Elena

"It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it." - Roger Ebert applies to every creative project

Achieving strategic clarity is hard. It takes asking tough questions about tradeoffs, deep concentration to get to the very essence of the issues and real courage to cut off competing priorities. It is worth the effort because with real clarity, people, teams and organizations can fully mobilize, break through to the next level and achieve... See more

Although the practical success of neural networks is still undeniable, it must be observed that their most powerful applications are in domains where rules are set in advance and don’t change over time — where the goals are clearly defined. The way you win a game of chess or Go is fixed and unambiguous. Protein folding is constrained by the laws of... See more

Be micro-ambitious. Put your head down and work with pride on whatever is in front of you. You never know where you might end up. Just be aware that the next worthy pursuit will probably appear in your periphery which is why you should be careful of long-term dreams. If you focus too far in front of you, you won’t see the shiny thing out of the... See more

Some might call this concatenation of elements a “vibe”: something that’s difficult to pin down precisely in words but that’s evoked by a loose collection of ideas, concepts, things that can be identified by intuition rather than by a prescribed logic.

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.

It’s the sound of failure: so much of modern art is the sound of things going out of

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“A lot of writing consists of waiting around for the aquarium to settle so you can see the fish. Walking around muttering seems to hasten the process. Taking public transportation nowhere helps. Looking out the bus window lets the back of your mind move forward. Don’t listen to anything but natural sound. Don’t look at anything you have to turn on.... See more