Much of the reluctance to do what climate change requires comes from the assumption that it means trading abundance for austerity. But what if it meant giving up things we’re well rid of, from deadly emissions to nagging feelings of doom and complicity in destruction? - Washington Post
The advancement of generative artificial intelligence is not an advancement toward artificial personhood for a simple, absolute reason: There is no falsifiable thesis of consciousness. You cannot find a researcher who can define, in a testable way, what consciousness is. - The Atlantic
The evolutionary history of our species negates and overturns all previous cosmologies. Ever since Darwin, it seems most fiction writers have pretended not to notice and continue to cater to false backstories. - 3 Quarks Daily
The so-called “Tripod of Freedom” — which positions free enterprise, along with civil liberties and democracy, as “one of the three great elements” in the American way of life — was an invention of the business lobby, one that was accompanied by abhorrence for any government involvement. - Washington Post
Each day is bringing us a little bit closer to a kind of information-sphere disaster, in which bad actors weaponize large language models, distributing their ill-gotten gains through armies of ever more sophisticated bots. - The Atlantic
Sure, some of the sequences were a bit zany (and then there are the hot dog finers), but the film "feels more in line with last year’s winner, CODA, suggesting that pandemic-scarred academy voters are especially fond of cozily sentimental family dramas these days." - Los Angeles Times
Majers Coin Laundry in San Fernando is "tucked between an auto repair shop and a mobile home park, its tall glass windows revealing vending machines stocked with M&M’s and bleach." And for six fateful days in 2020, it turned into a film set. - Los Angeles Times
"Tuxedo vendors say that awards season drives huge sales on top of their usual income from weddings and proms, on the order of 20% to 30% of their annual revenue." But, from last-minute requests to late returns, it's not easy. - Los Angeles Times
For how long has science occurred outside the West? Is it fundamentally a Western export, a product of distinctly Western attitudes and values? - Boston Review
Gorsuch’s fairness question resonates right away. Why these debts and not others? Why them and not me? These are rhetorical questions, and they have a rhetorical purpose: to frame student loan forgiveness as a sucker’s game. - Slate
One of the most consequential developments of our moment is that the experiences that create sensory memories are disappearing even faster than temperatures are rising. - City Journal
Using around 90 per cent of the brain-imaging data, the pair trained a model to make links between fMRI data from a brain region that processes visual signals, called the early visual cortex, and the images that people were viewing. - New Scientist
One of the first things I’d learned about optimization was that something is optimal if it is equal or preferable to any alternative. To optimize an experience, then, is to shepherd it toward the preferable. - Wired
There is little hope for meritocracy as a theory of distributive justice. The “playing field” isn’t level, there is an oversupply of talent and the methods for determining merit are often winner-take-all, the social determinants of merit often don’t line up with objective criteria of merit. - 3 Quarks Daily
