Brian Wiesner

Cities, like the residents that call them home, tend to run on distinct circadian rhythms; internal, collective clocks that dictate when the streets and town squares come alive, peaking with movement and activity, and when they eventually begin to quiet down, the bars, cafes and clubs emptying.

Having temporarily relocated from Berlin to Sydney,... See more

A very common trope is to treat LLMs as if they were intelligent agents going out in the world and doing things. That’s just a category mistake. A much better way of thinking about them is as a technology that allows humans to access information from many other humans and use that information to make decisions. We have been doing this for as long... See more

there is a third way, the Goldilocks Zone : we get increasingly smart and capable helpers without eliminating the need for humans, or birthing beings that have any desire to eliminate humans.

That is the implication of agreeing with Leopold’s curve but disagreeing with the mapping. It’s what you get when you believe in straight lines on a graph... See more

But if you think about your career from the perspective of which skills you have developed and where else they might be applicable, you’ll realize that opportunities are near-infinite . Journalists can become investors. Corporate executives can become authors. Even in the case of the most rigid disciplines such as law and medicine, nothing is... See more

When Roman war hero Valerius Maximus Messalla brought back a sundial from Catania after capturing the city in 263 BC, the crowds cheered—but this symbolic triumph over the Sicilian city soon became an ironic triumph over the lives of Roman citizens. The foreign timekeeping device, installed in the Roman Forum, heralded many more that were soon... See more

Even the sound of the word repels the smartest and most creative among us. You hear it and think, well that isn’t for me. Networking feels icky and so boring. It is something that a gel-haired sales bro does to fool people into buying what they’re selling. Not me.

It’s transactional. It feels daunting and unnatural. Plus, imagine mustering up the... See more

Thanks to the power of this myth, many of us take the safe route in life. We become lawyers instead of actresses, bankers instead of poets, and doctors instead of painters. We hedge our bets and hide from our true calling, choosing less risky careers, because it seems easier. Nobody wants to struggle, after all, so we keep our passion a hobby and... See more

Massively available video recordings of practitioners in action change this entirely. Through these videos, learners can now partially replicate the master-apprentice relationship, opening up skill domains and economic niches that were previously cordoned off by personal access. These new points of access range from the specialized trades, where... See more

Way beneath every step you’ve ever taken and every step you will take is this thing called mycelium. Long threads of fungi that grow one cell at a time, branching and re-branching, growing in every direction. They even grow three-dimensionally.