Interesting insight examining why we make slop. I feel like this also explains the broader emergence of slop in business contexts, whether or not it involves AI use.

An interesting open dataset dropped this month with very accurate footprints of almost every building on Earth, and also critically, the heights of the buildings, so they can be extruded into 3D. Interactive map: tubvsig-so2sat-vm1.srv.mwn.de Paper: essd.copernicus.org/articles/17/...

This whole thread is a great read on why, yes, we do need a healthy dose of individualism, & it may not be as obvious to those who grew up in highly individualistic societies but it so is to those of us who grew up in highly collectivist ones. You matter as an individual beyond your group too.

Someone should write a history of the syllabus. You could learn so much about higher ed just from the changes in these documents.

The Americas see about 3% of global elevator installations as of 2020. The U.S. & Canada: even less. But we've stuck with our own unique set of elevator codes, as if elevator companies still have no choice but to beat a path to our door. Nope! "Everywhere else" is a bigger common market now.

Read the article behind this screenshot, and the researchers working on this academic exercise do something right by at least acknowledging/anticipating privacy concerns as a significant barrier to adoption. www.cnet.com/tech/service...

When I was in high school & as a college undergrad it seemed easy to come up with a take on any topic that would impress other people. As I learned more I realized the world required depths of expertise to understand. But some people still retain the undergraduate mindset and are successful with it.

Good enough wins because of what you are able to treat as externalities

🧠: gondolas for ski 🧠🧠: gondolas for urban transit 🧠🧠🧠🤯: gondolas for apples The gondola connecting the central treatment hub of the largest apple producers consortium in Italy to the underground storage facility. Opened last November.

It’s always useful to learn to see signs of lost & forgotten invisible history.

i keep itching at the way that tile based videogames and textile aesthetics overlap. not done anything with this yet, but i keep trying to.

I came up with the concept here: tedium.co/2024/10/10/s...

The “books as academic origin stories” thread is depressing where it implies you can be involved with the academic world even if you have an origin story. ie. even if you came from outside it. It erases how often our world expects you to be born into those opportunities & displaces people who arent.

There should be an alternative to the traditional “year in review” thread which you can do if you want to promote your ideas & have an opportunity to meet new people even if you didn’t get enough things done this year.

In addition to liking and sharing posts, we could have a button that indicated when you wished you had a problem someone else was complaining about. Maybe you could even offer to trade.

almost every advance in technology both adds to, and undoes, other practices and skills and expectations. the challenge is to be able to see both the additions and undoings, so to speak. it mostly rubs me wrong when ppl talk of “pure, only good, addition” or “only negatives!”

Interesting to see AI computer vision become so ubiquitous that it’s found in unexpected places, like home DIY projects.

If you’re willing to let me stipulate that most folks’ relationship to art and culture is largely current, reaching back with nostalgia to childhood but mostly attending to what’s going on now: Is Christmas culture for most people their sole regular engagement with the slightly more distant past?

I’ve occasionally wondered whether resources like this would be useful, & figured you’d have a bottleneck trying to rapidly+remotely access the info on smartphones which rely on restricted App Store ecosystems. This database solves that problem by letting you use a simple text msg to look up plates.

What’s the next Christmas movie to see as an adult after you’ve already seen Die Hard, It’s a Wonderful Life and The Holdovers?

isolating us from communities of people who know things is a primary project of the chatbot

Realized that the ending to The Lives of Others might not be fully believable to today’s audiences, since in our current environment of corporate cost-cutting fewer stores offer to gift wrap your purchases.

this is incredible stuff. most state DOTs would spend tens of billions on highway expansions to try and see numbers like this (that wouldn’t even pan out anyway thanks to induced demand lol)

Next year I should try posting more about my extremely illegible personal project I don’t know how to discuss. I don’t think anyone else knows what to do with it either, but I could at least leave the posts up instead of deleting them.

In hindsight it should have been expected that the era where the internet allowed an asymmetrical one-to-many sharing of ideas would only last for a fleeting moment, but what a loss. It was such a new kind of freedom we never even knew how to appreciate it while it was here.

I have always said it, I will continue to say it, we are limiting the productive potential of millions of freaks by demanding they earn a wage to survive instead of enabling them to do whatever thing their brain is broken for

My New Year’s resolution last year was to try to meet and/or network with significantly more new people. I didn’t get that far with the goal, and I wish next year could be different.

It’s been so long since I’ve made a viral post that also caused other people to get mad at me online, that I honestly feel like I wouldn’t mind if it happened to me again.

If you’re working on a non-fiction research/writing project that isn’t journalism and you don’t have an academic affiliation, how do you find other people who are doing the same thing? Ideally locally (I’m in NY).

The load-bearing part of that is "effectively." Many tools (like CAD) are difficult to use AT ALL -- the unskilled are unlikely to be misled into thinking they have gotten good results. What makes current AI dangerous is that is so easy to delude yourself into *thinking* you're using it effectively.

Was recently comparing options for a service from several businesses. Websites with original text in a specific author’s voice stand out even more than they did before. It’s funny how writing of any kind now feels valuable, in a way that renders its exact quality/skill/perfectionism less relevant.

another example of AI as tracer dye, exposing an already existing problem (and, of course, significantly worsening it)

The entirety of the internet is now designed to make you think less and less about more and more things.

Hearing that this was coming is one of the reasons why I replaced both my laptops last year. Hoping they'll hang in there until we're past this nonsense, but I guess it's possible laptops in 2029 or whatever will just have one big Copilot button instead of a keyboard....

Wish it was less of a slog to get through the slump where you have a weird idea but don’t yet know how to make it legible to broader audiences. Like for a particularly symptomatic example, I have some thoughts on the future of electric cords.

all twitter arguments have the quality of a clown honking another clown's nose and then the other clown squirts the first clown with a trick lapel flower

A color palette generator, in a way.

I still want influence and relevance, but my feeling is that at this point there’s been a widespread structural change in social media, and the next method by which ordinary people will be able to build audiences is an open question. Participation now is about preparing for an opening to appear.

one of the great, pernicious myths perpetrated about higher ed—which media, higher ed administrators, politicians, and a number of faculty are complicit in spreading—is that humanities departments close due to some combination of cratering student demand and unjustifiable cost. It’s not true

this field biologist does a great job highlighting the insidiousness of AI editing these one-click AI edit buttons are incredibly appealing to many photographers, amateurs and professionals alike, and are framed as innocuous this is worth sharing and educating people about

If the AI bubble doesn't pop in the next 12 months, everyone is going to be paying for it with insane prices of consumer electronics, massively inflated cloud resource costs, and shortages across the board.

at some point, statistically, there has to be good news again

People who believe the liberal arts are inherently bullshitting unsurprisingly extremely excited to replace the liberal arts with bullshitting at scale as a service and charging for it

Just made & deleted a post because I’d been thinking about something without having seen the latest sad news. My thoughts on purely political/cultural conflicts involving education have to wait for another time, but I thought I’d mention that for anyone who saw the post to explain my poor timing.

Suspect there could be even more analysis + reflection (I know there’s already some) about what factors are making the internet feel like a bigger & more impersonal place than it used to be.

Most mad scientists are actually mad engineers, at least as commonly portrayed

Interesting to hear about “animal-computer interaction” being used as a term. www.bbc.com/news/article...

An economist from Ghana told me that a bonus reason for promoting wind and solar power is that it’s much harder to use for corruption and repressive geopolitics. Remind me again. Who is in favour of fossil fuels?

I wish that the world still existed, and not whatever aimless empty isolated void of space has replaced it now.