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  • AI Bureaucrats

    You know, the world is being filled with AI bureaucrats that in the armies, in the banks, in the universities, in the governments, more and more decisions, which house to bomb, who is a terrorist, whether to give you a loan, whether to give you a job, whether to give you a place in a university. These decisions are increasingly made by AI. And these decisions are becoming opaque to us.

    Yuval Noah Harari on the Hard Fork podcast.

    15 January 2025
  • Solitude changes us

    The individual preference for solitude, scaled up across society and exercised repeatedly over time, is rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity. And the consequences are far-reaching—for our happiness, our communities, our politics, and even our understanding of reality.

    From The Anti-Social Century. Emphasis mine.

    14 January 2025
  • A secret attic workspace

    A narrow attic workspace with a workbench, comfy chair, shelves, a very small window, and lots of wood.

    From r/CozyPlaces.

    13 January 2025
  • The Neon Museum

    Neon signs inside a hall including a mermaid with a sword and shield.

    Photo by Tomasz Filipek of the Neon Museum + more from 99% Invisible.

    10 January 2025
  • Fiction resists summary

    It is an interesting feature of stories and fiction that they resist summary. You cannot read a summary of Anna Karenina and somehow stockpile its pleasures and charms. Narrative resists compression.

    Resist Summary

    10 January 2025
  • Good advice

    A black and white photo of a neon sign that says “Do Not Trust Robots” with cans of Spam behind it.

    Art by Eve De Haan. Photographer unknown. /via Future Now / are.na

    10 January 2025
  • Dashboards

    “every dashboard is a sunk cost / every dashboard is an answer to some long-forgotten question / every dashboard is an invitation to pattern-match the past instead of interrogate the present / every dashboard gives the illusion of correlation / every dashboard dampens your thinking”

    Charity Majors

    7 January 2025
  • Snowy night vibes

    r/TheNightFeeling

    7 January 2025
  • Go light

    Light Phone 3

    7 January 2025
  • January

    A winter landscape seen through a house window. Inside, a house plant, some collected branches, pine cones. Outside, snow on a rural village, a person and a dog walking down a snow covered lane.

    By Stanley Roy Badmin.

    7 January 2025
  • Link blogs rock

    Sharing interesting links with commentary is a low effort, high value way to contribute to internet life at large.

    My approach to running a link blog

    3 January 2025
  • Doing good versus doing nothing

    In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn’t been good versus evil. It’s hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.

    Always Go To The Funeral /via SwissMiss

    24 December 2024
  • The Death of Music Genres

    People are following their “personal taste curation” instead of “mass consensus.” /via Jorge Arango

    24 December 2024
  • wind

    From Eternity! Eternity! by Vincent Glielmi. /via booooooom.com

    20 December 2024
  • Haunted Words

    A collection of ghost words …

    🆕 Ghost Artists: “Spotify, the rumor had it, was filling its most popular playlists with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians—variously called ghost or fake artists—presumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts.” /via pixel envy

    Ghost Hotels: “The “ghost hotel” nomenclature refers to an entire apartment building which is functionally a hotel because most or all units are short-term rentals instead of tenant-occupied.”

    Ghost Network Healthcare: “…he, like millions of Americans, was trapped in a “ghost network.” As some of those people have discovered, the providers listed in an insurer’s network have either retired or died. Many other providers have stopped accepting insurance — often because the companies made it excessively difficult for them to do so. Some just aren’t taking new patients. Insurers are often slow to remove them from directories, if they do so at all. It adds up to a bait and switch by insurance companies that leads customers to believe there are more options for care than actually exist.”

    Ghost Network Television: “Now MTV is a ghost. Its average prime-time audience of 256,000 people in 2023 was down from 807,000 in 2014, the Nielsen company said. One recent evening MTV aired reruns of “Ridiculousness” from 5 p.m. to 1:30 a.m.”

    Ghost Kitchen: “A virtual restaurant, also known as a ghost kitchen, cloud kitchen or dark kitchen, is a food service business that serves customers exclusively by delivery and pick-up based on phone and online ordering.[1] Virtual restaurants are stand-alone businesses that either operate out of an existing restaurant’s kitchen or from a separate kitchen set-up away from a restaurant.”

    See also: American Suburbs Are a Horror Movie and We’re the Protagonists “That’s how I feel when I walk through the bare, people-less parking lots of my neighborhood to get to the grocery store. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen other pedestrians while making this trip. If not for the moving cars nearby, it would be like walking through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It’s an isolating experience, one that makes me feel very small and vulnerable.”

    20 December 2024
  • The art of Silvia Celiberti / Instagram / via booooooom.com

    18 December 2024
  • a recurrent theme is a fatigue with the style of self-narration that the platforms encourage — which, whether we realize it or not, has been heavily influenced by brand storytelling logics. We talk about ourselves like we’re products.

    Posting Less

    18 December 2024
  • the best defense, the most meaningful work, the best preparation you can do at the level of an individual life is to boost your local resilience. To become a person of place. To connect with the people and land where you live. This is what we’re built to do.

    How I became ‘collapse aware’. This is not a depressing read (or listen, the author read option was great)! /via Dense Discovery

    18 December 2024
  • Al Brydon

    12 December 2024
  • Kinopio is such a neat tool.

    11 December 2024
  • A “Christmas” album that resurrects each year. Example comment:

    The last time my grandfather and I hangout together 2 Christmas' ago, I had this on in the car and I’ll never forget when he told me how much he enjoyed The Grinch flip. It made me so happy. I miss him everyday now. What a good human. Rest in peace.

    11 December 2024
  • Cancel all my meetings, Said the Gramophone’s best songs of 2024 dropped!

    10 December 2024
  • Acrylic Paintings of an Alpine Peak

    “RENAISSANCE # 05” by Conrad Jon Godly via Colossal

    10 December 2024
  • A very gothic morning.

    10 December 2024
  • His inner radio was all about oranges, dogs, and trucks

    “Truly this book is in memory of my brother, Jeff. When confronted with hatred or violence, he used to say: I don’t get that station, man. His inner radio was all about oranges, dogs, and trucks. We always made up life on our own. I miss him every day.”

    From the dedication of Mecca by Susan Straight.

    4 December 2024

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