Cal Newport compares ultra-processed food to ultra-processed content:
This analogy between food and media is useful because it helps us better understand responses to the latter. In the context of nutrition, we’re comfortable deciding to largely avoid ultra-processed food for health reasons.
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This is how we should think about the ultra-processed content delivered so relentlessly through our screens. To bypass these media for less processed alternatives should no longer be seen as bold, or radical, or somehow reactionary. It’s just a move toward a self-evidently more healthy relationship with information.
National treasure Matt Levine on Safe Superintelligence:
OpenAI was founded to build artificial general intelligence safely, free of outside commercial pressures. And now every once in a while it shoots out a new AI firm whose mission is to build artificial general intelligence safely, free of the commercial pressures at OpenAI.
Via Simon Willison, Nikhil Suresh, I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again:
Most organizations cannot ship the most basic applications imaginable with any consistency, and you’re out here saying that the best way to remain competitive is to roll out experimental technology that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than anything else your I.T department runs, which you have no experience hiring for, when the organization has never used a GPU for anything other than junior engineers playing video games with their camera off during standup, and even if you do that all right there is a chance that the problem is simply unsolvable due to the characteristics of your data and business? This isn’t a recipe for disaster, it’s a cookbook for someone looking to prepare a twelve course fucking catastrophe.
Neven Mrgn, How it feels to get an AI email from a friend:
It felt like the episode of Mrs. Maisel where Midge discovers that her husband’s comedy act features stolen Bob Newhart jokes.
Dynomight delivers 43 pieces of Obvious Travel Advice:
Time seems to speed up as you get older. And you wonder—is it biological, or is it because life had more novelty when you were a child? Travel partly answers this question—with more novelty, time slows way down again.
Finally, Phil Hazleden reviews The Iliad:
So I got basically no sense of what it was like to be on the battlefield. How large was it? How closely packed are people during fighting? How long does it take to strip someone of their armor and why isn’t it a virtual guarantee that someone else will stab you while you do? The logistics of the war are a mystery to me too: how many Greeks are there and where do they get all their food? We’re told how many ships each of the commanders brought, but how many soldiers and how many servants to a ship?