Posts
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QuotingGeorge Orwell predicts generative AI
There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.
[...]
It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator.
— Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
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QuotingSimone Weil on good and evil
Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.
Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.
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QuotingSimone Weil on forgiveness
I am also other than I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.
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QuotingOscar Wilde
The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.
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QuotingCharles Babbage
On two occasions I have been asked, — Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out? […]
I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.1
—Charles Babbage (1791–1871) – father of the computer and early pioneer of the facepalm.
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From: Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), ch. 5 Difference Engine No. 1 ↩
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QuotingJoanna Maciejewska on AI
You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction.
I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.
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QuotingDavid Bowie on the music industry, 2002
From a New York Times interview, June 9th, 2002:
Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity, so it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left.
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QuotingKaren Lloyd: There's life inside Earth's crust
On Intraterrestrials – microbes surviving deep below the Earth's surface without sun and oxygen but instead via thermodynamics, and the ability to respire most elements of the periodic table…
We know they must be refreshing their cellular biomass. But they are doing it immensely slowly — gradually replacing their parts, lipid by lipid, nucleotide by nucleotide. It takes roughly half a century for them to replace all their molecules.
These single-celled organisms can live for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of years. (By contrast, the oldest multicellular organisms are trees, some of which can live to be thousands of years old, although none of the cells that compose them live for that long.)
Theoretically, therefore, when I scoop deep sediment samples, I could be touching microbes that have been living and breathing continuously since well before humans were even a species.
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Friction
Friction warms hands and stops cars. It’s a force of nature, but it’s also a force in life. Friction slows us down, keeps us stuck, and makes the easy things hard.
But friction is neither good nor bad. Friction is a tool.
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TILHugh Laurie contributed to Hamilton
In his book Hamilton: The Revolution (2016), Miranda says that he went for a drink with Hugh Laurie after filming their 2009 episodes of Laurie's series House, in which Miranda guest starred. "I told him I wanted to write a breakup letter from King George to the colonies," Miranda writes. "Without blinking, he improv'd at me, 'Awwww, you'll be back,' wagging his finger. I laughed and filed it away. Thanks, Hugh Laurie."
— Wikipedia: You'll Be Back
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QuotingHome – Warsan Shire
Home
no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city is running as well your neighbours running faster than you breath bloody in their throats the boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is holding a gun bigger than his body you only leave home when home won't let you stay. no one leaves home unless home chases you fire under feet hot blood in your belly it's not something you ever thought of doing until the blade burnt threats into your neck and even then you carried the anthem under your breath only tearing up your passport in airport toilets sobbing as each mouthful of paper made it clear you wouldn't be going back. you have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land no one burns their palms under trains beneath carriages no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled mean something more than journey. no one crawls under fences no one wants to be beaten pitied no one chooses refugee camps or strip searches where your body is left aching or prison, because prison is safer than a city of fire and one prison guard in the night is better than a truckload of men who look like your father no one could take it no one could stomach it no one skin would be tough enough the go home blacks refugees dirty immigrants asylum seekers sucking our country dry niggers with their hands out they smell strange savage messed up their country and now they want to mess ours up how do the words the dirty looks roll off your backs maybe because the blow is softer than a limb torn off or the words are more tender than fourteen men between your legs or the insults are easier to swallow than rubble than bone than your child body in pieces i want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark home is the barrel of the gun and no one would leave home unless home chased you to the shore unless home told you to quicken your legs leave your clothes behind crawl through the desert wade through the oceans drown save be hunger beg forget pride your survival is more important no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear saying- leave, run away from me now I don’t know what I’ve become but I know that anywhere is safer than here
By Warsan Shire, a Kenyan-born Somali poet, writer, and educator based in London (wiki).
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QuotingNassim Taleb
I am, at the Fed level, libertarian;
at the state level, Republican;
at the local level, Democrat;
and at the family and friends level, a socialist.If saying that doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will.
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QuotingCicero
If you want to persuade me you must think my thoughts, feel my feelings and speak my words.
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QuotingSeneca On The Shortness Of Life
Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future.
The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours.
What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.
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QuotingO Vino Veritas
In vino veritas
“From wine comes truth”
(…how did I only learn the phrase in my 30s?!)