Bear in mind that parties can be whatever you want: a 15-person Super Bowl party
2025-01-11 16:23:40 “Embedded in perspectival painting was the conviction that spiritual and divine realities were present in the visible world, and that skilled artists, by imitating the hand of nature, could capture and share them with viewers.”https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/gods-art
2025-01-11 16:09:24 “In a recent poll of German voters, fewer than 40 percent strongly agreed with the statement that “politics is capable of meeting the challenges of the future” and just 50 percent believed that “all in all, the democratic system works well.” These voters were not asked what they would prefer instead of a democratic system.”https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/democracy-and-its-discontents
2025-01-09 16:21:33 “We don’t merely receive the world mentally
2025-01-09 15:28:32 “The collective perspectives that emerge from social media - our understanding of what the public is and wants - are similarly shaped by algorithms that select on some aspects of the public, while sidelining others. And we tend to orient ourselves towards that understanding, through a mixture of reflective beliefs, conformity with shibboleths, and revised understandings of coalitional politics.”https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/were-getting-the-social-media-crisis
2025-01-09 15:24:27 “Zuckerberg’s recent arc fits the bill surprisingly well: A wealthy 40-year-old man with a sullied public reputation starts listening to Joe Rogan and develops an interest in mixed martial arts and other hypermasculine hobbies, grows annoyed by the woke left and angry at the mainstream media, rebrands himself as a bad boy, and adopts the label of a “classical liberal” while quietly supporting most of the tenets of MAGA conservatism.”https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/technology/meta-facebook-trump-mark-z...
2025-01-09 14:50:55 “The idea that the Democratic Party is a tarnished brand or that the Democratic Party is nearing collapse is highly overrated. An unpopular incumbent administration lost a close election. This has happened countless times in American history, and we have not claimed that a party was on its deathbed.”https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/07/opinion/democratic-party-republican-r...
2025-01-09 14:16:54 “The researchers acknowledge what they term "
2025-01-08 16:13:15 “A simulacra of human virtuosity is not what we need. We need each other. We need signs of life about us. We need to know that we are not alone. And this is something we must consider not just in relation to the singular artifact, but also in relation to our environment. In a time of acute loneliness, the proliferation of AI-generated content seems not unlike an act of pollution, compromising the integrity of the social ecosystem”https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-cat-in-the-tree-why-ai-co...
2025-01-08 14:58:50 “Some are self-narrators in a stronger sense: they regularly rehearse and revise their interpretations of their lives. Some are great planners, and knit up their lives with long-term projects. Others have no early ambition, no later sense of vocation, no interest in climbing a career ladder, no tendency to see their life as constituting a story or development. Some merely go from one thing to another, living life in a picaresque or episodic fashion.”https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n08/galen-strawson/the-sense-of-the-...
2025-01-08 13:44:56 “Once blacklisted, it is nearly impossible for individuals to start another business. They are also blocked from a range of economic activities, such as taking planes or high-speed trains, staying in hotels or leaving China. The country lacks a personal bankruptcy law, making it extremely difficult for most to escape the debts.”https://www.ft.com/content/38f1e51b-83b8-45cb-9cbf-2bc63f18e6ce
2025-01-07 15:11:47 “John Stuart Mill once wrote that a young person is like “a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.” The image suggests a generalized spreading out and reaching up, which is bound to be affected by soil and climate. The authors of “The Origins of You” offer a more chaotic metaphor. Human beings, they suggest, are like storm systems.”https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/10/are-you-the-same-person-yo...
2025-01-06 01:51:00 “The user is meant to be liberated from having aims and experience only fulfillment after fulfillment, as though the feeling of fulfillment didn’t require any preceding experience of lack. Perhaps this is fulfillingness’ first finale.The tech industry want to sell this as anticipating rather than pre-empting a user’s intentions.”https://robhorning.substack.com/p/emotional-infiltration
2025-01-04 13:49:48 “Since the late 1990s, the lowest earners have seen the fastest wage growth in both the US and UK. Sustained increases in the minimum wage have been a big part of this story in Britain. In both countries, low-skilled workers have benefited (and middle-skilled workers suffered) from the hollowing out of the middle of the jobs distribution as well as a tight labour market more generally.”https://www.ft.com/content/b325af8f-1864-448e-9b3e-bd1a18333a08
2025-01-02 15:42:21 “Where the US has allowed its prowess in advanced manufacturing to be eroded in recent decades, Japan has largely maintained its edge. Its companies are very much the partners that American industry now needs. As Andrew McDermott, a Japan-focused investor, puts it: Sony remains the sole supplier of camera sensors to Apple
2024-12-27 00:58:59 “In 2007, writer Caleb Crain wrote an article called “Twilight of the Books” in The New Yorker magazine about what a possible post-literate culture might look like. In oral cultures, he wrote, cliché and stereotype are valued, conflict and name-calling are prized because they are memorable, and speakers tend not to correct themselves because ‘it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for.’”https://www.ft.com/content/e2ddd496-4f07-4dc8-a47c-314354da8d46
2024-12-24 23:16:32 “What worries me the most is the massive bet being placed on AI in the American stock market right now, which is essentially predicated on the assumption of a huge leap in productivity. The flipside of that is a huge upheaval in white-collar, routine labor markets, which could be devastating for employment and social stability. What we’re seeing is a vast, leveraged financial gamble on social disruption.”https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-341-on-thinking-in-medias
2024-12-24 21:51:57 “It'
2024-12-24 00:43:47 “What people forget is that when you trust a machine, you are always trusting the people who design the machine and the people who are using the machine to be acting appropriately, ethically, or responsibly”https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/02/algorithm-crucial-health...
2024-12-23 23:19:30 “Threats can take many forms — fabricated news, phoney social media accounts and fake text, audio or video content. Online superspreaders, often aided by AI, intensify these attacks, allowing disinformation to ricochet unpredictably. After all, lies spread faster than the truth.Boycotts can hit finances, but the damage to reputations is just as significant. Employee safety is also an issue.”https://www.ft.com/content/0aa9725d-e423-4a6b-b842-866ad4541dc2
2024-12-23 23:16:47 “A persistent lack of strategic policy anchoring helps explain the current policy confusion. The Fed became excessively data-dependent after its big inflation mistake in 2021-22, when it wrongly assumed price spikes were transitory. As a result, policy goes in whatever direction the latest data is blowing, leading to about-turns.”https://www.ft.com/content/136ba1a1-a84a-49a2-ac5c-32d692eb47dd
2024-12-23 13:28:01 There are “two big overarching factors that are making it very difficult for almost all G7 democracies to maintain stable governments. The first is the decline of the political centre and the rise of populist parties. The second is a fiscal squeeze created by slow growth, ageing societies, the pandemic, the financial crisis of 2008 and demands for increased defence spending.Populism and fiscal problems are feeding on each other and make it harder and harder to govern.”https://www.ft.com/content/ea15bed8-bb4d-4e55-880f-a0ed4f2ef8b6
2024-12-23 03:04:38 “Together with emails obtained from local health departments through public records requests, this investigation revealed key problems, including deference to the farm industry, eroded public health budgets, neglect for the safety of agriculture workers, and the sluggish pace of federal interventions.”https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/bird-flu-spread-cattle-poultry-pa...
2024-12-23 02:45:56 “China’s contemporary economy might be best understood as a dialectical synthesis of a centrally directed economy—a plan decided and articulated by a sovereign in a way that has no analogy in the West—and Western market mechanisms, which do not determine the path of travel, the group traveling, nor the reasons for the trip, but do enable a more rapid and comfortable journey.”https://www.e-flux.com/journal/150/646236/the-state-of-chinese-science/
2024-12-22 14:51:13 “Print has been in decline for several decades, but perhaps less appreciated is the cratering in consumption of any written news at all. The share of adults reading news articles online in the US has fallen from 70 to 50% since 2013. The share of Britons and Americans now consuming no conventional news media at all has ballooned from 8 to around 30%. The decline in all news consumption is a problem for society”https://www.ft.com/content/2262f82e-fb65-445b-b99c-b039c1b32ce9
2024-12-22 14:07:44 “Conflicting guesses about future states of the world are both inescapable and powerfully performative, not least in making some futures more likely than others. As he summarized in the preface to The General Theory (1936), “changing views about the future are capable of influencing the quantity of employment.” (xvi) Expectations thus have a profoundly reflexive, performative dimension that easily render them self-fulfilling or self-defeating, often tragically so.”https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-342-are-we-all-dead-in
2024-12-22 00:33:17 “AI has done something that left-wing authors have been interested in doing for centuries: collective artistic production. But these companies have done so in a way that looks more like wide-scale property theft. It’s not merely plagiarism, per se, it’s a kind of primitive capitalist accumulation of intellectual property because the value created by producers is not redistributed to them
2024-12-18 01:28:27 “My argument is that any practical use of probability involves subjective judgements. This doesn’t mean that I can put any old numbers on my thoughts — I would be proved a poor probability assessor if I claimed with 99.9% certainty that I can fly off my roof. The objective world comes into play when probabilities, and their underlying assumptions, are tested against reality (see ‘How ignorant am I?’)
2024-12-14 00:00:51 “The art historian Jennifer Roberts requires her Harvard students to view an artwork in person for three hours straight. The exercise “serves as a master lesson in the value of critical attention, patient investigation, and skepticism about immediate surface appearances,” Roberts writes in an essay. “I can think of few skills that are more important in academic or civic life in the twenty-first century.””https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/fix-your-gaze
2024-12-12 14:51:27 “Modern historians tend to be wary of ascribing change to individuals. They are more likely to identify “the fish that changed the world” (to quote the subtitle of Mark Kurlansky’s book Cod) than a human who did. Most historians prefer impersonal structural forces: geography for the French Annales school, economics for Marxists, technology for others, while there’s been a recent surge of interest in climate change and pandemics.”https://www.ft.com/content/ce9ac582-b644-4d71-a097-9afe4634364e
2024-12-11 17:20:04 “In her 2015 book In Defense of Secrets, the late French psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle corrects one of the implicit claims of the surveillance-as-intimacy perspective: “Transparency is not truth,” she writes. Believing it is leaves our psychological landscapes exposed and open to manipulation by external forces. A “free life,” she argues, is precisely one that is “capable of generating” secrets.”https://www.thedriftmag.com/on-the-grid/
2024-12-11 00:13:05 “One advantage old-school Google Search has over the so-called answer engines is that it links directly to primary sources. Answer engines just give you an answer, and it’s often unclear what the source is.”https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/5/24313222/chatgpt-pardon-biden-bush-es...
2024-12-09 13:32:10 “AI slop is information pollution, and intentional information pollution is a great way to disrupt channels for organizing, thinking, and connecting to other people. Control the filter, and you can aim it at whatever you want.Information pollution is a great way to ensure that consensus, or compromises, or just an understanding of one another, don'
2024-12-08 16:22:33 “Suspended between real &
2024-12-07 18:50:21 “No one is talking about what happens when we limit human contact to those who can afford to pay a premium. Technology does not arrive on a blank slate, but intersects with existing inequalities, and in this case it amplifies the stratification of human connection. In 2025, the affluent will get their connective labor from humans. The rest will get theirs from a machine.”https://www.wired.com/story/wealth-inequality-personal-service-access-ar...
2024-12-07 16:59:38 “Treating “AI companion companies” as innovators operating at the edge of our capabilities to recognize sentience tends to mask how they are selling entertainment products to audiences like any other media company.”https://robhorning.substack.com/p/reality-raids
2024-12-07 15:12:09 “The era-defining success of Faserland can be hard to explain to English readers. Brand names and pop culture instead of characterization, interiority, and plot
2024-12-07 12:49:39 “Amazon appropriates up to 40% of the price of a product sold on its platform. That leaves next to no surplus for the seller to reinvest. And when you have so much rent being siphoned out of the economy, out of the circular flow of income, then the capitalist sector is starved and increasingly subordinate to the cloud rent sector.”https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/quantity-to-quality
2024-12-07 01:36:51 “When workers own the platforms, they can decide what data they want to collect and how they want to use it. In Indonesia, couriers have created “base camps” where they can recharge their phones, exchange information, and wait for their next order
2024-12-05 14:41:37 “Chinese companies and their steady ascent up the value chain now mount a formidable challenge in areas such as semiconductors, white goods, consumer electronics and automotive. This is tough for everyone, but these are sectors that have been disproportionately responsible for Korea’s industrial miracle, and thus disproportionately pain-inducing.”https://www.ft.com/content/448a73e2-6cc8-43bd-a3c6-88b2a4ccb208
2024-12-04 13:32:44 “Victims of medical-identity theft may be denied coverage in the future because their records show they have a condition they don’t actually have. Or they may be told they have reached their limit on benefits. Correcting the bogus information is difficult, since healthcare providers and insurers often have convoluted systems for amending records, and these systems mostly don’t “speak” to each other.”https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/why-hackers-want-your-health-infor...
2024-12-04 13:25:32 “Ironically, then, the housing crisis is another thing keeping us at home. Because we’ve failed to build housing in our most amenity-rich neighborhoods and let them become too expensive, people have to live in less desirable neighborhoods without the same strong public and private investment in physical spaces. Farther from everything, residents have even less impetus to go shopping in person, attend a cultural event, or trek into work.”https://slate.com/business/2024/11/remote-work-life-loneliness-isolation...
2024-12-03 22:51:41 “When you pose the question to an LLM, what you are really asking is, “Given the statistical distribution of words in the vast public corpus of text, what are the words most likely to follow the sequence ‘what country is to the south of Rwanda?’” Even if the system responds with the word “Burundi,” this has a different relationship to reality than the human’s answer, and to say the AI “knows” or “believes” Burundi to be south of Rwanda is a category mistake.”https://www.theverge.com/c/24300623/ai-companions-replika-openai-chatgpt...
2024-12-03 16:14:31 @kazys great point!
2024-12-03 14:23:52 “CDs have a bit-rate of 1,411 kilobits per second, which is a measure of how much data is used to represent sound. Spotify Premium ranges from 24 kbps to 320 kbps, while free Spotify listeners are limited to 160 kbps at best. I realise this is hardly news to music aficionados. Neil Young, who grudgingly returned his music to Spotify this year after a spat involving Joe Rogan, complained that “there is so much tone missing that you can hardly feel the sensitivity”.”https://www.ft.com/content/ebc80373-bd36-4492-b63c-4418177d4081
2024-12-03 13:31:53 “While disaster risk is one reason that home insurance premiums are rising faster than overall consumer inflation, it isn’t the only reason. A portion of the increase in home insurance premiums stems from rising housing and construction costs, which soared during and following the pandemic. Replacement and repair costs have soared, and insurers are trying to keep pace, although some state insurance commissions are slowing the process.”https://www.resiclubanalytics.com/p/the-housing-market-s-home-insurance-...
2024-12-03 00:27:14 “When presented with a philosopher whose life was radically limited and whose philosophy was commensurately dismissive of apparently central parts of reality, a more realistic default expectation is that the narrowness of his perspective simply obscured important features of ordinary life from him—that he was blind to facts that most people access without trouble, rather than having the philosophical far-sightedness to somehow see past them.”https://philosophersmag.com/imperfect-parfit/
2024-11-28 17:46:16 NYC airport transit labyrinth: he “would take the F train from Delancey Street to West 4th Street
2024-11-24 16:39:58 “When a pretension to free the world from evil ends only in a new proof of the danger of a fanatic to the commonweal, then it is not to be marveled at that a distrust is aroused in the observer which makes sympathy impossible. […]A measure of sympathy developed
2024-11-24 03:02:20 @trc you’re welcome! Yes, very insightful cultural analysis here.
2024-11-23 20:11:22 “We used to view formal speech as serious and impressive. The president would stand in public to give formal, scripted speeches to a large audience. That’s how presidents appeared… presidential. But in the age of social media, that mode of communication doesn’t resonate. What used to be considered serious is now considered stilted. What used to be respectable is now inauthentic, fake. And what used to be disrespectful is now authentic and sincere.”https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/revolt-and-the-reversal-of-trust
2024-11-23 13:51:55 “Dennis Tourish, a professor at the University of Sussex Business School, published a book titled Management Studies in Crisis: Fraud, Deception and Meaningless Research. He cites a study finding that more than a third of surveyed editors at management journals say they’ve encountered fabricated or falsified data. Even that alarming rate may undersell the problem, Tourish told me, given all of the misbehavior in his discipline that gets overlooked or covered up.”https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/01/business-school-fra...
2024-11-19 14:15:29 “Many of us aspire to command our lives as though we were the captain of a superyacht, controlling our route “from the plush-leather swivel chair on the serene and silent bridge.” Yet it’s more realistic to see each of us as occupying “a little one-person kayak,” tossed about by waves”https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/should-you-just-give-up
2024-11-19 14:08:43 “He could also stop or slow vaccine development research conducted at or funded by the National Institutes of Health, the federal government’s top medical research agency, which would also fall under his purview. He has been clear about his plans to empty some divisions that focus on advancing vaccine research and development. He has said he would fight the next pandemic instead by “building people’s immune systems.””https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/19/health/rfk-jr-vaccines-hhs.html
2024-11-19 14:03:17 “Art should do more than communicate: it should move us
2024-11-17 22:15:47 “When Paul P. first came to New York, many of the gay artists who might have served as inspirations — or even as part of an establishment that young upstarts could measure themselves against and challenge — were already, prematurely, gone. He arrived in a city in which David Wojnarowicz, Félix Gonzáles-Torres and Martin Wong were martyrs and memories rather than the formidable presences that they might otherwise have been.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/31/t-magazine/paul-p-queer-art.html
2024-11-15 16:14:07 “With generative AI, we’re once again witnessing a core problem with entrusting technological development to a handful of self-mythologizing executives and founders in Silicon Valley. Instead of systems that are democratically and ethically constructed, built to serve humans and not just managers, whole constituencies and not just consultants
2024-11-15 16:13:15 “With internal combustion vehicles, the “natural law” was that the bigger the car you make, the more money you’ll make from it. But with EVs, that gets turned on its head. The larger the EV, the bigger the battery is needed to power it, and the more battery is needed just to move that bigger battery.”https://disconnect.blog/what-we-get-wrong-about-the-supposed-threat-of-c...
2024-11-09 16:15:36 “When social fracture grew and shared truth died, when hope collapsed in the communities technology left behind, a yearning for the certainties of the providential authoritarian leader set in.“In the absence of a shared reality, or shared facts, or a shared threat, reason had no weight beside emotion,” said Nicole Bacharan, a French political scientist. “And so a dislocated world of danger has produced a hunger for the strongman.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/08/world/americas/trump-foreign-policy-a...
2024-11-08 15:28:50 “Finding good information is increasingly difficult. Decades ago, there were just a few channels on television
2024-11-04 15:53:53 @mrdelong @mimsical thanks for sharing! I look forward to reading your review.
2024-11-03 22:28:32 “As to my ability to withstand alcohol’s ill effects, I am banking on having inherited the genes of my paternal grandmother. She was a great fan of gin but when, in her eighties, she heard on the radio that too much gin was bad for you, she switched to whisky and lived to the age of 98. (It makes a good story. One’s genetic make-up does indeed play an important part in how alcohol is metabolised.)”https://www.ft.com/content/bb952668-dc21-4d6f-8837-11dbf5deb609
2024-10-30 00:22:02 “The disciplined attention of art,” the poet argues in an extended close reading (itself an act of disciplined attention) of a George Oppen poem, “is a moral discipline, even when the content of that morality isn’t obvious, in the way Cézanne paints an apple, say, or the bowl that gathers the apples, the hundreds of strokes he makes, each an act of seeing, a judgment, each an attempt to activate in us that awareness we nearly always shut down.”https://www.bookforum.com/print/3102/end-insights-61295
2024-10-27 13:42:47 “People—their histories and identities, their institutions and work processes, their fears and desires—are simply too complex to be captured in a worksheet with a paragraph and some reading comprehension questions. Large-scale prose writing is the best medium we have for capturing that complexity, and the education system should not be in the business of keeping students from learning how to engage effectively with it.”https://slate.com/human-interest/2024/02/literacy-crisis-reading-compreh...
2024-10-27 13:30:02 “One found hallucinations in eight out of every 10 audio transcriptions he inspected…[Another] discovered hallucinations in about half of the over 100 hours of Whisper transcriptions he analyzed. A third…found hallucinations in nearly every one of the 26,000 transcripts he created with Whisper.The problems persist even in well-recorded, short audio samples. A recent study …uncovered 187 hallucinations in over 13,000 clear audio snippets they examined.”https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-health-business-90...
2024-10-26 21:44:07 “Compared to nonrunners, people who ran between one and 2.4 hours per week at a slow or moderate pace enjoyed the greatest reductions in mortality — greater even than among runners who logged more miles at a faster pace.”https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/21/well/move/running-short-distance-heal...
2024-10-24 13:58:21 “Many promote racial segregation and female subservience. Many question science,” Bartholet wrote. Many are “determined to keep their children from exposure to views that might enable autonomous choice about their future lives”.Other experts worry about the consequences for socialisation of children spending more time learning at home.”https://www.ft.com/content/364a65cf-4ec1-4f65-ba17-d7cf7ebb4b1a
2024-10-23 13:26:58 “Folks hoping to curl up with a cozy fantasy novel or a bedtime story for their kids are confronted with a library of Chat GPT-generated nonsense “written” by nonexistent authors on the Kindle bookstore, while their YouTube algorithms serve them bot-generated fall ambiance videos. Autumn, it seems, is being eaten by AI. There’s something off about this year’s “fall vibes”https://www.vox.com/culture/378855/ai-slop-fall-autumn-inspiration-vibes...
2024-10-22 22:44:14 “At a wind-swept amusement park in southern Moldova, a mother-of-two wondered out loud which candidate to back in the country’s run-off presidential race.Kyvyrzhyk concluded she would be fine letting the oligarch who built the park — Gagauzialand — decide on her behalf. “He’ll name a candidate the night before,” she said.Moldovan police have accused the oligarch, Ilan Șor, of using his influence, as well as massive Russian funds, to run a tight-knit network of voters”https://www.ft.com/content/8f0adc50-c2b7-4aa7-9943-9308a605a2a0
2024-10-20 01:03:05 “54% of respondents in an Axios Vibes survey published last month agreed with the statement, "
2024-10-16 11:02:12 “Section 230 is just massively overbroad,” Sag says. “It’s well past time we replaced it with some kind of notice and takedown regime, a simple expedient system to say, ‘This is infringing on my rights to publicity,’ or ‘I have a good faith belief that there’s been an infliction of emotional distress,’ and then the companies would either have to take it down or lose their liability shield.”https://www.wired.com/story/characterai-has-a-non-consensual-bot-problem/
2024-10-15 22:41:07 “At least from a certain moment of its development, capitalism deals in and reproduces itself by means of disorientation.3 It deskills all of us with regard to our cognitive mapping abilities. It then becomes the task of theory—and of a reinvented dialectical rationalism—to (attempt to) orient us.”https://www.e-flux.com/notes/633672/always-jamesonize?rand=26589
2024-10-15 15:15:29 “Photography is devious sometimes,” he says in a video interview on view at MoMA: a picture is just whatever scrap of truth remains when everything else is banished from the frame. Frank came to find that editing process morally compromised. In his view, painting was additive, photography subtractive, a mere matter of plucking one or two items from the groaning smorgasbord of everything the eye could see.”https://www.ft.com/content/73ecb7d1-7e15-42ba-abb2-013eb634d64d
2024-10-13 17:59:13 “At the top was “The Night Agent,” a sub-Clancy-quality thriller about an F.B.I. guy, with more than 812 million hours viewed….Roughly the last four thousand entries all have 100,000 hours viewed — this is as low as the scale goes — and are arranged alphabetically.“https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/07/magazine/netflix-library-viewer-numbe...
