Agalia Tan

I don’t talk about it much but I do work at Google and I just want to contribute, as a small addendum to the wider conversation about AI, and how much it sucks, and how stupid it is, and how if you make garlic oil like it tells you to you will give botulism to your entire family -

we don’t use it.

like internally. we don’t use it.

I mean that we... See more

"Think about the little things you enjoy, then turn around and do them for someone else.

If you feel relief when someone asks a question in class, then other students are probably relieved too. Be the one who asks.

If you love it when a friend calls to check in, your friends probably love it too. Be the one who calls.

If it makes your whole day when... See more

Here’s my point. Some people think that writing is merely the process of picking the right words and putting them in the right order, like stringing beads onto a necklace. But the power of those words, if there is any, doesn’t live inside the words themselves. On its own, “Love the questions” is nearly meaningless. Those words only come alive when... See more

In most areas of computing, programmers write code or train an AI model to achieve specific objectives, such as driving a car without crashing or generating humanlike text. Stanley creates systems that instead evolve, seeking novelty for its own sake. These systems sometimes discover stepping stones toward solutions that couldn’t be achieved via a... See more

not only are we playing an ever-expanding cast of characters, but we’re expected to commercialize them for public use, before facing their contradictions head on in the panopticon of our digital ecosystems.

With Instagram there was the idea that my life is constantly available for perception and evaluation by other people. I had these thoughts: I’d upload a photo and then I’d view my Instagram story and try to pretend to be somebody else—a stranger—and imagine how they’d see me. I’d be trying to present myself to be legible in a certain way to... See more