provocations

provocative ideas, musings, and statements to mull on

If we want to understand what AIs are going to look like, I think the proto AI that we have are corporations. Corporations are sort of these funny little beasts. They’re not small. I guess they’re not little beasts, but they’re strange. It takes special training to have humans be able to fit within them. They’re made out of humans mostly but... See more

Recode Staff • Full transcript: Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle on Recode Decode

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Alexis Ohanian Sr. on LinkedIn: As recommendation algorithms continue to get more advanced and… | 11 comments

linkedin.com

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Do ideas really occur in chains, or is the lineal structure imposed on them by scholars and philosophers? How is the world of logic, which eschews “circular argument” related to a world in which circular trains of causation are the rule rather than the expectation? (G. Bateson, 2002, p.18)

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I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing – their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling – their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses.

To sit alone without any electric light is curiously... See more

Jeanette Winterson • Why I Adore the Night, by Jeanette Winterson

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Dear @Apple, not a complaint, but an emoji curiosity: help me understand why 📈is red, and not green. And why 📉 is blue, and not red.

Danny Meyer twitter.com

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love observations like these. we assume people inside legit institutions are all competent, when the truth is everyone is just winging it and we can always make things better.

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Frank by Seth Brown

The Misalignment Museum

This is the first and most important test of alternative values. Can you take your own exit, and stay on the road. If the answer is no, there's no there there.

Reggie James • SAVE THE INTERNET

aron

Figma acquisition shows how hard it is to turn money into software. You'd think for $20B you could build something as good as Figma yourself, but you can't. Software is art.

Nathan Manousos twitter.com

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As a practical matter, I think it's easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty. Most of the people who've made beautiful things seem to have done it by fixing something that they thought ugly. Great work usually seems to happen because someone sees something and thinks,

I could do better than that.

Paul Graham • Taste for Makers

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