2024-10-12 14:15:43 “Mr Chen says that it'
2024-10-11 21:38:30 “Wittgenstein uses a lot of fictitious dialogue …he introduces a fictitious quote from someone who disagrees with him. Then he will explain back to that person why he was right in the first place, sometimes getting exasperated with the person, even though he invented them. That’s what I do. I make up fake people to get mad at all the time.The interplay of dialogue in Wittgenstein works toward a philosophical end, and I wondered, How could I do that to a novelistic end?”https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/10/09/loving-the-limitations-of...
2024-10-11 12:49:51 The No Kings Act “declares that it is Congress’s constitutional judgment that no president is immune from the criminal laws of the United States. It would strip the Supreme Court of jurisdiction to declare the No Kings Act unconstitutional. Any criminal actions against a president would be left in the hands of the lower federal courts. And these courts would be required to adopt a presumption that the No Kings Act is constitutional.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/11/opinion/laws-congress-constitution-su...
2024-10-11 12:08:22 “Making companies more ‘efficient’ often means little more than raising prices and lowering quality. Take US trailer parks, which PE firms have been amassing with the avidity of an eight-year-old playing Monopoly. Once they own these low-income residential communities, the firms jack up ground rents, transfer utility costs to residents and cut back on maintaining vital infrastructure such as sewers….to charge more for less, it’s smart business to target” the vulnerable.https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/10/slash-and-burn-is-priva...
2024-10-09 23:03:58 “MI5 is now working closely with European allies to crack down on criminal networks being funded by authoritarian states, he said.This summer seven people were accused by U.K. authorities of setting fire to a London warehouse owned by Ukrainian businessmen, an arson attack allegedly paid for by Russian intelligence. Russian saboteurs are also suspected of being behind a fire at a Berlin factory”https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/russia-pays-criminals-to-sow-mayhem-in-...
2024-10-09 00:55:05 “His colleagues who who get distracted in Amazon’s open-floor-plan office tell him that their work has improved since WFH.If remote work is such a drag, its defenders ask, then why has business been booming since the pandemic? Profits are up, even as employees code in sweatpants or practice their golf swing.”https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/remote-work-amazon-exe...
2024-10-08 23:44:30 “Rate increases, and a historic 113 consecutive days of temperatures peaking at or above 100 degrees in Phoenix, have generated record air conditioning bills and widespread consternation. Modest-sized homes are paying as much as $500 a month, while the biggest properties are shelling out $1,000 or more. Even some homes with solar panels are receiving surprisingly large bills.”https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/arizona-electricity-bills-trump-elec...
2024-10-08 23:42:33 “Billions of dollars of private and public funds have been invested in the redevelopment of downtown Tampa’s waterfront in recent decades. Many of these buildings are in vulnerable low-lying areas, according to data from CoStar.”https://www.wsj.com/us-news/climate-environment/tampa-florida-hurricane-...
2024-10-08 19:34:44 “Companies like Airbnb, Lehane understood, could make arguments faster, and more efficiently, than nearly any political party or other special-interest group, and this was a source of considerable power. “The platforms are really the only ones who can speak to everyone now,” Lehane said.https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley-the-new-lob...
2024-10-07 14:59:21 “The government’s approach to online feminist activism is marked by a nuanced &
2024-10-06 12:58:57 “Scholz’s government hasn’t delivered on promises to ease the housing crisis, cut red tape, improve infrastructure and reduce crime. Trains are notoriously late, corporate taxes are the highest among peer nations, and infrastructure is crumbling: A bridge collapsed in Dresden last month because of delayed repairs.”https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/is-europe-becoming-ungovernable-4f5a889...
2024-10-05 14:52:03 "
2024-10-03 23:23:27 “Passenger rail in Canada is a slow and unreliable mode of transport, and for those who have a choice, they are increasingly deciding to use cars, coach services, or, over longer distances, flying. It’s exactly the opposite of what is needed in an age of climate crisis.”https://ubisurv.net/2024/10/02/railways-in-canada/
2024-10-03 16:00:29 “A study published this year by Quess Corp, an Indian business service provider, and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry argued that India faced a wage — rather than an employment — problem. About 80 per cent of jobs pay less than Rs20,000 ($238) a month, not enough to meet rising living expenses, the study’s authors argued.”https://www.ft.com/content/14fc147e-8f11-45d7-9e7f-2ee97f899eea
2024-10-02 21:12:14 “Literature was the home of the intimate and irreducible, the stray gesture and sensuous particular, of everyt
2024-09-29 14:04:21 “For all its intensely practical importance as a connector of industrial centres and an arch logistician of human movement, the shinkansen continues to play a role as an ideological encapsulator of Japan’s sense of what it is and what it should ideally strive to be. There has never been a fatal accident. Average annual lateness across the JR Central network is 1.6 minutes. When the natural world forces the shinkansen to stop, you know conditions are genuinely bad.”https://www.ft.com/content/46bc31e6-6994-4f0f-859f-afe610afbbfe
2024-09-29 01:36:16 “From systemically poor public procurement to hopeless IT, to the hollowing out of core services and expertise at both central and local government, this newly active state stands on atrophying limbs.Stories abound. Officials grappling with the early rel
2024-09-27 11:39:28 “The rapid evolution of drone warfare and the weaponization of commercial and hobbyist drones has since become a stark fact, as has the proliferation of increasingly capable long-range ‘kamikaze‘ or ‘one-way attack’ drones that blur the definitions of drone and missile. Both of their impacts on modern warfare are now snowballing.”https://www.twz.com/news-features/drone-warfares-terrifying-ai-enabled-n...
2024-09-26 02:02:21 “When you first sign up, you’re prompted to choose these AI character archetypes: Do you want to hear from Fans? Trolls? Skeptics? Odd-balls? Doomers? Visionaries? Nerds? Drama Queens? Liberals? Conservatives? Welcome to SocialAI, where Trollita Kafka, Vera D. Nothing, Sunshine Sparkle, Progressive Parker, Derek Dissent, and Professor Debaterson are here to prop you up or tell you why you’re wrong.”https://www.wired.com/story/socialai-app-ai-chatbots-chatgpt/
2024-09-26 01:45:21 “Decade after decade of peace and affluence has had the consequence of raising expectations. Just a small share of people alive in the west now have clear memories of an existential war. Virtually no one remembers a financial crisis that the state wasn’t able to contain.”https://www.ft.com/content/90171f91-7d7f-4ff3-b733-763a228f5a43
2024-09-25 00:56:55 Empire of the Sun “is a meditation on time and memory, on how the shocks we encounter become traumas we cannot escape, and how these traces of unbearable pain, retrieved and transformed, can become life-affirming and renewing.Human memory is a constant reprocessing of our lives. As the world keeps on unmaking us, we remake ourselves or our lives are spent in forgetting.”https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2024/09/jg-ballards-apocalyptic-art
2024-09-22 01:10:35 “Regulation is only one half of the generative AI puzzle. Governments should also help ensure just rewards to reality-improving technology, to dissipate excess investment in hype-driven industries (ranging from crypto to the metaverse to the current direct-to-consumer GenAI boom). The US Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS (Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors) Act are two good examples of such legislation: both have spurred higher investment in factories.”https://asianews.network/industrial-policy-for-the-real-world/
2024-09-22 01:08:20 “The current bleeding-edge LLM AIs do nothing that can be thought of as thinking and are no more than massive, advanced versions of Clever Hans, responding to prompts and cues and processing them in mechanical (though stochastic) fashion. Their achievement is in showing just how convincing and lifelike such technology can be, but we shouldn’t conflate their usefulness (because they are useful) with actual thinking or overestimate the limits of their capabilities.”https://auerstack.substack.com/p/seeing-like-a-cyborg?utm_source=post-em...
2024-09-21 20:38:30 “Ford’s platform of platforms propelled the rapid proliferation of motorcar technologies, orchestrating a virtuous cycle of mass production and consumption that gave rise to a blue-collar middle class in the United States while mobilizing economies worldover. The radical democratization of mass automobility demanded the submission of bodies and brains to the robotic repetitions and frenetic rates of the assembly line.”https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/new-silk-roads/626301/the-fordian-slip/
2024-09-21 03:20:02 AI has “been pushed deliberately away from intriguing strangeness and toward banal interactions that often end up wasting humans’ time and money. As companies fumble toward a profitable vision of generative artificial intelligence, AI tools are becoming big business by blossoming into the least interesting version of themselves.AI is everywhere right now, including many places it fits poorly.”https://www.theverge.com/24067999/ai-bot-chatgpt-chatbot-dungeon
2024-09-21 03:10:50 “With generative AI, a little bit of programming effort can set off a process that pollutes the world automatically with limitless amounts of material that radiates inattention, absence, disaffection, manipulation, expediency, objectification, compulsion, turning the collected corpus of human expression into a means of unwinding it all into entropy.”https://robhorning.substack.com/p/artificial-intentionality?utm_source=p...
2024-09-20 02:04:25 “People who have worked on the large language models that power products such as ChatGPT can easily find jobs and make well over $1 million a year.Knopp says AI engineers are being offered two- to four-times the salary of a regular engineer. “That’s an extreme investment of an unknown technology,” she says. “They cannot afford to invest in other talent because of that.””https://www.wsj.com/tech/tech-jobs-artificial-intelligence-cce22393
2024-09-19 21:46:48 “Technological evolution, in this case involving big data and analytics fed by social media and online data aggregation techniques, is rapidly developing the ability to custom-design narratives that can effectively manipulate political behavior on an individual basis.”https://issues.org/the-age-of-weaponized-narrative-or-where-have-you-gon...
2024-09-19 13:48:43 Industrial policy for the real world: Governments should also help ensure just rewards to reality-improving technology, to dissipate excess investment in hype-driven industries (ranging from crypto to the metaverse to the current direct-to-consumer GenAI boom).https://asianews.network/industrial-policy-for-the-real-world/
2024-09-16 15:58:05 “What, I kept wondering, would her subjects say was her “deep story”? And would including that viewpoint in her book have destabilized its carefully engineered explanations? If America is increasingly divided into two countries, one liberal and one conservative, what would it have meant to compare their two deep stories in one narrative rather than have one side tell the other how it is?”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/10/books/review/stolen-pride-arlie-russe...
2024-09-14 23:27:39 “With no role in strategy, filming or production, Mr. Trump would not typically see the contestants “working” during the week.“He would fire the absolute wrong person,” recalled Mr. Braun “Our job then was to reverse engineer the show and to make him not look like a complete moron,” Mr. Braun said. They would go back through the tape from the week and selectively choose snippets “to make the person who he fired look not as good,” he said.https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/14/business/donald-trump-apprentice.html
2024-09-14 22:01:02 “As a physician, the scope for moments of generosity is “drastic”, she says, whether ringing a patient’s sister to update her, helping put someone’s socks on after an examination or rubbing the feet of a terminally ill patient. There is something heartbreaking about the disproportionate gratitude these interventions elicit, she says. “I think their expectations for us are so low.””https://www.ft.com/content/23b74c4c-1508-4e60-abaa-93468d52aa47
2024-09-14 14:23:42 “Among employees, news that Endless Shrimp would, in fact, never end was greeted with dread. As an occasional special over the years, it was always a frantic ordeal. Cooks and servers could barely keep up. Bargain hunters griped about the pace of refills. Cops were summoned to handle diners enraged that they couldn’t get takeaway bags.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/09/business/red-lobster-seafood-downfall...
2024-09-14 02:14:44 “Foreign governments’ attempts to manipulate Americans’ opinions are far more extensive than most people realize, and our government’s process for finding and countering them is very slow and cumbersome.”https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/at-least-five-interesting-things-577
2024-09-13 22:05:18 “Like trends in fashion, the dominant style of social media oscillates between aestheticized perfection and aestheticized mess, between minimalism and maximalism. One precedent for the Instagram dump was the Facebook album of the late two-thousands, a time when online content was less carefully curated because it was still meant for a small audience of real-life friends.”https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/the-desperation-of-the...
2024-09-13 11:06:58 “A report commissioned by Unesda, the European soft drinks association, estimated that the cost of the transition, including all the new equipment required, could be as much as three to nine per cent of the industry’s annual turnover. The new caps might even require more plastic than the old kind.”https://www.ft.com/content/e43c7099-6f8e-4196-8a14-ab11a2ed2695
2024-09-13 11:06:43 “A report commissioned by Unesda, the European soft drinks association, estimated that the cost of the transition, including all the new equipment required, could be as much as three to nine per cent of the industry’s annual turnover. The new caps might even require more plastic than the old kind.”https://www.ft.com/content/e43c7099-6f8e-4196-8a14-ab11a2ed2695
2024-09-12 10:49:40 “Without an electric vehicle industry, without the ability to mass-produce batteries in an emergency, the United States will lose its status as an energy superpower.It is possible to fall so far behind in an industry that a country cannot reasonably catch up.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/11/opinion/trump-electric-vehicles-china...
2024-09-10 12:10:01 Along AI “misrepresentations a ‘hallucination’ isn’t harmless because it “lends itself to the confusion that the machines are in some way misperceiving but are nonetheless trying to convey something that they believe or have perceived.””.https://untangled.substack.com/p/the-consequences-of-googles-ai-overview...
2024-09-07 01:41:33 “Unlike related concepts of misinformation, disinformation, libel and hallucinations in LLMs, careless speech causes unique long-term harms to science, education and society which resist easy quantification, measurement and mitigation. Voluntary technical measures to better align LLMs with ‘ground truth’ or reliable sources can help to combat these harms but are insufficient on their own.”https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.240197
2024-09-07 01:25:01 “Apple is the epitome of the “hollow corporation”
2024-09-07 00:39:11 Sputnik 2.0: “The US has superior firepower to China in neither green technology nor development finance. Low- and middle-income countries are not forced to choose between the US and China as European nations…did during the cold war.The US is a late starter in developing green technologies. In some of the critical products — solar panels, wind power and now electric vehicles — its technology is more expensive and often inferior”https://www.ft.com/content/a8198ad7-779c-4e35-b560-ab3bb6520779
2024-09-06 23:39:39 “Shallow, rapidly swirling narrative consciousness has come to define the refugees of the Attention Span Wars, those writers whose capacity for concentration has been so compromised by the internet that they leave us not with a fragmented form – which might still have something to offer readers – but with the fragmentation of concentration itself.”https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n17/brandon-taylor/use-your-human-mind
2024-09-06 20:52:44 “Today’s political deliriums are stoked by click-maximizing algorithms that steer people toward “engaging” content, which is often whatever feeds their righteous rage. Imagine what will happen…when bots generate that content themselves, personalizing and continually adjusting it to flood the dopamine receptors of each user.”https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/10/yuval-noah-harari-n...
2024-09-04 13:46:47 @fluidlogic Yes, my sense is that this would require human review of a range of queries.
2024-09-04 01:03:22 @greenboxcode a very interesting analogy. You may find David Golumbia'
2024-09-03 22:32:01 “LLMs pose a unique risk to science, education, democracy, and society that current legal frameworks did not anticipate. This is what we call ‘careless speech’ or speech that lacks appropriate care for truth. Spreading careless speech causes subtle, immaterial harms that are difficult to measure over time. It leads to the erosion of truth, knowledge and shared history”https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2024-08-07-large-language-models-pose-risk-soc...
2024-09-03 19:33:02 “Agnotology is the idea that “ignorance should not be viewed as a simple omission or gap, but rather as an active production,” according to Robert Proctor, a historian of science. You can think of censorship, propaganda, marketing campaigns, email deletion policies, and non-disclosure agreements all as creating a kind of ignorance.”https://untangled.substack.com/p/its-okay-to-not-know-the-answer
2024-09-03 18:26:58 Justice Dino compared X’s “refusal to comply with court orders to suspend accounts to the operator of a private highway refusing to stop traffic to prevent the escape of a dangerous criminal. “Would it be reasonable for this company to choose whether or not to comply with the court order, arguing that stopping the highway would violate the criminal’s freedom of movement?” he asked.https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/02/world/americas/brazil-elon-musk-supre...
2024-09-03 13:51:07 “About two years ago, Irrational put its theory that happier employees lead to better performing companies to the test, making it investable through three exchange traded funds, run in tandem with Harbor Capital, a boutique asset manager.The flagship ETF, HAPI, which picks large-cap stocks with the highest human capital scores, has beaten more than 90 per cent of peer funds since it launched in October 2022”https://www.ft.com/content/c5c72493-4d32-4d65-b49e-1df7b49a14a3
2024-09-03 12:54:47 “In a world where deepfakes are prevalent and uncertainty is widespread, public figures and private citizens alike can capitalize on that uncertainty to sow doubt in real audio content or video footage and potentially benefit from the liar’s dividend. In the courtroom, lawyers have attempted the “deepfake defense,” asserting that real audiovisual evidence against a defendant is fake.”https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/deepfakes-electi...
2024-09-03 12:29:35 “Developers of Recommendation Systems must face the music and wake up from their behaviorist dreams, if they want to remain relevant in a world that is swiftly moving toward lifting the veil from unsubstantiated claims.”https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/artificial-intelligence/articles/10...
2024-09-03 12:21:49 “The approach taken by Birhane and her colleagues is to understand human thought in terms that are "
2024-09-02 19:13:43 For “historical, demographic, economic and social reasons, mediating organisations that representative democracy requires to thrive — such as parties, unions or civil associations — struggled to flourish. Instead, a feeling of imagined inferiority and a culture of street protests with maximalist demands are fused in a toxic “hyperpolitics” that is extremely vulnerable to ruthless “polarisation entrepreneurs”. Enter the AfD &
2024-09-02 11:57:29 “Recht argues that researching to find the accepted solutions to certain problems “is more like learning guitar than it is taking a standardized aptitude test.” If you want to be a musician, you want to know how to play music, not merely what music sounds like. Chiang offers a similar metaphor: “Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room
2024-08-30 12:26:21 “Platforms are not passive conduits
2024-08-29 21:58:05 “Generalist appellate judges will be forced to independently evaluate highly technical interpretations of statutes-a task that judges are ill-equipped to accomplish. Rather than take the time to properly understand complex statutory regimes, judges may purposefully or inadvertently fall back on partisanship.”https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4939536
2024-08-29 21:57:09 “The conflation of these two types of studies is problematic because it does not make sense to consider a 5-minute exposure to Facebook measuring momentary mood with a 3-week abstinence from social media measuring risk of clinical depression on a validated scale to be measures of the same effect.”https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-case-for-causality-part-1
2024-08-26 12:36:05 “Part of the reason the clothes are cheap is, well, because they are cheap. One factory manager held up a baggy dress — likely destined for the US or UK — and joked that she would never sell such low-quality clothes to a more discerning Chinese clientele. She says she uses cheaper fabrics for Shein orders than for Alibaba’s Taobao, because the domestic platform gives more money to the factories to cover their costs.”https://www.ft.com/content/70634462-4d1e-4f3c-be87-710deb59e0da
2024-08-25 19:32:33 “Trump was already thinking and acting like an influencer in the 1980s, decades before the type appeared. He is the first top-level American politician to have internalised the modalities of social media for political purposes.”https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/problem-trump
2024-08-25 15:30:27 “Our research shows that while people fast-forward or skip videos to avoid boredom, this behaviour can actually make them feel more bored,” she said. “Just as we pay for an immersive experience in a movie theatre, enjoyment often comes from immersing ourselves in videos rather than swiping through them”https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/aug/19/scrolling-throug...
2024-08-25 13:28:47 “Algorithmic feeds make digital switching seem like the only kind of activity, the only way to intervene in a system intent on pacifying us — a system that muddles pacification with “immersion,” “engagement,” and “satisfaction.””https://robhorning.substack.com/p/no-flipping?utm_source=post-email-title&
2024-08-24 22:43:57 “Google’s own much-vaunted AI watermarking system was nowhere in sight when The Verge tried out the Pixel 9’s Magic Editor. The photos that are modified with the Reimagine tool simply have a line of removable metadata added to them. (The inherent fragility of this kind of metadata was supposed to be addressed by Google’s invention of the theoretically unremovable SynthID watermark”https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/22/24225972/ai-photo-era-what-is-reality...
2024-08-24 21:58:43 “Typically in IR, about 5 years pass between getting an idea and getting it published in a top journal (after multiple revisions which typically make the work ever more boringly conventional), so a full decade passes before that idea itself is used in a publication. In computer science and data analytics, a hot new method will be publicized, tested, &
2024-08-24 13:19:53 He “says his company received a grant from Johns Hopkins University to build “the world’s first AI caregiver trainer for dementia patients,” but that data labeling costs are “eating us alive.” The cost, he said, has skyrocketed 40% over the past year because of the specialized information needed from gerontologists, dementia experts, and veteran caregivers.”https://fortune.com/2024/08/23/data-labeling-ai-scaleai-snorkel-costs/I bet they’ll be needed for updates, too.
2024-08-22 13:18:51 “In an anthropocenic age characterized by accelerating technological development, building bridges between technical knowledge and that of the social sciences and humanities is arguably the most crucial civilisational challenge facing us.”https://www.e-ir.info/2024/05/09/interview-antoine-bousquet/
2024-08-22 12:51:43 “What really frightened me was the future of mediocrity [AI] suggested: the inescapable screens, the app-facilitated antisocial behavior, the assumptions advanced as knowledge, and above all the collective delusion formulated in high offices and peddled to common people that all this made for an easier life.”https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-47/essays/an-age-of-hyperabundance/
2024-08-21 16:05:53 “Most Britons are worried about the proliferation of hate speech and believe that social media platforms should be held to account for propagating it, as well as for the violence that often follows.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/21/world/europe/britain-riots-speech.html
2024-08-20 12:18:00 “”More than just another episode in the history of tools or media,” he writes, “it represents a culmination of the history of technology as such.” Because it presents itself as a neutral executor of our desires, embedded seamlessly into our daily lives, yet capable of transforming what and how we value, digital technology cuts across and transfigures everything we do.”https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/captive-users
2024-08-20 02:00:35 @jciv gotta keep that financial innovation coming!
