Jason Shen

As a result of these much larger outcomes we've built a movie-making system that is focused on big hits because the business model can't really absorb too many massive flops. So you get sequels, prequels, and spin-offs. Established IP and bankable stars. No big risks. And you don't get nearly as much experimentation, innovation, or creativity.

Gladwell: I get attracted to stories that strike me as having potential. Outliers began, for example, with the chapter on the Jewish lawyers. I was talking to someone whose father was one of those lawyers, and she made this observation: “They are all like my dad. They are all from the Bronx, and their parents were all in the garment industry. They... See more

Key features of the 2.0 release

• New text-to-image diffusion models  using a brand new text encoder (OpenCLIP). Result: improved image quality, although not everyone likes the style.


• Super-resolution upscaler diffusion models  which enhance the resolution of images by a factor of 4.


• Depth-to-image diffusion model  which infers the depth of an input

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In his 1905 essay “On Reading,” Marcel Proust puts it nicely: “With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: ‘What did they think of us?’—‘Did we... See more

"In addition, there are problems that humans rather than computers will have to solve for purely practical reasons. It isn’t because computers couldn’t eventually solve them. It’s because in real life, and especially in organizational life, we keep changing our conception of what the problem is and what our goals are."

— Geoff Colvin,  Humans Are

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IF A GREAT MUSICIAN PLAYS GREAT MUSIC BUT NO ONE HEARS . . . WAS HE REALLY ANY GOOD?

It’s an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or... See more

"When I was young I took my father and my three uncles for granted, and it never occurred to me that everyone else wasn't like them. Later on, I found that this was a mistake, but I've never quite managed to adapt myself to it. I suppose they were unusual, but I still think that they were right, and insofar as the world disagrees with them, I... See more