Sparks 👁️

You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system, and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not second-to-highest. But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling... See more

“When we are deprived of green, of plants, of trees, most of us (though evidently not all of us) succumb to a demoralization of spirit which we usually blame on some psychological or neurochemical malady, until one day we find ourselves in a garden or park or countryside and feel the oppression vanish as if by magic.”

➪ Robert Harrison

Borrowing from Mark Twain, who borrowed from Josh Billings, the difference between getting this right and getting it almost right is the difference between the lightning bug and lightning.

Sense-making emerges out of nonsense, to be blunt. We need to accept stages of confusion as potentially enjoyable, playful, resources.

I have long been a subscriber to the idea that any intelligence needs to be embodied and situated. The very first problems a baby has to solve are, How do I move my body? How do I move around in the world? Those tasks are entirely missing from existing large language models. And, as many people noted, the phrase “large language model” is a... See more

Why are we seeing a global homogenizing of culture across every dimension that counts? Why has Hollywood become so creatively bankrupt that nobody bothers watching that oh-so-predictable-52nd sequel to a superhero movie? Why have pop songs become so objectively similar? Why is everyone following the same formula for their posts on Instagram and hum... See more

‘The food is wet and crunchy, and tastes of all the cutting-up she just did to it,’ Brown writes: a sentence that stops the reader in their tracks.