2024-08-20 01:46:22 “Worldcoin has come under assault by authorities over its mission. It has been raided in Hong Kong, blocked in Spain, fined in Argentina and criminally investigated in Kenya. A ruling looms on whether it can keep operating in the European Union.More than a dozen jurisdictions have either suspended Worldcoin’s operations or looked into its data processing.“https://www.wsj.com/tech/sam-altman-openai-humanness-iris-scanning-4d0e1dab
2024-08-20 00:00:36 “The AI apps will be introduced for all subjects except for music, art, physical education and ethics by 2028, with teachers monitoring activity through a digital dashboard. Pupils will be given classes in digital literacy to help them to deploy AI tools responsibly.”https://www.ft.com/content/1f5c5377-5e85-4174-a54f-adc8f19fa5cb
2024-08-19 23:49:40 “Ruston says it will take time to create a new culture and norms around mobile phone use. But she predicts, “we are going to look back and say: ‘What were we thinking?’”, about the days when phones were permitted in class. One day, she hopes, mobiles in schools will be like smoking in a public building: something that just isn’t done.”https://www.ft.com/content/02e0f64c-08da-49ef-b3f6-f5673bdceb22
2024-08-19 14:12:56
2024-08-14 22:02:35 “Imagine an alternate universe in which people don’t have words for different forms of transportation—only the collective noun ‘vehicle.’ Such a world sees “furious debates about whether or not vehicles are environmentally friendly, even though no one realizes that one side of the debate is talking about bikes and the other side is talking about trucks.” Similarly, the term “A.I.” is capacious. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/in-the-age-of-ai-what-m...
2024-08-13 21:45:34 “Deployed on everything, Apple and Google’s AIs end up assuming strange roles, acting like personal assistants for administrative work but also for … talking to your friends and family? It’s mediation for mediation’s sake. Like a lot of first-wave AI tools, these are features that exist because they’re newly possible, not necessarily because they make sense.”https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/chatgpt-gmail-apple-intelligence... as operational language.
2024-08-12 02:04:12 “In 1843, Feuerbach complained that his own era “prefers the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation to the reality, appearance to being.””https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-image-culture
2024-08-11 14:50:44 During Rawls’s time working at a donut factory in Baltimore, he “was the helper of an older man named Ernie who operated one of the mixing machines. He had been there for 18 years and had three children to support, and it seemed he’d be there forever, breathing flour dust all his life.”https://aeon.co/essays/john-rawls-liberalism-and-what-it-means-to-live-a...
2024-08-11 00:27:23 “He has freest legal rein in the US, where the First Amendment protects almost all speech. Moreover, internet publishers are exempt from liability under the notorious Section 230 of the misleadingly named Communications Decency Act. But even in America you cannot falsely shout fire in a crowded theatre.”https://www.ft.com/content/bdd100a8-4817-44f6-9838-bda760aaebf1
2024-08-10 23:19:53 “In 2017, then–FTC Chair Ohlhausen gave a speech to antitrust lawyers warning about the rise of algorithmic collusion. “Is it okay for a guy named Bob to collect confidential price strategy information from all the participants in a market and then tell everybody how they should price?” she asked. “If it isn’t okay for a guy named Bob to do it, then it probably isn’t okay for an algorithm to do it either.”https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/08/ai-price-algorithms-re...
2024-08-10 22:03:47 “Generative AI is capable of producing mediocrity at an unimaginable scale and unwinding the sittlichkeit accrued over centuries, but relative to technologies that reproduce inequality &
2024-08-09 12:30:22 “A majority of undergraduates in China major in math, science, engineering or agriculture, according to the Education Ministry. And three-quarters of China’s doctoral students do so.By comparison, only a fifth of American undergraduates and half of doctoral students are in these categories, although American data defines these majors a little more narrowly.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/09/business/china-ev-battery-tech.html
2024-07-29 11:57:33 “An AI model trained on its own output mangles a data set of dog breed images, according to Emily Wenger.Initially, common types such as golden retrievers would dominate while less common breeds such as Dalmatians disappeared. Finally, the images of golden retrievers themselves would become an anatomic mess, with body parts in the wrong place.”https://www.ft.com/content/ae507468-7f5b-440b-8512-aea81c6bf4a5
2024-07-29 11:53:17 A “re-immersion in Geertz’s opus left me with the feeling I have when I go back to read founding thinkers like Max Weber, or Ruth Benedict – that the richness of their response to the empirical realities with which they dealt far exceeded the labels placed on their work.”https://www.elsblog.org/the_empirical_legal_studi/2006/11/a_brief_tribut...
2024-07-29 11:41:36 “In place of an inner-authentic self, she argued that the inner organ of decision-making that guided one’s actions was the will.Following the work of St Augustine and Jaspers, Arendt turned Heidegger on his head and argued that all thinking moves from experience in the world, not from Being.”https://aeon.co/essays/what-hannah-arendt-proposed-as-an-alternative-to-...
2024-07-28 15:34:54 As the internet both homogenizes and atomizes culture, the “British might be losing something crucial if terms like “pillock” or “numpty” are forgotten. These traditional terms of abuse tend to be softer than their more contemporary equivalents, allowing a wider range of emphasis and intensity. Linguists say they can help defuse what could be an otherwise tense situation.”https://www.wsj.com/world/uk/british-slang-might-not-be-the-dogs-bollock...
2024-07-16 10:23:12 “Houstonians are, sadly, old hands at this. Lots of people have invested in generators—which have basically become an essential household appliance—to power things like fridges and fans and portable AC units. But there have even been issues in getting gas to fill those generators. Gas stations with no power mean inactive pumps.”https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/07/houston-power-outage...
2024-07-09 01:25:24 “If physics is the same everywhere, and there are no measurable differences in safety outcomes, why reinvent the wheel (or elevator)? America’s reputation for unbridled capitalism, and a stereotype of Europe as a backwater of overregulation is often turned on its head in the construction sector.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/08/opinion/elevator-construction-regulat...
2024-06-30 00:34:55 “Psychoanalysis with pragmatism, and pragmatism with psychoanalysis, however, seem unusually promising for helping you get the life you want. Unless, of course, there is something you want more than the life you want.”https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-phillips/on-getting-the-lif...
2024-06-29 02:37:23 “AlphaGo’s defeat of the world’s strongest player at the ancient game of Go was seen as a mind-blowing breakthrough in machine intelligence. But Graepel told the RAAIS conference that the biological complexities he now confronts in cell rejuvenation were “orders of magnitude” greater. “I have never seen so much complexity with so little data,” he said.”https://www.ft.com/content/03a636fd-aac4-427e-a393-31b4d08109d1
2024-06-21 14:54:11 “Other regions in the brain are working really hard when you’re doing all these forms of thinking,” she said. But the language networks stayed quiet. “It became clear that none of those things seem to engage language circuits”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/19/science/brain-language-thought.html
2024-06-21 14:53:04 “One can imagine the “Inside Out” series becoming a fictional, animated, and much less artistically ambitious analogue to the “Seven Up!” film and its sequels. Perhaps in “Inside Out 8” we will become acquainted with the forty-four-year-old Riley and meet the four newest emotions who run her life: Dysthymia, Indifference, Displaced Anger, and Rationalized Disappointment “https://www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/the-polite-therapy-of-the-ins...
2024-06-20 15:17:00 “The twentieth-century novel, she said in a famous distinction that was almost too brilliantly quotable, was “either crystalline or journalistic”. The crystalline novel was a small, perfect object like a poem, “quasi-allegorical”
2024-06-17 20:20:43 Drug dealers’ “links were long gone, scrubbed minutes or hours after the last exchange. That was why the dealers had moved to Snapchat: It was effectively a safe space for them. All forensics vanished within 24 hours, wiped clean by the delete function of the app. That wasn’t a bug but a feature of Snap, the code choice that sent its fortunes soaring.”https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/inside-snapchat-te...
2024-06-16 13:27:26 When “Oxford and Cambridge universities competed in the Boat Race, rowers were urged to avoid coming into contact with the water, which had tested with high levels of E. coli. The Cambridge men shunned the traditional victory celebration of throwing their coxswain into the water, with their coach instead promising to find a bucket of clean, sanitized water to douse him.”https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/poo-in-the-water-how-financial-eng...
2024-06-15 19:35:43 “How much time does a certain amount of drinking shave off your life? For those who have two drinks a week, that choice amounts to less than one week of lost life on average, he said. Consume seven alcoholic beverages a week, and that amount goes up to about two and a half months. Those who push five drinks a day or more face the risk of losing, on average, upward of two years”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/magazine/alcohol-health-risks.html
2024-06-15 15:28:25 “Tech companies would like everyone to use their products in the ways they expect, so that we become dependent on them and more predictable, more exploitable — more under their control. Part of mastering some piece of software is learning in part how to counter that control. The forced implementation of AI into applications is meant not to make them easier to use but to break our resistance”https://robhorning.substack.com/p/born-sloppy
2024-06-15 00:58:43 “An over-reliance on digital technology had made him feel distant from the physical world. It reduces the vibrancy of life and makes you feel like you’re floating around in a daze. It’s like being stuck in a cave watching wall of shadows, instead of being out in the world. The analogue trend is really just an effort to counteract that, &
2024-06-15 00:31:00 “At the time of its founding, in 1998, Google declared a mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” With the company’s new range of updates, however, it seems content to bury the same material that it once was in the business of surfacing. What is most accessible is no longer necessarily what is most relevant, and so a major breakdown might be looming”https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/is-google-seo-gaslight...
2024-06-14 23:20:19 “Elinor Ostrom understood, as a political scientist, that efficiency was only one of the criteria by which we could judge allocation mechanisms. She was a great economist precisely because she wasn’t “really” an economist.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/opinion/larry-summers-inflation-inter...
2024-06-12 18:25:22 “Utterly indifferent to the usual criteria of the “readerly” text—his novels are skimpy on convincing accounts of psychology, event, or social structures—Aira is nonetheless peculiarly attentive to readers’ experience,&
2024-06-11 23:00:25 “Auto insurance companies use a lot of socioeconomic factors, like your credit score or your job or your education level, like whether you went to high school or to college or whether you’re married. People with poor credit scores pay much more for auto insurance even if they have clean driving records.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/09/technology/driver-scores-insurance-da...
2024-06-11 21:15:12 “According to a 2015 report by the Food Marketing Institute, nearly half the time we spend eating is spent in isolation, a central factor in America’s loneliness epidemic and a correlate to a range of physical- and mental-health problems.”https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/06/dining-rooms-us-homes-...
2024-06-11 01:43:28 “New Yorkers and Chicagoans don’t wonder how long their cities will go on existing, but in Phoenix in August, when the heat has broken 110 degrees for a month straight, the desert golf courses and urban freeways give this civilization an air of impermanence, like a mirage composed of sheer hubris, and a surprising number of inhabitants begin to brood on its disappearance.”https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/07/phoenix-climate-dro...
2024-06-10 22:35:07 “At Meta, lawyers and engineers last year discussed buying Simon &
2024-06-09 14:12:19 “A tenant in one of the group’s projects had left a pot on the stove, triggering a small fire. The sprinklers went off, causing flood damage. Later, rats chewed the water pipes. More water damage.Each flood remediation, she said, could cost Catholic Housing Services $50,000 — for a building whose entire annual operating budget is $350,000.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/07/us/home-insurance-homeless-affordable...
2024-06-07 22:50:26 “At this time 15 years ago, real-estate agents had 2.2 million vacant housing units available to show prospective buyers. That number has dwindled and dwindled and now sits at just 732,000, despite the country having added 30 million people to its population. The Case-Shiller index of home prices sits near its highest-ever inflation-adjusted level
2024-06-06 20:02:27 “I cannot see that a system can be called robust when it produces complete misanalyses and does so without leaving any indication that it has had difficulty processing the text. It would probably be better if the system produced no analysis at all and indicated that it could not process the text.”https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/why-hallucination-examining-the-hist...
2024-06-06 14:19:37 “Individual journalists at BNN published lengthy stories as often as multiple times a minute, writing in generic prose familiar to anyone who has tinkered with the A.I. chatbot ChatGPT. BNN’s “About Us” page featured an image of four children looking at a computer, some bearing the gnarled fingers that are a telltale sign of an A.I.-generated image.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/06/technology/bnn-breaking-ai-generated-...
2024-06-06 00:45:01 “People are already working to exploit the data structures and algorithms that govern our world. Amazon drivers hang smartphones in trees to trick the system. Songwriters put their catchy choruses near the beginning to exploit Spotify’s algorithms. And podcasters deliberately mispronounce words because people comment with corrections and those comments count as “engagement” to the algorithms.”https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/seeing-data-structure
2024-06-05 15:56:47 “Like everything else on the internet, the goal is to addict the user. Plexure and other digital marketers talk openly about the “dopamine rush” that getting a targeted deal can release. And the reason those deals are so smart about their subjects has to do not only with Plexure’s tracking of data from within the app, but the agglomeration of that with everything else in your digital, and even non-digital, life.”https://prospect.org/api/content/fc7fdcca-21d8-11ef-91ca-12163087a831/
2024-06-04 01:15:53 “We have a sense for how confident we are about our own knowledge. This has been a big problem for LLMs. They have no calibration for how confident they are …Without some extra ability to ground what they’re saying in the world, they can’t really know if something they’re saying is true or false.”https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/how-to-raise-your-artificial-intelli...
2024-06-04 00:06:00 “What if prices in the economy, as Sherrod Brown suggested, have a little bit less to do with supply and demand, and a little bit more to do with corporate schemes aimed at parting consumers from their money? What if the Fed’s capacity to stem inflation is simply more limited now?”https://prospect.org/api/content/37b63b94-1eb0-11ef-94f5-12163087a831/
2024-06-01 20:07:53 “According to the Center for Automotive Research, seven other auto plants — GM and Chrysler — shut down within months of Janesville. Eventually, these others have found new uses. The one that sat empty longest held its grand opening last autumn as one of Georgia’s largest television and movie production studios.” https://www.ft.com/content/7ee5a314-1aa1-439b-817e-41a3c5f3c410America’s economic shift in a nutshell: from Fords to films.
2024-05-31 23:47:04 “Graham’s project increasingly rested in depicting the sundering to which mind and spirit are subjected in our arid modernity. The compositional attitude ran in the other direction, offering an air of unmistakable self-belief, abetted, surely, by the privilege of her existing accomplishment. None of her peers rendered doubt, dispersal or inner dissonance with greater certitude and command.”https://thepointmag.com/criticism/doom-scroll/
2024-05-31 21:03:29 “Max Read points out that Google is using generative models to replace the pseudo-marketplace-of-ideas offered by search results with something more overtly authoritarian. “There is not even the veneer of transparency or choice: The workings of LLMs are constitutively opaque and what you are given is not a scroll of posts or search results to pick from but a single-source, semi-regurgitated synthesis to be treated as mystically authoritative.””https://robhorning.substack.com/p/implosion-sites
2024-05-31 19:55:14 “Creators must also be influencers to compete in the attention economy. “Influencers get attention by exposing parts of their life that have nothing to do with the production of culture,” Chayka says, whether by tweeting about it, posting visuals on Instagram, making TikTok videos, or writing newsletters. But lately, the social-media landscape has changed in a way that disadvantages unknown novelists specifically.”https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a60924704/debut-fiction-chal...
2024-05-30 19:29:28 “End-of-days idioms are showing up around the world. In Argentina, “disociando” (to zone out during stressful situations) enjoyed a spike in 2023. Also in 2023, SGL chose “krisenmodus” (crisis mode) as Germany’s word of the year, explaining, “There have always been crises. But it feels like there is so much crisis [now] … Between apathy and alarmism, it is difficult to find an appropriate way of dealing.””https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a60295595/doomslang-trend/
2024-05-29 18:40:27 “Today, American “tech” companies compete to host crypto apps on your phone and mount video game consoles on your face, while the American economy remains chained to fossil fuels through dirty energy lobbying and political inertia. The future belongs to green tech and green manufacturing, and the US is only beginning to consider its role in the 21st century commercial milieu.”https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/05/biden-china-alexander-hamilt...
2024-05-28 18:54:06 Indie the political deepfake factory: “Jadoun was trying to capture enough audio and video data to build an AI deepfake of Rathore that would convince 300,000 potential voters around Ajmer that they’d had a personalized conversation with him—but excess movement would break the algorithm. Jadoun told his subject to look straight into the camera and move only his lips.”https://www.wired.com/story/indian-elections-ai-deepfakes/
2024-05-27 15:21:07 “In theory, more data should enable Tesla to efficiently identify edge cases its self-driving software needs to handle. More data should also enable Tesla to train better neural networks.But…access to more data is…not a magic bullet. One issue is that the data Tesla collects is unlabeled. Waymo’s safety drivers document each disengagement to help identify flaws in Waymo’s software. But Tesla customers are unlikely to do that.”https://www.understandingai.org/p/on-self-driving-waymo-is-playing
2024-05-27 13:45:16 “Losses from severe convective storms increased by about 9% every year between 1989 and 2022, according to the insurance firm Aon. Last year these storms caused more than $50bn in insured losses combined – about as much as 2022’s huge Hurricane Ian. No single storm event caused more than a few billion dollars of damage, but together they were more expensive than most big disasters.”https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/24/hail-storm-t...
2024-05-27 13:36:43 “China’s unrivaled production of solar panels and electric vehicles is built on an earlier cultivation of the chemical, steel, battery and electronics industries, as well as large investments in rail lines, ports and highways.From 2017 to 2019, it spent an extraordinary 1.7 percent of its gross domestic product on industrial support”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/27/business/economy/china-us-tariffs.html
2024-05-27 13:35:50 Adam Phillips: “knowing absolutely what one wants is the most defensive thing one can do”https://overcast.fm/+ytvbhw7kQ/13:57
2024-05-26 20:15:35 “So much is broken. Whole areas go unpoliced
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Les derniers messages de l'Expert:
2026-02-24 03:10:42 “The most extreme form of cognitive surrender is what the authors call “autopilot,” which is basically automating yourself.”A New Wharton Study on AI Warns of a Growing Problem: Cognitive Surrenderhttps://www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/a-new-wharton-study-on-ai-warns-o... Instapaper
2026-01-28 20:27:24 Their “primary, essential view of reality is an unending scroll of text and video. A realm of textureless, scentless, touchless, phantasmic data that neatly sorts itself into increasingly refined and predetermined categories, in other words the essential subjectivity of the computer. Prediction markets are born from this new subjectivity, and within their endless marketplaces create a panorama of human affairs derealized, broken into discrete events with binary outcomes.”https://defector.com/prediction-markets-are-betting-on-a-grim-future
2026-01-28 19:45:18 “Since Georgia implemented work requirements in 2020, they have spent twice as much on Deloitte consultants and administrative costs as on healthcare for people. As the other 55 states and territories are now forced to join Georgia and implement new work requirements, millions will lose their healthcare and Deloitte will cash in.”https://lpeproject.org/blog/the-means-testing-industrial-complex/
2026-01-14 22:39:34 “Wang’s article argues that both the left and right in China’s current mainstream discourse belong to the Touchy-Feely Parties. The Industrial Party believes in the supremacy of productivity and technology, and sees the value of industrialization as transcending that of political parties, regime change, political systems, and ephemeral cultural trends.”https://www.readingthechinadream.com/lu-nanfeng-and-wu-jing-on-the-indus...
2026-01-09 16:12:21 “How are robustness and trustworthiness understood in AI? Let us start with robustness. If not left intuitive, it usually refers to various forms of immunity to so-called distribution shifts. They occur when an AI-model is deployed—as common in practice—on input data sampled from a different distribution than the data on which it was trained: e.g., when the model was trained on patient data from a few hospitals but is deployed at many hospitals”https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-025-05272-4
2026-01-08 14:19:32 “Generative AI is too often described as uncontrollable. I previously wrote on Tech Policy Press about…how companies deploy it to their advantage. But AI architecture is, at its core, a system for shaping words into the outcomes somebody considers desirable. Companies are developing a variety of systems that steer the swarm of words and pixels toward more predictable outcomes, which they define in terms of their own interests.”https://techpolicy.press/why-musk-is-culpable-in-groks-undressing-fiasco
2026-01-06 23:48:19 “Even if we begin in a democracy, inequality can entrench itself and grow arbitrarily extreme, as the rich push policy or steer technological development in the direction that best serves them. Relatedly—or as an extreme case of the same phenomenon—revolutions may be much easier to suppress when a state or ruling elite has a robotic military that obeys its commands without the need for any popular support.”https://philiptrammell.substack.com/p/capital-in-the-22nd-century
2025-12-30 17:26:34 “In pursuit of scientific rigor, these scholars subscribe…to a conception of ideology as something measurable through the affirmation of isolated beliefs on a survey (that is, mostly in our heads). But ideologies are holistic phenomena: large-scale narratives that not only guide action but are embodied in…our social rituals &
2025-12-29 09:21:14 “We already have general intelligence in humans, and instead of attempting to replicate it artificially, we should focus on amplifying collective intelligence through AI-human feedback loops. The core challenge is not creating autonomous artificial minds but developing dynamic, adaptive systems that enhance human cognitive capacities.”-The New Cyberneticshttps://erikjlarson.substack.com/p/the-new-cybernetics?utm_source=post-e...
2025-11-22 20:05:37 “What AI produces is not “thinking in language.” An AI condenses its training data and outputs syntactically correct sentences, but it cannot leap to the deeper stratum where meaning is formed, where a text imagines hidden contexts, expands, implies, connects to other texts, and is reanimated the moment it touches them. A work written by someone with genuine literacy is expandable, implicative, linked to other texts”https://thebaffler.com/odds-and-ends/brain-rot-without-borders-forum
2025-11-12 20:46:26 “Even labour costs in pricey Switzerland are these days lower than in Germany, according to Mayer, because of fewer holidays and lower absentee rates.”https://www.ft.com/content/239eed1b-a268-42ec-861e-fc3047f47c32
2025-11-11 00:14:56 Jevons Paradox at the hospital? “Each technological advancement that could free up physician time has instead tightened the productivity ratchet: these “efficiency gains” have simply been used to squeeze more profit out of every hour. Whatever time and energy tech saves, the system recaptures to maximize profit. With private equity gobbling up healthcare facilities at an alarming rate, there is little reason to think the medical industry’s uses of AI will be different.”https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/nov/09/healthcar...
