ok, but can someone explain whether this construction (which I call 'M&S style') is an emergent property of LLMs or something that has been imposed on them somehow… it would be funny if something so banal was actually somehow the "perfect" rhetorical style based on the digestion of all previous text
not really much of a point this, but it is dispiriting to see all the cheap advertisements adopt AI video generation so rapidly. All the edges become a little bit soft, all lights glow a little more than physically possible… I don't enjoy advertising anyway, but it feels insulting
you've reminded me of this blogpost whose imagined conversations have stuck with me for more than a decade now stainedglassattitudes.com/2014/08/10/g...
oooooft! 🫢
speaking of dangerous
there's a humungous wall of resentment to break through for a leisure society to come into being, and then even after that there's an existentially terrifying boredom which, well, is potentially very dangerous
A lot of my research for Last Futures etc dealt with predictions of the society of leisure… I feel that it's not impossible for humans to achieve, but I also feel like there isn't a modern society anywhere that has the mental setup for it to be realistic
a nice sentiment, sure, but right now the 'positive effect' only seems to be greater concentration of wealth for those who own the technology – there's two 'positive' scenarios – either it creates new jobs (really?!?!) or it actually creates the leisure society (impossible to imagine happening)
I can't really be sure if the sort of intelligence he claims not to have is doomed. Some days it feels like all intelligence is doomed, other days that only 'shape rotators' will make it through, then others it seems the opposite.
FT interviewing Amodei… he did physics at Stanford, of course he did, but this detail is telling (the not being good with languages, not the leathery dad)
New Boards of Canada incoming!
(don't know who made the clip but there's a very short excerpt from Le Corbusier's film from the 1958 Phillips Pavilion at 0:50)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bgh...
the wanton ignorance in fascism is part of the technique, it's not an error
"champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends"
having been past it a few times I can't say I think the exterior is much to show off about either
UK economy faces hardest hit from Iran war of G7, says IMF Growth in Britain is forecast to take the biggest knock from the conflict, leading to the joint-highest inflation of the group of seven rich nations
Wrecked by the financial crisis, some of the most savage austerity in the aftermath; hardest hit by Covid and now hit hardest by America’s disastrous new war. Did something uniquely enfeebling happen in Britain over the last, say, 50 years that left us with very little resilience or spare capacity?
The war in the Middle East has compounded an already sluggish economy, leading to a ‘collapse’ in construction starts in the first quarter of the year, according to leading industry analyst Glenigan.
incroyable
www.theguardian.com/education/ng... this is very well done, full of the madnesses of the British university sector
and in general, as an art school, our international students are well-off to start with
our department is popular with applicants but isn't really all that international, and I don't think the uni likes this one bit
yeah it's getting to the point at everywhere outside the Russell Group where admissions is just maximising recruitment, there's no saying no
fwiw I am drawn to the idea that there is a kind of 'thought-training' that goes on in continental prose… the only way I can understand Lacan's methodology is him operating right on the edge of gibberish (no easy feat) and daring people to work it out, even if it doesn't "mean" anything
in conversation with a colleague (architectural history & theory person) I mentioned someone and said "they're in the analytical tradition" and she said "ugh I don't read any of that stuff" and I thought 'my god, it's 2025, get over yourself'
christ are people STILL doing this
true that would be daft
he's Hungarian himself isn't he? I think even if I didn't know the connection I probably assumed
a lot of discourse today about surviving on the planet has an often downplayed implication that *overall* everyone has to be poorer… and the question for me is largely – what aspects of technological modernity (i.e. pain relief) would be truly awful to lose and what is just distracting fluff
There's a trope that often comes up in the 1960s along the lines of:
"the average council house dweller today has a standard of living way beyond that of a mediaeval king"
and of course there's ways of interpreting that but one fundamental thing for me is that inequality matters
