Sterling Proffer

The civic fathers who presided over the industrial cities of the late nineteenth and early and middle twentieth centuries—the Rockefellers and Carnegies who built the museums and libraries and concert halls—supported culture as an end in itself: a public good, a social value, a point of local and national pride. Today’s planners and plutocrats... See more

So to me, the problem is not with the buying, nor even with the culture-grifting of brands, but with some kind of insufficiency on the part of the companies themselves. If the meanings they have on offer are starved versions of cultural membership, then perhaps, I started to feel, the brands aren’t going far enough. Could we imagine a version of a... See more

8.  Build with your squad

This is the publishing paradox nowadays: opportunities come to you in direct proportion to your ability to operate without them.

Emergent properties are linked to another highly promising feature: flexibility. Earlier generations of ai systems were good for only one purpose, often a pretty specific one. The new models can be reassigned from one type of problem to another with relative ease by means of fine tuning. It is a measure of the importance of this trait that, within... See more