culture

The most frequent complaint I hear about streaming services is that they don’t pay artists fairly. Michael Pelczynski, the former Vice President of Strategy at SoundCloud, took that complaint personally. Over his five years with the streaming service, he helped conceive and implement a novel payment scheme that received much praise.

In an hour-long... See more

“There’s no way to make these systems without human labor at the level of informing the ground truth of the data — reinforcement learning with human feedback, which again is just kind of tech-washing precarious human labor. It’s thousands and thousands of workers paid very little, though en masse it’s very expensive, and there’s no other way to... See more

There’s also an almost unbearable sense of intimacy between author and reader — Céline famously said “what interests me is a direct message to the nervous system.” His total reliance on ellipses forecloses the cheap little tricks used to construct the artifice of what we are told is “good” writing: the strategic period, the melodramatic line break,... See more

To me, the significance of the theory is its introduction of a coherent frame by which we can better understand root causes for the complex array of global catastrophic risks and the prevailing crises that humanity currently faces. Critically, the Metacrisis theory also calls to our attention a staggering hidden premonition: our civilization... See more

We can’t address the decline in empathy without addressing the decline in attention . Empathy requires a degree of sustained focus:

• Paying attention to an experience someone is sharing


• Recalling experiencing a similar emotional response


• Sitting with your own and the other person’s inner state

When we are fragmented and distracted , we simply can’t... See more