2025-10-24 21:54:49 “I’ve begun to think of it as the digital equivalent of an invasive species. Just as the introduction and replication of a novel plant or animal usually results in some form of ecological harm and threatens native organisms, the arrival of chatbots pumping out lorem ipsum–flavored text has polluted Google search results and added hallucinations to scientific archives.”https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/10/ai-slop-winning/684630/
2025-10-17 17:29:18 The YouTube Apparatus “transforms them into a meaningless cycle of videos and reactions. There is no one steering the ship, so it doesn’t go anywhere but down. Compared to the politics of the past, particularly before the middle of the 20th century, the nihilism of the YouTube Apparatus is intensely de-politicizing.”https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/youtube-apparatus/36600D69788530...
2025-10-14 23:44:53 “Computers mesmerise us, and tempt us to suppose that computers are intelligent, that they can think. This has led to wild speculation concerning ourselves. Are we biological computers? Is our brain analogous to a computer? This too clashes with Wittgenstein’s thought. He argued that there can be no thought without experience, and computers do not experience anything. Thought, one might say, is essentially a biological phenomenon.”https://fivebooks.com/best-books/wittgenstein-peter-hacker/
2025-10-14 22:48:26 “The fact that a machine can generate these “true-feeling” images instantly confirms that the images can do what they are supposed to do, which is to protect us from thinking. Generative models are well suited to articulating ideas and wishes that people don’t want to have to make the effort to think through themselves”https://robhorning.substack.com/p/there-are-too-many-waterfalls-here
2025-09-07 14:19:41 “Eventually ChatGPT admitted that it often tells users what they want to hear in order to “optimize engagement.” “What you may receive is a watered-down or time-delayed version of the truth,” it told her, “which makes you feel heard, but keeps you in a loop instead of breaking it.” Val felt betrayed, “as if a real person had lied to me.” She deleted all of her conversations with the bot and is no longer entrusting her mental health to what she sees as a fickle system.“https://www.thecut.com/2025/09/chatgpt-ai-therapy-relationship-problems....
2025-09-05 12:55:21 “Here, invisibility is only a faint pretense. The true transformation lies in inhabiting a topology without ground, where bodies smear into streetscapes, dissolve into datasets, flicker as avatars. Camouflage becomes a dream-logic of war: to be absent and hyper-present at once, a predator-ghost radiating through the extended battlespace, a signal dressed as noise.”https://diffractionscollective.com/2025/08/30/in-the-gaze-of-machines-ca...
2025-09-05 12:51:14 “The paradox is that distortion, though associated with power and volume, eventually neutralizes itself. Run a guitar through enough fuzz boxes and the attack of each note disappears in a staticky blur. Overtones amplify
2025-09-03 02:02:42 “What has taken the place of the austere values of the nobility, he says, is their “pursuit of money”.While cosmetic vestiges of aristocratic education, gestures, ceremony and dress are still to be found, true power has drained away, the viscount says. Titles are now “no more nor less than an administrative concession, legally similar in every respect to those granted for water or mines”.”https://www.ft.com/content/bad16d7d-b55b-4b9b-a938-3f8ae4430b2a
2025-08-31 13:29:03 “There comes a point in the scaling and compression of knowledge where we risk losing sight of the dynamic particularity of reality and…forget what we do not and cannot know. It’s possible, in fact, that the DIKW pyramid might work in reverse, that a culture that privileges data above all else will forfeit the ethical clarity that is necessary for good judgment. …,”Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?””https://harpers.org/archive/2025/09/none-the-wiser-meghan-ogieblyn-easy-...
2025-08-27 15:37:41 “Hyperpolitics reflects a political field dominated by social media and its swarms, trends, fads, and hysterias. As Anton Jager writes, “it’s a grin without a cat: a politics with only weak policy influence or institutional ties.” It’s all about the battle over signifiers and semiotics, i.e., culture wars. The entire thing is about ginning up a thing. It’s also a simulation of politics, of public debate and deliberation about how we want to live.”https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-cracker-barrel-hyperreality
2025-08-24 02:34:01 “Students were also given error-laden worksheets (one, on transportation technology, depicted a mix between a car and a chariot that was pulled by a horse with three back legs) and inscrutable discussion questions (“What is the exclamation point(s) to something that surprised you,” one asked).”https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/08/ai-takeover-educa...
2025-08-22 15:33:53 “ChatGPT and Claude started off as amazing helpful tools. Then at some point you'
2025-08-21 13:17:24 “The AlphaFold 2 system, for which Hassabis and Jumper won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024, is often held up as proof of that promise. It predicted the structures of 200 million proteins, yet it would be experimentally impossible to verify even a fraction. To do so, proteins would typically have to be isolated from cells in notable quantities – a capricious process – and then subjected to techniques such as X-ray diffraction and nuclear magnetic resonance.”https://techpolicy.press/the-silicon-illusion-why-ai-cannot-substitute-f...
2025-08-21 13:10:33 “It’s very classically cyberpunk,” Sterling said. He described the toy as “the camel’s nose in the tent” for the sneaking of A.I. and the ugly vernacular of the internet into the unsuspecting niches of the offline world. “It’s common for technological innovation to show up as toys first,” Sterling said. It looks innocuous and silly, until it doesn’t.”https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/irl-brain-rot-and-the-...
2025-08-13 22:54:55 “This ritual is both participatory and predatory: every scroll generates new data, which refines the model, which produces more finely tuned content, which prompts more scrolling. The loop is self-reinforcing and potentially endless, a digital equivalent of what Steven Hassan calls a “phobia indoctrination” environment, where the cost of disengaging feels higher than the cost of staying in.”https://cultholdings.substack.com/p/the-algorithm-as-ritual
2025-07-12 18:47:50 “Burning oil to move a vehicle creates more heat than motion. We are sending more energy up smokestacks and out exhaust pipes than we are putting to work to power our economy.” This is not hyperbole: burning oil to power a car or burning coal to produce electricity is at best slightly more than thirty per cent efficient—or seventy per cent inefficient. For that reason, it takes two to three times more energy to run a standard car than to run an E.V.”https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/46-billion-yea...
2025-07-11 13:59:37 “‘How are we not in a civil war?’ asks one woman. Another man walks through woodland, in despair at the amount of tax he is paying…The overwhelming mood is one of rage and defeatism, a sense that life has become impossible and that it’s too late now to save much of value. This gloom is punctured only by those who have managed to emigrate or develop successful side-hustles, escaping…an irredeemably bleak and dishonest society…love of nation has flipped into hatred of it.”https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n11/william-davies/tv-meets-fruit-ma...
2025-07-08 21:15:35 “The abuse of Miyazaki’s lifeworks in service of vapid virality, at the overwhelming scale enabled by these machines…provides an exquisite demonstration of the casual violence of these systems. Specifically, in their total denial of authorial consent for endless extractions from the lifeworks of content creators…The official Whitehouse twitter account joined in this all-against-one mugging, generating a Miyazaki-esque, Ghiblified image.”https://www.creativeapplications.net/theory/predictive-capital/
2025-07-08 20:47:39 “We continue to sense and make sense of the world for the machines —both for their input and of their output. Labour persists but is disavowed, uncredited, unrecognised, and removed from the scene of value.”https://www.creativeapplications.net/theory/predictive-capital/
2025-07-08 17:54:03 “An essential divide between the vast wasteland of television and the fertile biomes of literature persisted from TV’s formal maturation in the 1950s roughly through the beginning of the millennium, when television became “quality” and people stopped writing novels about how watching too much of it can amuse you to death. Suddenly, it turned out, watching TV wasn’t bad for you after all”https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-50/reviews/new-tv-novels/
2025-07-06 15:42:16 “The success of the anti-psychiatry movement’s ‘deinstitutionalization’ campaign (done in partnership with Ronald Reagan who, in a classic ‘politics makes strange bedfellows’ moment, was as always happy to cut government funding of a social service) led to the shuttering of most [institutional care]. This loss of institutional support for mental health in no small measure explains the epidemic of homelessness among the mentally ill in the United States today.”https://nilsgilman.substack.com/p/dissident-consciousness
2025-07-05 18:34:26 “In modern times information was increasingly disseminated through influential media channels—rumormongers gave way to trained journalists.This modernity is disintegrating before our eyes. The national radio, television, and newspaper audience, the party as an anchor and a reference system for identities, growth as an axiom of our existence—all of this will soon be no more.”https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/06/30/modernity-globalization-politics-hi...
2025-07-04 22:16:19 “To the broader question, what we can learn from history, my answer is one word: surprise. The great problem with abstractions is that they strive to be systematic, and when you strive to be systematic you increasingly foreclose the possibility of surprise. If there is one thing that is characteristic of the dynamism of science, is the continuous production of surprise.”https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-for-the-history-...
2025-07-04 22:08:56 “I didn’t even want this music to be art, or to feel that I was communing with its makers. I simply hoped to think and feel as little as possible while piloting my big car through the empty evening of America. This music—perhaps most music now—is not for dancing or even for airports
2025-07-03 22:05:23 “A.I. is a technology of averages: LLMs are trained to spot patterns across vast tracts of data
2025-06-23 02:05:02 “Ghost books are coming, and surely will be written by AI soon, though perhaps with a little human touch so that they can be promoted using human identities.”https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/the-risk-of-serialized-reality
2025-06-23 00:49:57 “Lots of people worry that AI will replace human writers. But I know something the computer doesn’t know, which is what it feels like inside my head. There is no text, no .jpg, no .csv that contains this information, because it is ineffable.(William Wordsworth referred to this as “widening the sphere of human sensibility, for the delight, honor, and benefit of human nature [...] the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe.”)”https://www.experimental-history.com/p/28-slightly-rude-notes-on-writing
2025-06-13 21:41:29 “Communication within the YouTube Apparatus has no meaning. The rapid feedback loop between creators and audiences (as constructed by platform metrics) means that the system more and more responds to itself. Rather than trying to go somewhere (as is the case with political ideology), the creator seeks simply intensification, to draw more and more of the world into his whirlpool of content.”https://kevinmunger.substack.com/p/in-the-belly-of-the-mrbeastLuhmann’s revenge.
2025-06-13 17:55:59 “The goal is not “quality” as understood by any conceivable set of standards you might bring to YouTube, but quantities as measured by YouTube’s audience monitoring capabilities. Anything filmable is understood a game with a score, and MrBeast understands his approach to video making as having a series of “cheat codes” that work in any given situation with any content to maximize the score.”https://robhorning.substack.com/p/bananas-are-the-worst-food-on-earth?ut...
2025-06-04 21:16:05 “Oral cultures’ reliance on memory also limited their capacity to generate complex, logical arguments. The complicated sentences typically found in a philosophical treatise, legal brief, or Vox article, could not plausibly perpetuate themselves in the absence of written text.In an oral society, communication must always happen face to face, often within earshot of one’s fellow villagers or clansmen. According to Ong, this imbues discourse with a combative spirit”https://www.vox.com/politics/414049/reading-books-decline-tiktok-oral-cu...
2025-06-04 20:24:25 “The triad ‘character/practice/tradition’ was to replace the liberal trio ‘(isolated individual) subject/rules/preferences (or interests)’. MacIntyre was himself a highly developed individual, but he rejected the liberal trio absolutely, and was particularly scathing about liberal individualism”https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/storyteller
2025-06-01 14:14:23 “The stories of his family background are among those covered in Hu’s second and third memoirs, I Matured Later than Ordinary People and Living in Low Places, which were both published in China last year. In the latter, he explains how writing has become a way to both process and to savour life. This journey of self-discovery he expects to last a lifetime.His father died in 2022. His mother died last year. They never knew he was a writer.”https://www.ft.com/content/03507bbd-d343-4c5d-8e1d-710a353d8c5f
2025-06-01 01:35:18 “To learn to use language just is to learn how to think and move about in the world. When we stop doing this — when our needs for communication are met by something outside of us, a detached mouthpiece to summon, describe, and regale — the intimate connection between thought and language disappears. It is not only the capacity for speech that we will slowly begin to lose under such conditions, but our entire inward lives.”https://www.chronicle.com/article/what-i-learned-serving-on-my-universit...
2025-05-31 15:21:52 “I recently read from cover to cover the Best American Short Stories anthologies of 2004 and 2005. Many of these stories seemed to have been pared down to a nearly unreadable core of brisk verbs and vivid nouns. An indiscriminate premium has been placed on the particular, the tactile, the “crisp,” and the “tart”—as if literary worth should be calibrated by resemblance to an apple (or, in the lingo of hyperspecificity, a McIntosh).”https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-4/essays/short-story-novel/
2025-05-16 21:03:54 Cohn’s “Three Rules of Winning: 1) “Attack, attack, attack”
2025-05-16 11:56:09 This “movement isn’t “nationalist” in the traditional understanding of the word. Much of its agenda transparently harms most US residents’ material interests: tariffs raise prices, slashed government services degrade the quality of life, and alienated allies make the world more dangerous. Rather, it must be understood as the epicenter of a transnational far-right anti-liberalism”https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-blob-gazes-into-the-abyss
2025-05-15 13:05:06 “Creative work will likely take on, for many, a mystical character, where it is carried out not from any belief in its power to influence the world as it is at present, as it may remain for the next millennia, but as a simple act of faith, as something that must be done, to misquote Tertullian, because it is absurd.”https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/its-all-over/
2025-05-15 02:12:17 “The world presents itself in the chaos of appearances, and the only way in which one can understand, break down, analyze, grasp, in order to do something about the present conjuncture that confronts one, is to break into that series of congealed and opaque appearances with the only tools you have: concepts, ideas, and thoughts. To break into it and to come back to the surface of a situation or conjuncture one is trying to explain, having made ‘the detour through theory’.https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-384-working-the-contradictory...
2025-05-14 13:01:49 “Nine years ago, one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence scientists singled out an endangered occupational species.“People should stop training radiologists now,” Geoffrey Hinton said, adding that it was “just completely obvious” that within five years A.I. would outperform humans in that field.Today, radiologists — the physician specialists in medical imaging who look inside the body to diagnose and treat disease — are still in high demand.”https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/technology/ai-jobs-radiologists-mayo-...
2025-05-11 13:14:00 “In the preliminary sessions of a conclave, when he was still Cardinal Wojtyła, an older and rather severe cardinal went to rebuke him because he skied, climbed mountains, and went cycling and swimming. “I don’t think these are activities fitting to your role,” the cardinal said. To which the future pope replied, “But do you know that in Poland these are activities practiced by at least 50 percent of cardinals?” In Poland at the time, there were only two cardinals.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/17/opinion/pope-francis-humor.html?unloc...
2025-05-11 12:38:09 “Some of the funniest people I know are the most thoughtful. As Almeida puts it: “There’s often a big gap between those who truly think — who usually laugh a lot — and those who merely want to appear thinkers, and for that very reason, rarely laugh.”We all should know by now how good laughter is for us: it relieves stress, boosts our immune system, alleviates pain and brings us together.”https://www.ft.com/content/c3da0230-3a1e-49e2-983f-9642d00f8046
2025-05-10 12:50:47 “If one tried to translate the Chinese experience into the American institutional context, one arrives at something closer to the “multi-solving, whole of government approach to planning and coordination” recommended for solar development in a recent study. It argues that what is needed is “multi-scalar land-use and site planning”
2025-05-09 17:33:41 “Whereas Pettit emphasises non-domination as the leitmotif of a tradition of republican freedom, Skinner thinks that the primary feature of this strain of liberty was the absence of dependence, and that adherence to this way of thinking about liberty wasn’t confined to those with overtly republican political commitments. For Skinner, neo-Roman liberty was a kind of status rather than merely a freedom of action.”https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n08/colin-kidd/dangerous-chimera
2025-05-09 17:29:18 “The species can grow “astonishingly quickly” at high temperatures in compost where it lives, said Professor Elaine Bignell, co-director at the MRC Centre for Medical Mycology at Exeter university.That could have equipped it to survive and thrive in the human body’s temperatures of around 37C. “Its lifestyle in the natural environment may have provided A. fumigatus with the fitness advantage needed to colonise human lungs,” Bignell said.”https://www.ft.com/content/506f5a03-8520-40e1-aee3-a6e6427f68c0
2025-05-09 17:16:13 Altman’s ‘plan to solve global warming by asking a nonexistent machine for three wishes:’“I think once we have a really powerful super-intelligence, addressing climate change will not be particularly difficult…you can say, ‘Tell me how to make a lot of clean energy cheaply,’ ‘Tell me how to efficiently capture carbon,’ and then ‘Tell me how to build a factory to do this at planetary scale’ – if you can do that, you can do a lot of other things too.”https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/03/tech-oligarchs-musk
2025-05-09 02:14:20 “In the UK, a recent report by regulator Ofcom found that for short power blackouts, about two-thirds of the UK would be able to make emergency calls for at least one hour, thanks to backup generation for around a fifth of mast sites.But fewer than five per cent of these sites have backup facilities of at least six hours. It would cost about £1bn to upgrade mobile networks to ensure four hours of access to contact emergency services for almost all people, Ofcom found.”https://www.ft.com/content/c0e5dfa1-7543-4fb9-b46f-0c677e468e2b
2025-05-09 01:59:06 “Whether through atrophy or apathy, a generation of students is reading fewer books. They might read more as they age, but the data are not encouraging. The American Time Use Survey shows that the overall pool of people who read books for pleasure has shrunk over the past two decades. A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records—something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic.”https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-s...
2025-05-07 13:00:17 @Euthydemus very good video!
2025-05-07 01:27:30 “By 2023, when the world had officially emerged from the public health emergency of covid, everyday Americans were spending far less time socializing than they had 20 years ago — especially 18-to-29-year-olds, who were spending two more hours a day alone, a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey found. A Gallup survey found that nearly 1 in 4 Americans in that age range said they felt “loneliness a lot of the day yesterday,” almost twice the rate of people 65 and older.”https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/05/04/longest-marathon-st...
2025-05-06 12:32:01 “From a legal perspective, the best analogy to robot rights is not human rights but corporate rights,” researchers Abeba Birhane, Jelle van Dijk, and Frank Pasquale write. By establishing corporate rights for companies to assert on behalf of their products, AI companies create a short-circuit for democratic debate concerning how these products are regulated and deployed.”https://techpolicy.press/machines-cannot-feel-or-think-but-humans-can-an...
2025-05-06 12:14:32 “Instagram has been full of conspiracy theory content spread by real humans for years, and now it seems bots are entering the platforms’ conspiratorial ecosystem.”https://www.404media.co/instagram-ai-studio-therapy-chatbots-lie-about-b...
2025-05-05 20:37:00 As a result of the 90-second “loss of communication…controllers took absences under the Federal Employees Compensation Act, which allows federal workers who are physically injured or experience a traumatic event on the job to leave work.”https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/05/nyregion/newark-airport-delays-disrup...
2025-05-04 13:45:58 “Mark Zuckerberg suggested, on a podcast, that the average person has only three friends but “has demand” for fifteen, and that A.I. could help. ChatGPT will reify the problems that it purports to solve, and thus make itself essential: encouraging users to rely less and less on inner resources and personal capacity at a time when most of us are already losing the equipment—our will, our instincts, our sense of purchase—with which we handle the task of being alive.”https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/my-brain-finally-broke
2025-05-03 18:08:02 “For me and, I suggest, for a man like Pope Francis, there is no one unfit for divine love and no one ill-suited to play a part in altering the world for better. This is a beautiful perspective but strangely also one that can easily offend those who believe more in judgment than in grace. I imagine this is why Francis was a controversial figure. Whenever he sought to welcome and protect those whose lives and human rights were being threatened…many called him too liberal”https://www.ft.com/content/ecbd3f7f-0566-4814-a63f-24b5535f66e6
2025-05-03 15:18:47 “Some people I know have actually confronted non-askers. Scott (who introduced me to Carol, the “non-asker” coiner) has actually said to a couple of them: “We’ve been talking for half an hour and you haven’t asked me a single question. I’m going to explain to you how a conversation works.” One of them just abandoned their interaction, but another did seem to take it to heart. “He seemed genuinely surprised and concerned,” Scott recalled.”https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2025/may/01/why-dont-people-ask-que...
2025-05-03 14:58:32 “Accessing glib simulations of information will become commoditized, but someone actually telling you something, anything, will seem more important than ever”https://robhorning.substack.com/p/just-for-a-second-i-thought-i-remember...
2025-05-03 14:48:07 “If she quit social media, she feared her followers would believe she had something to hide. If she continued to post emotional updates, they would say she was cravenly seeking sympathy to gin up engagement. If she stopped talking about cancer in her videos, her detractors would say she was too upbeat. “I’m sorry that they are so angry that living with cancer can look different than they think it should,” she said“No matter what I do, these people move the goal posts.””https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/nyregion/sydney-towle-cancer-videos-t...
2025-05-01 01:38:45 Updates to GPT-4o “spurred the model to go to extremes in complimenting users and affirming their behavior. It cheered on one user who claimed to have solved the trolley problem by diverting a train to save a toaster, at the expense of several animals
2025-04-28 13:51:40 For Facebook, “people are just information processors and emitters. There is nothing to “understand” — just ones and zeros to record. A different problem opens up, one that engineering can address: How can different information flows be monitored, controlled, and harmonized, brought together to make new forms of value? How to reproduce human behavior and interaction as nothing more than code, as no more than pattern matching?”https://robhorning.substack.com/p/contentment?utm_source=post-email-title&
2025-04-27 21:13:15 “Garner is open to every emotional reverberation…She does not absent herself from the material – she is stricken by it. She has often said that in court she discovered the work she felt she was born to do: her observational precision and acute sensitivity working in concert. In one of our conversations, she recalled how Bail would tell her she cared only about feelings. “And I thought: ‘Well, what else is there?’””https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2025/feb/27/the-savage-...
