Curating The Week
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Curating The Week: The Essay Field, AI and Cooking, Measuring Training
“The impact of an essay is how much it changes readers’ thinking multiplied by the importance of the topic. But it’s hard to do well at both. It’s hard to have big new ideas about important topics. So in practice there’s a tradeoff: you can change readers’ thinking a lot about moderately important things, or… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Experience In The Digital Age, Swing Changes And Teachers, Social Media Art, Narrative Warfare
“It feels as if the whole world has been transformed into images of the world and has thus been drawn into the human realm, which now encompasses everything. There is no place, no thing, no person or phenomenon that I cannot obtain as image or information. One might think this adds substance to the world,… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: AI and The Mind, AI and The Humanities, Enji
“It’s becoming clear that artificial intelligence can relieve us of the burden of trying and trying again. A.I. systems make it trivially easy to take an existing thing and ask for a new iteration.” “The whole painful cycle of trying, failing, revising, judging, and redoing can be replaced with something simpler: plucking the most suitable… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: The Bottleneck, Drum Machines, AI and Writing, What To Do
• An essay on the bottleneck. “The bottleneck of the digital age is different: The new era is killing us softly, by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete.” “It starts with substitution:… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Athletic Training, Work, Elite Cubing, AI Love
• An essay an athletic training. “The main idea of my training program was that you will become good at whatever it is that you train.” “My training program was very simple and therefore very robust. It was cheap and reliable. Not fancy nor extraordinary. I tried not to involve things that I could not… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: The Serum Synthesizer, Insight, Being A Media Theorist
“What you want is some sort of motor memory—sort of like what makes a QUERTY keyboard great is that you know where the W key is without having to look down. So with Serum there’s a bit of that same concept—you want to know where things are without having to analyze too much. I think… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: AI Writing Assistants, Zone 2 Training, New Musical Instruments
“Letting a robot structure your argument, or flatten your style by removing the quirky elements, is dangerous. It’s a streamlined way to flatten the human mind, to homogenize human thought. We know who we are, at least in part, by finding the words—messy, imprecise, unexpected—to tell others, and ourselves, how we see the world. The… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Social Media, Attention, Note-Taking, The Simplification Of Music
• An essay on social media. “On social media, everyone believes that anyone to whom they have access owes them an audience: a writer who posted a take, a celebrity who announced a project, a pretty girl just trying to live her life, that anon who said something afflictive. When network connections become activated for… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Devaluing Music, Vibes, The New Minimalism
“Perhaps Spotify understood the stakes—that when it removed real classical, jazz, and ambient artists from popular playlists and replaced them with low-budget stock muzak, it was steamrolling real music cultures, actual traditions within which artists were trying to make a living. Or perhaps the company was aware that this project to cheapen music contradicted so… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Writing, Clichés, Music Streaming
“AI has blown this world open. Almost all pressure to write has dissipated. You can have AI do it for you, both in school and at work.” “The result will be a world divided into writes and write-nots. There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it. But the middle… Continue reading
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