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The remarkable thing about television is that it permits several million people to laugh at the same joke and still feel lonely. — T.S. Eliot, 1963 Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. — Dune , Frank Herbert, 1965 An interesting rumination on literacy and AI by Jan Mullen: We seem to be grieving literacy in public lately. Neuroscientists show how the “reading brain”…
I’m not interested in walking across the country (vanity), or visiting every baseball stadium (trivia). I don’t need to super-max wealth (accumulation), or stay quiet with my opinions (self-protection). That’s the negative frame of ambition, but with what shall I fill my own ambitious life? I’ve realized that my ambition is diffuse. I want to execute the work only I can do, and to intensify my…
I recently learned about the “rats in cage theory” and it helped put things into perspective. Essentially, when rats are in a cage together and one of them tries to get out, the others try taking them down, preventing them to be free. That’s the internet.
The phone eats time; it makes us live the way people do inside a casino, dropping a blackout curtain over the windows to block out the world, except the blackout curtain is a screen, showing too much of the world, too quickly. This avoidance of time’s actual flow, this compulsion toward the chronophage, the time-eater, is a horror story that is likely to happen only in a society that is busily…
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over-animation. One can either see or be seen. — John Updike Notice the difference between when you’re creating in light mode and heavy mode . Notice how the internet favors light mode . You feel like…
For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper Now I let it fall back in the grasses. I hear you. I know this life is hard now. I know your days are precious on this earth. But what are you trying to be free of? The living? the miraculous task of it? Love is for the ones who love the work. Sean Monahan's post on 8 Ball sez... As we pair increasingly sophisticated data with ever more advanced…
The Doorway Effect describes the phenomenon when you enter a new room and your brain resets its focus, often causing you to forget what you were thinking about or planning to do in the previous room. It essentially creates a mental "event boundary" between spaces. Like leaving a cave to go hunting. Or entering a clearing from a forest. Horizon Gazing is the phenomenon where looking at the horizon…
Hanif Abdurraqib's new book, “There’s Always This Year” had a quote which echoes the notion that a person is the summary of the five people they spend the most time with. “I propose that above all, you are a reflection of who loves you. We are a reflection of the people who love us.” “The meaning of life is just to be alive.” — Alan Watts “Meaning arises out of the social interaction that people…
This post about Hokusai’s Great Wave was interesting. It took 34 years of drawing waves to arrive at the iconic image. Werner Herzog’s book “Every Man for Himself and God Against All” is bananas and the audio book is narrated by the author in his thick Bavarian accent. The man has lived an insane life and a perfect snapshot of Herzog comes from his cameo in “The Mandalorian”, excerpted below: He…