LAST WEEK I came across a thought-provoking quote by David Cain about work:
"But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours ... but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work."
628 results for
take me away
Off the southwest tip of Iceland, you’ll find what’s often called a “marginal” body of water. This part of the Atlantic, the Irminger Sea, is one of the stormiest places in the northern hemisphere.
Some years back, I stopped by a French deli to buy some big chunks of cheese and carried them home in a plastic bag. The cheese was so heavy that the bag stretched and bulged, and the handle dug painfully into my hands.
The art of storytelling is the art of simplification—of giving smooth contours and sharp points to messily loose-ended incidents. That’s why, when artists tell their life stories, the plethora of factual details is secondary to the emotions, the ideas, the insights, and the sublime style that distinguish their art.
Last year, Rachel Antell, an archival producer for documentary films, started noticing AI-generated images mixed in with authentic photos. There are always holes or limitations in an archive; in one case, film-makers got around a shortage...
What has intelligence? Slime moulds, ants, fifth-graders, shrimp, neurons, ChatGPT, fish shoals, border collies, crowds, birds, you and me?
The influencers, yes, with their perfect makeup and strategic camera angles and professional lighting, all to make their lives seem enviable while narrating their days in a strange monotone. They show off massive homes with the house numbers in the font of gentrification.
The ocean is a lonely, perilous place. It is especially so when you are aboard a leak-prone wooden vessel laden with a rich cargo of sugar, silks, and opium, like the traders sailing the Quedagh Merchant around India’s southern tip in 1698.
ON FRIDAY WE fit in all of summertime in a day. We pedaled to our favourite pub on the Thames and managed to find a much-coveted seat on the lower dock, right next to the water.
But an ecosystem around text-based generative AI had evolved well before The Atlantic revealed the contents of key datasets. Large language models (LLMs) have been in development since 2017, and OpenAI’s GPT-3, the model that introduced generative AI to the mainstream, hit the world back in 2020.
Imagine a place where you can taste some of the finest wines in the world, enjoy delicious gourmet meals, hike on sea-sprayed oceanfront trails, explore deep ancient caves, surf world class waves, and meet some of the friendliest people anywhere on earth.
What was the World Wide Web like at the start? Long before it became the place we think and work and talk, the air that we (and the bots) now breathe no matter how polluted it’s become?
About 13.8 billion years ago, the entire cosmos consisted of a tiny, hot, dense ball of energy that suddenly exploded. That’s how everything began, according to the standard scientific story of the Big Bang, a theory that first took shape in the 1920s.
The school year has ended and with it its practice schedules and playoffs, but most sports can be year-round if you want them to be, and now the summer leagues begin, along with the clinics and the development camps.
When it comes to our membership of different social groups, most of us switch between different versions of ourselves multiple times each day.
