It would’ve been a hugely valuable lesson years ago, to realize that it’s not simply that my journals and sketchpads don’t need to be perfect. It’s best when they’re not!
I love Chuck’s attitude towards keeping unfocused and messy journals. Much like the photos I share on this blog, the process is the whole point.
If we allow these [AI] tools to dictate our visual culture, we must accept that it will be vitrified by machines which consider a few billion webpages equivalent to the sum total of human existence. I don’t accept that. How dare we abandon so many countless traditions and people and ideas and nuances, simply because they are underrepresented in the training data?
It’s harder to convince people there’s something wrong with them when they intimately understand that the things they are experiencing are normal and shared.
smallthingsgrowing, What you’re missing without a village is not just material help
The people you know in real life are also trying to figure things out as they can. The problem is not struggling, it’s struggling alone.
Whenever you’re lucky enough to find it, you have to receive life’s poetry – even when, and especially if, it makes for a funny story to tell.
The world, one giant selfie jostle. Eventually, right before the machines turn off our light of meat-based consciousness, we’ll do some Borgesian space selfie and be done with it all. But for now, we selfie on the ground, with great desperation, preening for the screen, to be uploaded to god only knows where for god only knows what audience. The volume of media captured defies comprehension. It is empyrean in volume, flip-flopping beyond theory into the theology of bytes, for how could so many selfies be contained within the physics of our world?
The history of tech has calcified into stories of dramatic wins and unforeseen downfalls, and what results is a tech culture of near compulsory participation in prediction rather than creating value or serving needs.
Expecting a sanctioned biopic to deliver unvarnished truth misunderstands the dynamics: The estate is the gatekeeper, and the film is a catalog activation strategy — a two-hour advertisement engineered to send audiences straight to streaming platforms to rediscover the back catalog.
It feels really good when the dominant culture likes the things you like but it should never be construed as more than companies finding new ways to amortize art.
Meanwhile, the barons of the private sector have likewise backed down from even superficial concern for equality, and now demand such extreme fealty to their enterprises that only someone with no caretaking responsibilities whatsoever—with no care at all, not even for themselves—could possibly meet them.
These are fields where monotony walks hand in hand with craft. Some people throw their hands up and bemoan the death of such practices in the age of AI, but I believe we’re headed toward a resurgence in valuing the things machines cannot do.
…we are very easily taken in by the promise that buying or upgrading to some new thing will measurably improve our lives. I propose that, if we learned how to fully use what we already had better, such depth of knowledge and skill would have a far greater and more lasting impact.
I absolutely love the (almost secret) positivity in Patrick’s advice here: You bought a thing. A really cool thing! Learn how to really use it so your enjoyment can last longer than the afterglow of the purchase.
“The majority of us would much rather be happy than try to found a company that takes over the world — sacrificing the majority of our waking hours, our hobbies, and likely many of our relationships in the process.”
“We’re not just processing information but living in bodies that know things minds can’t articulate.”
“The kid who tries to run Blender on a Chromebook doesn’t learn that his machine can’t handle it. He learns that Google decided he’s not allowed to. Those are completely different lessons.”
I read this thinking of my daughter’s untaught hatred for her school Chromebook and how quickly she figured out the school forms to drop it for an ancient MacBook Air that she still refuses to let me replace.
Producing training data means working toward your own obsolescence. While the number of people doing data work may continue to rise, any particular gig will last only as long as it takes for the machines to successfully mimic it. It takes years for a human to develop expertise, and sooner or later, they’re going to run out of skills to sell.
We have been a technological civilization, in any meaningful sense, for only around 200 years. We are, statistically speaking, at the very beginning of the most vulnerable period of our existence.
The good of a moral act inheres in the act itself. That is why an act can itself ennoble or corrupt the person who performs it.
Videos are everywhere, we cannot stop to breathe and think. But a photo makes us pause. We cannot consume photos without pausing, even if it is for a intangible split-second.
The gravitational-wave background is huge news for the cosmos, yes, but it’s also huge news for you. The nature of reality has not changed—you will not suddenly be able to detect vibrations in your morning coffee that you couldn’t see before. And yet, moments like these can and should change how each of us sees our world. All of a sudden, we know that we are humming in tune with the entire universe, that each of us contains the signature of everything that has ever been. It’s all within us, around us, pushing us to and fro as we hurtle through the cosmos.
The culture-wars approach to museums seems to me to be related to the assumption that museums are, or should be, the caretakers of singular, true and timeless narratives. (but) Truth isn’t a matter of supporting a specific set of beliefs, and the stories we tell—even about ourselves—change the more we know.
It’s even harder to take a week off from your shit job to go on a road trip to the airplane graveyard when your rent is $2000 a month, you’re sitting on a hundred grand in student debt, and your company is laying off 25% of the workforce because they believe they can replace you with a racist autocomplete script on meth and steroids, and chased by a glass of refreshing cooler from the Three Mile Island reactor.