ANATOLY IVANOV / PROSE / CATEGORIES / SOCIETY

STRUGGLING ARTIST? GIVE AWAY YOUR WORK FOR FREE.

ART THEORY / ECONOMICS / SOCIETY / OUTSIDE NEWS / 2024-01-02

Yann Le Cunn, a Chief AI Scientist at Meta, writes that only a few book authors make significant money from book sales, so most books should be freely available for download. The lost revenue for authors would be small, and the benefits to society large by comparison.  + 

STUDY BIOLOGY OR FACE THE CONSEQUENCES

BIOLOGY / ECONOMICS / JOURNALISM / ESSAYS / 2023-12-30

We’ve had opposite extremes — capitalists & communists, Adam Smithians & Karl Marxists — completely miss the obvious. Humans are not rational, deterministic “utility functions” optimizing for individual or collective “good”. Free markets’ invisible hand will correct?  + 

CALLING ELVIS, ANYBODY HOME?

ENVIRONMENT / POLITICS / SOCIETY / OUTSIDE NEWS / 2023-12-16

Have you received “the call” from COP28′s final plenary assembly to “transition away from fossil fuels in a just, orderly and equitable manner”? No? Why not? By the way, the UNFCC gives us a 67% chance of limiting global temperature rise to 2°C, if global  + 

I’M A CONSUMER, WHAT’S WRONG WITH THAT?

ECONOMICS / SOCIAL MEDIA / SOCIETY / ESSAYS / 2023-10-25

“I’m a consumer, what’s wrong with that?” The way you consume? The quantity? The fact that luck gave you an opportunity to NOT be an animal, to use that neocortex to create a better world, maybe?  + 

ODESSA’S DESTRUCTION OF UNESCO HERITAGE SITES

ARCHITECTURE / POLITICS / ESSAYS / OUTSIDE NEWS / 2023-09-27

As of 13 September 2023, UNESCO has verified damage to 289 cultural sites in Ukraine: 120 religious buildings, 27 museums, 109 buildings of historical and/or artistic interest, 19 monuments, 13 libraries… In Odessa alone, a city near and dear to me from childhood  + 

ART VS LIMITLESS’ MONEY, SEX & POWER… WHO’D WIN?

CINEMA / ECONOMICS / FINANCE / SOCIETY / REVIEWS / 2023-09-18

Fascinating how the film “Limitless” by Neil Burger starring Bradley Cooper paints a dreamy picture of a struggling artist with an external solution to everything — a pill, stolen by the artist — to be used by the artist to pursue: 1) money 2) sex 3) power… and his art?  + 

IF ALEXEI MEDVEDEV REACTIVATES THEIR ACCOUNT, YOU’LL STILL BE FRIENDS

CINEMA / POLITICS / SOCIAL MEDIA / OUTSIDE NEWS / 2023-08-19

When I saw a “person missing” announcement in my Facebook feed, I somehow didn’t quite understand… “What’s going on? How so?” The usual, the so commonly trivial was going on — the death of an interesting person who did so much for Russian culture.  + 

RUSSIANS DON’T CARE

ECONOMICS / LINGUISTICS / POLITICS / ESSAYS / 2023-06-13

You know what? Russians still living in Russia, the remaining 140 million of them, don’t care about the war. Nor do they care about their rulers or the Western sanctions. Or the Western companies having left or banned. Russia is stuck in yet another historical  + 

SAM ALTMAN – EVERYBODY THOUGHT: FIRST AI WOULD DO PHYSICAL LABOR

ART THEORY / COMPUTERS / MUSIC / SOCIETY / ESSAYS / 2023-06-04

Everybody thought: first AI would do physical labor, then some cognitive labor, then the really hard cognitive labor, like programming… And then, last of all, but maybe never, because it’s magical and human… was creativity  + 

ИСКУССТВО КИНО – THE LAST ISSUE TO PRINT

CINEMA / JOURNALISM / ESSAYS / OUTSIDE NEWS / 2023-05-24

Искусство Кино — published since 1931 and thus, together with “Sight & Sound” and “Cahiers du Cinéma” one of the earliest magazines to cover the film industry, art and theory — has printed its last issue. Yes, my work has been featured in it. But  + 

ELON MUSK: IF AI COULD REPLACE ME, SHOULD I BE DOING THIS?

