Recent content in Blog on Jay Mollica
In the ancient Greek play The Frogs by Aristophanes, the god Dionysus decides there has been a decline in good theater, so he endeavors to retrieve the late playwright Euripides from Hades and bring him back to Athens. On his way he must cross Lake Acheron in a boat guided by Charon, where he is antagonized by a chorus of frogs. The god of excess arguing with a bunch of frogs on his way to hell…
Last year The New Yorker published “ The New Literalism Plaguing Today’s Biggest Movies ,” an essay by Namwali Serpell regarding the simplification of movie plots. This simplification emerged from the assumption that most people are looking at their phones while the movie plays, so themes need to feel familiar and dialogue needs to be redundant in order to make the viewer feel…
Sam Altman doesn’t understand the technology he’s building. In a recent New Yorker profile , neither he nor anyone else interviewed could quite explain how large language models produce what they produce, or what they’ll do next, or whether they pose an existential threat to the species. Altman holds this opacity up as a reason he should be the one in control of it. The move…
In 2006 a new facet of art history was identified called “post-internet”, signifying art that has been made within the native context of the internet. That is, the internet is no longer regarded as a separate entity to daily life, it represents ideas and art that is made in a society fully saturated by connectivity and mass media the internet provides. Art made in this context…
An unacknowledged truth in museums is that you are either an audio tour person or not an audio tour person and no amount of persuading can convince you otherwise. This is a fixed part of your identity that you’re born with like your innate fear of snakes or preference for chocolate over vanilla. Furthermore, only a vanishingly small number of people are audio guide people. This stat will…
Most people’s associations with technology come from media narratives about Silicon Valley. Teams of software engineers working at an accelerated pace, pumping out new software, new features, new designs. Museums on the other hand, work at an entirely different cadence. As the cost of technical labor skyrocketed in the 2010s, museum budgets failed to keep up. The result is an increasing gap…
With the proliferation of AI there’s been a lot of concern that certain professions may be rendered obsolete. I would argue, the consolidation of web design by AI is a signal of what we think the internet is for rather than what design does. Today I’d like to take a look at the implications this technology has on the field of design. Early web design was defined by free form aesthetics…
If you’re following AI trends, you’ve seen the profession of software engineering change overnight. One veteran engineer after another has been saying they haven’t written any code in months, but rather rely purely on AI to produce work (aka vibe coding). In this year alone we are already seeing pure vibe coded apps get acquired. For instance, OpenClaw, an AI assistant, was…