“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…
“The Rot-com Bubble” – Ed Zitron
“The tech industry can no longer rely on the idea that every year (or couple of years) somebody will find an idea that will create 200 more startups or trillions of dollars in market capitalization. It must reconfigure both venture capital investment and public tech companies to a more sustainable, profitable and useful model where…
“The Complex Problem of Lying for Jobs” – Ludicity
“You meditate, reflect, do self-work, speak to professionals and the like because you don’t want to be a monkey that treats the people closest to you based on whatever the monkey-brain decides its immediate ego needs are, and then you realize that most people are fully in the grips of monkey-brain. You just throw a…
“The ‘24 Election and Institutional Change” – Matt Glassman
“But make no mistake, the current filibuster practices in the Senate—in which the minority filibusters literally everything—are not a stable equilibrium. And honestly, they’ve only been around since 2010. I expect them to fall sooner or later. Now, the Senate can stay irrational perhaps longer than you can stay sane. But the rise of the…
“The Most Interesting Uninteresting Thing” – Jason Scott
“And now, one version of a type of software that has been around for a long time is suddenly on everyone’s minds. It’s being used to make a variety of toys. A number of people are hooking those toys up to heart machines and bombs. And I’m fifty years old and I get to watch…