In which I criticize Churchill and admire Dr George Augustus Auden.
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Freeman Dyson (1997):
It often happens that a scientific revolution is accompanied by a change in style. I like to use the names of Napoleon and Tolstoy to symbolize two contrasting styles: rigid organization and discipline represented by Napoleon, creative chaos and freedo...
Tikkun Olam, One Prompt at a Time | Sara Wolkenfeld and Samuel Arbesman:
If the Jewish approach to AI does not revolve around the imposition of a single utopian vision, then the focus should be on how AI technologies can act as enabling tools: ones that allow each of us to ...
Currently listening: John Hiatt, Crossing Muddy Waters. Haven’t listened to this in years, and am glad to be reconnected with it. Almost every song a banger. ♫
Another example. “I meant to do that.”
I’m struggling with manual focus and exposure on this film camera, but let’s call this a deliberate artifice … and call it a day.
Currently listening: Claire Holley, Where I Lived. What a superb record. Now, Claire is an old friend, and I listened to this when it came out some months ago — but I didn’t really hear it. My recently chaotic life had to settle down a bit before there was enough silence inside me to let this music in. The songs are beautifully arranged and recorded, and the whole mood is meditative, reflective, evocative. But above all these are wonderful songs, songs that often go (lyrically and harmonically) in directions you don’t expect but that always in the end come sweetly home. ♫
Donald Knuth:
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be...
Freddie preaching the gospel:
The spectacle of grown adults insisting that we simply cannot judge college students for outsourcing their thinking to machines is one of those little moral evasions that contemporary culture specializes in: tender, quasi-therapeutic, progressi...
I have a large collection of Library of America volumes, and I love almost all of them, but one big disappointment is American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau. I’m disappointed because the collection exemplifies an attitude that I questioned in my little essay “How Not To Save the Planet.” Too many pieces in the collection are about “the Earth” or “the planet” or “Nature” or “the environment”; not enough are about specific places.
That’s because in AItopia nobody will ever go anywhere.
Jane Freilicher, The Painting Table
This Adam Neely video about his alma mater, the Berklee College of Music, which is simultaneously fascinating and immensely discouraging, provides an excellent illustration of the ways that all the institutions scrambling to get on board the AI train, in the belief that that will make them seem up-to-date and relevant, just end up giving a “How do you do, fellow kids” vibe.
To each his own, but I’d rather go to the First Church of Lucifer Antichrist than to James Talarico’s church. Say what you will about Satanism, dude, at least it’s an ethos.
Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want | The Verge: I don’t think this is the right framing. The Valley techbros have never known what normal people want, do not care what normal people want, and do not believe that they need to know or care. They’re planning to do what they want to do in complete indifference to the preferences of anyone else.
Over at Cosmos Malick, a long post on Knight of Cups.
Mandy Brown:
In one layoff announcement after another, we hear that AI can now do the work of a great many people, which is why far fewer people are needed to do the work. If, for the moment, we take that assertion at face value, this still leaves an obvious alternati...
Currently listening: Mingus Ah Um 🎵
If I were the Emperor of American Christianity, I would forbid any complaints about how persecuted American Christians are unless they include the following three points:
- The early church, and Christians in many parts of the world right now, have it infinitely worse than we do;
- Jesus promised us that if we are faithful to him we will be persecuted;
- And Jesus also commanded us to rejoice when we are thus persecuted.
