Perhaps the most important is “constitutive luck”, which covers all the fortunate or unfortunate circumstances of your very existence; the period of history in which you were born, your parents, background, genes and character traits. - The Guardian
When I think of sayings, I think first of the early Greek philosophers—the so-called pre-Socratics—whose ideas, if they wrote them down at all, survive as elusive fragments of text. - The Point
“Privacy is valuable not because it empowers us to exercise control over our information, but because it protects against the creation of such information in the first place.” - The New Yorker
Those stories that Americans tell about themselves in the name of the “imagined community,” manifest through public rituals like fireworks shows, public school curricula, the discourse of politicians, and the touchstones reinforced by constant references in the press and pop culture: the Alamo, Custer’s Last Stand, the showdown at the O.K. Corral. - LA Review of Books
Part of living well is thinking well. Our souls have an intellectual, as well as a practical, part; we cannot live fully flourishing lives unless we flourish intellectually. Are there, then, specifically intellectual virtues – excellences of intellectual character, whose exercise makes us good thinkers? - Aeon
Though Kahle’s ideals have never wavered, his creations were subsumed by a Silicon Valley behemoth feeding off all things antithetical to his vision of an open internet: advertising models, insane capital markets, and the ultimate “poison” (as he calls it), monopoly power. - Rolling Stone
Television shows that are 50 years old aren’t thick on the ground. But SNL strikes a thread of absurd comedy from time to time that goes viral. The latest is centered on … George Washington? - The Atlantic
Among others, “you can find the contemplative radicals of Hummingbirds trolling the streets of Laredo over on PBS; the determined detectives of The Chicano Squad solving crimes in Houston on A&E; and on Netflix, a dozen or so student musicians competing in Going Varsity in Mariachi.” - Los Angeles Times (Yahoo)
Just feed the raw material into a large language model and in an instant you’ll have a summary to scan. With OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude as our wingmen, summary reading is what now qualifies as preparedness. - Wired
Hundreds of scientists mapped out those connections in stunning detail in a series of papers published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. - The New York Times
Pre-internet, the lines were pretty clear about the binary relationship between artist and audience. Artists created and audience consumed. In today’s digital world, the landscape is fluid—we create and express our identities by what we choose to share online. - National Endowment for the Arts
Perhaps we’re wearing a mask that others are too inattentive to peer behind; or maybe we’re just too deep to know. There are many variations on a central theme: others sail to our shores, they even disembark, but they never quite venture into our unexplored interiors. - The New Yorker
From a legal perspective, even though the use of AI dates back to the 1950s... the proliferation of AI today brings to the forefront questions that we have not previously considered, specifically from a copyright law perspective: Should AI itself be considered an “author” under copyright law? - New York State Bar Association
I had been thinking about how so many people taking GLP-1 medications find that, without even trying, they’ve suddenly released their desires for food, alcohol, tobacco, shopping, and more—and how Buddhists have been contemplating this exact transition for centuries. - The Atlantic
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