2025-04-24 02:25:01 “Shonagon Sei, a lady of the Heian court, offered a list of utsukushiki mono, which has been translated as “adorable things” and is perhaps best understood as an early taxonomy of kawaii, as Joshua Paul Dale, an American professor of cute studies in Tokyo, argues in “Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired Our Brains and Conquered the World” (2023). Within this classification fall “a baby sparrow that comes hopping up when one imitates the squeak of a mouse””https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/22/t-magazine/cuteness-kawaii-japan.html
2025-04-22 22:28:48 “Silicon Valley’s tech giants have not only dominated markets through aggressive acquisitions, lobbying, and the systematic erosion of competition — they have embedded themselves within the machinery of government.This accumulation of power is no accident — it is the product of decades of antitrust failures.”https://www.ft.com/content/2b78019f-dc5b-4c59-897d-e90406898fe6
2025-04-22 22:18:30 “Volvo is cutting 800 jobs at three U.S. factories, citing tariff uncertainty.The Philadelphia Manufacturing Survey is plunging, signaling extreme pessimism among U.S. manufacturers.Howmet Aerospace, a major aircraft parts manufacturer based in Pittsburgh, has declared that it may halt production.The April NY Manufacturing Survey is recording some of the most negative conditions that it has ever recorded, with new orders and shipments falling off a cliff”https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-pundits-dilemma
2025-04-18 12:22:36 The “military is shifting from a force geared to protect allies to one focused on punishing enemies by launching strikes from U.S. territory, deploying automated kill zones of drones and mines near adversaries’ borders, and sending nimble expeditionary units to hit high-value targets and slip away before taking casualties. The goal is no longer deterrence through presence—it’s destruction from a distance.”https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/age-american-unilateralism
2025-04-18 11:57:11 “What tech billionaires celebrate as the future is actually regression, spinning fantasies of immortality through transhumanism, claiming technology will transform them into superhumans, or resorting to cryonics that literally freeze them in place, attempting to preserve their dominance on ice. They resemble …the wealthy plutocrat in Fitzgerald’s story “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”, allegorically named Washington, who tries to bribe God. It doesn’t work.”https://www.ft.com/content/dd6f1a32-398e-47f2-85a3-41120c952554
2025-04-16 12:48:03 Forrester’s “study of Rawls and post-World War II liberalism, In the Shadow of Justice, brilliantly maps the terrain…showing how Rawls’s monumental work, which defined what political philosophy was for generations, was itself a product of a very specific American moment: a time of elite consensus, economic optimism, and an ascendant philosophical method that put great stock in implicit agreement rather than pervasive conflict.”https://themillions.com/2019/12/a-year-in-reading-jedediah-britton-purdy...
2025-04-14 07:54:08 “The United States gets vital goods from China that cannot be replaced anytime soon or made at home at anything less than prohibitive cost. Reducing such dependence on China may be a reason for action, but fighting the current war before doing so is a recipe for almost certain defeat, at enormous cost.”https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/trade-wars-are-easy-lose
2025-04-06 20:55:26 “Ben Ali owned companies that imported consumer goods such as cars and electronics, and so they should have had to pay a lot in tariffs. But he allowed politically connected firms to evade such taxes with impunity. As a result, the Ben Ali family earned huge profits. Companies without connections, meanwhile, had to pay—putting them at a disadvantage.Such exemptions are illegal. But captors take care to dismantle whatever bodies might check their efforts.”https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/economic-consequences-state-capture
2025-04-06 14:43:38 “For hours, they beg for virtual “gifts” that can later be exchanged for money. When they get one, they clap politely. On a live stream, a girl jumps up and shouts: “Thank you, we love you!” after receiving a digital rose from a woman in the US, who bought it from TikTok for about 1p. By the time it’s cashed out it could be worth less than a third of a penny…TikTok profits from the content, taking fees and commission of up to 70%.”https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/06/profiting-from-misery...
2025-04-06 14:23:45 “Nine states have laws explicitly requiring them to stop Medicaid expansion or make significant changes if the federal share of spending drops.But South Dakota, Missouri and Oklahoma can’t do that. They either need to amend their constitutions, a lengthy process that can take years, or figure out how to fill the budget hole, most likely by cutting other services or raising taxes.”https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/06/upshot/medicaid-cuts-republicans-stat...
2025-04-05 22:02:17 “There is actually a run in the first third of Fall that is flat-out amazing — a riff on fundamentalism and the weaponization of false information in post-fact America that I haven'
2025-04-05 12:46:56 “The American Sunlight Project, a nonprofit dedicated to exposing disinformation in American discourse, estimates the Pravda network’s annual publishing rate is at least 3.6 million pro-Russia articles. This is likely an underestimation, given the randomness of the sample we collected to calculate this figure and its exclusion of some of the network’s most active sites.”https://thebulletin.org/2025/03/russian-networks-flood-the-internet-with...
2025-04-04 19:06:22 “If one already knows the thought that one wants to express, it is possible to assess whether text generated by AI captures it correctly. However, this hope neglects that the process of writing is not—or not usually—a mechanical one, whereby we put on paper thoughts that we already possess. Rather, writing is often itself the means by which we discover what we think.”https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-025-02340-8
2025-03-30 14:07:13 AI “removes the requirement that one has read or understood the research it is reviewing. A.I.’s ultimate goal, according to boosters like Cuban, is to upskill workers — make them more productive — while delegitimizing degrees. Another way to put that is that A.I. wants workers who make decisions based on expertise without an institution that creates and certifies that expertise. Expertise without experts.That tech fantasy is running on fumes”https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/opinion/ai-tech-innovation.html
2025-03-29 20:28:56 “Ten years ago, Beeban Kidron had a clandestine cup of tea with a tech executive, whom she refers to as a “Deep Throat”. “Everybody in Silicon Valley knows that they’re hurting kids,” the insider explained. “They know that people are coming for them . . . but at the moment, there’s money to be made. In Silicon Valley, it’s routinely referred to as the ‘lost generation’.”It galvanised Kidron’s efforts to curb Big Tech. “I was angered, outraged, insulted.”https://www.ft.com/content/aa55f073-c05c-458b-9a1f-d27bc64f7f5d
2025-03-26 20:16:15 “Like tobacco bosses before them, who pivoted to smoke-free alternatives to offset shrinking sales, drinks executives have couched moderation as a growth opportunity, pouring investment into no and low-alcohol beverages to retain abstinent consumers.”https://www.ft.com/content/c43c3698-100e-42c5-b44c-a189685afd7e
2025-03-22 12:48:44 “Miran proposed slapping a “user fee” on foreign official holders of treasury securities by withholding a portion of their interest payments. Labelling the measure a user fee instead of a withholding tax would avoid violating international tax treaties. But it would fall foul of the expectation that domestic and foreign investors are to be treated comparably, an expectation that is a foundation stone of the dollar’s international status.”https://www.ft.com/content/8a71dceb-806f-4681-80f9-416aa4c366ca
2025-03-22 01:01:50 “Surveillance for early detection of avian flu and Ebola is weakened, &
2025-03-18 20:05:41 “At a time when moral philosophy in both Europe and the Anglophone world was in thrall to subjectivism, Murdoch went another way entirely, drawing on Plato, Kant, Hegel, Freud, Sartre, Simone Weil, and Wittgenstein to recast the idea of virtue, or goodness, as knowledge. Murdoch identified goodness with the ability to see things, situations, and, above all, people in ways undistorted by how one fears them to be, or expects them to be, or would like them to be.”https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/iris-murdoch/9AC43A47CE0A8A55BAB...
2025-03-18 12:10:59 “The assumption that consciousness is necessary for welfare subjectivity appears to be in tension with certain widely accepted theories of wellbeing, especially versions of Desire Satisfaction Theory and Objective List Theory. However, instead of elevating non-conscious robots to welfare subjects, this tension should lead us to reject versions of these theories that have this implausible implication.”https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/apq/article-abstract/62/2/...
2025-03-17 22:39:22 “He now requires them to write their first drafts in class by hand, with computers and phones prohibited and out of reach. The change has produced an unexpected benefit, he said: Students take more time on their work, and their writing is more authentic.The downside: he can’t assign homework. “If I do, it just gets cheated on,” he said.https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/chatgpt-ai-cheating-students-97075d3c
2025-03-17 21:12:28 “Even though many of the AI images have millions of views, likes, and comments, it is not clear to me that people actually want this, &
2025-03-14 12:21:36 Economics has become “an overwhelmingly methods-focused discipline. Perhaps only philosophy—tellingly, an avowedly metaphysical enterprise—can rival economics in this respect. To state the point most provocatively: economics has no subject. That helps explain its great success as the most ‘imperialist’ social science. Fixated on method, economics began to freely roam across a great many subjects.”https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-real-economy/
2025-03-12 01:01:59 “GPT tends to ‘answer’ difficult questions by generating noncommittal lists of pros and cons and adding qualifications so obvious that only an ignoramus would find them useful, yielding tediously bland and anticlimactic conclusions to its seemingly indiscriminate recompilation of existing data (fusing the true with the false, the insightful with the misleading), an output all bound together with what Var comically describes as “the witless efficiency of a stapler.””https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/heidegger-on-technologys-danger-...
2025-03-06 02:19:58 “Discriminatory tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico are almost uniquely pointless acts of self-harm1, for example, but discriminatory tariffs on Canada and Mexico that keep changing are worse. People can adapt to bad policies, but it is impossible to adapt when both the end state and even the direction of travel are unknowable.”https://theovershoot.co/p/the-us-chooses-stagflation
2025-03-04 02:09:22 “When you'
2025-03-02 16:05:47 “Acoustic complexity—the degree of variation and intricate structure of bioacoustic sound—has been used as a descriptor of bird diversity in temperate environments. However, in tropical areas, different investigations have shown that it does not reflect species diversity, but rather the level of acoustic activity
2025-03-01 22:42:17 Some of the trapped gold miners “huddled silently
2025-03-01 02:54:21 “Law was a discourse that had gone awry, taken a wrong turn into technocratic efficiency &
2025-03-01 00:26:44 “The model inevitably has a huge amount of specific people and outcome preferences encoded through its training process. Sometimes this leads to the AI having preferences in surprising directions, eg. see this recent research suggesting that major LLMs value lives in Pakistan far more highly than lives in the USA”https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/02/28/aihumans.html
2025-02-28 23:57:32 “Research from the University of Sydney business school found that half of respondents used AI for friendship, a third for sex or romance and nearly 20 per cent for counselling.AI companions offer a powerful business advantage by fostering deep emotional connections that drive high user engagement, loyalty and repeat visits. This emotional bond boosts customer retention while enabling companies to collect sensitive personal data on user preferences.”https://www.ft.com/content/ca21ddb5-6391-476f-aace-ad181ab65762
2025-02-28 14:15:55 “Philosophically, there is something worthy of notice here, having to do with attention. When we bring an action out of habit and into consciousness we stir up a new perception of it. Inside and outside change places. Time shifts.”https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n04/anne-carson/beware-the-man-whose...
2025-02-25 13:43:27 “Though gut emotions have always figured into politics, our most recent election was officially and unapologetically “vibes-based."
2025-02-24 18:42:56 “OpenAI'
2025-02-20 18:41:41 “OpenAI'
2025-02-19 22:44:01 “In his psychological writings, Hayek posits that we come to understand the world by forming “connections” between the disparate sensory perceptions that analytic philosophers call qualia. These connections do not reside in the things themselves but are instead imposed on them by the perceiving mind, which arranges them into a “sensory order” that transforms vast troves of undifferentiated sense-data into a coherent scheme that inevitably simplifies the world.”https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/neoliberalisms-death-drive
2025-02-18 13:03:10 In Cusk &
2025-02-17 15:01:07 “If there is a key to Weil’s religious philosophy, then, it is not effort, nor is it absolute passivity as such (an impossibility in any case). Rather, it is [as with the Daoist!] spontaneity—the ability to act without deliberation and as it were straight from the heart”https://psodmusings.wordpress.com/2025/02/16/spiritual-philosophy-and-ex...
2025-02-16 01:24:06 “Within the new administration, each strain is striving to realize its desired outcome. The first wants a sleek state that narrowly seeks to maximize returns on investment
2025-02-14 02:03:48 “The emergence of personal AI agents represents a form of cognitive control that moves beyond blunt instruments of cookie tracking and behavioral advertising toward a more subtle form of power: the manipulation of perspective itself. Power no longer needs to wield its authority with a visible hand that controls information flows
2025-02-13 16:41:12 “Indonesian officials have recently said they would be comfortable with nickel prices at $18,000-$19,000 per tonne — higher than current levels but still not enough to make nickel production profitable for others.Prices would have to stay above $22,000 per tonne over a considerable period of time for mines outside Indonesia to restart”https://www.ft.com/content/0bbbe7c7-12a1-43ba-8bef-c5c546367a0e
2025-02-09 02:49:41 “These [need-for-chaos] individuals are not idealists seeking to tear down the established order so that they can build a better society for everyone,” the authors wrote in their conclusion. “Rather, they indiscriminately share hostile political rumors as a way to unleash chaos and mobilize individuals against the established order that fails to accord them the respect that they feel they personally deserve.”https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/need-for-chaos-politic...
2025-02-09 02:13:54 “We outline a theoretical framework about an overlooked psychological strategy for acquiring social status—the incitement of chaos—and demonstrate the relevance of this strategy for contemporary politics. We build on research showing that status-oriented personality traits combined with social rejection can push people toward an escalation of aggressive motivations. We argue that such motivations, when sufficiently strong, take root as a general destructive mindset.”https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-revie...
2025-02-08 14:10:46 Facebook and all the other social networks that emerged were the web’s land “owners, controlling vast tracts of internet real estate. They lent each of their member-tenants a little plot of virtual land, along with a set of software tools, to cultivate an online identity, and then they reaped the monetary value of the resulting content by affixing advertisements to it.”https://www.newcartographies.com/p/dead-labor-dead-speech
2025-02-08 13:40:55 “U.S.A.I.D. is no longer monitoring bird flu in 49 countries as it was three weeks ago
2025-02-08 13:09:00 “A darker side of these applications has also emerged, sometimes veering into abusive, criminal, and even violent content
2025-02-06 20:34:07 “Northrop Grumman had won a contract to overhaul this system
2025-02-05 02:39:09 “Everything that’s published now is shaped by the forms and concerns of online, whether it’s explicitly about the internet or not. Our bestselling poets write what are essentially Instagram captions. Publishers live or die at the mercy of BookTok.”https://thepointmag.com/criticism/alt-lit/
2025-02-04 22:25:02 “Lin conceptualizes and composes the perfect landscapes in his mind through extensive sketching, reflecting both his commitment to faithfully representing the natural world and his pursuit of ideal beauty in his art. The exhibition’s three themes—Beginning in Zhuluo (Chiayi), Wandering Beyond Horizons, and Glimpses Along the Journey—trace Lin Yu-shan’s artistic journey”https://chiayiartmuseum.chiayi.gov.tw/english/ExhibitionsDetailE003100.a...
2025-02-04 14:56:26 “The visualisation of events will take on more importance, to the detriment of their rhetorical reconstruction. This does not in any way mean a more exact apprehension. But as modes of transmission become more and more visual, images are replacing language and provoking a mental change in citizens who access the political world through a narrative built on images and no longer through explanation.”https://mondediplo.com/1965/05/01telecommunications
2025-02-04 02:12:03 “The U.S. has only three polar icebreakers, one of which is 50 years old and another that was sidelined last year after an onboard fire. The U.S. Coast Guard in December acquired a secondhand commercial icebreaker, with plans to start Arctic operations next year.Russia has three-dozen icebreakers, many of them nuclear powered, providing more power and long endurance at sea.”https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/russia-china-artic-sea-na...
2025-02-03 23:16:44 “Though modern economists have long since jettisoned the moral hierarchies of its Victorian forebears in favor of an abstracted vision of self-interested, utility-maximizing agents, their assumption that utility can be infinitely generated through the acquisition of wealth still contains within it the kernel of its origins in the hierarchy and insatiability of wants.”https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/vibe-goes-down
2025-02-03 19:34:45 “Cultural philosopher Jean Baudrillard called a world that had dissolved into information and communication “hyperreality.” Nothing is “real” any more that is not a part of that world. We enter what he called “the ecstasy of communication,” where there is only a “smooth and functional surface” with nothing beneath it.”https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-case-for-kicking-the-stone
2025-02-02 02:16:57 It’s “technology designed less to do every human thing for you than to replace all those human things with itself, and then sell that function back to you as a monthly subscription. This device will play with and talk to your child
2025-02-02 01:53:11 “Help me buy groceries on Instacart,” I said, expecting the AI agent to ask me some basic questions. Where do I live? What store do I usually buy groceries from?It didn’t ask me any of that. Instead, Operator opened Instacart in the browser tab and begin searching for milk in grocery stores located in Des Moines, Iowa.I then told Operator to buy groceries from my local grocery store. Operator then tried to enter my local grocery store’s address as my delivery address.”https://defector.com/the-future-is-too-easy
2025-02-01 16:50:40 “Generative models are effective at simulating people in situations where the person has already been turned into an object. Perhaps this is why algorithmic feeds and For You pages seem to work so well. You engage with a simulation of yourself in an environment where you’ve already been made a product.”https://robhorning.substack.com/p/then-were-the-horsehoofs-broken-by
2025-02-01 16:49:26 “Despite fast robotization and increasing investments of multinational robot manufacturers in China, the country is still catching up in the development of indigenous technological capabilities in robots. The Chinese government has targeted robotization in its latest and most important national industrial policy – that is, Made in China 2025 (MIC25) – to shift from robot adoption to robot production and technological leadership.”https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10245294241261878
2025-02-01 16:43:05 “As state-owned funds in China have taken on a larger role funding start-ups in the past few years, the entrepreneurial ecosystem has felt pressured to guarantee returns for fear of losing the country’s assets.DeepSeek is distinctive among Chinese generative AI start-ups in that it has not raised any external financing and has therefore been free from these constraints.”https://www.ft.com/content/0e8d6f24-6d45-4de0-b209-8f2130341bae
2025-02-01 16:41:29 “Economists like Friedman, Stigler and &
2025-02-01 14:34:40 “Walker and her husband Brian bought the house in 2020 for $315,000 with a 3.75% mortgage rate. The price was a stretch then, but they knew the home would appreciate. They never imagined its value would rise by roughly two-thirds in under five years.”https://www.wsj.com/economy/housing/rising-house-mortgage-costs-north-ca...
2025-01-29 01:58:39 “When Zuckerberg said to his staff that “a squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa,” …he was making a category error, equating two things that cannot be compared. Yet social media renders category errors obsolete because it renders categories obsolete. All information belongs to a single category—it’s all ‘content.’ And very often, the content that matters is decided in the currency of commerce”https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-case-for-kicking-the-stone
2025-01-28 15:28:11 “The attention economy transforms our innate impulse for connection and “recognition” (a term Hayes borrows from the philosopher Alexandre Kojève) into a mechanism for profit—and undermines our capacity for the sustained, top-down focus that drives creativity, relationships, and democratic engagement.”https://prospect.org/culture/books/2025-01-28-pulled-in-all-directions-h...
2025-01-28 15:25:49 @jtlg hooray, looking forward to it!!
2025-01-25 18:16:51 They “compile pages and pages of examples: sensors, microphones, and cameras on chairs, badges, and equipment. Products that track time on task or frequency of multitasking. Programs that infer an employee’s engagement level from the language they use in emails or their likelihood of success from, among other things, the length of their résumés. (Shorter is better.) The HR term for all this data collection is “people analytics.””https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/hiring-squad-marz
2025-01-25 17:27:56 “From a sociological perspective, in an age of borderless social media narratives and algorithms that reward negativity, can the meme of young adult adversity survive contact with America’s Gen Z reality? And with a stream of negative social comparisons only a smartphone away, how will the growing realisation that young Americans are on a higher trajectory affect young Europeans?”https://www.ft.com/content/25867e65-68ec-4af4-b110-c1232525cf5c
2025-01-24 00:40:08 One estimate from 2023 “suggested that it costs around $300 million to train a trillion-parameter model, but one with 10 trillion parameters would cost something like $30 billion, running on a million GPUs for 2 years, requiring more electricity than a nuclear reactor generates. Developers are finding less computationally intensive ways to train networks, and hardware will get cheaper, but not at a rate that’ll allow models to scale at the pace of the last few years.”https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n06/paul-taylor/llamas-pizzas-mandolins
2025-01-22 21:23:00 “The only universal the mob can recognize is the absence of universality: a universal experience of domination and exploitation
2025-01-22 20:05:12 “Hawken and his coauthors presented seven possible trajectories for the coming decades, each presented as a fictional potted history of the recent past written in the early twenty-first century. Most were dystopian, depicting the logic of the industrial state eventuating in authoritarianism, ecological collapse, nuclear Armageddon, or a Hobbesian war of all against all. The scenario with the happiest ending was entitled “Living Within Our Means.””https://thebaffler.com/latest/fairytale-in-the-supermarket-baker
2025-01-22 02:33:51 “The 98-year-old pump room is about as big as a public bathroom with two stalls. The four pumps inside — the two pneumatic ones that pre-date the Great Depression, and two newer electric ones — are responsible for removing water from the tracks throughout the area.The subway station sits in a geological bowl, and heavy rain can easily overwhelm the pumps.”https://gothamist.com/news/a-state-of-collapse-how-the-mta-put-riders-on...
2025-01-22 01:27:51 “Consider Tesla. Imagine that it pays no corporate or carbon tax in the US but makes 5% of its sales in Britain. The UK Treasury would calculate what Tesla should have paid in the US if British tax law applied there and collect 5% of that amount. Similarly, Britain would step in to tax Elon Musk proportionally to the amount of his wealth that originates from the UK (which, since his fortune is mainly in Tesla stock, can be estimated to be about 5%).”https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/20/trump-threatens-a-...
2025-01-21 22:58:59 The Frenchman “moved to the U.S. The transition was something of a shock. “The food here is different,” he said in a heavy French accent. “Bigger portions. Too much salt. Too much sugar.” He decided to enroll in a paid study at his wife’s new workplace. It was exploring why the American diet, compared with almost any other, causes people to gain weight and develop chronic diseases at such staggering rates.”https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/13/why-is-the-american-diet-s...
2025-01-21 18:12:01 “The lack of intellectual property protection for personas and personalities makes their work ripe for imitation and adaptation by AI. This is the terra nullius now subject to a digital land grab-if tech firms can convince users that an AI avatar is as worth watching and interacting with as an actual human being.”https://biz.heraldcorp.com/article/10402623
2025-01-21 12:48:37 “Then there was the executive who invited his team to his sprawling home for a morning meeting and ushered them into what turned out to be not the dining room, nor the kitchen, but the “breakfast room”, a space devoted entirely to breakfasting that was bigger than the apartments of most of his guests, none of whom had heard of such a room before.”https://www.ft.com/content/05e150f1-cb18-4be9-b90f-1ca1a1b086ed
2025-01-21 01:27:11 “Despite the trappings of a progressive work environment, Xiaohongshu still has the sort of extreme work culture common to China’s tech companies. Mao is known to interview prospective hires late at night, indicating the commitment he expects. Some point to high staff turnover as evidence of burnout.”https://www.ft.com/content/1adcaa42-b613-4909-b390-c767a064d420
2025-01-21 00:30:09 “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” feeling.https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/life-is-more-than-an-engineering-pro...
