“Much as the pocket calculator long ago caused arithmetic skills to atrophy, newer technologies have made history ubiquitous instead of chronological, let alone explanatory. Mashups are now constructed with no real deliberateness but as part of a steady acquisitive spree through the videos that crowd our screens. We doomscroll and catastrophize and feel a Yeatsian certainty that we’ve reached the point where ‘things fall apart,’ while history itself congeals into its own gluey casserole. To take a trivial, innocent example: How many young viewers of ‘Grease’ understand that the film is in fact a backward glance from five decades ago to seven?”
• An essay on AI’s influence on computer programming.
“When I got into programming, it was because computers felt like a form of magic. The machine gave you powers but required you to study its arcane secrets—to learn a spell language. This took a particular cast of mind. I felt selected. I devoted myself to tedium, to careful thinking, and to the accumulation of obscure knowledge. Then, one day, it became possible to achieve many of the same ends without the thinking and without the knowledge. Looked at in a certain light, this can make quite a lot of one’s working life seem like a waste of time.”
• An article about a musician who releases an album a day.
“It is a trial and error process, but I release it all, the good sound quality and the bad sound quality without any concealment.”
brettworks 
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