“One of the key edicts of management cybernetics is that “it is not necessary to look inside the black box in order to understand its behaviour”. But this is only true a) if you’ve made the right decisions about how to divide things up into black boxes and b) if you’re prepared to accept that…
Month: June 2024
“Bits of the mind’s string” – Julian Simpson
“A notebook crackles with potential energy. Between the covers, myriad scribbles hold ideas, observations, quotes, anxieties… This is pure thought, suspended in time. Only when an idea is extracted from the book and exposed to daylight does it start to decay. Nothing lives up to the original idea, or at least nothing lives up to…
“The New Alt Media and the Future of Publishing” – Anil Dash
“Look, I could talk your ear off about how the tech aspect of this alone improves the odds for these new publications. (Content management is business strategy! Open distribution platforms are fundamentally politically radical!) But the more important thing is that regular people, people who aren’t nerds who’ve spent two straight decades worrying about how…
“Economic termites are everywhere” – Big
“Economic termites describes where these same forces get into the mostly unseen business foundations of our society and profiteer. These termites are in the infrastructure or guts of business, like recruiting services, construction equipment or software, the industrial gasses that go into chemicals and electronics, and so forth. It’s the stuff you don’t see that…
“Congestion Pricing, A Good Idea, Died Because Our Government Doesn’t Deserve the Money” – Very Serious
“But then, who’s counting? New York mega-projects always take way too long and cost way too much. At least, now that it’s open, commuters from Long Island must be really happy with their shorter commutes? Right? Unfortunately not. Here’s the thing: the MTA, the parent agency of the LIRR, built this very expensive new terminal….
“I Think Ibram Kendi is Just… an Academic” – Freddie deBoer
“The thing is… this is kind of how the ideas industry functions in general, these days. Many, many arguments that find their way into the public consciousness have this general two-faced nature, a more incendiary side to generate publicity and a more equivocal side to evade criticism. I don’t exonerate Kendi for the deficiencies of…
“A new A.I. influencer is producing some of the most criminal charts I’ve ever seen” – Max Read
“It seems too cheap and on-the-nose to point out that in their unwavering confidence and abstract relationship to the truth, large language models like GPT-4o project a kind of intelligence that most closely resembles the intelligence projected by the founders and investors and ambitious little freaks behind this generation of generative A.I. applications. But, you…
“Voice, taste, trust and scarcity” – Kyle Chayka (One Thing)
“In the social-media era, websites and article formats became more generic in order to fit in the templates of feeds and search results. I think in the near future we’ll see more differentiated websites and presentations, not in a scroll-y HTML5 way but the sense of new interactions and bespoke interfaces. My experience of the…
“Welcome to the twilight of Big Tax” – Boondoggle
“So a little public money on the front end could save a lot of money and eliminate a lot of corporate extraction on the back end. Tax prep is one of those areas in which the long, neoliberal push away from public goods really hurt society, on both fairness and cost; what should be a…
“Where the f— is this supposed to be” – Robin Sloan
“As a reader, I can get over this. I have done so many times — easily, eagerly. Prydain, Krynn, whatever The Wheel of Time’s world is called … I’m game. I’ll admit, I appreciate it when writers knit their creations into the skein of reality — I’m thinking of Philip Pullman, his matrix of worlds — but if a nonsensical premise opens the door to something…