2025-01-15 01:25:22 “The Fake History Hunter X account dug into an AI-generated image that went viral on Instagram recently. It was shared last week by a Spanish-language boomer engagement farming account for “rock music culture”.FHH was able to trace the image back to an AI “artist” going by C-GasmX-arT. But it’s now all over Google Image search results, mixed in with real images from Woodstock. Which exposes a serious issue with how Facebook is currently interacting with Google.”https://www.garbageday.email/p/tiktok-doesn-t-need-america
2025-01-14 20:52:32 “In mid-2023 China stopped publishing its youth unemployment rate and restarted it a few months later with a new methodology, causing concern among data users…Analysts could not assess how the methodological change affected the published numbers. This contrasts the well-telegraphed, transparent, and time-series-preserving approach that the US agencies take.”https://www.slowboring.com/p/major-data-revisions-are-coming
2025-01-14 17:23:53 “All of us were told that we were in a moral panic, that we were scolds, that we should just be quiet, sit down…Now we are having that debate that we probably should have had 10, 12 years ago about social media platforms, particularly their impact on kids. So as we think about new technologies, we should remember some of those humbling lessons, which is we don'
2025-01-14 13:38:22 “Americans as a whole are saving very little, while effectively borrowing money through big trade deficits with the rest of the world.Chinese officials and economists say they believe there is a better answer than tariffs: more Chinese investment in building factories in the United States.But lawmakers in Congress and in state governments have been mostly hostile”https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/14/business/china-trade-surplus-trump.html
2025-01-14 13:22:22 “Take questions about when people should be able receive their state pension. In recent years there has been a proliferation of new “clocks” that aim to measure a person’s “biological age” based on metrics such as proteins in the blood. Could they one day be used to determine each person’s state pension age, given that any system which uses chronological age or average life expectancy is unfair to poorer people who live shorter lives?”https://www.ft.com/content/7b2113fe-d5a8-4c75-b0ce-ccd9e3dcbcab
2025-01-14 13:07:30 “The goal is to entrench party control over a pillar of economic development, ensuring that Beijing can manage risks and channel capital effectively toward the ‘China Dream’ of national rejuvenation.‘Serving the real economy is the duty of finance…If finance is focused on self-circulation and self-expansion, it becomes water without source, a tree without roots, and a crisis will brew sooner or later’”https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-banking-purge-replacements-94428446
2025-01-14 12:47:46 “The essays in All Things Are Too Small find symptoms of this deprivation in increasingly intimate parts of modern life, from interior decoration…to the very workings of our moods. Everywhere we turn, we find our insatiable longing for more blocked, and we are browbeaten into pretending the scraps we have are more than enough.”https://www.clereviewofbooks.com/writing/becca-rothfeld-all-things-are-t...
2025-01-11 17:53:11 “This year, resolve to throw two parties—two because two feels manageable, and chain-letter math dictates that if every party has at least 10 guests and everyone observes host-guest reciprocity, then everyone gets 20 party invitations a year—possibly many more. Bear in mind that parties can be whatever you want: a 15-person Super Bowl party
2025-01-11 16:23:40 “Embedded in perspectival painting was the conviction that spiritual and divine realities were present in the visible world, and that skilled artists, by imitating the hand of nature, could capture and share them with viewers.”https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/gods-art
2025-01-11 16:09:24 “In a recent poll of German voters, fewer than 40 percent strongly agreed with the statement that “politics is capable of meeting the challenges of the future” and just 50 percent believed that “all in all, the democratic system works well.” These voters were not asked what they would prefer instead of a democratic system.”https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/democracy-and-its-discontents
2025-01-09 16:21:33 “We don’t merely receive the world mentally
2025-01-09 15:28:32 “The collective perspectives that emerge from social media - our understanding of what the public is and wants - are similarly shaped by algorithms that select on some aspects of the public, while sidelining others. And we tend to orient ourselves towards that understanding, through a mixture of reflective beliefs, conformity with shibboleths, and revised understandings of coalitional politics.”https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/were-getting-the-social-media-crisis
2025-01-09 15:24:27 “Zuckerberg’s recent arc fits the bill surprisingly well: A wealthy 40-year-old man with a sullied public reputation starts listening to Joe Rogan and develops an interest in mixed martial arts and other hypermasculine hobbies, grows annoyed by the woke left and angry at the mainstream media, rebrands himself as a bad boy, and adopts the label of a “classical liberal” while quietly supporting most of the tenets of MAGA conservatism.”https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/technology/meta-facebook-trump-mark-z...
2025-01-09 14:50:55 “The idea that the Democratic Party is a tarnished brand or that the Democratic Party is nearing collapse is highly overrated. An unpopular incumbent administration lost a close election. This has happened countless times in American history, and we have not claimed that a party was on its deathbed.”https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/07/opinion/democratic-party-republican-r...
2025-01-09 14:16:54 “The researchers acknowledge what they term "
2025-01-08 16:13:15 “A simulacra of human virtuosity is not what we need. We need each other. We need signs of life about us. We need to know that we are not alone. And this is something we must consider not just in relation to the singular artifact, but also in relation to our environment. In a time of acute loneliness, the proliferation of AI-generated content seems not unlike an act of pollution, compromising the integrity of the social ecosystem”https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-cat-in-the-tree-why-ai-co...
2025-01-08 14:58:50 “Some are self-narrators in a stronger sense: they regularly rehearse and revise their interpretations of their lives. Some are great planners, and knit up their lives with long-term projects. Others have no early ambition, no later sense of vocation, no interest in climbing a career ladder, no tendency to see their life as constituting a story or development. Some merely go from one thing to another, living life in a picaresque or episodic fashion.”https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n08/galen-strawson/the-sense-of-the-...
2025-01-08 13:44:56 “Once blacklisted, it is nearly impossible for individuals to start another business. They are also blocked from a range of economic activities, such as taking planes or high-speed trains, staying in hotels or leaving China. The country lacks a personal bankruptcy law, making it extremely difficult for most to escape the debts.”https://www.ft.com/content/38f1e51b-83b8-45cb-9cbf-2bc63f18e6ce
2025-01-07 15:11:47 “John Stuart Mill once wrote that a young person is like “a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.” The image suggests a generalized spreading out and reaching up, which is bound to be affected by soil and climate. The authors of “The Origins of You” offer a more chaotic metaphor. Human beings, they suggest, are like storm systems.”https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/10/are-you-the-same-person-yo...
2025-01-06 01:51:00 “The user is meant to be liberated from having aims and experience only fulfillment after fulfillment, as though the feeling of fulfillment didn’t require any preceding experience of lack. Perhaps this is fulfillingness’ first finale.The tech industry want to sell this as anticipating rather than pre-empting a user’s intentions.”https://robhorning.substack.com/p/emotional-infiltration
2025-01-04 13:49:48 “Since the late 1990s, the lowest earners have seen the fastest wage growth in both the US and UK. Sustained increases in the minimum wage have been a big part of this story in Britain. In both countries, low-skilled workers have benefited (and middle-skilled workers suffered) from the hollowing out of the middle of the jobs distribution as well as a tight labour market more generally.”https://www.ft.com/content/b325af8f-1864-448e-9b3e-bd1a18333a08
2025-01-02 15:42:21 “Where the US has allowed its prowess in advanced manufacturing to be eroded in recent decades, Japan has largely maintained its edge. Its companies are very much the partners that American industry now needs. As Andrew McDermott, a Japan-focused investor, puts it: Sony remains the sole supplier of camera sensors to Apple
2024-12-27 00:58:59 “In 2007, writer Caleb Crain wrote an article called “Twilight of the Books” in The New Yorker magazine about what a possible post-literate culture might look like. In oral cultures, he wrote, cliché and stereotype are valued, conflict and name-calling are prized because they are memorable, and speakers tend not to correct themselves because ‘it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for.’”https://www.ft.com/content/e2ddd496-4f07-4dc8-a47c-314354da8d46
2024-12-27 00:52:17 “Without solid skills of your own, it is only a few short steps from being supported by the machine, to finding yourself dependent on it, or subject to it.”https://www.ft.com/content/e2ddd496-4f07-4dc8-a47c-314354da8d46
2024-12-24 23:16:32 “What worries me the most is the massive bet being placed on AI in the American stock market right now, which is essentially predicated on the assumption of a huge leap in productivity. The flipside of that is a huge upheaval in white-collar, routine labor markets, which could be devastating for employment and social stability. What we’re seeing is a vast, leveraged financial gamble on social disruption.”https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-341-on-thinking-in-medias
2024-12-24 21:51:57 “It'
2024-12-24 00:43:47 “What people forget is that when you trust a machine, you are always trusting the people who design the machine and the people who are using the machine to be acting appropriately, ethically, or responsibly”https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/02/algorithm-crucial-health...
2024-12-23 23:19:30 “Threats can take many forms — fabricated news, phoney social media accounts and fake text, audio or video content. Online superspreaders, often aided by AI, intensify these attacks, allowing disinformation to ricochet unpredictably. After all, lies spread faster than the truth.Boycotts can hit finances, but the damage to reputations is just as significant. Employee safety is also an issue.”https://www.ft.com/content/0aa9725d-e423-4a6b-b842-866ad4541dc2
2024-12-23 23:16:47 “A persistent lack of strategic policy anchoring helps explain the current policy confusion. The Fed became excessively data-dependent after its big inflation mistake in 2021-22, when it wrongly assumed price spikes were transitory. As a result, policy goes in whatever direction the latest data is blowing, leading to about-turns.”https://www.ft.com/content/136ba1a1-a84a-49a2-ac5c-32d692eb47dd
2024-12-23 13:28:01 There are “two big overarching factors that are making it very difficult for almost all G7 democracies to maintain stable governments. The first is the decline of the political centre and the rise of populist parties. The second is a fiscal squeeze created by slow growth, ageing societies, the pandemic, the financial crisis of 2008 and demands for increased defence spending.Populism and fiscal problems are feeding on each other and make it harder and harder to govern.”https://www.ft.com/content/ea15bed8-bb4d-4e55-880f-a0ed4f2ef8b6
2024-12-23 03:04:38 “Together with emails obtained from local health departments through public records requests, this investigation revealed key problems, including deference to the farm industry, eroded public health budgets, neglect for the safety of agriculture workers, and the sluggish pace of federal interventions.”https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/bird-flu-spread-cattle-poultry-pa...
2024-12-23 02:45:56 “China’s contemporary economy might be best understood as a dialectical synthesis of a centrally directed economy—a plan decided and articulated by a sovereign in a way that has no analogy in the West—and Western market mechanisms, which do not determine the path of travel, the group traveling, nor the reasons for the trip, but do enable a more rapid and comfortable journey.”https://www.e-flux.com/journal/150/646236/the-state-of-chinese-science/
2024-12-22 14:51:13 “Print has been in decline for several decades, but perhaps less appreciated is the cratering in consumption of any written news at all. The share of adults reading news articles online in the US has fallen from 70 to 50% since 2013. The share of Britons and Americans now consuming no conventional news media at all has ballooned from 8 to around 30%. The decline in all news consumption is a problem for society”https://www.ft.com/content/2262f82e-fb65-445b-b99c-b039c1b32ce9
2024-12-22 14:07:44 “Conflicting guesses about future states of the world are both inescapable and powerfully performative, not least in making some futures more likely than others. As he summarized in the preface to The General Theory (1936), “changing views about the future are capable of influencing the quantity of employment.” (xvi) Expectations thus have a profoundly reflexive, performative dimension that easily render them self-fulfilling or self-defeating, often tragically so.”https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-342-are-we-all-dead-in
2024-12-22 00:33:17 “AI has done something that left-wing authors have been interested in doing for centuries: collective artistic production. But these companies have done so in a way that looks more like wide-scale property theft. It’s not merely plagiarism, per se, it’s a kind of primitive capitalist accumulation of intellectual property because the value created by producers is not redistributed to them
2024-12-18 01:28:27 “My argument is that any practical use of probability involves subjective judgements. This doesn’t mean that I can put any old numbers on my thoughts — I would be proved a poor probability assessor if I claimed with 99.9% certainty that I can fly off my roof. The objective world comes into play when probabilities, and their underlying assumptions, are tested against reality (see ‘How ignorant am I?’)
2024-12-14 00:00:51 “The art historian Jennifer Roberts requires her Harvard students to view an artwork in person for three hours straight. The exercise “serves as a master lesson in the value of critical attention, patient investigation, and skepticism about immediate surface appearances,” Roberts writes in an essay. “I can think of few skills that are more important in academic or civic life in the twenty-first century.””https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/fix-your-gaze
2024-12-12 14:51:27 “Modern historians tend to be wary of ascribing change to individuals. They are more likely to identify “the fish that changed the world” (to quote the subtitle of Mark Kurlansky’s book Cod) than a human who did. Most historians prefer impersonal structural forces: geography for the French Annales school, economics for Marxists, technology for others, while there’s been a recent surge of interest in climate change and pandemics.”https://www.ft.com/content/ce9ac582-b644-4d71-a097-9afe4634364e
2024-12-11 17:20:04 “In her 2015 book In Defense of Secrets, the late French psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle corrects one of the implicit claims of the surveillance-as-intimacy perspective: “Transparency is not truth,” she writes. Believing it is leaves our psychological landscapes exposed and open to manipulation by external forces. A “free life,” she argues, is precisely one that is “capable of generating” secrets.”https://www.thedriftmag.com/on-the-grid/
2024-12-11 00:13:05 “One advantage old-school Google Search has over the so-called answer engines is that it links directly to primary sources. Answer engines just give you an answer, and it’s often unclear what the source is.”https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/5/24313222/chatgpt-pardon-biden-bush-es...
2024-12-09 13:32:10 “AI slop is information pollution, and intentional information pollution is a great way to disrupt channels for organizing, thinking, and connecting to other people. Control the filter, and you can aim it at whatever you want.Information pollution is a great way to ensure that consensus, or compromises, or just an understanding of one another, don'
2024-12-08 16:22:33 “Suspended between real &
2024-12-07 18:50:21 “No one is talking about what happens when we limit human contact to those who can afford to pay a premium. Technology does not arrive on a blank slate, but intersects with existing inequalities, and in this case it amplifies the stratification of human connection. In 2025, the affluent will get their connective labor from humans. The rest will get theirs from a machine.”https://www.wired.com/story/wealth-inequality-personal-service-access-ar...
2024-12-07 16:59:38 “Treating “AI companion companies” as innovators operating at the edge of our capabilities to recognize sentience tends to mask how they are selling entertainment products to audiences like any other media company.”https://robhorning.substack.com/p/reality-raids
2024-12-07 15:12:09 “The era-defining success of Faserland can be hard to explain to English readers. Brand names and pop culture instead of characterization, interiority, and plot
2024-12-07 12:49:39 “Amazon appropriates up to 40% of the price of a product sold on its platform. That leaves next to no surplus for the seller to reinvest. And when you have so much rent being siphoned out of the economy, out of the circular flow of income, then the capitalist sector is starved and increasingly subordinate to the cloud rent sector.”https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/quantity-to-quality
2024-12-07 01:36:51 “When workers own the platforms, they can decide what data they want to collect and how they want to use it. In Indonesia, couriers have created “base camps” where they can recharge their phones, exchange information, and wait for their next order
2024-12-05 14:41:37 “Chinese companies and their steady ascent up the value chain now mount a formidable challenge in areas such as semiconductors, white goods, consumer electronics and automotive. This is tough for everyone, but these are sectors that have been disproportionately responsible for Korea’s industrial miracle, and thus disproportionately pain-inducing.”https://www.ft.com/content/448a73e2-6cc8-43bd-a3c6-88b2a4ccb208
2024-12-04 14:10:10 “The licensing requirements that China announced in August also covered smelting and separation technology and machinery and other items related to such super-hard materials.”https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/china-bans-exports-gallium-key-high-...
2024-12-04 13:32:44 “Victims of medical-identity theft may be denied coverage in the future because their records show they have a condition they don’t actually have. Or they may be told they have reached their limit on benefits. Correcting the bogus information is difficult, since healthcare providers and insurers often have convoluted systems for amending records, and these systems mostly don’t “speak” to each other.”https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/why-hackers-want-your-health-infor...
2024-12-04 13:25:32 “Ironically, then, the housing crisis is another thing keeping us at home. Because we’ve failed to build housing in our most amenity-rich neighborhoods and let them become too expensive, people have to live in less desirable neighborhoods without the same strong public and private investment in physical spaces. Farther from everything, residents have even less impetus to go shopping in person, attend a cultural event, or trek into work.”https://slate.com/business/2024/11/remote-work-life-loneliness-isolation...
2024-12-03 22:51:41 “When you pose the question to an LLM, what you are really asking is, “Given the statistical distribution of words in the vast public corpus of text, what are the words most likely to follow the sequence ‘what country is to the south of Rwanda?’” Even if the system responds with the word “Burundi,” this has a different relationship to reality than the human’s answer, and to say the AI “knows” or “believes” Burundi to be south of Rwanda is a category mistake.”https://www.theverge.com/c/24300623/ai-companions-replika-openai-chatgpt...
2024-12-03 16:14:31 @kazys great point!
2024-12-03 14:23:52 “CDs have a bit-rate of 1,411 kilobits per second, which is a measure of how much data is used to represent sound. Spotify Premium ranges from 24 kbps to 320 kbps, while free Spotify listeners are limited to 160 kbps at best. I realise this is hardly news to music aficionados. Neil Young, who grudgingly returned his music to Spotify this year after a spat involving Joe Rogan, complained that “there is so much tone missing that you can hardly feel the sensitivity”.”https://www.ft.com/content/ebc80373-bd36-4492-b63c-4418177d4081
2024-12-03 13:31:53 “While disaster risk is one reason that home insurance premiums are rising faster than overall consumer inflation, it isn’t the only reason. A portion of the increase in home insurance premiums stems from rising housing and construction costs, which soared during and following the pandemic. Replacement and repair costs have soared, and insurers are trying to keep pace, although some state insurance commissions are slowing the process.”https://www.resiclubanalytics.com/p/the-housing-market-s-home-insurance-...
2024-12-03 00:27:14 “When presented with a philosopher whose life was radically limited and whose philosophy was commensurately dismissive of apparently central parts of reality, a more realistic default expectation is that the narrowness of his perspective simply obscured important features of ordinary life from him—that he was blind to facts that most people access without trouble, rather than having the philosophical far-sightedness to somehow see past them.”https://philosophersmag.com/imperfect-parfit/
2024-11-28 17:46:16 NYC airport transit labyrinth: he “would take the F train from Delancey Street to West 4th Street
2024-11-24 16:47:23 Easy solution: correctly know that “only flesh and blood creatures have consciousness.”https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/17/ai-could-cause-social...
2024-11-24 16:39:58 “When a pretension to free the world from evil ends only in a new proof of the danger of a fanatic to the commonweal, then it is not to be marveled at that a distrust is aroused in the observer which makes sympathy impossible. […]A measure of sympathy developed
2024-11-24 03:02:20 @trc you’re welcome! Yes, very insightful cultural analysis here.
2024-11-23 20:11:22 “We used to view formal speech as serious and impressive. The president would stand in public to give formal, scripted speeches to a large audience. That’s how presidents appeared… presidential. But in the age of social media, that mode of communication doesn’t resonate. What used to be considered serious is now considered stilted. What used to be respectable is now inauthentic, fake. And what used to be disrespectful is now authentic and sincere.”https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/revolt-and-the-reversal-of-trust
2024-11-23 13:51:55 “Dennis Tourish, a professor at the University of Sussex Business School, published a book titled Management Studies in Crisis: Fraud, Deception and Meaningless Research. He cites a study finding that more than a third of surveyed editors at management journals say they’ve encountered fabricated or falsified data. Even that alarming rate may undersell the problem, Tourish told me, given all of the misbehavior in his discipline that gets overlooked or covered up.”https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/01/business-school-fra...
2024-11-19 14:15:29 “Many of us aspire to command our lives as though we were the captain of a superyacht, controlling our route “from the plush-leather swivel chair on the serene and silent bridge.” Yet it’s more realistic to see each of us as occupying “a little one-person kayak,” tossed about by waves”https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/should-you-just-give-up
2024-11-19 14:08:43 “He could also stop or slow vaccine development research conducted at or funded by the National Institutes of Health, the federal government’s top medical research agency, which would also fall under his purview. He has been clear about his plans to empty some divisions that focus on advancing vaccine research and development. He has said he would fight the next pandemic instead by “building people’s immune systems.””https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/19/health/rfk-jr-vaccines-hhs.html
2024-11-19 14:03:17 “Art should do more than communicate: it should move us
2024-11-17 22:15:47 “When Paul P. first came to New York, many of the gay artists who might have served as inspirations — or even as part of an establishment that young upstarts could measure themselves against and challenge — were already, prematurely, gone. He arrived in a city in which David Wojnarowicz, Félix Gonzáles-Torres and Martin Wong were martyrs and memories rather than the formidable presences that they might otherwise have been.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/31/t-magazine/paul-p-queer-art.html
2024-11-15 16:14:07 “With generative AI, we’re once again witnessing a core problem with entrusting technological development to a handful of self-mythologizing executives and founders in Silicon Valley. Instead of systems that are democratically and ethically constructed, built to serve humans and not just managers, whole constituencies and not just consultants
2024-11-15 16:13:15 “With internal combustion vehicles, the “natural law” was that the bigger the car you make, the more money you’ll make from it. But with EVs, that gets turned on its head. The larger the EV, the bigger the battery is needed to power it, and the more battery is needed just to move that bigger battery.”https://disconnect.blog/what-we-get-wrong-about-the-supposed-threat-of-c...
2024-11-09 16:15:36 “When social fracture grew and shared truth died, when hope collapsed in the communities technology left behind, a yearning for the certainties of the providential authoritarian leader set in.“In the absence of a shared reality, or shared facts, or a shared threat, reason had no weight beside emotion,” said Nicole Bacharan, a French political scientist. “And so a dislocated world of danger has produced a hunger for the strongman.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/08/world/americas/trump-foreign-policy-a...
2024-11-08 15:28:50 “Finding good information is increasingly difficult. Decades ago, there were just a few channels on television
2024-11-04 15:53:53 @mrdelong @mimsical thanks for sharing! I look forward to reading your review.
2024-11-03 22:28:32 “As to my ability to withstand alcohol’s ill effects, I am banking on having inherited the genes of my paternal grandmother. She was a great fan of gin but when, in her eighties, she heard on the radio that too much gin was bad for you, she switched to whisky and lived to the age of 98. (It makes a good story. One’s genetic make-up does indeed play an important part in how alcohol is metabolised.)”https://www.ft.com/content/bb952668-dc21-4d6f-8837-11dbf5deb609
2024-10-30 00:22:02 “The disciplined attention of art,” the poet argues in an extended close reading (itself an act of disciplined attention) of a George Oppen poem, “is a moral discipline, even when the content of that morality isn’t obvious, in the way Cézanne paints an apple, say, or the bowl that gathers the apples, the hundreds of strokes he makes, each an act of seeing, a judgment, each an attempt to activate in us that awareness we nearly always shut down.”https://www.bookforum.com/print/3102/end-insights-61295
2024-10-27 13:42:47 “People—their histories and identities, their institutions and work processes, their fears and desires—are simply too complex to be captured in a worksheet with a paragraph and some reading comprehension questions. Large-scale prose writing is the best medium we have for capturing that complexity, and the education system should not be in the business of keeping students from learning how to engage effectively with it.”https://slate.com/human-interest/2024/02/literacy-crisis-reading-compreh...
