Alex Dobrenko

“It isn't poor taste. It's what you do with it that's poor taste.” - Don Featherstone

I can’t think of a piece of writing that does this more effectively than Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp.’” In her words, “a sensibility is one of the hardest things to talk about... To snare a sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and powerful, one must be tentative and nimble. The form of jottings, rather than an essay (with its claim... See more

In a 2017 interview, Ev Williams (the founder of Twitter), said something that has stuck with me since: “the trouble with algorithms, is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it... See more

This is, by the way, the dirty secret of the machine learning movement: almost everything produced by ML could have been produced, more cheaply, using a very dumb heuristic you coded up by hand, because mostly the ML is trained by feeding it examples of what humans did while following a very dumb heuristic. There's no magic here. If you use ML to... See more

3. Start or end every day with writing about your life. There’s always something buried underneath the to do list in your head, something you didn’t realise you felt, that when written down, will make everything clearer.

PEREZ: You are fucking hilarious. Do you remember that time? It was a Deontay Wilder fight at the Barclays Center. You were there with Kiki and we were sitting next to you.

TYSON: The actor guy. He’s a good actor. I seen him on television the other day.

PEREZ: Yeah, Oscar Isaac. He saw me and he’s like, “I want to meet Mike Tyson.” So I go over to... See more

To really like my work I have to look at it with different eyes. I have to forget everyone who did it better or faster, and remind myself that no one has ever done it quite the way I have. I have to remind myself that the people I compare myself to probably compare themselves to others and that if they let their self-doubt keep them from creating... See more