There’s no accident that there’s a lot of overlap between the book banners and the people who want to automate creativity using fake AI. The creative process is full of trial, uncertainty, and error in dialogue with other artists. That is basically antithetical to certainty and authority.
A “user-centered” approach to design has been replaced by what [Jarrett Fuller] has taken to calling a “corporation-centered” approach. Rather than optimizing for the user’s experience, it optimizes for the extraction of profit. If Spotify succeeds at turning us all into passive listeners, then it doesn’t really matter which content the platform licenses. As Fuller put it, “It’s about ‘How do you get through as much music as you can so you keep paying for it?’" -Why I Finally Quit Spotify
Quitting Spotify has been a huge improvement to my music listening.
We need to diversify the kinds of people who make software, the kinds of problems they’re solving, and the philosophies and worldviews that govern how they build. Putting every software creator inside a tiny, privileged bubble that’s awash in VC cash and obsessed with hierarchical status games isn’t going to give us novel, “innovative”, or diverse software that serves the needs of everyone.
Remote work isn’t, by definition, better or worse than IRL work. But it is different, and it is a necessary adaptation in an era marked by climate change and the slow collapse of long-neglected infrastructures. It’s past time to engage with its flaws directly, instead of always harking back to a fabricated office history we never lived in and cannot return to.
I can’t overstate how beneficial working fully remote for the past four years has been for myself and my family.
Part of what makes art special is that it’s difficult to make, even with all the tools right in front of you. It takes practice, it takes skill, and every time you do it, you expand on that skill. […] Generative AI is only about the end product, but it won’t teach you anything about the process it would take to get there.
Gen AI is a bad middle-manager trying harder than ever to convince people that its stolen output isn’t bad.
I definitely do not want small talk and relationships outsourced to server farms. This stuff shouldn’t feel hard or taxing; it’s what our presence here on Earth is mostly made up of. The effort, the clumsiness, and the time invested are where humanity is stored.
Ecology knows that shifting baselines dampen collective urgency and deepen generational divides. People who care about internet monoculture and control are often told they’re nostalgists harkening back to a pioneer era. It’s fiendishly hard to regenerate an open and competitive infrastructure for younger generations who’ve been raised to assume that two or three platforms, two app stores, two operating systems, two browsers, one cloud/mega-store and a single search engine for the world comprise the internet.
Twitter’s dead carcass could feed many new blooms.
I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success. (…) Something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success. I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.
Defining success as “do it forever” is a very capitalistic view of the human creative process.
Most truths are like that, easy to hear or recite, hard to live in the sense that slowness is hard for most of us, requiring commitment, perseverance, and return after you stray. Because the job is not to know; it’s to become. A sociopath knows what kindness is and how to weaponize it; a saint becomes it.
Rebecca focuses this around political change but I feel like it applies to personal growth and development just as well. Want to loose weight? Write or draw more? Be a better friend? Take the slower, grace-filled path of becoming.
Just because something’s good doesn’t mean we don’t deserve other options, and just because something is good for most people doesn’t mean there aren’t people who would benefit from something else.
True fandom is sharing your love, not judging. It’s about expanding, growing, and learning. And if you’re not enjoying it, why are you a fan? I don’t see how you can call yourself a fan if you’re focused on being miserly just hoarding every scrap of knowledge, because then, when you die, it dies. You want this to go on, right?
No matter what you’re doing, it can be something positive or negative, if you can’t say stop, bad things will happen. Try to go for a run, and don’t stop. Ever. Or try to drink water, and don’t stop. Ever.
Constant growth is a human-created cult that continues to harm the world and the life attempting to thrive within it. Even trees and mountains know there’s a time to stop.
You can get into deep debates about the role of language in the human mind, but no one would suggest that it represents the totality of our experience. Humans obviously enjoy a rich sensorium — one that goes way beyond the “big five”, by the way. Our language draws on these sensations; vibrates against them.
We have a world to use language in, a world to compare language against.
“I’ve grown to think that keeping your desk clean is actually probably a sign that you’re not being effective.”
Tiny excerpt from an excellent article @manton was kind enough to pass forward. I read it about three times already.
“We earn our name by what we bring back from the underworld. If we have no gift, no insight, then we are often gabbling trauma rather than speaking wisdom.”
How can people not know what beauty this is?
I’ve taken it for granted my whole life
Since the day I was born
There’s a lot of overlap between AI Bros and People Mad About Women Ghostbusters.
When you turn up to take somebody’s picture, there’s a fundamental choice. You’re either taking a picture of your relationship with that person or you’re taking a picture of a human being having their picture taken. And the first one is much more interesting to me.
The web is being littered with AI-generated content. Looking for a recipe? Advice on a medical issue? Perhaps you’re troubleshooting. You read a few paragraphs of the article before it hits you: a human definitely didn’t write this. The website you’re looking at is somehow worse than a recipe blog with a long story and ads, it’s an AI-generated recipe blog with a long story and ads.
Therefore, I believe it’s everyone’s imperative to genuinely invest in making websites again. For ourselves, for our businesses, for our interests.
While listening to a podcast discussing Star Wars: Attack of The Clones, arguably the worst of all the films, one host points out a hidden gem amongst the mess. One of the main characters, Obi-wan, visits the Jedi archives (a sci-fi private library) …