2024-10-27 13:30:02 “One found hallucinations in eight out of every 10 audio transcriptions he inspected…[Another] discovered hallucinations in about half of the over 100 hours of Whisper transcriptions he analyzed. A third…found hallucinations in nearly every one of the 26,000 transcripts he created with Whisper.The problems persist even in well-recorded, short audio samples. A recent study …uncovered 187 hallucinations in over 13,000 clear audio snippets they examined.”https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-health-business-90...
2024-10-26 21:44:07 “Compared to nonrunners, people who ran between one and 2.4 hours per week at a slow or moderate pace enjoyed the greatest reductions in mortality — greater even than among runners who logged more miles at a faster pace.”https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/21/well/move/running-short-distance-heal...
2024-10-24 13:58:21 “Many promote racial segregation and female subservience. Many question science,” Bartholet wrote. Many are “determined to keep their children from exposure to views that might enable autonomous choice about their future lives”.Other experts worry about the consequences for socialisation of children spending more time learning at home.”https://www.ft.com/content/364a65cf-4ec1-4f65-ba17-d7cf7ebb4b1a
2024-10-23 13:26:58 “Folks hoping to curl up with a cozy fantasy novel or a bedtime story for their kids are confronted with a library of Chat GPT-generated nonsense “written” by nonexistent authors on the Kindle bookstore, while their YouTube algorithms serve them bot-generated fall ambiance videos. Autumn, it seems, is being eaten by AI. There’s something off about this year’s “fall vibes”https://www.vox.com/culture/378855/ai-slop-fall-autumn-inspiration-vibes...
2024-10-22 22:44:14 “At a wind-swept amusement park in southern Moldova, a mother-of-two wondered out loud which candidate to back in the country’s run-off presidential race.Kyvyrzhyk concluded she would be fine letting the oligarch who built the park — Gagauzialand — decide on her behalf. “He’ll name a candidate the night before,” she said.Moldovan police have accused the oligarch, Ilan Șor, of using his influence, as well as massive Russian funds, to run a tight-knit network of voters”https://www.ft.com/content/8f0adc50-c2b7-4aa7-9943-9308a605a2a0
2024-10-20 01:03:05 “54% of respondents in an Axios Vibes survey published last month agreed with the statement, "
2024-10-16 11:02:12 “Section 230 is just massively overbroad,” Sag says. “It’s well past time we replaced it with some kind of notice and takedown regime, a simple expedient system to say, ‘This is infringing on my rights to publicity,’ or ‘I have a good faith belief that there’s been an infliction of emotional distress,’ and then the companies would either have to take it down or lose their liability shield.”https://www.wired.com/story/characterai-has-a-non-consensual-bot-problem/
2024-10-15 22:41:07 “At least from a certain moment of its development, capitalism deals in and reproduces itself by means of disorientation.3 It deskills all of us with regard to our cognitive mapping abilities. It then becomes the task of theory—and of a reinvented dialectical rationalism—to (attempt to) orient us.”https://www.e-flux.com/notes/633672/always-jamesonize?rand=26589
2024-10-15 15:15:29 “Photography is devious sometimes,” he says in a video interview on view at MoMA: a picture is just whatever scrap of truth remains when everything else is banished from the frame. Frank came to find that editing process morally compromised. In his view, painting was additive, photography subtractive, a mere matter of plucking one or two items from the groaning smorgasbord of everything the eye could see.”https://www.ft.com/content/73ecb7d1-7e15-42ba-abb2-013eb634d64d
2024-10-13 17:59:13 “At the top was “The Night Agent,” a sub-Clancy-quality thriller about an F.B.I. guy, with more than 812 million hours viewed….Roughly the last four thousand entries all have 100,000 hours viewed — this is as low as the scale goes — and are arranged alphabetically.“https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/07/magazine/netflix-library-viewer-numbe...
2024-10-12 14:15:43 “Mr Chen says that it'
2024-10-11 21:38:30 “Wittgenstein uses a lot of fictitious dialogue …he introduces a fictitious quote from someone who disagrees with him. Then he will explain back to that person why he was right in the first place, sometimes getting exasperated with the person, even though he invented them. That’s what I do. I make up fake people to get mad at all the time.The interplay of dialogue in Wittgenstein works toward a philosophical end, and I wondered, How could I do that to a novelistic end?”https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/10/09/loving-the-limitations-of...
2024-10-11 12:49:51 The No Kings Act “declares that it is Congress’s constitutional judgment that no president is immune from the criminal laws of the United States. It would strip the Supreme Court of jurisdiction to declare the No Kings Act unconstitutional. Any criminal actions against a president would be left in the hands of the lower federal courts. And these courts would be required to adopt a presumption that the No Kings Act is constitutional.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/11/opinion/laws-congress-constitution-su...
2024-10-11 12:08:22 “Making companies more ‘efficient’ often means little more than raising prices and lowering quality. Take US trailer parks, which PE firms have been amassing with the avidity of an eight-year-old playing Monopoly. Once they own these low-income residential communities, the firms jack up ground rents, transfer utility costs to residents and cut back on maintaining vital infrastructure such as sewers….to charge more for less, it’s smart business to target” the vulnerable.https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/10/slash-and-burn-is-priva...
2024-10-09 23:03:58 “MI5 is now working closely with European allies to crack down on criminal networks being funded by authoritarian states, he said.This summer seven people were accused by U.K. authorities of setting fire to a London warehouse owned by Ukrainian businessmen, an arson attack allegedly paid for by Russian intelligence. Russian saboteurs are also suspected of being behind a fire at a Berlin factory”https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/russia-pays-criminals-to-sow-mayhem-in-...
2024-10-09 00:55:05 “His colleagues who who get distracted in Amazon’s open-floor-plan office tell him that their work has improved since WFH.If remote work is such a drag, its defenders ask, then why has business been booming since the pandemic? Profits are up, even as employees code in sweatpants or practice their golf swing.”https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/remote-work-amazon-exe...
2024-10-08 23:44:30 “Rate increases, and a historic 113 consecutive days of temperatures peaking at or above 100 degrees in Phoenix, have generated record air conditioning bills and widespread consternation. Modest-sized homes are paying as much as $500 a month, while the biggest properties are shelling out $1,000 or more. Even some homes with solar panels are receiving surprisingly large bills.”https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/arizona-electricity-bills-trump-elec...
2024-10-08 23:42:33 “Billions of dollars of private and public funds have been invested in the redevelopment of downtown Tampa’s waterfront in recent decades. Many of these buildings are in vulnerable low-lying areas, according to data from CoStar.”https://www.wsj.com/us-news/climate-environment/tampa-florida-hurricane-...
2024-10-08 19:34:44 “Companies like Airbnb, Lehane understood, could make arguments faster, and more efficiently, than nearly any political party or other special-interest group, and this was a source of considerable power. “The platforms are really the only ones who can speak to everyone now,” Lehane said.https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley-the-new-lob...
2024-10-07 14:59:21 “The government’s approach to online feminist activism is marked by a nuanced &
2024-10-06 12:58:57 “Scholz’s government hasn’t delivered on promises to ease the housing crisis, cut red tape, improve infrastructure and reduce crime. Trains are notoriously late, corporate taxes are the highest among peer nations, and infrastructure is crumbling: A bridge collapsed in Dresden last month because of delayed repairs.”https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/is-europe-becoming-ungovernable-4f5a889...
2024-10-05 14:52:03 "
2024-10-03 23:23:27 “Passenger rail in Canada is a slow and unreliable mode of transport, and for those who have a choice, they are increasingly deciding to use cars, coach services, or, over longer distances, flying. It’s exactly the opposite of what is needed in an age of climate crisis.”https://ubisurv.net/2024/10/02/railways-in-canada/
2024-10-03 16:00:29 “A study published this year by Quess Corp, an Indian business service provider, and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry argued that India faced a wage — rather than an employment — problem. About 80 per cent of jobs pay less than Rs20,000 ($238) a month, not enough to meet rising living expenses, the study’s authors argued.”https://www.ft.com/content/14fc147e-8f11-45d7-9e7f-2ee97f899eea
2024-10-02 21:12:14 “Literature was the home of the intimate and irreducible, the stray gesture and sensuous particular, of everyt
2024-09-29 14:04:21 “For all its intensely practical importance as a connector of industrial centres and an arch logistician of human movement, the shinkansen continues to play a role as an ideological encapsulator of Japan’s sense of what it is and what it should ideally strive to be. There has never been a fatal accident. Average annual lateness across the JR Central network is 1.6 minutes. When the natural world forces the shinkansen to stop, you know conditions are genuinely bad.”https://www.ft.com/content/46bc31e6-6994-4f0f-859f-afe610afbbfe
2024-09-29 01:36:16 “From systemically poor public procurement to hopeless IT, to the hollowing out of core services and expertise at both central and local government, this newly active state stands on atrophying limbs.Stories abound. Officials grappling with the early rel
2024-09-27 22:09:13 “Buoyed by the gains of cheap capital, government contracts and subsidies, and a rising stock market, this new generation of the ultrarich convinced themselves of their exceptionalism.”https://newrepublic.com/article/185438/musk-silicon-valley-tech-embrace-...
2024-09-27 11:39:28 “The rapid evolution of drone warfare and the weaponization of commercial and hobbyist drones has since become a stark fact, as has the proliferation of increasingly capable long-range ‘kamikaze‘ or ‘one-way attack’ drones that blur the definitions of drone and missile. Both of their impacts on modern warfare are now snowballing.”https://www.twz.com/news-features/drone-warfares-terrifying-ai-enabled-n...
2024-09-26 02:02:21 “When you first sign up, you’re prompted to choose these AI character archetypes: Do you want to hear from Fans? Trolls? Skeptics? Odd-balls? Doomers? Visionaries? Nerds? Drama Queens? Liberals? Conservatives? Welcome to SocialAI, where Trollita Kafka, Vera D. Nothing, Sunshine Sparkle, Progressive Parker, Derek Dissent, and Professor Debaterson are here to prop you up or tell you why you’re wrong.”https://www.wired.com/story/socialai-app-ai-chatbots-chatgpt/
2024-09-26 01:45:21 “Decade after decade of peace and affluence has had the consequence of raising expectations. Just a small share of people alive in the west now have clear memories of an existential war. Virtually no one remembers a financial crisis that the state wasn’t able to contain.”https://www.ft.com/content/90171f91-7d7f-4ff3-b733-763a228f5a43
2024-09-25 00:56:55 Empire of the Sun “is a meditation on time and memory, on how the shocks we encounter become traumas we cannot escape, and how these traces of unbearable pain, retrieved and transformed, can become life-affirming and renewing.Human memory is a constant reprocessing of our lives. As the world keeps on unmaking us, we remake ourselves or our lives are spent in forgetting.”https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2024/09/jg-ballards-apocalyptic-art
2024-09-22 01:10:35 “Regulation is only one half of the generative AI puzzle. Governments should also help ensure just rewards to reality-improving technology, to dissipate excess investment in hype-driven industries (ranging from crypto to the metaverse to the current direct-to-consumer GenAI boom). The US Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS (Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors) Act are two good examples of such legislation: both have spurred higher investment in factories.”https://asianews.network/industrial-policy-for-the-real-world/
2024-09-22 01:08:20 “The current bleeding-edge LLM AIs do nothing that can be thought of as thinking and are no more than massive, advanced versions of Clever Hans, responding to prompts and cues and processing them in mechanical (though stochastic) fashion. Their achievement is in showing just how convincing and lifelike such technology can be, but we shouldn’t conflate their usefulness (because they are useful) with actual thinking or overestimate the limits of their capabilities.”https://auerstack.substack.com/p/seeing-like-a-cyborg?utm_source=post-em...
2024-09-21 23:39:02 “It is unsustainable to fire a $4mn patriot missile to intercept a $50,000 drone.”https://www.ft.com/content/fe136479-9504-4588-869f-900f2b3452c4
2024-09-21 20:38:30 “Ford’s platform of platforms propelled the rapid proliferation of motorcar technologies, orchestrating a virtuous cycle of mass production and consumption that gave rise to a blue-collar middle class in the United States while mobilizing economies worldover. The radical democratization of mass automobility demanded the submission of bodies and brains to the robotic repetitions and frenetic rates of the assembly line.”https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/new-silk-roads/626301/the-fordian-slip/
2024-09-21 03:20:02 AI has “been pushed deliberately away from intriguing strangeness and toward banal interactions that often end up wasting humans’ time and money. As companies fumble toward a profitable vision of generative artificial intelligence, AI tools are becoming big business by blossoming into the least interesting version of themselves.AI is everywhere right now, including many places it fits poorly.”https://www.theverge.com/24067999/ai-bot-chatgpt-chatbot-dungeon
2024-09-21 03:10:50 “With generative AI, a little bit of programming effort can set off a process that pollutes the world automatically with limitless amounts of material that radiates inattention, absence, disaffection, manipulation, expediency, objectification, compulsion, turning the collected corpus of human expression into a means of unwinding it all into entropy.”https://robhorning.substack.com/p/artificial-intentionality?utm_source=p...
2024-09-20 02:04:25 “People who have worked on the large language models that power products such as ChatGPT can easily find jobs and make well over $1 million a year.Knopp says AI engineers are being offered two- to four-times the salary of a regular engineer. “That’s an extreme investment of an unknown technology,” she says. “They cannot afford to invest in other talent because of that.””https://www.wsj.com/tech/tech-jobs-artificial-intelligence-cce22393
2024-09-19 21:46:48 “Technological evolution, in this case involving big data and analytics fed by social media and online data aggregation techniques, is rapidly developing the ability to custom-design narratives that can effectively manipulate political behavior on an individual basis.”https://issues.org/the-age-of-weaponized-narrative-or-where-have-you-gon...
2024-09-19 13:48:43 Industrial policy for the real world: Governments should also help ensure just rewards to reality-improving technology, to dissipate excess investment in hype-driven industries (ranging from crypto to the metaverse to the current direct-to-consumer GenAI boom).https://asianews.network/industrial-policy-for-the-real-world/
2024-09-16 21:54:28 Delong: James C. Scott’s most famous book, Seeing Like a State, “mark[ed] the final stage in the intellectual struggle that the Austrian tradition has long waged against apostles of central planning.”https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-omnivorous-james-c-s...
2024-09-16 15:58:05 “What, I kept wondering, would her subjects say was her “deep story”? And would including that viewpoint in her book have destabilized its carefully engineered explanations? If America is increasingly divided into two countries, one liberal and one conservative, what would it have meant to compare their two deep stories in one narrative rather than have one side tell the other how it is?”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/10/books/review/stolen-pride-arlie-russe...
2024-09-15 00:05:19 “These influencers have massive audiences into the tens of millions. And more importantly, they’re heavily networked into other conservative spaces.”https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/you-are-still-not-worried-enough
2024-09-14 23:27:39 “With no role in strategy, filming or production, Mr. Trump would not typically see the contestants “working” during the week.“He would fire the absolute wrong person,” recalled Mr. Braun “Our job then was to reverse engineer the show and to make him not look like a complete moron,” Mr. Braun said. They would go back through the tape from the week and selectively choose snippets “to make the person who he fired look not as good,” he said.https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/14/business/donald-trump-apprentice.html
2024-09-14 22:01:02 “As a physician, the scope for moments of generosity is “drastic”, she says, whether ringing a patient’s sister to update her, helping put someone’s socks on after an examination or rubbing the feet of a terminally ill patient. There is something heartbreaking about the disproportionate gratitude these interventions elicit, she says. “I think their expectations for us are so low.””https://www.ft.com/content/23b74c4c-1508-4e60-abaa-93468d52aa47
2024-09-14 14:23:42 “Among employees, news that Endless Shrimp would, in fact, never end was greeted with dread. As an occasional special over the years, it was always a frantic ordeal. Cooks and servers could barely keep up. Bargain hunters griped about the pace of refills. Cops were summoned to handle diners enraged that they couldn’t get takeaway bags.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/09/business/red-lobster-seafood-downfall...
2024-09-14 02:14:44 “Foreign governments’ attempts to manipulate Americans’ opinions are far more extensive than most people realize, and our government’s process for finding and countering them is very slow and cumbersome.”https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/at-least-five-interesting-things-577
2024-09-13 22:05:18 “Like trends in fashion, the dominant style of social media oscillates between aestheticized perfection and aestheticized mess, between minimalism and maximalism. One precedent for the Instagram dump was the Facebook album of the late two-thousands, a time when online content was less carefully curated because it was still meant for a small audience of real-life friends.”https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/the-desperation-of-the...
2024-09-13 11:06:58 “A report commissioned by Unesda, the European soft drinks association, estimated that the cost of the transition, including all the new equipment required, could be as much as three to nine per cent of the industry’s annual turnover. The new caps might even require more plastic than the old kind.”https://www.ft.com/content/e43c7099-6f8e-4196-8a14-ab11a2ed2695
2024-09-13 11:06:43 “A report commissioned by Unesda, the European soft drinks association, estimated that the cost of the transition, including all the new equipment required, could be as much as three to nine per cent of the industry’s annual turnover. The new caps might even require more plastic than the old kind.”https://www.ft.com/content/e43c7099-6f8e-4196-8a14-ab11a2ed2695
2024-09-12 10:49:40 “Without an electric vehicle industry, without the ability to mass-produce batteries in an emergency, the United States will lose its status as an energy superpower.It is possible to fall so far behind in an industry that a country cannot reasonably catch up.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/11/opinion/trump-electric-vehicles-china...
2024-09-10 12:10:01 Along AI “misrepresentations a ‘hallucination’ isn’t harmless because it “lends itself to the confusion that the machines are in some way misperceiving but are nonetheless trying to convey something that they believe or have perceived.””.https://untangled.substack.com/p/the-consequences-of-googles-ai-overview...
2024-09-07 01:41:33 “Unlike related concepts of misinformation, disinformation, libel and hallucinations in LLMs, careless speech causes unique long-term harms to science, education and society which resist easy quantification, measurement and mitigation. Voluntary technical measures to better align LLMs with ‘ground truth’ or reliable sources can help to combat these harms but are insufficient on their own.”https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.240197
2024-09-07 01:25:01 “Apple is the epitome of the “hollow corporation”
2024-09-07 00:39:11 Sputnik 2.0: “The US has superior firepower to China in neither green technology nor development finance. Low- and middle-income countries are not forced to choose between the US and China as European nations…did during the cold war.The US is a late starter in developing green technologies. In some of the critical products — solar panels, wind power and now electric vehicles — its technology is more expensive and often inferior”https://www.ft.com/content/a8198ad7-779c-4e35-b560-ab3bb6520779
2024-09-06 23:39:39 “Shallow, rapidly swirling narrative consciousness has come to define the refugees of the Attention Span Wars, those writers whose capacity for concentration has been so compromised by the internet that they leave us not with a fragmented form – which might still have something to offer readers – but with the fragmentation of concentration itself.”https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n17/brandon-taylor/use-your-human-mind
2024-09-06 21:30:29 “The main use case for LLMs is writing text nobody wanted to read. The other use case is summarizing text nobody wanted to read. Except they don’t do that either.” https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/09/04/dont-use-ai-to-summarize-documents-it...
2024-09-06 20:52:44 “Today’s political deliriums are stoked by click-maximizing algorithms that steer people toward “engaging” content, which is often whatever feeds their righteous rage. Imagine what will happen…when bots generate that content themselves, personalizing and continually adjusting it to flood the dopamine receptors of each user.”https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/10/yuval-noah-harari-n...
2024-09-04 13:46:47 @fluidlogic Yes, my sense is that this would require human review of a range of queries.
2024-09-04 01:03:22 @greenboxcode a very interesting analogy. You may find David Golumbia'
2024-09-03 22:32:01 “LLMs pose a unique risk to science, education, democracy, and society that current legal frameworks did not anticipate. This is what we call ‘careless speech’ or speech that lacks appropriate care for truth. Spreading careless speech causes subtle, immaterial harms that are difficult to measure over time. It leads to the erosion of truth, knowledge and shared history”https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2024-08-07-large-language-models-pose-risk-soc...
2024-09-03 19:33:02 “Agnotology is the idea that “ignorance should not be viewed as a simple omission or gap, but rather as an active production,” according to Robert Proctor, a historian of science. You can think of censorship, propaganda, marketing campaigns, email deletion policies, and non-disclosure agreements all as creating a kind of ignorance.”https://untangled.substack.com/p/its-okay-to-not-know-the-answer
2024-09-03 18:26:58 Justice Dino compared X’s “refusal to comply with court orders to suspend accounts to the operator of a private highway refusing to stop traffic to prevent the escape of a dangerous criminal. “Would it be reasonable for this company to choose whether or not to comply with the court order, arguing that stopping the highway would violate the criminal’s freedom of movement?” he asked.https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/02/world/americas/brazil-elon-musk-supre...
2024-09-03 13:51:07 “About two years ago, Irrational put its theory that happier employees lead to better performing companies to the test, making it investable through three exchange traded funds, run in tandem with Harbor Capital, a boutique asset manager.The flagship ETF, HAPI, which picks large-cap stocks with the highest human capital scores, has beaten more than 90 per cent of peer funds since it launched in October 2022”https://www.ft.com/content/c5c72493-4d32-4d65-b49e-1df7b49a14a3
2024-09-03 13:39:14 “Sustaining constant negative emotions is a form of self-punishment, and self-punishment incurs heavy long-term costs.”https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/progressives-need-to-learn-to-take
2024-09-03 12:54:47 “In a world where deepfakes are prevalent and uncertainty is widespread, public figures and private citizens alike can capitalize on that uncertainty to sow doubt in real audio content or video footage and potentially benefit from the liar’s dividend. In the courtroom, lawyers have attempted the “deepfake defense,” asserting that real audiovisual evidence against a defendant is fake.”https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/deepfakes-electi...
2024-09-03 12:29:35 “Developers of Recommendation Systems must face the music and wake up from their behaviorist dreams, if they want to remain relevant in a world that is swiftly moving toward lifting the veil from unsubstantiated claims.”https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/artificial-intelligence/articles/10...
