Thomas
@tomcat
Thomas
None of the world's top industries would be profitable if they paid for the natural capital they use
David Robertsgrist.org
Content has become like clay. LLMs can remix it, summarize it, elaborate on it, hallucinate it, combine it with other content, freely transform it between text, audio, image, and back again. It seems we have achieved a kind of information post-scarcity. A regime of radical overproduction. A content singularity. How will this change things?
Gordon Brander • LLMs and information post-scarcity
That is, we’ve traded our craftsmenship for management. We now are less immersed in the exact pieces we’re putting together and more interested in the outcome of the work. To us, programming has now become a means to an end, instead of an end in itself.
Manager vs Craftsman — Derrick Persson
Four-and-a-half years ago, as the COVID epidemic hit its first, horrible spike, Jamais Cascio , a professional futurist, wrote a prescient and helpful post titled, “Facing the Age of Chaos.” He began with this simple insight: “This current moment of political mayhem, climate disasters, and global pandemic — and so much more — vividly demonstrates... See more
Micah L. Sifry • When History Overflows, Build a Lifeboat
The role of metaphor and narrative, as opposed to new theories or experiments, is too little recognised in discussions of the historian of science Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shifts, supposed (and contested) moments of dramatic change in science. All scientists know how to go about scrutinising a theory: you use it to formulate some testable hypothesis,... See more
Philip Ball • We need new metaphors that put life at the centre of biology | Aeon Essays
Culture is to humans a bit like water is to fish; it is everywhere and yet imperceptible because it is not so much what we perceive but what we perceive through . Culture is what brings the world into focus, and it can be thought of as the lens through which objects are seen, not the object as such. In this sense, looking for culture is like... See more