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. +
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? +
“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? +
What would a trilingual like myself do with a ChatGPT? Torture it with correspondence tests, of course. Here’s the result: 🤪 ChatGPT: If we were to use English proficiency as a base and attribute a numerical score of 100 to it, I would rank my +
Oh, now Twitter asks me to pay 100 USD per month to read and backup my own tweets on my server. Since early July 2023, I can no longer GET my own posts, sort them into 3 distinct languages and store them in my own +
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. +
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 +
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 +
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 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. +
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 +
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 +
“Off the Clock” – Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done… by Laura Vanderkam. Oh, wow. Such a promising title. Again. Bless those who helped increase my reading speed! Because this book is 1% trite time management advice and 99% memory recalls of various mothers +
Over 50% of Americans haven’t read a book in 2022. Nearly 25% of adults have not read a book in 1-2 years. 11% haven’t read a book in 3-5 years. And 10% of US adults haven’t read at least 1 full book in the past +
“Cheap Sex” is a great book by sociologist Mark Regnerus to compliment David Buss’ “Evolution of Desire”. It describes the current personal and interpersonal sexuality / gender relations state of affairs in the US. The local trends and stats which do or will impact the +
“How Emotions Are Made“ is yet another weird book with a promising title, written for someone without any knowledge of science, its methods and branches. Possibly for those of us who skipped biology classes in school and haven’t read anything about neuroscience ever since? The +
I wonder how much time architects spend writing instead of designing? The typical text that describes a random contemporary house is something else… “Architecture, specifically the house, is an act of enabling shelter, a vessel through which in turn enables habitation and the ongoing experience +
“The Art of Impossible” by Steven Kotler is a perfect example of a book by a journalist who does punchy write-ups of other books written by other punchy journalists who cite popular self-hack writers (like Tim Ferriss, whose advice is retold several times), who talk +
“When things get tough with that rewrite, and you’re starting to see this whole dream fall apart… who are the ones that actually stay in for the long haul? Often it’s narcissists. Often it’s people with big egos. It’s people who really think they’re interesting. +
Instagram is a great tool to get to know people. Open a profile and: Scroll through their posts — sample their taste (or lack thereof), attention to detail (feet cut off, random branches in the frame, etc.) Pay attention to the number of selfies — +
| TWEETS | CATEGORIES | ARCHIVES | SEARCH | ABOUT PROSE |
TIP: To print images, enable “Print backgrounds” in your browser preferences.