2024-09-03 12:21:49 “The approach taken by Birhane and her colleagues is to understand human thought in terms that are "
2024-09-02 19:13:43 For “historical, demographic, economic and social reasons, mediating organisations that representative democracy requires to thrive — such as parties, unions or civil associations — struggled to flourish. Instead, a feeling of imagined inferiority and a culture of street protests with maximalist demands are fused in a toxic “hyperpolitics” that is extremely vulnerable to ruthless “polarisation entrepreneurs”. Enter the AfD &
2024-09-02 11:57:29 “Recht argues that researching to find the accepted solutions to certain problems “is more like learning guitar than it is taking a standardized aptitude test.” If you want to be a musician, you want to know how to play music, not merely what music sounds like. Chiang offers a similar metaphor: “Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room
2024-08-30 12:26:21 “Platforms are not passive conduits
2024-08-29 21:58:05 “Generalist appellate judges will be forced to independently evaluate highly technical interpretations of statutes-a task that judges are ill-equipped to accomplish. Rather than take the time to properly understand complex statutory regimes, judges may purposefully or inadvertently fall back on partisanship.”https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4939536
2024-08-29 21:57:09 “The conflation of these two types of studies is problematic because it does not make sense to consider a 5-minute exposure to Facebook measuring momentary mood with a 3-week abstinence from social media measuring risk of clinical depression on a validated scale to be measures of the same effect.”https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-case-for-causality-part-1
2024-08-26 12:36:05 “Part of the reason the clothes are cheap is, well, because they are cheap. One factory manager held up a baggy dress — likely destined for the US or UK — and joked that she would never sell such low-quality clothes to a more discerning Chinese clientele. She says she uses cheaper fabrics for Shein orders than for Alibaba’s Taobao, because the domestic platform gives more money to the factories to cover their costs.”https://www.ft.com/content/70634462-4d1e-4f3c-be87-710deb59e0da
2024-08-25 19:32:33 “Trump was already thinking and acting like an influencer in the 1980s, decades before the type appeared. He is the first top-level American politician to have internalised the modalities of social media for political purposes.”https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/problem-trump
2024-08-25 15:30:27 “Our research shows that while people fast-forward or skip videos to avoid boredom, this behaviour can actually make them feel more bored,” she said. “Just as we pay for an immersive experience in a movie theatre, enjoyment often comes from immersing ourselves in videos rather than swiping through them”https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/aug/19/scrolling-throug...
2024-08-25 13:28:47 “Algorithmic feeds make digital switching seem like the only kind of activity, the only way to intervene in a system intent on pacifying us — a system that muddles pacification with “immersion,” “engagement,” and “satisfaction.””https://robhorning.substack.com/p/no-flipping?utm_source=post-email-title&
2024-08-24 22:43:57 “Google’s own much-vaunted AI watermarking system was nowhere in sight when The Verge tried out the Pixel 9’s Magic Editor. The photos that are modified with the Reimagine tool simply have a line of removable metadata added to them. (The inherent fragility of this kind of metadata was supposed to be addressed by Google’s invention of the theoretically unremovable SynthID watermark”https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/22/24225972/ai-photo-era-what-is-reality...
2024-08-24 21:58:43 “Typically in IR, about 5 years pass between getting an idea and getting it published in a top journal (after multiple revisions which typically make the work ever more boringly conventional), so a full decade passes before that idea itself is used in a publication. In computer science and data analytics, a hot new method will be publicized, tested, &
2024-08-24 13:19:53 He “says his company received a grant from Johns Hopkins University to build “the world’s first AI caregiver trainer for dementia patients,” but that data labeling costs are “eating us alive.” The cost, he said, has skyrocketed 40% over the past year because of the specialized information needed from gerontologists, dementia experts, and veteran caregivers.”https://fortune.com/2024/08/23/data-labeling-ai-scaleai-snorkel-costs/I bet they’ll be needed for updates, too.
2024-08-22 13:18:51 “In an anthropocenic age characterized by accelerating technological development, building bridges between technical knowledge and that of the social sciences and humanities is arguably the most crucial civilisational challenge facing us.”https://www.e-ir.info/2024/05/09/interview-antoine-bousquet/
2024-08-22 12:51:43 “What really frightened me was the future of mediocrity [AI] suggested: the inescapable screens, the app-facilitated antisocial behavior, the assumptions advanced as knowledge, and above all the collective delusion formulated in high offices and peddled to common people that all this made for an easier life.”https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-47/essays/an-age-of-hyperabundance/
2024-08-21 16:05:53 “Most Britons are worried about the proliferation of hate speech and believe that social media platforms should be held to account for propagating it, as well as for the violence that often follows.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/21/world/europe/britain-riots-speech.html
2024-08-20 12:18:00 “”More than just another episode in the history of tools or media,” he writes, “it represents a culmination of the history of technology as such.” Because it presents itself as a neutral executor of our desires, embedded seamlessly into our daily lives, yet capable of transforming what and how we value, digital technology cuts across and transfigures everything we do.”https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/captive-users
2024-08-20 02:00:35 @jciv gotta keep that financial innovation coming!
2024-08-20 01:46:22 “Worldcoin has come under assault by authorities over its mission. It has been raided in Hong Kong, blocked in Spain, fined in Argentina and criminally investigated in Kenya. A ruling looms on whether it can keep operating in the European Union.More than a dozen jurisdictions have either suspended Worldcoin’s operations or looked into its data processing.“https://www.wsj.com/tech/sam-altman-openai-humanness-iris-scanning-4d0e1dab
2024-08-20 00:00:36 “The AI apps will be introduced for all subjects except for music, art, physical education and ethics by 2028, with teachers monitoring activity through a digital dashboard. Pupils will be given classes in digital literacy to help them to deploy AI tools responsibly.”https://www.ft.com/content/1f5c5377-5e85-4174-a54f-adc8f19fa5cb
2024-08-19 23:49:40 “Ruston says it will take time to create a new culture and norms around mobile phone use. But she predicts, “we are going to look back and say: ‘What were we thinking?’”, about the days when phones were permitted in class. One day, she hopes, mobiles in schools will be like smoking in a public building: something that just isn’t done.”https://www.ft.com/content/02e0f64c-08da-49ef-b3f6-f5673bdceb22
2024-08-19 14:12:56
2024-08-14 22:02:35 “Imagine an alternate universe in which people don’t have words for different forms of transportation—only the collective noun ‘vehicle.’ Such a world sees “furious debates about whether or not vehicles are environmentally friendly, even though no one realizes that one side of the debate is talking about bikes and the other side is talking about trucks.” Similarly, the term “A.I.” is capacious. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/in-the-age-of-ai-what-m...
2024-08-13 21:45:34 “Deployed on everything, Apple and Google’s AIs end up assuming strange roles, acting like personal assistants for administrative work but also for … talking to your friends and family? It’s mediation for mediation’s sake. Like a lot of first-wave AI tools, these are features that exist because they’re newly possible, not necessarily because they make sense.”https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/chatgpt-gmail-apple-intelligence... as operational language.
2024-08-12 02:04:12 “In 1843, Feuerbach complained that his own era “prefers the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation to the reality, appearance to being.””https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-image-culture
2024-08-11 14:50:44 During Rawls’s time working at a donut factory in Baltimore, he “was the helper of an older man named Ernie who operated one of the mixing machines. He had been there for 18 years and had three children to support, and it seemed he’d be there forever, breathing flour dust all his life.”https://aeon.co/essays/john-rawls-liberalism-and-what-it-means-to-live-a...
2024-08-11 00:27:23 “He has freest legal rein in the US, where the First Amendment protects almost all speech. Moreover, internet publishers are exempt from liability under the notorious Section 230 of the misleadingly named Communications Decency Act. But even in America you cannot falsely shout fire in a crowded theatre.”https://www.ft.com/content/bdd100a8-4817-44f6-9838-bda760aaebf1
2024-08-10 23:19:53 “In 2017, then–FTC Chair Ohlhausen gave a speech to antitrust lawyers warning about the rise of algorithmic collusion. “Is it okay for a guy named Bob to collect confidential price strategy information from all the participants in a market and then tell everybody how they should price?” she asked. “If it isn’t okay for a guy named Bob to do it, then it probably isn’t okay for an algorithm to do it either.”https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/08/ai-price-algorithms-re...
2024-08-10 22:03:47 “Generative AI is capable of producing mediocrity at an unimaginable scale and unwinding the sittlichkeit accrued over centuries, but relative to technologies that reproduce inequality &
2024-08-09 20:11:18 “We need to include a kill switch in case we lose control over our own creations — in case things get too real.”https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/virtual-reality-reboots-history
2024-08-09 12:30:22 “A majority of undergraduates in China major in math, science, engineering or agriculture, according to the Education Ministry. And three-quarters of China’s doctoral students do so.By comparison, only a fifth of American undergraduates and half of doctoral students are in these categories, although American data defines these majors a little more narrowly.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/09/business/china-ev-battery-tech.html
2024-07-29 11:57:33 “An AI model trained on its own output mangles a data set of dog breed images, according to Emily Wenger.Initially, common types such as golden retrievers would dominate while less common breeds such as Dalmatians disappeared. Finally, the images of golden retrievers themselves would become an anatomic mess, with body parts in the wrong place.”https://www.ft.com/content/ae507468-7f5b-440b-8512-aea81c6bf4a5
2024-07-29 11:53:17 A “re-immersion in Geertz’s opus left me with the feeling I have when I go back to read founding thinkers like Max Weber, or Ruth Benedict – that the richness of their response to the empirical realities with which they dealt far exceeded the labels placed on their work.”https://www.elsblog.org/the_empirical_legal_studi/2006/11/a_brief_tribut...
2024-07-29 11:41:36 “In place of an inner-authentic self, she argued that the inner organ of decision-making that guided one’s actions was the will.Following the work of St Augustine and Jaspers, Arendt turned Heidegger on his head and argued that all thinking moves from experience in the world, not from Being.”https://aeon.co/essays/what-hannah-arendt-proposed-as-an-alternative-to-...
2024-07-28 15:34:54 As the internet both homogenizes and atomizes culture, the “British might be losing something crucial if terms like “pillock” or “numpty” are forgotten. These traditional terms of abuse tend to be softer than their more contemporary equivalents, allowing a wider range of emphasis and intensity. Linguists say they can help defuse what could be an otherwise tense situation.”https://www.wsj.com/world/uk/british-slang-might-not-be-the-dogs-bollock...
2024-07-16 10:23:12 “Houstonians are, sadly, old hands at this. Lots of people have invested in generators—which have basically become an essential household appliance—to power things like fridges and fans and portable AC units. But there have even been issues in getting gas to fill those generators. Gas stations with no power mean inactive pumps.”https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/07/houston-power-outage...
2024-07-09 01:25:24 “If physics is the same everywhere, and there are no measurable differences in safety outcomes, why reinvent the wheel (or elevator)? America’s reputation for unbridled capitalism, and a stereotype of Europe as a backwater of overregulation is often turned on its head in the construction sector.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/08/opinion/elevator-construction-regulat...
2024-06-30 00:34:55 “Psychoanalysis with pragmatism, and pragmatism with psychoanalysis, however, seem unusually promising for helping you get the life you want. Unless, of course, there is something you want more than the life you want.”https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-phillips/on-getting-the-lif...
2024-06-29 02:37:23 “AlphaGo’s defeat of the world’s strongest player at the ancient game of Go was seen as a mind-blowing breakthrough in machine intelligence. But Graepel told the RAAIS conference that the biological complexities he now confronts in cell rejuvenation were “orders of magnitude” greater. “I have never seen so much complexity with so little data,” he said.”https://www.ft.com/content/03a636fd-aac4-427e-a393-31b4d08109d1
2024-06-21 14:54:11 “Other regions in the brain are working really hard when you’re doing all these forms of thinking,” she said. But the language networks stayed quiet. “It became clear that none of those things seem to engage language circuits”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/19/science/brain-language-thought.html
2024-06-21 14:53:04 “One can imagine the “Inside Out” series becoming a fictional, animated, and much less artistically ambitious analogue to the “Seven Up!” film and its sequels. Perhaps in “Inside Out 8” we will become acquainted with the forty-four-year-old Riley and meet the four newest emotions who run her life: Dysthymia, Indifference, Displaced Anger, and Rationalized Disappointment “https://www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/the-polite-therapy-of-the-ins...
2024-06-20 15:17:00 “The twentieth-century novel, she said in a famous distinction that was almost too brilliantly quotable, was “either crystalline or journalistic”. The crystalline novel was a small, perfect object like a poem, “quasi-allegorical”
2024-06-17 20:20:43 Drug dealers’ “links were long gone, scrubbed minutes or hours after the last exchange. That was why the dealers had moved to Snapchat: It was effectively a safe space for them. All forensics vanished within 24 hours, wiped clean by the delete function of the app. That wasn’t a bug but a feature of Snap, the code choice that sent its fortunes soaring.”https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/inside-snapchat-te...
2024-06-16 13:27:26 When “Oxford and Cambridge universities competed in the Boat Race, rowers were urged to avoid coming into contact with the water, which had tested with high levels of E. coli. The Cambridge men shunned the traditional victory celebration of throwing their coxswain into the water, with their coach instead promising to find a bucket of clean, sanitized water to douse him.”https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/poo-in-the-water-how-financial-eng...
2024-06-15 19:35:43 “How much time does a certain amount of drinking shave off your life? For those who have two drinks a week, that choice amounts to less than one week of lost life on average, he said. Consume seven alcoholic beverages a week, and that amount goes up to about two and a half months. Those who push five drinks a day or more face the risk of losing, on average, upward of two years”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/magazine/alcohol-health-risks.html
2024-06-15 15:28:25 “Tech companies would like everyone to use their products in the ways they expect, so that we become dependent on them and more predictable, more exploitable — more under their control. Part of mastering some piece of software is learning in part how to counter that control. The forced implementation of AI into applications is meant not to make them easier to use but to break our resistance”https://robhorning.substack.com/p/born-sloppy
2024-06-15 00:58:43 “An over-reliance on digital technology had made him feel distant from the physical world. It reduces the vibrancy of life and makes you feel like you’re floating around in a daze. It’s like being stuck in a cave watching wall of shadows, instead of being out in the world. The analogue trend is really just an effort to counteract that, &
2024-06-15 00:55:31 Doge was “rescued from a puppy mill, was named Kabosu, after the Japanese citrus that the pooch’s round face resembled.”https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/what-doge-taught-me-ab...
2024-06-15 00:31:00 “At the time of its founding, in 1998, Google declared a mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” With the company’s new range of updates, however, it seems content to bury the same material that it once was in the business of surfacing. What is most accessible is no longer necessarily what is most relevant, and so a major breakdown might be looming”https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/is-google-seo-gaslight...
2024-06-14 23:20:19 “Elinor Ostrom understood, as a political scientist, that efficiency was only one of the criteria by which we could judge allocation mechanisms. She was a great economist precisely because she wasn’t “really” an economist.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/opinion/larry-summers-inflation-inter...
2024-06-12 18:25:22 “Utterly indifferent to the usual criteria of the “readerly” text—his novels are skimpy on convincing accounts of psychology, event, or social structures—Aira is nonetheless peculiarly attentive to readers’ experience,&
2024-06-11 23:00:25 “Auto insurance companies use a lot of socioeconomic factors, like your credit score or your job or your education level, like whether you went to high school or to college or whether you’re married. People with poor credit scores pay much more for auto insurance even if they have clean driving records.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/09/technology/driver-scores-insurance-da...
2024-06-11 21:15:12 “According to a 2015 report by the Food Marketing Institute, nearly half the time we spend eating is spent in isolation, a central factor in America’s loneliness epidemic and a correlate to a range of physical- and mental-health problems.”https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/06/dining-rooms-us-homes-...
2024-06-11 01:43:28 “New Yorkers and Chicagoans don’t wonder how long their cities will go on existing, but in Phoenix in August, when the heat has broken 110 degrees for a month straight, the desert golf courses and urban freeways give this civilization an air of impermanence, like a mirage composed of sheer hubris, and a surprising number of inhabitants begin to brood on its disappearance.”https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/07/phoenix-climate-dro...
2024-06-10 22:35:07 “At Meta, lawyers and engineers last year discussed buying Simon &
2024-06-09 14:12:19 “A tenant in one of the group’s projects had left a pot on the stove, triggering a small fire. The sprinklers went off, causing flood damage. Later, rats chewed the water pipes. More water damage.Each flood remediation, she said, could cost Catholic Housing Services $50,000 — for a building whose entire annual operating budget is $350,000.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/07/us/home-insurance-homeless-affordable...
2024-06-07 22:50:26 “At this time 15 years ago, real-estate agents had 2.2 million vacant housing units available to show prospective buyers. That number has dwindled and dwindled and now sits at just 732,000, despite the country having added 30 million people to its population. The Case-Shiller index of home prices sits near its highest-ever inflation-adjusted level
2024-06-06 20:02:27 “I cannot see that a system can be called robust when it produces complete misanalyses and does so without leaving any indication that it has had difficulty processing the text. It would probably be better if the system produced no analysis at all and indicated that it could not process the text.”https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/why-hallucination-examining-the-hist...
2024-06-06 14:19:37 “Individual journalists at BNN published lengthy stories as often as multiple times a minute, writing in generic prose familiar to anyone who has tinkered with the A.I. chatbot ChatGPT. BNN’s “About Us” page featured an image of four children looking at a computer, some bearing the gnarled fingers that are a telltale sign of an A.I.-generated image.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/06/technology/bnn-breaking-ai-generated-...
2024-06-06 00:45:01 “People are already working to exploit the data structures and algorithms that govern our world. Amazon drivers hang smartphones in trees to trick the system. Songwriters put their catchy choruses near the beginning to exploit Spotify’s algorithms. And podcasters deliberately mispronounce words because people comment with corrections and those comments count as “engagement” to the algorithms.”https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/seeing-data-structure
2024-06-05 15:56:47 “Like everything else on the internet, the goal is to addict the user. Plexure and other digital marketers talk openly about the “dopamine rush” that getting a targeted deal can release. And the reason those deals are so smart about their subjects has to do not only with Plexure’s tracking of data from within the app, but the agglomeration of that with everything else in your digital, and even non-digital, life.”https://prospect.org/api/content/fc7fdcca-21d8-11ef-91ca-12163087a831/
2024-06-04 01:15:53 “We have a sense for how confident we are about our own knowledge. This has been a big problem for LLMs. They have no calibration for how confident they are …Without some extra ability to ground what they’re saying in the world, they can’t really know if something they’re saying is true or false.”https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/how-to-raise-your-artificial-intelli...
2024-06-04 00:29:52 “He’s clearly committing crimes. He’s documenting it on Instagram. It’s frustrating that Instagram hasn’t taken this down.”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/29/us/seattle-belltown-hellcat.html
2024-06-04 00:06:00 “What if prices in the economy, as Sherrod Brown suggested, have a little bit less to do with supply and demand, and a little bit more to do with corporate schemes aimed at parting consumers from their money? What if the Fed’s capacity to stem inflation is simply more limited now?”https://prospect.org/api/content/37b63b94-1eb0-11ef-94f5-12163087a831/
2024-06-01 20:07:53 “According to the Center for Automotive Research, seven other auto plants — GM and Chrysler — shut down within months of Janesville. Eventually, these others have found new uses. The one that sat empty longest held its grand opening last autumn as one of Georgia’s largest television and movie production studios.” https://www.ft.com/content/7ee5a314-1aa1-439b-817e-41a3c5f3c410America’s economic shift in a nutshell: from Fords to films.
2024-05-31 23:47:04 “Graham’s project increasingly rested in depicting the sundering to which mind and spirit are subjected in our arid modernity. The compositional attitude ran in the other direction, offering an air of unmistakable self-belief, abetted, surely, by the privilege of her existing accomplishment. None of her peers rendered doubt, dispersal or inner dissonance with greater certitude and command.”https://thepointmag.com/criticism/doom-scroll/
2024-05-31 21:03:29 “Max Read points out that Google is using generative models to replace the pseudo-marketplace-of-ideas offered by search results with something more overtly authoritarian. “There is not even the veneer of transparency or choice: The workings of LLMs are constitutively opaque and what you are given is not a scroll of posts or search results to pick from but a single-source, semi-regurgitated synthesis to be treated as mystically authoritative.””https://robhorning.substack.com/p/implosion-sites
2024-05-31 19:55:14 “Creators must also be influencers to compete in the attention economy. “Influencers get attention by exposing parts of their life that have nothing to do with the production of culture,” Chayka says, whether by tweeting about it, posting visuals on Instagram, making TikTok videos, or writing newsletters. But lately, the social-media landscape has changed in a way that disadvantages unknown novelists specifically.”https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a60924704/debut-fiction-chal...
2024-05-30 19:29:28 “End-of-days idioms are showing up around the world. In Argentina, “disociando” (to zone out during stressful situations) enjoyed a spike in 2023. Also in 2023, SGL chose “krisenmodus” (crisis mode) as Germany’s word of the year, explaining, “There have always been crises. But it feels like there is so much crisis [now] … Between apathy and alarmism, it is difficult to find an appropriate way of dealing.””https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a60295595/doomslang-trend/
2024-05-29 18:40:27 “Today, American “tech” companies compete to host crypto apps on your phone and mount video game consoles on your face, while the American economy remains chained to fossil fuels through dirty energy lobbying and political inertia. The future belongs to green tech and green manufacturing, and the US is only beginning to consider its role in the 21st century commercial milieu.”https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/05/biden-china-alexander-hamilt...
2024-05-28 18:54:06 Indie the political deepfake factory: “Jadoun was trying to capture enough audio and video data to build an AI deepfake of Rathore that would convince 300,000 potential voters around Ajmer that they’d had a personalized conversation with him—but excess movement would break the algorithm. Jadoun told his subject to look straight into the camera and move only his lips.”https://www.wired.com/story/indian-elections-ai-deepfakes/
2024-05-27 15:21:07 “In theory, more data should enable Tesla to efficiently identify edge cases its self-driving software needs to handle. More data should also enable Tesla to train better neural networks.But…access to more data is…not a magic bullet. One issue is that the data Tesla collects is unlabeled. Waymo’s safety drivers document each disengagement to help identify flaws in Waymo’s software. But Tesla customers are unlikely to do that.”https://www.understandingai.org/p/on-self-driving-waymo-is-playing
2024-05-27 13:45:16 “Losses from severe convective storms increased by about 9% every year between 1989 and 2022, according to the insurance firm Aon. Last year these storms caused more than $50bn in insured losses combined – about as much as 2022’s huge Hurricane Ian. No single storm event caused more than a few billion dollars of damage, but together they were more expensive than most big disasters.”https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/24/hail-storm-t...
2024-05-27 13:36:43 “China’s unrivaled production of solar panels and electric vehicles is built on an earlier cultivation of the chemical, steel, battery and electronics industries, as well as large investments in rail lines, ports and highways.From 2017 to 2019, it spent an extraordinary 1.7 percent of its gross domestic product on industrial support”https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/27/business/economy/china-us-tariffs.html
2024-05-27 13:35:50 Adam Phillips: “knowing absolutely what one wants is the most defensive thing one can do”https://overcast.fm/+ytvbhw7kQ/13:57
2024-05-26 20:15:35 “So much is broken. Whole areas go unpoliced