The economic and enforcement arguments against cash may stack up nicely, but a payment isn’t just an economic or administrative act; it is a social one that depends on the two parties’ common acceptance of a currency and the mode of delivering it. - The Guardian
Paris is dead, and many people like it that way. Living in the ruins of an old Cathedral, Parisians are the ivy that overtake it, the vandals who paint their names on the side of it, and the squatters inside who reinforce its cracking walls. - 3 Quarks Daily
It turns out that with enough training data and sufficiently deep neural nets, large language models can display remarkable skill if you ask them not just to fill in the missing word, but also to continue on writing whole paragraphs in the style of the initial prompt. - The New York Times
Research has found that we actually harbor an aversion to creators and creativity; subconsciously, we see creativity as noxious and disruptive, and as a recent study demonstrated, this bias can potentially discourage us from undertaking an innovative project or hiring a creative employee. - The New York Times
And, quite frankly, it's ruining their comedy. "That isn’t just bad for public discourse—it’s bad for a mainstream comedy landscape that too rarely spotlights the many voices doing subtler, gentler, weirder, or more experimental work." - Time
International data flows surged as the pandemic sent in-person interactions online. The annual growth rate of international internet traffic roughly doubled in 2020. But that was just a one-time spike. - Harvard Business Review
If truth is a problem now for everyone, if the idea seems empty or useless in ‘the era of social media’, ‘science denialism’, ‘conspiracy theories’ and suchlike, maybe that just means that ‘everyone’ has caught up to where philosophy was in 1922. - Aeon
Weeks, days, hours, minutes—especially minutes—are just more mechanisms for keeping humans in thrall ultimately based on astronomy, astrology’s lesser sibling. In the globalized information environment we currently enjoy, we should and must construct better timescales. - Wired
We should hesitate to call someone a liar because we are not privy to other people’s motives or states of mind. That a statement is untrue can usually be established beyond reasonable doubt; that the person who said it knew it was untrue is harder to establish. - Prospect
Feelings are real—people do have them, I have observed—and they can certainly be plausible explanations for all kinds of behavior. But they are not excuses or justifications. - The Atlantic
At first blush, it might seem obvious. But history is full of failed, unfinished or underperforming scratch-built city projects, in California and elsewhere, and more are in the pipeline. - Bloomberg
A cultural dope is someone like me or you, a consumer of culture or a “creative content provider” who produces, or consumes, the preexisting cultural artifacts of the dominant political economy while functioning under the illusion that what they are creating or consuming is “new.” - Los Angeles Review of Books
We have established a culture that expects us to have opinions on everything, and even rewards us for unexpected and implausible ones. Those of us privileged to fall within the clicking and scrolling classes would like to have something to show for our daily efforts. - 3 Quarks Daily
Russia’s assault on Ukraine is shocking, therefore, not only for its violence, but for the fact that it reopens the question of war as such and thus also the question of history. - Chartbook
