Longreads
• Cheri Lucas Rowlands
"The industry has grown rapidly, straining state budgets. A focus on finances has led to overbilling, fraud and even harm."
My Son’s Math Homework Is Essentially Just Pokémon. “As I watched my son play Prodigy, it became clear there wasn’t much learning happening. In about 10 minutes of gameplay, he spent less than 30 seconds answering math questions.”
The first-ever Enhanced Games (open to those using performance-enhancing drugs) featured 42 athletes, three of whom were competing clean. All three won their respective events.
Tenderly Tracking My Husband. “Knowing when to step in and tell a loved one with [Alzheimer’s] that they can no longer do something because it’s too risky is a game of chance we caregivers hate to play.” Lovely & heartbreaking.
Longreads
• Cheri Lucas Rowlands
"An analysis of 200,000 similes from popular fiction."
Great title for a book: Fascist Yoga. “Ever since, the world of yoga has been full of grifters, occultists and white supremacists, all out to exploit and recruit via the medium of exercise.”
Colossal
• Kate Mothes
Hugh Broughton Architects incorporates designs by artist and illustrator James Lambert, who interprets the distinctive character of each location.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Eight London Underground Restrooms Get Vibrant Refurbs with Illustrated Tiles appeared first on Colossal.
Longreads
• Krista Stevens
"Cooking. Doing laundry. Tidying up. All your household tasks can be turned into data to train future humanoids—if you’re prepared for the consequences."
Pinterest Has Become Unusable. “When I started painting again in January, I went back to Pinterest and found it overrun with AI slop. It’s continued to get worse and worse, and it’s now basically unusable.”
An unusual new-to-me animal: the aardwolf. It’s a hyena but it eats insects like an aardvark. The cubs are incredibly cute.
A lot of the emails I get from founders are now written in a hard-hitting journalistic style. I know they're written by AI, because no founder ever wrote this way before. And once you realize something is written by AI, it's hard not to ignore it.
I have never knowingly finished reading an email signed by a human but written by AI. It feels like being lied to, and who would stand for that?
[...] It makes me think less of the author. It means they can't write well unaided (or feel they can't), and that they're trying to trick me.
It's not impressive to use AI to write stuff for you; any teenager can do that.
Tags: writing, ai-misuse, paul-graham, generative-ai, ai, llms
Essential summertime reading: Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning. “Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for, is rarely seen in real life.”
