“We’re not just processing information but living in bodies that know things minds can’t articulate.”

• Dustin Parker, The Future Smells Like Paper

“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.”

• Sam Henri Gold, This Is Not The Computer For You

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.

• Josh Dzieza, writing for The Verge about another depressing “business” created to exploit people.

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.

• How long do civilizations last?

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.

• Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason

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.

Winnie Lim

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.

• Adam Frank, Scientists Found Ripples in Space and Time. And You Have to Buy Groceries

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.

• John McCoy, The Stream of Warm Impermanence

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.

• Mike Monteiro, How to Live Off The Rails

Aristotle claimed that excellence is not an act, but a habit. I used to think that meant discipline. Now I think it means alignment. When the form of your day supports the function of your mind, when what you do with your time supports the kind of thoughts you hope to have.

• Joan Westenberg, I Spent 90 Days Rebuilding My Brain. Here’s What I Learned.

The next time you use something that works so well you barely notice it, remember that somewhere, a designer solved a problem so thoroughly that both the problem and its solution became invisible. That designer might not be famous, might not have thousands of followers, might not be invited to speak at conferences — but they’ve achieved something remarkable: greatness through invisibility.

• Christopher Butler, You Can Be a Great Designer and Be Completely Unknown

The strongest heart is the one that’s still beating. Even at your lowest point, the job of the heart is to make sure all your organs are getting blood so your body survives. You don’t have to be amazing all the time. Sometimes there are low points, and even if you’re just surviving, that’s a big deal.

• Saadia Faruqi, Author

When nations grow old,
the Arts grow cold,
And Commerce settles on every tree:
And the poor and the old
Can live upon gold,
For all are born poor.
Aged sixty-three.

• William Blake, On Art And Artists (1800) ‘On the Foundation of the Royal Academy’

The things that I have made over the years of my life have taught me so much, and in so many different ways. They have different lessons depending on the period of my life that I’m engaging with them and they change over time to me. There are many pieces in this building that have also changed over time so, to me, that is a bit of a kind of a life. There is a bit of something alive in that intersection.

• Adam Savage on remaining engaged with the art he made in his early 20’s, YouTube

Browsing one day in a library, I opened a book in the stacks and found a passage on 1830s France by Charles Fourier, the utopian French philosopher, in which he talks about the dishonesty of business transactions, the tedium and deceit of family life, the hardship of small farmers, the miseries of the poor and near-destitute in great cities, the evils of naked greed, the neglect of genius, the sufferings of children and old people, the stupidity of war, the coercive mechanisms of society disguised as law, morality and the benefits of civilization. Can you believe this? I thought to myself. Everything this man said one-hundred-and-eighty years ago is true about us today. I had no choice but to write it down, so I could prove to my friends that nothing ever changes.

• Charles Simic, Take Care of Your Little Notebook

Any jackass can kick a barn down. But it takes a carpenter to build one.

• Lyndon Johnson

Finally, consider how lucky you are to have someone who still occasionally lets you perform a nearly useless act of love that you always try really hard to do well.

• Merlin Mann, How to Make A Proper Bedtime Bottle of Water

We contain multitudes, all of us, even the worst of us.

From those multitudes, we make things.

Sometimes the things we make come from the light in us. Sometimes they come from the shadows. Usually, making something requires a bit of both.

• Annie Mueller, When you love something made by a terrible person