“thinking is becoming a luxury good.” oof. also it's important to realize that being "incompatible with a free society" is **the principal selling point** of digitally-engineered postliteracy, from the point of view of its architects. that is why they are our enemies.

Immediately adding this to a list of books I need to read.

this is one of the most devastating things about free slopbots for everyone. i have hope it'll significantly decrease when the bill comes due. but this shit will still be out there.

Wonder if the next cycle of media evolution will be for newsletters to become more professionalized and hire multiple writers & editors until they become indistinguishable from the experience of reading online magazines today. Except they’ll get investment support since they’re a “new” thing.

Beyond passenger elevators, Europe has way more freight elevators than us. On the left, a dumbwaiter at a small Tibetan restaurant in Paris. On the right, a NYC worker about to carry the better part of a ton of beer down into a basement by hand. High elevator costs are a worker safety problem.

Imagine a modern world were all those artists never died. What would that look like? It would probably be so different it would be unrecognizable. So many books/plays were finished. So many more great movies were made. Think of the music we missed. Maybe millenial grey would never have happened.

The NYC street tree data map is fun to look at, but it also reminds me a little bit of reading Seeing Like a State. You could go walk over to this tree and see if it exists for yourself, but it has to go through an official process to have its existence “verified” by the government.

Wonder if we’ll eventually have special conduits for little robots to travel around above the ceiling tiles in our office buildings in addition to air ducts.

They seem to have impacts of industrial facilities (using lots of power, emitting noise) w/o having an industrial appearance. I wonder if that leads them to be built closer to populated areas than obvious industrial bldgs would be. People may not have the right frame of reference to understand them.

i think this is treated as a proxy for "do you want to let tech titans guide us towards their version of future?" and people are struggling for ways to say "no, we want a more democratic process for deciding who to be."

This one point is proving remarkably challenging to get across: ALGORITHMIC FEEDS ARE EDITORIAL You wouldn't expect to do well pitching your ideas to a newspaper or TV that hates you. Why expect anything better from X or Insta, which are openly authoritarian media?

New technique to reduce doomscrolling: every time you catch yourself doing it, you have to create some content instead of only consuming it.

Wonder if what we need is simply a ~2010 era social media site introduced today.

The US is now spending more on data center construction than on public transportation infrastructure

You can automate the work. You can't automate the responsibility for the work. Someone still has to put their name on it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the shifting baseline concept as applied to everyday life. People in their 20’s now have no memory of highly functional systems, products (from blenders to sweaters) that were so well made you could hand them down across generations, or even helpful customer service.

danah boyd recently argued that social media (as we knew it) is mostly dead; what we have now is parasocial media: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... I agree. Networked social media is disappearing, replaced by a new logic/structure of content creator, creator-centered community, & algorithm.

I felt like > boring office job as some sort of otherworldly terror was millennials via office space, matrix, fight club whereas backroom being mysterious for gen z was by the time they hit working age malls and many in person stores were a world abandoned, ghost town, ruins of former civilization

twitter used to have like 'academic/scientific discussion of recent papers' (besides AI). that's all gone obviously, but did it reform somewhere on bluesky, that I don't see with the feeds I have, or did it just kind of permanently disintegrate

All of the new mediums writers are pivoting to these days seem to have in common that they require frequent labor-intensive time commitments, and I wonder if that’s an under-discussed systemic structural condition. It leaves less time for deep thought.

“… new research suggests that the most useful robot body may look less like a human and more like a sea urchin.”

New: Regretful cities are literally covering their Flock cameras with black trash bags because they cannot figure out how to immediately exit their surveillance contracts or get the cameras taken down: www.404media.co/cities-are-c...

I just came off of reviewing hundreds of submissions for an amazing program and the people that used GenAI killed their chances because it basically made all of their submissions blandly interchangable. Any one person reading their own thought it sounded great. But it sounded like all the others.