HEALTH / PSYCHOLOGY / SOCIETY / ESSAYS / 2023-05-17

Elon Musk just said on CNBC something I’d been thinking about a lot: “If we do get to this sort of magic genie situation, where you can ask the AI for anything. And let’s say, even if it’s a benign scenario… How do we actually  + 

HOW TO BE HAPPY? MY 5 MINUTES DIALOGUE WITH CHATGPT

COMPUTERS / HEALTH / LINGUISTICS / ESSAYS / 2023-05-16

My conversation about human happiness with ChatGPT took 5 minutes. Question: According to what is currently known to science, what 50 factors, listed from most influential to least, influence a human (male, with an IQ above 100) self-reported feeling of happiness  + 

THE GLOBAL HARMONIZED STANDARD OF WOMEN

HEALTH / INDUSTRIAL DESIGN / SOCIETY / ESSAYS / 2023-05-08

Social media, especially Instagram, has succeeded to complete the Global Harmonized Standard of Women™, an industrialized process started by the female magazines (Vogue, ELLE…) It’s all pretty… scary. We now have a draft proposal for ISO review.  + 

NO MORE TINDER FOR RUSSIANS

POLITICS / SOCIAL MEDIA / OUTSIDE NEWS / 2023-05-06

The Match Group withdraws from Russia. Tinder, OKcupid, Hinge… will all vanish from Russian social space by June 30. Meanwhile, The Russian Government™ is planning — finally, again, for real this time — to launch RuTube… and close access to YouTube.  + 

THE BLOCK FOREVER ARCHIVE

PSYCHOLOGY / SOCIAL MEDIA / SOCIETY / ESSAYS / 2023-05-02

Only thoughtless people do crazy things, publish emotional photos, record damming TikToks, break up “forever”… relying on the “Delete Chat” and “Block” buttons of messengers and social apps. Those unable to think ahead imagine they will never face the consequences. Our digital footprint describes our  + 

DELEGATE AN AI (LLM) TO TALK WITH YOUR TINDER MATCH

COMPUTERS / PSYCHOLOGY / SOCIETY / ESSAYS / 2023-04-21

Wow. The Match Group did indeed introduce chat-assist to Tinder. Just look at their suggestions to start a dialogue after a match: 😱 • Hiiii Jane! Getting into anything fun this week? • Hello Jane. How’s it going? • Hi there! Getting into anything fun  + 

MORE THAN HALF OF AMERICAN WOMEN ARE SINGLE

SOCIETY / ESSAYS / 2023-04-07

52% of American women were unmarried or separated in 2021. The rising share of single women households has been driven entirely by women who have never married. Over 80% of women under 30 have never tied the knot in 2021… Despite all the readily-available research  + 

CLIMATE CHANGE? NO, WE WILL NOT LIMIT ANYTHING.

CYCLING / ECONOMICS / ENVIRONMENT / ESSAYS / 2023-04-04

As a civilization, we’d known about our impact on climate since the 1950-60s. We’ve also continued to fail to agree on anything that would have prevented its negative impact… since the 1970s. 50 years later, the IPCC reports, again, that nothing’s changed. We will not  + 

THE ARGUMENT BY FUZZY CONCEPT

LINGUISTICS / PHILOSOPHY / PSYCHOLOGY / ESSAYS / 2023-02-11

The “argument by fuzzy concept” fallacy is second only to ad hominem… An argument of intellectual indoctrination, laziness and dullness which, if pressed, degenerates into circular reasoning, requiring, at best, a definition by negation (“not hate, not lust, not friendship, not nⁿ…”) Got a World  + 

WHY ARE WE NOT FREE?

PSYCHOLOGY / RELIGION / SOCIETY / SPIRIT / ESSAYS / 2023-02-10

Are we really free? Are we free to be who we really are? The answer is no, we are not free. True freedom has to do with the human spirit — it is the freedom to be who we really are. Who stops us from  + 

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