There are 2 posts from April 2024.
Robin Sloan, in his latest newsletter, on the âphase changeâ of AI training.
When capability increases so substantially, the activity under discussion is not âthe same thing, only fasterâ. It is a different activity altogether. Phase change.
Basically, I want to immunize you against this analogy, and this objection. Thereâs plenty to reasonably debate in this nascent field, but any comparison between AI training and human education is just laughably wrong.
This is what digitization does, again and again: by removing friction, by collapsing time and space, it undermines our intuitions about production and exchange.
No human ever metabolized information as completely as these language models. âAs our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.â Youâre gonna need fresh intuitions.
Robinâs new novel, Moonbound, comes out in June. Spoiler alert: itâs fucking great.
ten recent good things
Deb Chachraâs book, How Infrastructure Works.
I think of these two systems, time and mapping, as the infrastructure for infrastructure. Their growth in extent and precision has paralleled and enabled the infrastructural networks that rely on them.
Olga Tokarczukâs novel, Flights.
The world is ready to be overturned â itâs only a convention that the floor is beneath our feet, while the ceiling is overhead, the body no longer belongs just to itself, but is instead a part of a live chain, a section of a living circle.
Episode 9 of ShĹgun.
Accepting death isnât surrender. Flowers are only flowers because they fall.
Jaqueline Novakâs Netflix special, Get On Your Knees.
I do have a sort of poetic sensibility I like to warn people about at the top of the show because I know it can be trying at times. I canât help myself. Yeah, I used to write poetry in college. Like many, I gave it up. I grew tired. I grew tired of being in a constant state of enchantment. You know, just so many hours spent curled in windowsills, just the muscles cramping, the eyes drying out from all that wonderment, just⌠Every night seeing the moon as if for the first goddamn time. I just wanted to grow accustomed to the moon, you know? I wanted to take moonlight for granted, like other girls.
Ted Gioia on the MacGuffin, What Is Really Inside the Briefcase in âPulp Fictionâ?
The fun is in the pursuit, not its final object. But consider the unsettling implication: Hollywood heroes are really chasing nothing.
Robin Rendle, Longboarding.
Onboarding is the interface. All of it. Not just a check list or a flow or big dumb modals with fancy illustrations in them. Onboarding is every moment in the application. So every moment should be cared for.
Heather Cox Richardson, April 12, 2024.
At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort built on an artificial island in Charleston Harbor. ⌠Over the next four years, the Civil War would take more than 620,000 lives and cost the United States more than $5 billion. By 1865, two-thirds of the assessed value of southern wealth had evaporated; two-fifths of the livestockâ horses and draft animals for tilling fields as well as pigs and sheep for foodâ were dead. Over half the regionâs farm machinery had been destroyed, most factories were burned, and railroads were gone, either destroyed or worn out. But by the end of the conflagration, the institution of human enslavement as the central labor system for the American South was destroyed.
Amanda Petrusich, Maggie Rogersâs Journey from Viral Fame to Religious Studies.
Headlines are overblown by design, but her audienceâs devotionâsomething akin to worshipâwas real. The tumult of the Trump Administration and the pandemic meant that Rogersâs fans, like everyone, were increasingly desperate for moral guidance. But Rogers was, too. âI was looking for answers, just the same as everybody else,â she said. âIt was really jarringâpeople asking me for advice on suicide, or to perform marriages. I started to realize that there was this functional misalignment with the work that I had trained to do and the work that I was being asked to perform.â
Rosencrans Baldwin, Stillness.
Phones ping. Pots clatter. Every day has its heartbeats and hydraulics, and so do I. But to sit with them, feel them in my chest and know them betterâa feeling of freedom grips me.
Brooks Reitz, A sauce for anything/everything.
Tonnato is a sauce made from canned tuna, lemon, olive oil, anchovies, and mayonnaise. It doesnât jump off the page when you read âtuna sauce,â but it way overdelivers on the plate. It comes together in the food processor in minutes and should be deployed liberally on anything: raw veggies, hard boiled eggs, and grilled chicken being a few of my favorite vehicles.