There's something quaint about, in our current day and age, opening up and reading a PDF of an old book which still contains quirky errors from the process of having its physical pages scanned.

People need user interfaces to navigate computers. Do AIs need reverse user interfaces to navigate people? I sought to find out in a new article for @noemamag.com. www.noemamag.com/how-ais-see-...

"Beaver, transformed in two directions" by Leslie Mesei, 1967. From the book Computer Graphics, Computer Art

Once "enshittification" just means "remember when things were better", then it becomes nothing more than nostalgia, and nostalgia is a deeply conservative force.

Something I think about regarding the era of horse-powered transportation is that an infrastructure that poops creates continuous physical evidence of the problem it presents, but an infrastructure whose damage is not immediately visible (and smelly) creates a second order problem of communication.

This looks like a convenient solution if you have a bunch of cables coming out of different electronic devices that you want to keep organized.

sometimes I wonder if people in other fields have any clue what we go through as women in computational fields... (graph from: www.npr.org/sections/mon...)

This isn’t the first time i’ve heard this and it may explain why, despite the unpopularity of AI in polling, the pro-AI voices seem much louder. Seems possible that by convincing the bosses of AI’s inevitability, it’s had a chilling effect on workers who oppose it but fear for their livelihoods.

We need more walkable, mixed-use datacenters. Like community gardens, people should be able to experience the joy and satisfaction of cultivating their own hardware. Big Cloud has alienated the connection people felt with their computers. Kids should know what it's like to swear at rack mount rails.

When you read about 1890s debates around electrification, it feels like you're reading about a contemporary debate involving AI.

I'll never figure out why a carefully selected population of students who were generally in the top of their classes everywhere they came from (excluding maybe donor and celeb admits) is nonetheless supposed to fall into a normal curve grading distribution. It's not a random population.

Wow I really like this idea of an exhibit presenting “disembodied trackballs” from old computer mice in a new context today.

For Places, scholar of architecture Mohamad Nahleh wrote about the perverse achievements of dark-sky activism in the United States. And he embraces a different politics of the night sky, in which "looking upward becomes a practice of solidarity in an age of ruin.”

I've talked about this with a lot of different smart people lately but it is truly amazing to see how much the tide of public opinion has changed against the tech oligarchs and executives.

There's a whole world of memes to be made about "what if AI had been invented in the 90s."

“What aesthetic is this?” My newest It's Nice That column is about visual trends, the rise of taxonomic warfare, and what gets flattened when culture becomes searchable infrastructure 🏷️ www.itsnicethat.com/articles/eli...

Over a year ago, I spoke with @rasheedabueideh.bsky.social about Dreams on a Pillow for a piece that was killed before it could be published. I am honored that he was willing to take the time to speak with me again in spite of that and tell me about his beautiful homeland: kotaku.com/upcoming-ste...

Large-scale energy storage is stunning. A sand battery!

This is the summer of micro-papers: small ideas, shared freely, archived for posterity. I've had 2 separate emails and multiple new citations based on my micro-paper I wrote for micro-papers back in 2023.

This is the future for small markets in 1-4 hour driving distance to big hubs (e.g. near Chicago: Champaign, Springfield, Peoria, Rockford, South Bend). Removing all the small regional feeder jets is good for the environment and for airport congestion; fewer delays on long-haul.

Oligarchs have been constructing their entire lives around never hearing "no" for so long that they forgot they were in an entirely artificial information environment Now they are maladapted for dealing with the outside world

“A.I. has made super-high-resolution images so standard, he added, that they have lost all currency as signals of quality. Distinguishing oneself aesthetically requires letting conspicuous human effort show.” www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

People are weird sometimes if you don't have kids, they're like what about having a legacy, and I just point to my box of various wires and power cables

"Through various artistic and adversarial experiments, we demonstrate that tokenization is a political act that determines what can be represented and how images become computable through language."

Prompt injection on LinkedIn is a genre of sloptrolling even Bluesky can get behind.