P.O.S.S.E.
“1640. The protestants who dominate Scotland’s parliament pass a law making celebrating Christmas illegal; England follows five years later. The ban is short-lived south of the border – once Charles II is restored to the throne in 1660 it’s party on, really – but Christmas remains verboten in Scotland rather longer, and does not officially become a public holiday until (this is mind blowing) 1958. This is why the Scots are so big on New Year”
“I wrote that the man’s expression “simply cannot be defined” but it contained “relief, and bafflement, and newfound innocence, and the first hesitant vulnerable expression of hope”. My main crime here was that this section was overwritten. My lesser crime was that it’s now demonstrably bullshit. Then, because I am a parody of myself, I wrote that his face reflected “the aspirations of centuries of liberal struggle”. It is therefore a shame that he seems to be an Assad loyalist putting on an act.
I can learn several things from this. First, I must never, ever, under any circumstances become a police detective. And second, we really do see what we want to see. We can project, especially in dramatic but changeable circumstances, the things we want to believe, the story of a world we wish to be true. We all have it within us to look a right mug and I have accomplished that here”
https://iandunt.substack.com/p/merry-christmas-you-cold-hearted
“One of the tricks used to make transformer neural networks produce more human-sounding output is to introduce a bit of randomness (the “temperature” parameter), so that they select one of the closest few “near neighbour” tokens rather than always glomming onto the single smallest vector distance. Consideration of the function of boilerplate immediately shows why that’s problematic – as well as wasting everyone’s time trying to work out whether a minor change in verbal expression is significant, there’s a constant danger of creating something which actually does have a different effect than the boilerplate and changing contract terms by accident”
https://backofmind.substack.com/p/let-boilerplate-be-boilerplate
“To learn to photograph, you learn to think in angles and apertures. To learn to paint, you begin to think in brushstrokes and pigments. And to learn to write fiction, you start to think in sentences, POV, and other aspects of narrative prose. This takes a lot of time. Time studying and time practicing. No, there never are any shortcuts there.
This applies within mediums too. Thinking in fairy tales is different than thinking in hardboiled detective fiction. Thinking in aphorisms is different than thinking in longform essays. So on and so forth. (This is likely why so many artists can excel in one area but struggle in adjacent ones. Short story writers who can’t finish novels. Actors who flop at directing. Etc.)”
https://countercraft.substack.com/p/turning-off-the-tv-in-your-mind
“The industry now is contracting and adapting. I would argue that the changes it is undergoing are changes for the better. I’ve spoken to a lot of movie execs over the last few weeks and not one of them has any interest in trying to set up a $200 million movie at a streamer; they’re all talking in terms of more modestly budgeted movies that might sell tickets at an actual movie theatre. The TV people still think there is a market for drama, but it has shrunk – the ideas need to be better, the budgets need to be significantly lower. And I think we’re slowly, s-l-o-w-l-y moving away from the godawful notion that everything has to be based on something else”
“Excel made a whole new style of working possible for the financial industry in two ways. First, it facilitated the creation of much bigger and more detailed financial models; in the days when you had to fill everything in yourself having worked it out on a pocket calculator, you would really think twice about whether you really needed to estimate staff costs separately from other costs, let alone about how many divisions and geographies you were going to model for big companies.
But much more importantly, it allowed you to work iteratively. Rather than thinking about what assumptions made the most business sense, then sitting down to project them, Excel encouraged you to just set out the forecasts, then sit around tweaking the assumptions up and down until you got an answer you could live with”
https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-spreadsheet-revolution
“They are really rather beautiful things, of the sort which we rarely appreciate. They’re the product of years of hard-fought for constitutional change. They are the kind of literature which a sophisticated political society produces, so that it can govern itself more effectively. They deserve a level of respect which we do not currently give them
But these reports only work where the political culture around them actually gives a damn. They rely on journalists and politicians bothering to read them, or at least skimming the executive summary. They rely on publications acknowledging that they exist and that their conclusions provide a final word on what is really happening”
https://iandunt.substack.com/p/a-little-love-song-to-the-national
“ If we could step back for just a moment and look not at the immediate question of which candidate and policy in which point of time, but at the general political strategy of the Democrats for the past 50 years – that is, moderating, triangulating, and other euphemisms for moving rightward – we would have to conclude that it has failed. And yet there is precious little appetite for actually coming up with a radically different approach, because ultimately politics is about taxes and the funding base of the party are rich people who won’t tolerate significantly higher taxes”
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/clintonism-lost-in-2000
“Mosquera either hacked the CBF’s official email account or created a fake one (reports vary) that he used to convince the Russians he was a representative of the national team. He allegedly then managed to get the Russians (probably desperate to put together a tournament, given the sanctions) to pay all the team’s expenses, including flights from Bogotá, luxury hotels, and meals. The “team,” however, was allegedly just 11 of Mosquera’s pals and a guy posing as their coach. Mosquera himself wrangled a flight down from Kazan (where he was reportedly studying architecture) to join them when they arrived, and the rest is allegedly history”
“It takes effort to remember that the figures and outfits in the paintings were just what was around at the time, not some remembered or imagined history. The frocks and suits were the equivalent of today’s cardigans and crop tops and baggy jeans and chore coats. (There’s a genre of 21st-century painting that I’ve taken to thinking of as Brooklyn Impressionism, IYKYK.) In the paintings, these are people just walking around in the park upon an afternoon, taking their dogs out, drinking glasses of wine. (I would love to see an Impressionism show focused solely on meals and tables.) The normalcy was radical, the banality was modern”
https://onethingnewsletter.substack.com/p/paintings-of-your-friends-and-nice