Resonant Thoughts
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Resonant Thoughts: Dwarkesh Patel’s “The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025” (2025)
“To get real creativity, you need to search through spaces of possibilities and find these hidden gems. That’s what creativity is. Current language models don’t really do that. They’re mimicking the data. They’re mimicking all the human ingenuity they’ve seen from all these internet data, which are originally derived from humans” (29). – Shane Legg, Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Christopher Alexander’s “The Nature of Order” (2002)
“What is order? We know that everything in the world around us is covered by an immense orderliness. We experience order every time we take a walk. The grass, the sky, the leaves on the trees, the flowing water in the river, the windows in the houses along the street–all of it is immensely orderly. Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Anna Wiener’s “Uncanny Valley” (2020)
“Listening to EDM while I worked gave me delusions of grandeur, but it kept me in a rhythm. It was the genre of my generation: the music of video games and computer effects, the music of the twenty-four-hour hustle, the music of proudly selling out. It was decadent and cheaply made, the music of ahistory, Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Nicholas Carr’s “Superbloom” (2025)
“The way we see the social and political environment, the way we create a picture of reality through the welter of messages furnished by our ever more encompassing media, is and always will be refracted by scanty attention, by the poverty of language, by distraction, by unconscious constellations of feeling, by wear and tear, violence, Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Pico Iyer’s “Aflame: Learning from Silence” (2025)
“The point of being here is not to get anything done; only to see what might be worth doing” (16). “There’s no such thing as dead time when everything is alive with possibility” (24). “It’s never possibility that’s not present; only me” (27). “When one keeps quiet, the situation becomes clear” (62). “Leisure is where Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Kathy Willis’s “Good Nature” (2024)
“Our eyes also appear to seek out patterns with a mid-level of fractal complexity .22 Why is this significant? Because evidence suggests that when we view silhouette outlines of natural scenes with this fractal dimension, it triggers greater levels of calming and attention restoration than when we look at the outline shape of other landscape Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Witold Rybczynski’s “How Architecture Works: a Humanist’s Toolkit” (2011)
“You arrive at the sublime or poetic not by metaphor, but by making virtues out of necessity. That’s the secret of design.” Diamond Schmitt “The plan is the generator.” Le Corbusier “Values, not rules.” Witold Rybczynski, How Architecture Works Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Callum Robinson’s “Ingrained” (2024)
“A Brief Note On: Finding Your Voice Pore over books and magazines, get online, read interviews with designers in different fields and discover, if you can, what moves them to do what they do. Scroll (God help you) through social media. Collect, curate, and digitally scrapbook. Train that algorithm to feed you something nutritious for Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Kevin Kelly’s “Excellent Advice For Living” (2023)
“Separate the processes of creatingfrom improving. You can’t write and edit or sculpt and polish or make and analyze at the same time. If you do, the editor stops the creator. While you invent, don’t select. While you sketch, don’t inspect. While you write the first draft, don’t reflect. At the start, the creator mind Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Brian Eno and Bette A.’s “what art does: an unfinished theory” (2024)
“In art we research our feelings. Artists are feelings merchants–a piece of art is something designed to trigger feelings.” “Through art, you can investigate the kind of feelings you want to have, and where to get them. Art gives us the chance to answer the question: What is it that I really like?” “The things Continue reading
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