The downside of these machine-learned embeddings is that, unlike in a game of 20 Questions, many of the descriptions encoded in each list of numbers are not interpretable by humans. - The Atlantic
How should we create things? The word “should” isn’t quite right, since there’s no correct way to be creative; still, when you’re actually creating something, you have to answer the question definitively for yourself, with some urgency. - The New Yorker
Michael Crichton was so powerful that he won a “frozen rights” contract, one that even follows him after death - and may tank a proposed, but unauthorized by his estate, ER spinoff. - Fast Company
Gladwell has insisted that change happens neatly, and he’s sticking to it. Epidemics, he writes in the new book, are “not wild and out of control.” They have a single source... He’s also sticking to a career-long dismissal and devaluation of digital communication and its possible effects. - The Atlantic
People can intentionally shape the traits they need to be successful in the lives they want. That’s contrary to the popular belief that your personality type places you in a box, dictating that you choose partners, activities and careers according to your traits. - The Conversation
"My recent research findings suggest that people are often well-advised to decide intuitively, in terms of how it makes them feel. There is emerging evidence that the act of deciding – and, in particular, making gut decisions – is emotionally rewarding." - Psyche
My work explores the ways in which creative individuals prioritise information differently to their less creative counterparts. In one of our studies, my research collaborators and I used a classic task to see how the brain responds to another type of high priority information: surprising information. - Psyche
Olivier Roy argues that culture in the sense we have understood it is being inexorably eroded. It’s not, as some of his countrymen believe, that one culture is being replaced by another - say, Christianity by Islam. It’s that all culture is being hollowed out by technology, data, globalisation, bureaucracy, and consumerist individualism. - Ian Leslie
Natasha Rothwell in conversation with Samara Joy: “Improv saved my life. You have to trust your instincts; you have to abandon the need for perfection. Maybe that’s why I love jazz so much.” - The New York Times
“This year’s festival will mark 10 years since Unesco designated Dundee a design city, alongside Berlin, Montreal, Istanbul and others. The accolade is given to cities which have an established design industry and opportunities for designers, among other criteria.” - The Observer (UK)
“I’m guessing an image generator scraped a photo of my dad from somewhere online (maybe the wedding pictures I posted in 2007?) and then didn’t jumble it up enough to make it into someone new. Instead, it issued forth an eerie facsimile.” - Slate
There are burgeoning efforts to explore how LLMs can be used to automate research tasks, including writing papers, generating code and searching literature. But it’s been difficult to assess whether these AI tools can generate fresh research angles at a level similar to that of humans. - Nature
These corporations have erected a private state over us. They who have disrupted almost every economic and political balance in the Republic. They who have amassed the power to shape and determine how we speak to one another and share news and information. Even how we think, dream, and perceive our place in the world. - Harper's
We all suffer from delusions, and we all, like Oedipus, use tricks of self-deception to keep ourselves from acknowledging truths about our lives. Yet understanding, or even describing, this everyday experience can seem like a fool’s errand. - Harper's
What we hardly talk about is how we’ve reorganized not just industrial activity but any activity to be capturable by computer, a radical expansion of what can be mined. Friendship is ground zero for the metrics of the inner world, the first unquantifiable shorn into data points. - The Walrus
