internet culture

If you consider yourself a technologist, here’s your imperative: build things that are unabashedly, beautifully tangled into all else in life — people and relationships, politics, emotion and pain, understanding or the lack thereof, being alone, being together, homesickness, adventure, victory, loss. Build things that come alive, and drag... See more

New Anthropic research: How university students use Claude. We ran a privacy-preserving analysis of a million education-related conversations with Claude to produce our first Education Report. https://t.co/apwAqH1ol3

So I’ll end with a very weird question: What does slow AI look like? We’ve automatically assumed that the way we interact with it is instantaneous. Are we sure that’s right? Would it be interesting to be able to say to an AI, Look, over the next three or four months, can you give me some ideas about holidays in Greece? Do we want to make that... See more

This situation, where more data is the goal, means there is great collection software and terrible decision making software. We are told to star, favorite, and bookmark everything. Yet, like real life hoarders, we cannot say what exactly we collected or why. Nor can we find any of it. How many times have you spent an hour trying to find that one... See more

In Sarah Schulman’s book The Gentrification of the Mind , she laments, “Will everything (books, music, pornography, education, movies, friendship, camaraderie, love, and television) all be free if they’re consumed online and prohibitively expensive to experience in person?” She wrote this in 2012 and may not have anticipated how much further that... See more

If technology-inflected solitarist identity makes it difficult or impossible to identify and admire heroes, saints and sages, then it will be difficult or impossible for us to learn how to live well in the digital age.

We’re seeing the progressive unbundling of human agency in memory creation, and I think it’s happening in clear phases.

The first phase started a very long time ago. Cameras, voice recorders, and digital notebooks were primitive tools for documentation. Sure, each of these tools were enhanced by technology. We chose what to capture and the tools... See more

It is not a critical approach towards values, policy, nor the subsequent consequences of these artifacts. We experience our political landscape through the veneer of our “ discourse interfaces” (that’s a Reggie phrase) .

Whereas philosophers, psychologists, and the like search for models of human cognition and behavior, the field of artificial intelligence aims to take such models and turn them into useful tools in reality. As the salience of vibes as a way of (not) explaining experience has grown, so too have the applications of machine learning and neural... See more