reading, watching & listening to

This was illuminating. My notes:

Negative power is the way people have been control for most of human history.

Negative power means being controlled by prohibition or limitation, telling people you can’t do this or that. Today, people are controlled through positive power. Positive power tells you you can be whatever you want, you’re in charge, so you have no limitations. As long as you can put your head down, focus, grind, achieve your short term goals, set new ones and achieve those.

Authenticity is an ad campaign of neo-liberalism. It's a self absorbed nightmare. People now have to define themselves through themselves without any sort of help from the outside. Everyone is their own little personal project. Everything we learn is not just learning anymore. It's an investment in ourselves. Everything is about mentally optimizing yourself working, producing more efficiently with your mind.

Smaller, slower distribution could mean better content, better relationships, and better businesses — doubtless at smaller scales than what was hoped from BuzzFeed, Vice, etc., but then those didn’t work out. The benefits of cultivating and controlling your own distribution are mutual comprehension between a publication and its consumers; feelings of loyalty and trust; and perhaps an ability to survive in the long term, building a more durable institution.

sobbed pretty much the entire last episode

Ten blue links isn’t the answer for search, but neither is an all-purpose text box. Search is everything, and everything is search. It’s going to take a lot more than a chatbot to kill Google.

averageness is a feature of modern life. scaling means figuring out what works on average.

the future value of AI may depend less on raw computing power and more on how effectively organizations curate the information they feed into these expanded context windows.

excellent work by C. Thi Nguyen